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Timelapse Sculpt and Airbrush of the Night King!..(Read…)

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Nishizawa Architects has replaced the facade and interior walls of this residence in Vietnam‘s An Giang province with moveable corrugated metal panels to create a “half-outdoors” dwelling for three families.

The house, which is set in the city of Chau Doc, is close to the Mekong river and raised on pilotis above flood-prone grounds. It is shared by three separate families, who asked the Ho Chi Minh City-based practice if it could improve living alongside each other.

To begin, the practice integrated corrugated metal shutters into the facade of the residence, permitting open views of the surrounding rice fields.

“We felt this ambition was attractive to collaborate with,” practice founder Shunri Nishizawa told Dezeen, “even though we realised this was a challenging project when we visited their original house”.

“We tried to satisfy the rich lifestyle which is fulfilled by sunlight, greenery and natural ventilation.”

The internal walls of House in Chau Doc have been swapped for moveable metal partitions, opening up the layout and allowing the inhabitants to move freely from room to room, creating a “melting and ambiguous” space.

A self-contained apartment occupies the lower floor, while a duplex is set across a portion of the first and second level, where there is also a studio.

The frame of the house is configured by a network of timber beams that are left exposed.

The roof has been inverted so that it forms a butterfly-like structure when the metal panels are pushed open.

Keen to use local materials, the practice built the columns of the house from a Vietnamese hardwood called Shorea Obtusa, and sourced the timber for the flooring from a second-hand market nearby.

The outer walls have been made from concrete and then embossed with the pattern of woven bamboo to emulate regional craft techniques.

“It was an important theme for us to preserve the regional customs and spirits inside the house,” said Nishizawa.

Other architects using moveable walls to improve the connection between living spaces and the outdoors include Benjamin Garcia Saxe’s use of folding wooden screens at the front of a house in Costa Rica to reveal ocean vistas, while an Italian villa designed by Bergmeisterwolf features an extension with sliding glazed panels that opens the living area up to the garden.

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Brand identity firm Matchstic has worked with Atlanta‘s Department of City Planning to redesign its branding and create new zoning signs around the city.

Speaking about the department‘s initial rebrand, Matchstic explained, “We worked with [Tim Keane, Commissioner of City Planning] and his core team to uncover why the department exists and what they hope to accomplish.”

“Atlanta’s Department of Planning and Community Development has a lot to say to a lot of people, but the messages aren’t always clear,” it continued. “The challenge was to design a system within the longstanding city brand, including a seal that’s been around since the 19th century.”

Keeping the original seal, the new identity features bold practical typography and focuses more on utility than ornamentation.

As well as creating a new visual identity, Matchstic were also responsible for “humanising” the language used by the department, so that it could communicate with the public more clearly.

A series of improvements to the customer experience were made, including the creation of a new simplified department name, changing it from “Department of Planning and Community Development” to “Department of City Planning”.

Within the department’s offices, the studio helped implement new wayfinding standards, which included adding signage to clearly direct people through the permitting and approval process. Here, the studio implemented emotional colour theory in order to differentiate the offices within the department.

Following the successful rebranding, Matchstic were asked to reinvent the department’s public notice signs in order to better engage Atlanta’s citizen’s with the development work happening around the city.

“As the City of Atlanta, everything that we design should be exceptional,” said commissioner of city planning Tim Keane. “The city is responsible for setting the standard of work that is representative and worthy of contributing to Atlanta.”

“We’re in the process of evaluating ourselves to ensure we are clear and concise in all that we do.”

Describing the existing signage as “difficult to read and impossible to understand”, the studio wanted to improve the legibility of the outdated notices and create a cleaner aesthetic.

“Our solution was to design a clear visual system, one that is unexpectedly engaging and flexible for future expansion,” said the studio. “We also created a legible, consistent visual hierarchy that distinctly identifies the notices by assigning each one a single letter.”

“The colours were refined to reflect what our flourishing city represents, boldly framing each sign, no matter its backdrop.”

As well as the bold colours, the notices have been refreshed and modernised with the department’s newly designed logo and typefaces printed in black and white ink.

The crisp new identity chimes with the recent trend for reducing logos and branding down to the bare essentials.

Earlier this year London-based studio Blond created a minimal bank card for new banking start-up Revolut, England’s primary professional football competition kicked off its 2016/2017 season with a significantly simplified lion’s head logo, and design agency Pentagram created a more stripped-back logo and visual identity for Mastercard.

The post Matchstic reworks Atlanta’s zoning signs to make them more readable appeared first on Dezeen.

This museum in Incheon, South Korea, is dedicated to teaching visitors about wood and features moving timber screens that create effects similar to dappled sunlight filtering through trees.

Seoul architecture studio Soft Architecture Lab designed the Wood Culture Museum for a site in Incheon Grand Park, where the Korea Forest Service operates a large arboretum.

Soft Architecture Lab’s proposal won a competition organised by the city and the forestry service for a building that provides facilities for the large number of visitors who come to explore the arboretum’s diverse plants and trees.

In its response to the competition brief, the studio sought to move away from the more typical timber museum buildings used to house exhibitions about wood at the organisation’s other sites.

Instead, the Mokyeonri building incorporates wood into its architecture in ways that provide visitors with a multi-sensory experience of the material and where it comes from.

“The project name, Mokyeonri, means a harmony between trees from different roots,” said the architects, “which identifies an architecture of a series of spatial experiences sensing the diverse attributes of wood.”

The building features a striking, angular form, with a pointed corner facing the adjacent car park extending over an entrance incorporated into a glazed surface on the ground floor.

Cylindrical pillars support a pair of concrete slabs that form the floor and roof of the upper level. The interactive wooden screen occupies a void between these two surfaces at the corner of the building.

The screen is formed of six-sided “leaves” made from a hardwood called merbau and attached at a single point to metal frames.

The wooden panels are arranged in pairs fixed together at one end by springs. When the wind blows, they close up slightly before gently regaining their original position.

The effect of the subtle movement combined with the shadows cast when the sun shines is evocative of the dappled light in a forest.

On the opposite side of the upper floor, a similar screen is positioned around the edge of a deck that can be seen from inside the building’s main circulation area.

This screen incorporates a pulley system driven by a motor so the distances between the vertical elements can be manually adjusted.

Drawing the leaves together creates broad gaps that increase light levels and views inside, while opening them out again produces a more even, permeable surface.

This same technique is applied to a screen that forms a gate set into an angular concrete frame protruding from the eastern end of the ground floor.

Drawing the moveable elements of the gate together using the motorised pulleys provides gaps through which visitors can pass to reach a paved courtyard.

The museum is described by the architects as “the first public project of kinetic architecture in South Korea”, and aims to enhance the visitor’s perception of the sun and wind through the actions of the moving surfaces.

A double-height void containing a staircase connecting the two floors is topped with a ceiling featuring Japanese cypress battens that extend downwards in regular rows.

The wooden sticks partially conceal utilities integrated into the ceiling and form another surface that appears to alter in appearance as the viewer moves around within the space.

Alongside a lobby and reception desk, the building’s ground floor contains facilities for teaching and conducting woodwork, including a workshop with an adjoining preparation room, an instructor’s waiting room, storage and a dust-collection space.

The stairs ascend to an upper floor housing a children’s wood museum, playground, seminar room, toilets and outdoor spaces at either end, one of which is designated as a playground and the other as an observation deck.

Photography is by Shin Kyungsub.

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