Hasta La Ideas

British artist Richard Wentworth has collaborated with Swiss architects GRUPPE to build a pop-up wooden auditorium in the atrium of Central Saint Martins art and design college in London (+ slideshow).

The structure is named Black Maria, after Thomas Edison’s first movie production studio. Built entirely from wood, it was also inspired by both the timber scaffolds historically used in the industrial areas of King’s Cross and the building-site hoardings that surround much of the area today.

A tiered seating area is positioned at the front of the installation and is framed behind a wooden screen, creating what the designers refer to as an “inhabitable billboard”.

Large audiences can surround the structure during open presentations or talks, while more intimate performances can be accommodated by placing screens over the facade and closing off the space from its surroundings.

Two extra entrances are located on the back of the structure. One goes in at ground level, while the other features a grand staircase that leads into the top of the auditorium through an enclosed foyer.

Both GRUPPE and Richard Wentworth emphasise that the installation is also an informal meeeting area, where students can spend time during breaks.

Wentworth explained: “You have to magnetise some venues more than others so that people who feel that they are there ‘by accident’ are mixed with people who have a clear ‘sense of purpose’. This is an obvious condition of metropolitan space.”

Black Maria was installed in the Granary Building of Central Saint Martins this week and will remain in place until 12 March. The school was designed by architects Stanton Williams and is only in its second year of use.

Other recently completed timber installations include a cabin filled with coloured light and smoke and a wooden chamber installed at the Venice Architecture Biennale. See more installations on Dezeen.

Here’s a project description from the design team:

Black Maria by Richard Wentworth and GRUPPE

Black Maria, by Richard Wentworth and Swiss architecture practice GRUPPE, is part of RELAY, a nine-year arts programme that is enlivening the new public spaces at King’s Cross and turning the area into a destination for discovering international contemporary art that a celebrate the area’s heritage and its future. The second commission in the King’s Cross series, Black Maria, is a structure that acts as a place of meeting, based around discussion, performance and moving images.

Launching on 12 February 2013 for an initial 28 days, with the potential to be brought back at a later date, the Black Maria comprises a collection of spatial elements of varying sizes that recall an early film studio of the same name. The structure will be installed in The Crossing, in the Granary Building, the new home of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. The Crossing brings together several departments of the art school, new commercial tenants at the development, a restaurant and the public, which Wentworth and GRUPPE see as the ideal conditions to create a place of exchange.

The emphasis is on flexibility and happenstance, both in terms of the construction’s physicality and in the programming being arranged around it. Black Maria sits at one end of The Crossing, facing the larger part of the hall as a kind of inhabitable billboard with a staircase auditorium behind it. The talks happen “within” the billboard, allowing for different kinds of audience on either side of it: a more intimate audience within the structure; and another potentially much larger audience outside the structure. The billboard makes use of a large door to allow events to be either closed and private, or open to the hall and public. Black Maria recalls the vital but forgotten timber scaffolds used to build King’s Cross’ industrial past, and building site hoardings used today. In a related sense the Black Maria is a support structure for the community activities in the hall today.

Richard, who has lived near King’s Cross since the 1970’s, has witnessed and chronicled the transformation of the area through projects such as ‘An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty’, created for Artangel in 2002. Much like Black Maria, the Artangel work was an experiential one, encouraging visitors to walk into apparently unremarkable shops and alleyways around King’s Cross and see them from a fresh perspective. Black Maria has the potential to transform the somewhat neutral crossroads at the entrance to Central Saint Martins into a destination where people can attend scheduled talks and screenings, but also just find a place to sit, gather, eat lunch and chat.

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and GRUPPE appeared first on Dezeen.

Internet shoppers in San Sebastian can now pick up their purchases from a shop that appears to be furnished with nothing but cardboard boxes (+ slideshow).

Spanish architects VAUMM designed the store for group discount voucher website Deskontalia as a place where customers can pick up their deliveries and find out about the latest offers.

Unlike most shops, the space has no products to display, so the architects were challenged with filling an empty room. Inspired by the cardboard boxes used to transport purchases, they developed a concept to cover the floor and walls with boxy wooden furniture and shelving.

“Cartons are converted into the measurement unit of the architectural proposal,” explain the architects. “Small cartons are elements to generate a kind of sculpture that envelops the walls and roof to create different environments which users can interact with.”

Most of the boxes are used as shelves that can be reconfigured to suit different displays. Others are made from wood and provide tables and stools where customers can sit and browse the website.

A reception counter lines the edge of the room and also resembles a pile of boxes.

Aside from the boxes, the shop’s interior is kept simple, with existing walls and columns painted white and plants positioned beside the windows.

Other cardboard interiors include a cardboard meeting room for Bloomberg, a cardboard bank and a fold-out cardboard shop.

Spanish architects VAUMM are based in San Sebastian. Past projects by the firm include a golden culinary centre and an outdoor elevator.

Photography is by Aitor Ortiz.

Here’s a project description from VAUMM:

Deskontalia store in Donostia – San Sebastian, Gipuzkoa, Spain.

When somebody thinks about a shop, he can hardly avoid thinking about the products sold inside, and therefore those products are those which give sense of the need for a space. What would it happen if that object of desire was any? What if no one?

For Deskontalia store, located in a urban downtown street, the sale has occurred even before one reaches the local. The space should be a pick up point for any product that one could imagine buying over the Internet, but even something else.

From that point of view the space should become not only a space to sell, but a space to be a meeting point between brand and people, an open space, a place of the city where an online business becomes a physical reality.

The store activity is linked to package traffic, cardboard containers in which travel purchased products, which are collected in this new architectural space. A small counter where to exchange these packages of hands, solves all the functional requirements of the trade.

The space has been treated as a white empty space where old items such as masonry walls or casting pillars are bathed in this colour, as well as more contemporary new resin pavement, in an attempt to transform the store not in a shop but in a store where different transformations may occur.

Cartons are converted into the measurement unit of the architectural proposal. Small cartons are elements to generate a kind of sculpture that envelops the walls and roof to create different environments which users can interact with.

Above: floor plan – click above for larger image

These packaging boxes incorporate the graphic image of the brand, a d-, like a strip on both sides, 90 degrees in space. Thus, the store gets a sculptural object at its scale by stacking the cartons with multiplications of their shapes and cubic components, qualified by the impression of the brand. Somehow it has been generated a kind of recycled space, in which low cost boxes transcend the value and meaning we could give to them individually, to become artistic and modulate the space when considered together.

The walls are not only boxes bookshelf but also part of the shell, the roof parts are not only sculptures but also shapes that break the echo sound of the store which also modulate the sound.

Above: ceiling plan – click above for larger image

Cartons are organized this way in which the white container has become the store, which can be moved at any time, changed or simply replaced by other objects. The cartons composition will be transformed as easily as the other part of the store, which is the Deskontalia web site, which is also shown in the store through two digital projections which interact with users.

Furniture is also involved in this changing condition, so its module-based design lets multiple configurations of the store, so you can have a lecture, read a newspaper, show a new product, or just hang out in internet.

Above: shelving concept – click above for larger image

The counter, stools and tables, somehow show the same packaging language, that besides also incorporates to the design other meanings such as low cost, the ephemeral, the changing and the casual, all of them concepts that underlie also the Internet purchase which serves to this commercial space.

The post Deskontalia store in Donostia
by VAUMM appeared first on Dezeen.

Bold blocks of colour at ground level contrast with the white upper storeys of this school in Mallorca by Spanish architects RipollTizon (+ slideshow).

The Binissalem School Complex combines both a primary and a secondary school and comprises a single building made up of overlapping volumes and recessed openings.

RipollTizon explains that the building was designed to reference the different scales of its neighbours: “From the beginning, our intent was to develop the project as a dialogue, on different scales, between the school and its surroundings.”

The colourful stripes were generated using photographs of children wearing bright clothing. “The intention of using colour in some parts of the facade is to create a background for the children,” the architects told Dezeen. “Their colourful clothing and movement will blend with the facade.”

The school is laid out on an L-shaped plan with three storeys. This creates long walls along the edge of an adjacent road but opens the building out to playgrounds at the rear.

Classrooms are arranged in tiers so that multi-purpose spaces are located nearest to the playground and can be utilised for non-school events.

A long ramp also leads up from this area to a roof terrace with a view out towards the mountains.

The main entrance is on the north-west corner, where the walls step back to frame a small courtyard.

RipollTizon is led by architects Pep Ripoll and Juan Miguel Tizón. The studio also recently completed a family house at the end of a traditional row.

Other newly completed school buildings include a stark concrete extension to a school in Portugal and a UK school built with brick, aluminium and timber.

See more schools on Dezeen »

Photography is by José Hevia.

Here’s a project description from Ripolltizon:

Binissalem School Complex by RipollTizon

The School Complex (provides primary and secondary school levels) is located in the outskirts of Binnisalem urban fabric. The plot is located along a suburban road named “Camí de Pedaç” on which the urban planning has concentrated a heterogeneous mix of typologies, including diverse row houses, detached blocks and urban facilities.

From the beginning, our intent was to develop the project as a dialogue, on different scales, between the school and its surroundings. On the one hand, the new school building faces the road with a fragmented volume and a broken skyline that enhances perspective effects and scale control in relation to the singularities of the unorganized neighborhood volumes. On the other hand, towards interior of the plot that faces the countryside, the building embraces the sport ground areas creating a facade with bigger scale elements and more compact massing. Moreover, the building areas used only for teaching were clearly separated from those that can be used also for non-school events, creating different building parts and scales that were properly arranged into the complex.

A set back on the facade to the road creates the main access space, an open plaza in the building corner, that generates the circulations and arranges the different functions. The functional packages are grouped in different levels with the intention to reduce the building coverage surface and create a plot area where playgrounds, sport grounds and future extensions can be located.

Above: site plan – click above for larger image

An exterior ramp connects the school grounds to an elevated plaza that is created in the roof of part of the ground-floor. From this roof plaza is also possible to enjoy the excellent views of Binissalem skyline and its surrounding mountains.

Above: ground floor plan – click above for larger image

Architects: Pep Ripoll – Juan Miguel Tizón
Collaborators: Xisco Sevilla (architect)
Quantity Surveyor: Toni Arqué

Above: first floor plan – click above for larger image

IBISEC Collaborators: Juan Vanrell (architect IBISEC)
José Juan Amengual (quantity surveyor IBISEC)
Structural Engineer: Jorge Martín
Building Services E.: TIIS Ingeniería

Above: second floor plan – click above for larger image

Client: Institut d’Infraestructures i Serveis Educatius i Cultural (IBISEC)
Contractors: PROINOSA
Project Area: 3.166 sqm
Budget: 2.060.064 EUR

Above: section – click above for larger image

Start of Design: 2005
Year of Completion: 2011
Location: Camí de Pedaç – Binissalem. Mallorca. Spain

The post Binissalem School Complex
by RipollTizon appeared first on Dezeen.

This spiralling stone house in Vietnam by architect Vo Trong Nghia has grass on its roof and an oval courtyard at its centre (+ slideshow).

Vo Trong Nghia wanted to avoid copying the concrete and plaster buildings that are common in the surrounding Quang Ninh province and to instead create “a space that can record the changes and traces of time over the years through the aging of natural materials”.

Following this concept, the two-storey Stone House is constructed from locally quarried stone blocks that are stacked up in an alternating grid to give a brickwork pattern to the walls.

Dark timber frames surround the windows and stand out against the muted grey colour of the stone.

Like many of Vo Trong Nghia’s projects, the house was designed to minimise energy consumption. The central courtyard contains both a tree and a pool of water, intended to naturally cool the surrounding rooms.

Similarly, a thick layer of grass blankets the entire roof and is maintained by an inbuilt irrigation system.

The spiralling volume of the house gives a variety of ceiling heights to rooms on both floors. Bedrooms are stacked up on top of one another with lower ceilings, while the living room becomes a double height space.

Small study areas branch off from the main corridor and slot into the spaces between rooms.

Dark wood beams create stripes across the ceilings and accommodate low-energy LED lighting. Timber also lines the walls in most rooms and was used to construct the staircase.

Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia has studios in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and his firm picked up two awards at the 2012 World Architecture Festival for the Stacking Green house and Binh Duong School. Speaking to Dezeen, Nghia explained his plans to reduce the energy crisis in both residential and public buildings.

See more architecture by Vo Trong Nghia Architects »
See more architecture in Vietnam »

Photography is by Hiroyuki Oki.

Here’s some more information from Vo Trong Nghia Architects:

Stone House

This torus-shaped stone house is located in a quiet residential quarter beside the way to Ha Long Bay from Hanoi. A rising green roof and walls composed of subdued color stones in dark blue create a landscape, which stands out in the new residential area.

In Vietnam, ordinary houses are made by reinforced concrete, brick, plaster and painted boards despite there are abundant natural resources in the country such as stone, timber and so on. The subject of this project was to create a space that can record the changes and traces of time over the years through the aging of natural materials, which contributes to cultivate the beauty and enhance inhabitants’ affection for the house. To achieve this goal, stones quarried from Thanh Hoa province (so-called blue stone) and hard wood (“Go Huong”) were chosen for the main material of the house and they are designed together with greenery.

Above: concept diagram

A characteristic of this house is the layout of rooms in an elliptic plan. The rooms, composed of four clusters, surround the oval courtyard, making a colony-like relationship. The voids are inserted between each room-clusters and become activity nodes for its inhabitants as well as pathways for wind and light, connecting the courtyard and outside garden. The surface of the oval courtyard is a shallow pond with a symbol tree, which let cool air flow into the interior spaces.

Above: ground floor plan

Circulating flow runs around the courtyard and continues to the green roof, connecting all places in the house. The rising roof creates spaces with various ceiling height, which correspond to the functions of the house. For instance, the living room has nearly five-meter-high slanted ceiling, which provides verticality and openness. The courtyard and the green roof compose a sequential garden, which creates a rich relationship between inside and outside of the house. Residents discover the changes of the seasons and realize their wealthy life with the nature, thanks to this sequential garden. Irrigation pipes are buried under the soil of green roof as a component of automatic watering system, to lighten the maintenance work of the inhabitants.

Above: first floor plan

To create a wall with smooth curvature, cubic stones with 10cm thickness, 10cm height and 20 cm width are carefully stacked. The curved wall was stacked trapezoidal stone alternately and the regular pattern of the gap performs the play of light and shadow. Massive and meticulous texture of the wall generates a cave-like space, which recalls the image of a primitive house.

Above: roof plan

Interior of the living and dining room is finished with hard wood. Wood boards on its wall and round-shaped wood louvers under the ceiling create a friendly atmosphere for gathering. Louvers have LED tapes on its tops of and provide indirect light to the space underneath.

The fence of the house was also made of blue stones. It is harmonized with the main building and its garden. Creepers on the barb wires on the fence form a circle of green, and this green fence together with the green roof create a multi-layered green-scape and become a landmark of the town.

Above: section

Cow grass was originally planted on the roof and several native ferns covered the roof afterwards. The combination of plants, stones and timbers provides a space, in which the time of the family is being recorded. The family with 2 young children has been enjoying their living in the house which changing day by day. They sense each other and deepen their communication, rounding and rounding in the house.

Above: section

Architect Firm: Vo Trong Nghia Architects
Principal architect: Vo Trong Nghia
Contractor: Wind and Water House JSC
Status: Built in 02.2012
Program: Private House
Location: Quang Ninh province, Vietnam
GFA: 360sqm
Client: Individual

The post Stone House by
Vo Trong Nghia appeared first on Dezeen.

This house outside Lisbon by architects GGLL Atelier has a grey base that nestles into the landscape and an angular white upper level that follows the incline of the hill (+ slideshow).

GGLL Atelier designed the residence as the home for a family of four and it is located beside a golf course.

The house features an L-shaped plan that folds around a patio on the south side of the house. “The L-shaped plan came from the need to create an exterior area that is protected from the wind from the north,” architect Gary Barber told Dezeen.

A garage, a wine cellar, a games room and a cinema room are located on the ground floor, while living rooms, bedrooms and a library benefit from the higher ceilings on the first floor.

“We split the house into two distinct volumes,” said Barber. “The base is where the least common areas of the house are found and it has a more solid nature, kind of working like a pedestal. The upper volume of the house is where the more normal spaces are found and is white to show the clean lines.”

A terrace occupies the roof, offering a view out over the golf course.

Other recently completed houses in Portugal include a residence with red concrete walls and a bright white house with a sprawling extension.

See more houses in Portugal »

Photography is by Fernando Guerra.

Here’s a project description from GGLLatelier:

Quinta dos Alcoutins Lt.4

The House is inserted on an estate situated at the northern limit of Lisbon, the lot is north-facing with an accentuated decline.

A grey volume draws the exterior spaces of the house and rectifies the inclined nature of the terrain, allowing the social areas a better solar exposure, the slanting white volume floats over it, turned away from the exterior limits of the lot and opening over the garden and the swimming pool.

The distribution is pragmatic and very clear: The grey volume is filled with the complementary spaces of the house, illuminated by a patio carved in it (shower room, spa, cinema room, wine cellar and garage) the white volume is occupied by the main spaces of the house (lounge, library, kitchen and bedrooms) privileged by the transparency towards the garden and swimming pool. The rooftop is torn by a white terrace overlooking the golf-course and the city skyline.

Architecture: GG. LL atelier – Gabriela Gonçalves, arqtª, Leonel Lopes, arqtº
Design Team: Miguel Malaquias, arqtº, Gary Barber, arqtº, José Doroana, arqtº; Ana Braga, arqtª
Structural engineer: Betar, Miguel Villarengº
Constructor: Ultracasa 2001

Above: ground floor plan

Above: first floor plan

Above: second floor/roof plan

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by GGLL Atelier appeared first on Dezeen.