Hasta La Ideas

Perforated yellow cupboards and drawers resemble slices of Swiss cheese inside this apartment in São Paulo by Brazilian architects Zoom Urbanismo (+ slideshow).

Zoom Urbanismo renovated the flat for a young couple, moving partitions to create an open-plan kitchen, living room and dining area with an original parquet floor and an exposed brick wall.

“The big windows, high ceiling and the good quality of the wooden floor showed that the apartment had potential,” said the architects, “but the closed spaces, divided by the walls, had poor lighting and ventilation, and deteriorated wall coverings.”

Bright yellow cupboards unite the various spaces and are dotted with holes that mimic star constellations. These holes can also be used as handles.

Thick concrete pillars frame the walls and high ceilings in the dining area and are lined with bookshelves on one side.

Sliding glass doors lead out from the living room to a terrace with a view over the city.

A corridor leads back towards two bedrooms, bathrooms, and a laundry room. These spaces also include perforated cupboards, but feature wooden and white-painted surfaces rather than yellow.

Other apartments we’ve featured include one in the Ukraine with a combined bookshelf and staircase, a 1950s inspired flat in Tel Aviv and a renovated residence in the Prenzlauerberg district of Berlin.

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Photography is by Maíra Acayaba.

Here’s a description from the architects:

Apartment Apinagés 

In the neighbourhood of Perdizes, in São Paulo, a young couple (an executive and a graphic designer) purchased the top apartment in a four-storey charming and old building.

The big windows, the high ceiling and the good quality of the wooden floor (all common in old constructions) showed that the apartment had potential, but the closed spaces, divided by the walls, had poor lighting and ventilation and deteriorated wall coverings.

The internal distribution of the apartment was reorganised in order to optimise and integrate the spaces. The social area became wide and articulated with the kitchen and the back balcony, which also contains the laundry.

A big shelf/cabinet/stand, with a dynamic set of full and empty spaces, links the living room with the kitchen.

The shelves and cabinets have different heights, so that many objects could be stored and shown. The cabinet doors have small holes that, combined, form the geometry of constellations. The holes are also handles for the cabinets.

Location: Brazil, Sao Paulo
Status: constructed
Started: February 2012
Finished: June 2012
Area: 109,00 sqm
Architects: Guilherme Ortenblad, Samira Rodrigues, Augusto Aneas, Fernão Morato (authors), Fabiano Reis, Kathleen Chiang and Lígia Lupo.

The post Apartment Apinagés
by Zoom Urbanismo appeared first on Dezeen.

In the Details is our weekly look at one especially smart, innovative or unusual detail of a new design.

About a year ago, James Smith set out to design a lamp with what turned out to be a challenging set of parameters. With a bachelor’s degree in product design and sustainability, and an apprenticeship in cabinetmaking, Smith, who is based Cornwall, England, aimed for something with a simple, stripped-down appearance that was made sustainably. “I wanted to try and create a lamp that has the same sort of functionality as angle pulleys—and to do it all using timber and as many natural materials as possible,” Smith says. “It was an exercise in structure and engineering to see what I could achieve without any mechanical components.”

Smith chose ash wood as the base material—not only because it’s fast growing and indigenous to the UK, but also because he could source the strips from a place he has a connection to: his parents’ farm, which has some forestland as well as livestock. When a tree needs to come down, Smith buys the lumber from his father.

All photos by Artur Tixliski

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News: architect Rafael Viñoly has admitted he knew the facade of his curvy Walkie Talkie skyscraper in London would focus an intense beam of sunlight onto a neighbouring street, but says that he “didn’t realise it was going to be so hot”.

Speaking to Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright, Viñoly said that his curvaceous 37-storey tower at 20 Fenchurch Street was originally designed with horizontal sun louvres that would prevent a glare strong enough to melt the paint and bodywork of parked vehicles on Eastcheap Street, but that they were removed to cut costs.

“We made a lot of mistakes with this building,” he said, “and we will take care of it.”

The architect claims to have identified the problem during the design stages, but says he was without appropriate tools or software to analyse the precise effect.

“When it was spotted on a second design iteration, we judged the temperature was going to be about 36 degrees,” he said. “But it’s turned out to be more like 72 degrees. They are calling it the ‘death ray’, because if you go there you might die. It is phenomenal, this thing.”

He also suggested that the problem could be down to changing climate. “When I first came to London years ago, it wasn’t like this,” he said. “Now you have all these sunny days. So you should blame this thing on global warming too, right?”

This week developers installed a two-storey netted shield to cover the facade of the building, now nicknamed “Walkie Scorchie”, while city officials have suspended three parking bays until a more permanent solution can be found.

Reports first surfaced at the start of the week that the building was damaging vehicles. Since then it has been reported to have cracked pavement tiles, started a fire and even been used to fry an egg.

This isn’t the first time that Viñoly has had complaints about sun reflecting from one of his buildings. In 2010, guests at the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas complained of scorched hair and melted drinks glasses.

“That was a completely different problem,” Viñoly told the paper, stating that the brief for that project had called for curvy towers. “We pointed out that would be an issue too, but who cares if you fry somebody in Las Vegas, right?”

The Walkie Talkie is scheduled to complete next year.

See more architecture by Rafael Viñoly »
See more skyscraper news »

Images of the Walkie Talkie are courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post “We made a lot of mistakes with this building”
says Walkie Scorchie architect Viñoly appeared first on Dezeen.

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