Hasta La Ideas

New York architect Steven Holl describes how he designed the mixed-use Sliced Porosity Block complex in Chengdu, China, as a container for public space in the first of two movies by architectural filmmakers Spirit of Space.

“This is an example of how you can shape space first and the architecture supports that,” explains Holl. “This isn’t just some iconic skyscraper.”

Completed at the end of 2012, Sliced Porosity Block is of one of a string of recent projects by Steven Holl Architects in China, which include a pair of museums for Tianjin, a “horizontal skyscraper” in Shenzhen and the Linked Hybrid complex in Beijing. “One of the things about working in China is that right now I feel it’s a culture that understands the urgency of building for the future,” says Holl.

The complex comprises a cluster of five towers around a public plaza, with a shopping centre tucked underneath. Holl cites New York’s Rockefeller Centre as inspiration for his design concept, which rejects the “towers and podium” approach commonly adopted for large mixed-use developments. “Rockafella Centre shapes a big public space without any building being iconic,” he says.

In the movie, the architect gives a walking tour of the completed project and visits some of the integrated installations, including the Light Pavilion designed by Lebbeus Woods. “The concept of buildings within buildings was something that was driving the original design,” he adds.

See more images of Sliced Porosity Block in our earlier story, or see more architecture by Steven Holl Architects.

Spirit of Space previously filmed two movies about Steven Holl’s Daeyang Gallery and House, an underground gallery with a pool of water underneath. See more movies by Spirit of Space on Dezeen.

Architectural photography is by Hufton + Crow.

The post “This isn’t just some iconic skyscraper”
– Steven Holl on Sliced Porosity Block appeared first on Dezeen.

Holly Lewis and Oliver Goodall of Hackney studio We Made That have been exploring architecture’s “soft side” by planting flowers in the Olympic Park, as they explain in the final talk filmed at our Designed in Hackney Day last year.

In the movie, the We Made That founders look at why they’ve been working on “things you never get taught in [architecture] school,” with projects like Fantasticology, a group of landscape interventions in the London 2012 Olympic Park.

Movie image: wildflower meadows in the Olympic Park
Above: Fantasticology facts on benches in the Olympic Park

Working with architect Tomas Klassnik and artist Riitta Ikonen, they planted wildflower meadows in the footprints of the buildings that previously occupied the site.

“Essentially it becomes a floral memorial to some of those things that were there before, and are no longer,” says Lewis. “We just love the idea that there’s some recognition of that past. The majority of the flowers are annuals, so next year they’ll fade and self-seed, disperse and become less distinct.”

Above: site of wildflower meadows in the Olympic Park

Plaques engraved with unusual facts were also inserted into benches around the Olympic Park as part of the same project.

They collected the facts through workshops with local people, finding out that sharks, for example, go into a trance if they’re flipped over. “There was a kid in the park debating with his dad how you turn a shark upside down,” says Lewis. “I love that people can have that kind of interaction with their surroundings, and see something different in their surroundings than this spick and span park.”

Above: copies of The Unlimited Edition newspaper

The duo also worked on a neighbourhood newspaper, The Unlimited Edition, which reported on local news from the High Street 2012 route stretching from Aldgate to Stratford.

“We’re interested in engaging people with tactics for making change,” says Goodall. “If you say to someone, ‘we’re interested in talking about urbanism and policy’, they glaze over. But if you hand out a newspaper on the high street for free and talk about someone’s neighbourhood, they’re interested in having that conversation.”

Above: proposal for The Wild Kingdom play area in Newham

Finally, they discuss a project to build an outdoor play area in Newham, east London. “With this, there’s a number of engagement activities and planned workshops and what we call ‘slow build’,” says Goodall. “That’s an important aspect – not just delivering something, finishing it and walking away. It’s a longer term involvement with these projects.”

Goodall and Lewis founded We Made That in 2006 as an architecture and design studio working within the public realm.

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

The post “A soft side to architecture is coming
to the fore” – We Made That appeared first on Dezeen.

A tree-filled courtyard is glimpsed through the shimmering glass-brick facade of this house in Hiroshima, designed by Japanese architect Hiroshi Nakamura (+ movie).

Optical Glass House was constructed beside a busy road, so Hiroshi Nakamura and his studio NAP wanted to create a private oasis where residents could still make out the movements of people and traffic beyond the walls. “The serene soundless scenery of the passing cars and trams imparts richness to life in the house,” said the architect.

The garden is raised up to first floor level to make room for a garage below and the architects used 6,000 specially made glass blocks to build a two-storey-high wall in front of it. The wall was too tall to support itself, so the blocks had to be bolted together.

As light filters through the glass it creates dancing patterns across the walls and over a group of maple, ash and holly trees.

“The facade appears like a waterfall flowing downward, scattering light and filling the air with freshness,” said the architect.

An open living room is located just behind and is only separated from the garden by a lightweight metal curtain. This curtain folds back to reveal a second glass-block wall at the back of the room, which lines the edge of a central staircase.

Residents are faced with the staircase upon first entering the house. A water basin skylight is positioned immediately above and projects more light patterns onto the floor.

A split-level second garden is located at the back of the house, while the children’s rooms occupy the top floor, a dining room and kitchen are on the first floor and a hobby room, Japanese room and extra bedroom can be found on the ground floor.

Hiroshi Nakamura worked under Kengo Kuma before setting up his studio in 2002. Previous projects include the Roku Museum, a small art gallery with softly curving walls.

See more architecture in Japan, including a house fronted by a stack of gardens.

Photography is by Koji Fujii, Nacasa & Partners.

Here’s some information from the architects:

Optical Glass House

This house is sited among tall buildings in downtown Hiroshima, overlooking a street with many passing cars and trams. To obtain privacy and tranquility in these surroundings, we placed a garden and optical glass façade on the street side of the house. The garden is visible from all rooms, and the serene soundless scenery of the passing cars and trams imparts richness to life in the house.

Sunlight from the east, refracting through the glass, creates beautiful light patterns. Rain striking the water-basin skylight manifests water patterns on the entrance floor. Filtered light through the garden trees flickers on the living room floor, and a super lightweight curtain of sputter-coated metal dances in the wind. Although located downtown in a city, the house enables residents to enjoy the changing light and city moods, as the day passes, and live in awareness of the changing seasons.

Optical Glass Façade

A façade of some 6,000 pure-glass blocks (50mm x 235mm x 50mm) was employed. The pure-glass blocks, with their large mass-per-unit area, effectively shut out sound and enable the creation of an open, clearly articulated garden that admits the city scenery. To realize such a façade, glass casting was employed to produce glass of extremely high transparency from borosilicate, the raw material for optical glass. The casting process was exceedingly difficult, for it required both slow cooling to remove residual stress from within the glass, and high dimensional accuracy. Even then, however, the glass retained micro-level surface asperities, but we actively welcomed this effect, for it would produce unexpected optical illusions in the interior space.

Waterfall

So large was the 8.6m x 8.6m façade, it could not stand independently if constructed by laying rows of glass blocks a mere 50mm deep. We therefore punctured the glass blocks with holes and strung them on 75 stainless steel bolts suspended from the beam above the façade. Such a structure would be vulnerable to lateral stress, however, so along with the glass blocks, we also strung on stainless steel flat bars (40mm x 4mm) at 10 centimeter intervals. The flat bar is seated within the 50mm-thick glass block to render it invisible, and thus a uniform 6mm sealing joint between the glass blocks was achieved. The result – a transparent façade when seen from either the garden or the street. The façade appears like a waterfall flowing downward, scattering light and filling the air with freshness.

The glass block façade weighs around 13 tons. The supporting beam, if constructed of concrete, would therefore be of massive size. Employing steel frame reinforced concrete, we pre-tensioned the steel beam and gave it an upward camber. Then, after giving it the load of the façade, we cast concrete around the beam and, in this way, minimized its size.

Project name: Optical Glass House
Main purpose: Housing
Design: Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP Co.,Ltd.
Structure design: Yasushi Moribe
Contractor: Imai Corporation
Location: Naka-ku, Hiroshima-shi, Hitroshima, Japan
Site area: 243.73m2
Total Floor area: 363.51m2
Completion year: October,2012
Structure: R.C.structure

Above: site plan

Above: ground floor plan

Above: first floor plan

Above: second floor plan

Above: section

The post Optical Glass House by
Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP appeared first on Dezeen.

Parasitic dwellings for homeless people would cling to the sides of lamp posts in this concept by British architecture graduate Milo Ayden De Luca (+ slideshow + movie).

Milo Ayden De Luca began working on Excrescent Utopia as a personal project after completing his architecture degree at the University of Greenwich.

“Every weekend for nearly a decade now, I’ve been travelling into the centre of London during the earliest hours of the day,” De Luca told Dezeen. “During these hours, the usually dense, lively, tourist-populated London is absent and is instead populated only by the many homeless people who sleep on our city’s streets. I’ve always thought about how the life of those living on the city’s streets can be improved.”

The project imagines street lights as temporary dwellings for homeless people by creating tensile structures around them using cheap, basic materials.

The structures are designed to be as lightweight as possible so that they can be modified and moved easily, and are inspired by the construction of sailing ships.

“The practical and technological constituents of sail ships – the pulleys, the sails and rope lines – also exude a sense of transparency, weightlessness, and movement,” he said. “I think this is a nice contrast to the surrounding structures in London, which are usually opaque, grounded and static.”

Street lights aren’t very structurally secure because they aren’t deeply embedded in the ground, said De Luca. This is in order to limit damage to vehicles and drivers in case of a collision.

To get around this, he proposes using guy ropes, cables and clamps to tie the structure to other street furniture and surrounding buildings. “This method creates only a little surface damage, but more importantly causes no structural damage to the building,” he said.

The ropes would thread through the structure’s nylon or Gore-Tex ‘skin’ and effectively divide the space into smaller areas with varying levels of privacy.

Horizontal boxes would provide areas for lying down and sleeping, while vertical spaces would provide a space for busking, he suggested.

The materials, fixtures and fittings necessary could mostly be obtained through the re-use and recycling of existing objects, or bought cheaply from DIY shops.

De Luca is currently hoping to raise funds to build a 1:1 scale prototype of the design.

Other conceptual architecture we’ve featured on Dezeen includes an algae-covered skyscraper that would produce its own energy and clean water and a high-rise building constructed from the rubbish of São Paulo’s streets – see all our stories about conceptual architecture.

We’ve also published other parasitic architecture, including a wooden hut clinging to the side of a San Francisco hotel and a fabric-covered tensile structure on the roof of a Buenos Aires apartment.

See all our stories about parasite buildings »
See all our stories about conceptual architecture »

The post Excrescent Utopia
by Milo Ayden De Luca appeared first on Dezeen.

The fourth and final movie from our series featuring the architecture of Slovenian studio OFIS Arhitekti features Shopping Roof Apartments, an apartment block on the roof of a shopping market in the Alpine village of Bohinjska Bistrica.

Completed in 2007, the apartments were designed by OFIS Arhitekti on an L-shaped plan around a rooftop courtyard. This layout opens up views of the mountains to the south and allows as much sunlight as possible to reach each residence.

Diagonal rows of grey slate tiles clad the building’s pitched roof and wrap down onto some of the walls, protecting them from damage by strong winds and snow.

West-facing balconies also need shelter from the weather and sit within recesses in the facade.

The architects used locally sourced larch for the other elevations, adding vertical panels across the walls and chunky slats around the balconies.

Dezeen first revealed images of Shopping Roof Apartments when it was first completed, alongside an apartment block based on local Alpine hayracks.

See more movies in this series produced by Carniolus, including one about an Alpine holiday hut and another about three baroque houses converted into apartments.

Other projects by OFIS Arhitekti on Dezeen include student housing inspired by wooden baskets and an apartment with staggered floors.

See all our stories about OFIS Arhitekti »

Photography is by Tomaz Gregoric.

Above: first floor plan – click above to see larger image

Above: second floor plan – click above to see larger image

Above: third floor plan – click above to see larger image

Above: roof plan – click above to see larger image

Above: section A – click above to see larger image

Above: section B – click above to see larger image

The post Movie: Shopping Roof Apartments
by OFIS Arhitekti appeared first on Dezeen.