Hasta La Ideas

Earlier this year Slovenian firm OFIS Arhitekti transformed three Baroque houses in Ljubljana into an apartment block with a secret courtyard, which is featured in this third movie from our series about the studio’s work.

Located in the city’s historic centre, the three buildings had most recently been used as the offices and bookshop of a publishing company, before OFIS Arhitekti were brought on to combine the spaces and create twelve new apartments.

Providing daylight for each apartment proved difficult so the architects added glass elevations around the existing courtyard, which they then converted from a storage area for air conditioning units into a small garden for residents.

“Since the court is very narrow and enclosed from all sides, the main concern was to provide as much light as possible to become a form of internal garden,” said the architects.

Behind the glass, rows of arches with stone pillars provide traces of the original architecture, while the street-facing elevations are restored to their original condition.

The movie was produced by Carniolus and follows one about an Alpine holiday hut and another about a social housing block inspired by hayracks.

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 and Jan Celeda.

Above: level 1 plan – click above to see larger image

Above: level 2 plan – click above to see larger image

Above: attic level 1 plan – click above to see larger image

Above: attic level 2 plan – click above to see larger image

Above: north section – click above to see larger image

Above: south section – click above to see larger image

Above: east section – click above to see larger image

Above: west section – click above to see larger image

Above: sun diagram – click above to see larger image

The post Movie: Baroque Court Apartments
by OFIS Arhitekti appeared first on Dezeen.

Film studio Carniolus has produced a series of movies to document the architecture of Slovenian practice OFIS Arhitekti and the first gives a tour of the 6×11 Alpine Hut, a holiday home in Slovenia’s Triglav National Park.

Completed in 2009, the house was designed by OFIS Arhitekti in line with a set of plans for a traditional Slovenian hut that had already been granted permission on the site. The architects designed a contemporary version with the same dimensions, roof pitch and materials, meaning a new construction permit was not required.

The house is used as an alpine retreat for a family, so the architects added three bedrooms and a sauna on the top floor, as well as a large living and dining room on the ground floor that opens out to a sheltered veranda.

See more photographs of 6×11 Alpine Hut in our earlier story.

See all our stories about OFIS Arhitekti »

Photography is by Tomaz Gregoric.

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by OFIS Arhitekti appeared first on Dezeen.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 closes this weekend and this movie by Cristobal Palma shows how visitors to the Chilean Pavilion had to walk over a bed of salt while viewing proposals for Chile’s public spaces on glowing boxes suspended from the ceiling.

The pavilion was named Cancha, the pre-Hispanic Quechuan word for public space, to tie in with biennale director David Chipperfield’s theme of Common Ground. “Cancha is the reference used to comprehend our Chilean Ground, our Common Ground which is not urban but territorial,” explained the curators.

In response to this, seven architects presented concepts for public spaces in Chile as images on the hanging boxes, while Cristobal Palma produced seven short movies (shown below) to capture the essence of each idea.

The salt crystals covering the floor of the pavilion were a nod to the salt flats of Tarapacá, which supply salt to Venice and form a tie between the two places. Roughly cut salt blocks also provided seating for visitors.

See all our stories about the biennale, including the Russian Pavilion covered in QR codes and the Dutch Pavilion with constantly changing spaces.

Photography is by Cristobal Palma.

Palma’s movies follow below with project captions from the exhibition:

Deserta by Pedro Alonso: ”The constant mutation of a territory traced by the human interventions of ground exploitation reveals from the apparent emptiness of the Atacama Desert.”

Metropolitan Promenade by Alejandro Arevena, Elemental: ”An urban scale public space as a tool to build social equality in Santiago de Chile”

Limitless Chile by Juan Pablo Corvalán, Susuka: “Cancha’s spatial conditions begin on its boundaries, just like a country. By using the traditional Mexican mural method, they show us a process of delimitation and then the suppression of the country limits, reaching a utopian continent-like country.”

Playground by Genaro Cuadros: “By explaining the consequences of property speculation, he lets us understand the fundamentals of the constitution of a country by its ground system with the participation of the State and the individuals.”

Kancha by Germán del Sol: “By focusing in the origin of common American space, he takes us out from the colonial structure into Quechuan and pre-Hispanic origins; the spatial matrix that established territories and landscapes with the presence of man.”

Travesía of the Amereida by Iván Ivelic: “Through the method used in the School of Architecture of the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, he shows us how the South American continent can be re-comprehended and re-founded.”

Performance of a Conquest by Rodrigo Tisi: “A proposal of categorisations of the way that social and political individual bodies conquer the land, through three case studies on Chilean territory.”

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Architecture Biennale 2012 appeared first on Dezeen.