Hasta La Ideas

This concrete house in Switzerland’s March District was designed by Zurich studio Kit with split levels, creating a living room that cantilevers over an external dining area.

Known as House in the March District, the property was designed by Kit for a family who wanted a home with plenty of floor space and a four-car garage, for a small site in a densely populated neighbourhood.

To minimise the building’s footprint and provide the diversity of internal spaces requested by the clients, the architects arranged the rooms over five split levels that work with the natural slope of the land.

“The building was designed as a split-level to create a connection to the surrounding garden,” explained the architects. “This allows a sequence of spaces with different degrees of intimacy, light qualities and orientations.”

Above the ground floor garage and a basement that is submerged beneath a sloping section of the garden, the living areas are differentiated by the amount of light, privacy and views afforded by their position in the staggered plan.

A glazed entrance sits beside the garage and below the cantilevered living room. This leads to a staircase that ascends through the centre of the house, loosely dividing the plan into two halves.

“The spacious program is shoehorned into the constricted envelope by literally upending the traditional house plan,” said the architects.

“Instead of common spaces on the ground floor and the private spaces above, the two are squeezed side by side in vertical strips, divided by a single wall.”

One side of the building is designated as an open-plan kitchen, dining and living space, with bedrooms accommodated on the opposite side.

Sliding doors along one wall of the kitchen and dining area open out to the upper level of the garden, from which a staircase descends to the patio accommodating a sheltered outdoor dining space.

A staircase connecting the kitchen with the living room incorporates wider sections that can be used for casual seating. A further set of stairs leads to the library on the building’s top floor, which features a slanted bookcase fitted along one wall.

The top storey also contains an additional bedroom and bathroom, with a short flight of steps leading to a terrace carved out from the sloping roofline.

A mixture of exposed concrete, white render and long windows was specified to “add to the feeling of ease and openness in the house’s mezzanine-like living areas”.

External surfaces are rendered with a rough trowel-thrown plaster, which has been painted in a warm tone and finished with a reflective silver treatment that picks out the peaks of the lumpy surface to give it added depth.

“The plaster is double coated with a warm white ground coat and a reflecting silver coat to accentuate the tips of the grain, giving depth to the surface and allowing the building to change its expression depending on the point of view and the lighting conditions,” added the team.

Photography is by Dominique Marc Wehrli.

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with the slope of the garden appeared first on Dezeen.

Le photographe Ken Hermann, nous fait découvrir une sélection de ses portraits de marchands de fleurs travaillant au célèbre Mallick Ghat, marché de Calcutta. Chaque cliché représente le portrait d’un homme bardé d’éléments aux couleurs époustouflantes et aux formes créatives.

Dutch studio Archiview gave this planetarium-like cinema in Groningen a spiralling dome structure, which invites comparisons with hats, eyeballs and UFOs (+ slideshow).

The pop-up movie theatre, known as the Infoversum, was the brainchild of Edwin Valentijn, a professor at the University of Groningen‘s astronomy department, who was asked to develop a space that would make science more accessible to the general public.

He came up with an idea of a cinema where visitors can experience a multi-dimensional view of the universe through 3D projections.

Architect Jack van der Palen of Archiview was then brought on board to give the idea a physical form, and designed a huge white sphere held in place by a ribbon of pre-rusted steel and glass.

Exactly 83 panels of Corten steel – distinguished by its orange colour – were used to constructed the curved outer skin of the building. These contrast with the ball-like central structure, which is finished in white to help.

“In time the steel plates will get a beautiful rusty layer, to protect the material underneath from the elements, meanwhile changing the appearance of the building day by day,” said the design team in a statement.

“To make it stand out more, the dome is coated white, which gives it an artistic appearance showcasing the impressive Dutch skies,” they added.

To create the irregular curves that give the building its distinctive shape, it was constructed using techniques normally employed in the ship-building industry, creating a monocoque structure that required little additional support.

“In the dome and in the lobby can one still see the special construction techniques being used and the actual shape of the outer layers,” said the team.

The interior of the building is arranged over two main storeys. At ground level, a glazed entrance leads into a lobby space known as the Infowave – an interactive digital exhibition that introduces visitors to some of the scientific themes.

A mezzanine provides an intermediate space above, while the first floor accommodates the movie theatre, which features a 20-metre-long projection screen. Visitors can tilt back their seats to get a better view.

A roof terrace allows residents to observe light projections over the roof.

External details were designed to not interrupt the smooth forms of the exterior. Windows sit behind perforations in the Corten steel surfaces, while panels peel up to reveal emergency doors.

“These perforations and the light that flows through the skylights create a wonderful light show inside the building,” added the team.

Infoversum was designed as a temporary addition to the centre of Groningen, but the team expect it to have a longer lifespan, potentially being installed in a new location.

The post Cinema meets planetarium at
Archiview’s Infoversum theatre appeared first on Dezeen.

At left, a view of the Paris apartment designed by Le Corbusier that inspired Chanel’s latest haute couture collection and runway show. (Photos from right: © FLC/ADAGP, Olivier Saillant)

Having recently tapped into markets high (fine art) and low (the grocery store) to inspire his collections for the megahouse of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld looked to the work of Le Corbusier to fire up his creativity for the fall couture. With the blessing of the Le Corbusier Foundation, he transformed the Grand Palais to resemble the paradoxical outdoor living room, complete with fireplace, of the long-demolished Champs-Elysées apartment that Corbu designed in 1929 for one Charles de Beistegui. “All white concrete, with some baroque elements,” said Lagerfeld yesterday in a post-show interview, as he described his architectural inspiration.

The modern material found its way into the collection via tiny tiles of gray and white concrete (pink and green are in the works) that Lagerfeld used for elaborate or starkly geometric mosaic-style embroideries that accented bodices, traced hems, and encrusted entire dresses, all shown with flat sandals and feather-like hairstyles. “What I liked about this collection is that it’s really flawless, impeccable shapes—they’re light, they float, they don’t walk heavily…and I think that makes it more modern.”
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Surface to Structure: Folded Forms est une exposition au Cooper Union à Manhattan qui s’est déroulée en juin dernier et qui a proposé de réunir des oeuvres d’origamis de 88 artistes issus des quatre coins du monde. Des créations magnifiques et poussant la maîtrise du pliage de papier à un niveau impressionnant.

Des oeuvres dans le désordre de : Ronald Koh, Nguyen Hung Cuong, Byriah Loper, Erik & Martin Demaine, Joel Cooper, Rebecca Gieseking, Linda Smith, Hana Coufalová, Bernie Peyton, Tran Trung Hieu & Tomohiro Tachi.