Hasta La Ideas

German photographer Peter Ortner has spent seven years documenting 500 bus stops across former Soviet countries, including a triangular pavilion, a winged shelter and several colourful mosaic designs.

Ortner visited seven former-Soviet territories including Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, The Crimea Peninsula, Ukraine and Moldova to create the Back in the USSR photo series.

Unlike the grey concrete buildings often associated with socialist architecture built throughout the 20th century, Ortner found an eclectic, colourful micro-architecture that emerged on the roadside.

Described as “jewels”, the bus stops allowed the architects to experiment free from the pressures of socialist Moscow.

“This under­lines the autonomy of the republics and ostensibly goes against the central­ism of Moscow,” said Ortner.

“It seems as if a little free space for architecture opened up here, in the face of all centralistic planning.”

Ortner’s path from east to west initially followed the Silk Road through central Asia, where he found bus stops decorated with oriental ornamentation and repetitive geometric patterns that reference Islamic design.

In Uzbekistan he found a trio of blue-hued pavilions – one with painted brickwork highlighted by accents of red and yellow, and another with three poles supporting up-turned roofs.

For the third, two walls angle together to form a triangular cover above a pair of benches.

He then branched out in the Caucasus, leading from the Georgian Military Road. Here he found a curved brick shelter topped by a rounded canopy, and a roughly rendered structure with a blue and white striped bench.

Azerbaijan showcases a series of colourful mosaic designs, using tiles in hues of orange, yellow, blue green and red marked to mark out geometric patterns.

In the Armenia spa towns he captured a brick shelter with a pointed winged roof that parts in the centre. Another colourful mosaic shelter has a long window that offers views to the sea behind.

Ortner wanted to document the buildings as a series to compare their differences, and so aimed to use consistent perspectives and illuminations.

But he found a number of obstacles in his way, including the change in backdrop and people using the shelters.

“Owing to the large distances, the dense traffic in some places, and the escalating number of objects, mistakes occurred,” said Ortner.

“The light changed on the way from the central Asian steppe to rainy Moldova, along with the fauna and the surrounding landscape,” he continued.

“Local police authorities, parking taxis, or waiting people forced a break with the planned perfectibility and demanded improvisation.”

Two corrugated-metal structures also feature in the series, including a tubular shelter places on its side and another with a roof made up of six linked volumes painted red underneath.

On the Black Sea coast in the Crimean he spotted an intricately designed shelter with a covered area topped with a temple-like roof, before he meandered on to Ukraine.

Last up was Danube in Moldova, where a stop with a black-and-white mosaic design sits against a backdrop of rolling fields.

Back in the USSR is not the first photography series to investigate the topic of Soviet architecture.

Other examples include BACU’s images of buildings in the former Eastern Bloc, Rebecca Litchfield’s documentation of monumental structures, Nicolas Grospierre’s photographs of modernist architecture across five continents.

The post Peter Ortner photographs 500 bus stops in former Soviet Union appeared first on Dezeen.

The corners of this aluminium-clad sports hall near the Iranian city of Bastam lift up from the earth to lend the irregular form a “cloud-like” appearance.

The hall was designed by Tehran-based FEA Studio for the Noor-e Mobin Educational and Cultural Institute – a non-profit private boys school based in Bastam.

Apart from a boundary wall and gatehouses, the sports centre is the first structure to be completed on the site to the north of the city.

The school’s brief called for a proposal to complement the facilities that will gradually be added to the site, but that also has a unique character.

Rather than sticking to the standard warehouse-like typology that is commonly used for buildings of this purpose, the architects drew inspiration from the surrounding scenery.

“In this site, there is a panoramic view of the clouds, mountains and plains,” said FEA Studio.

“The idea was to create a building that would be like part of a natural thing, not only as a building construction, and that will become part of the landscape itself – like a cloud.”

The building’s proportions are informed by the size of the basketball court it contains, which is also designed to be used for other sports.

An area along one edge of the facility contains a lobby, office, changing rooms, bathrooms, kitchen and storage spaces on the ground floor, with a table-tennis hall accommodated above.

White aluminium-faced panelling forms an angular shell around the structure. On one corner, this surface is sliced away to create a sheltered and welcoming entrance.

The cladding is also raised up along the edge of the main hall. This lightens the building’s visual mass and provides views of the landscape from inside the facility.

“Sports halls are usually designed in a way that they do not have a view of the nature,” said the architects, “and the connection of inside and outside is based on getting daylight, but we wanted the in-out connection incessantly.”

“Therefore, this sports hall is a panoramic view itself, that the entire natural scenes can be observed from its inside.”

The double-glazed wall lining the side of the sports hall has a thickness of 18 millimetres, so it can withstand impacts from any balls being bounced against it.

Despite requesting a unique and characterful building, the school also wanted to keep costs to a minimum to achieve a budget of approximately $400,000 (£320,000).

A standard portal frame helped to reduce construction costs, while enabling small adjustments to the form straightforward. The aluminium sandwich cladding is also economical and easy to apply, as well as highly insulating.

Architects Florian Fischer and Harald Fuchshuber also took cues from warehouse typology for a prefabricated, shed-like sports hall in Germany’s Upper Bavarian region.

The post FEA Studio installs “cloud-like” sports hall in mountainous landscape of northern Iran appeared first on Dezeen.

This coastal cafe in the South Korean city of Gijang comprises a series of enormous concrete volumes that dwarf neighbouring houses, and are stacked and rotated to optimise views of the East China Sea.

The Waveon cafe perches high on a hilltop overlooking the rocky shoreline of the area north of South Korea’s second largest city, Busan.

Seoul studio IDMM Architects was asked to develop the 500-square-metre building to make the most of the spectacular views.

“Depending on where and how we see the beach, the sea shows diverse views for us,” said the architects, referring to the varying vistas available from the rocky headland.

“Accordingly, the significant matter of this project is how we can grasp and deal with the relationship between natural scenery and architecture.”

A need to accommodate dining areas with different aspects prompted the arrangement of the cafe as a stack of elongated and angular volumes with large openings integrated into the facades.

Circulation is positioned in a void at the centre of the building to ensure the spaces along the edges remain open and able to look out through full-height glazing.

The central staircase also incorporates stepped wooden seating, with glass balustrades enabling visitors see all the way to the outside when using these spaces.

The layered arrangement of the concrete forms results in a dynamic interior with shifting views between the various internal spaces and out through the large windows.

The ground floor accommodates the main serving area and a large space for seating, as well as toilets, an office and additional storage and catering areas.

Stairs ascend to further stone-floored seating areas lined with glazing on the first and second floors.

Rectangular recesses that punctuate the concrete ceilings throughout these spaces contain concealed lighting.

Further seating is provided in several outdoor spaces, including a decked rooftop terrace that can be reached by following a ramp from the second floor.

Steps built into a steep section of the roof ascend to the very top of the building, where a viewpoint provides a panorama of the surrounding area.

At the rear of the cafe, a series of stepped wooden platforms interspersed among tall pine trees provide an alternative place to relax and have a drink.

The platforms are based on the traditional Korean pyeongsang – a simple outdoor deck used for small communal activities like tea drinking.

The building’s smooth concrete walls are punctured in places by oblique openings which emphasise the angular structure and frame views that change as visitors move around the spaces.

Photography is by Jaeyoon Kim.

The post Stacked concrete blocks and roof deck give diners sea views from South Korean cafe by IDMM Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

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