Hasta La Ideas

Chicago firm Studio Gang Architects has completed a boathouse on the northern bank of the Chicago River with a rhythmic roofline intended to capture the alternating motions of a rower’s arm movements (+ slideshow).

Located beside Clark Park in the north-west of the city, the WMS Boathouse provides a home for the Chicago Rowing Foundation. It is one of four boathouses proposed as part of a city-funded regeneration of the Chicago River, and the first of two designed by Studio Gang.

Structural roof trusses that alternate between M and upside-down V shapes give the building its jagged roof profile, which was conceptualised by tracing the time-lapse movements of rowing.

“The architecture is meant to visually capture the poetic rhythm and motion of rowing,” said Studio Gang principal Jeanne Gang, “but by providing a publicly accessible riverfront, it also reveals the larger movement toward an ecological and recreational revival of the Chicago River.”

The boathouse comprises two buildings positioned alongside one another. The first is a single-storey shed for storing rowing equipment, while the second is a two-storey structure containing offices, community facilities, a fitness suite and a rowing tank where teams can practice indoors.

The exterior of the building is clad with a mixture of slate tiles and zinc panels, which share the same silvery grey colouring.

Interior spaces are lined with timber, which also extends outside the building to wrap the inside of balconies and undersides of overhanging eaves.

South-facing clerestory windows extend up to the edge of the roof, bringing high levels of natural light through the building, but also helping to warm the interior in winter and allow natural ventilation during the summer.

Studio Gang’s second boathouse will be located on the south side of the river and is set to complete in 2015.

Read on for more information from Studio Gang Architects:

Studio Gang Architects completes WMS Boathouse at Clark Park

First of the two new boathouses along Chicago River designed and constructed by SGA state-of-the-art, 22,620-square-foot facility now open to the public

Studio Gang Architects (SGA) is pleased to announce the completion of the WMS Boathouse at Clark Park along the north branch of the Chicago River. Designed and built by SGA, the state-of-the-art facility opened to the public on October 19, 2013. It is located at 3400 North Rockwell Avenue on the northwest side of the City of Chicago.

The Clark Park facility is one of four boathouses proposed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as cornerstones of his riverfront revitalisation plan, anchoring the river’s future development. Emanuel’s initiative was spurred by the provision of nearly $1 million in grant funds by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to help clean up the river and drive job creation. Studio Gang was commissioned to realise two of the four boathouses, with the second facility to be located along the south branch of the Chicago River at 28th and Eleanor Streets. It is scheduled for completion in 2015.

The WMS Boathouse at Clark Park is currently home to the Chicago Rowing Foundation (CRF). In partnership with the Chicago Park District, the CRF offers a wide range of indoor and outdoor activities year-round, including learn-to-row sessions both in tanks and on the river, youth and masters team rowing, ergometer training, rowing-inspired yoga classes, and lessons tailored to individuals with disabilities.

As the City of Chicago works to transform the long-polluted and neglected Chicago River into its next recreational frontier, Studio Gang’s boathouse at Clark Park helps catalyse necessary momentum. “The architecture is meant to visually capture the poetic rhythm and motion of rowing,” said Jeanne Gang, Founder and Principal of Studio Gang Architects. “But by providing a publicly accessible riverfront, it also reveals the larger movement toward an ecological and recreational revival of the Chicago River.”

The boathouse’s design translates the time-lapse motion of rowing into an architectural roof form, providing visual interest while also offering spatial and environmental advantages that allow the boathouse to adapt to Chicago’s distinctive seasonal changes. With structural truss shapes alternating between an inverted “V” and an “M”, the roof achieves a rhythmic modulation that lets in southern light through the building’s upper clerestory. The clerestory glazing warms the floor slab of the structure in winter and ventilates in summer to minimise energy use throughout the year.

The 22,620-square-foot complex consists of a two-story mechanically heated and cooled training centre, one-story boat storage facility, and a floating launch dock. The main building houses row tanks, ergometer machines, communal space, and an office for the Chicago Park District. Boat storage accommodates kayak and canoe vendors and includes office space, as well as clear span storage for rowing shells and support equipment.

The total building cost is $8.8 million, with $3.2 million in private funding—including $2 million from WMS, $1 million from North Park University, and $200,000 from the Chicago Rowing Foundation—and $1 million matched by Alderman Ameya Pawar (47th ward) with TIF funds.

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to echo the rhythms of rowing appeared first on Dezeen.

French architect Paul Coudamy has converted this former butcher’s shop in suburban Paris into a private residence and included mysterious figures in the photographs (+ slideshow).

Paul Coudamy renovated the old charcuterie in Bagnolet into a home by adding a spiralling oak staircase and a bookcase with moving sections.

“Renovating professional premises to change them into living accommodation is now a frequent occurrence in Paris and its surrounding suburbs, an exercise in architecture that requires thinking of new concepts of living, interchanging private life and public life,” said the designer.

The Blur home was converted for a motorbike enthusiast, for whom Coudamy created a garage in the previous doorway to store his vehicle.

The designer also installed a tilted mirror above the bookshelf so the owner can keep an eye on his parked bike while relaxing in his armchair.

Sitting and reading areas are located behind the large shop window facing onto the street.

Alternate cubby holes in the wooden bookshelf are fitted with pivoting metal boxes, which can be tucked away to save space or pulled out to create a more interesting display.

The same wood and metal are used for the spiral staircase, which has fan-shaped treads that get smaller towards the top.

This staircase leads up to a bathroom, partitioned with screens covered in a condensation pattern.

Surfaces on the ground floor have been retained from the building’s former use, including wall and floor tiles plus large metal refrigerator doors.

Paul Coudamy has previously used figures in the photoshoots for his projects. He has also included an invisible man and woman in the images of a Paris apartment and a guy wearing a gimp mask at another residence in the French capital.

Photography is by Benjamin Boccas.

Read on for more information from the designer:

Paul Coudamy has transformed a butcher shop in Bagnolet, France, into a private home. Renovating professional premises to change them into living accommodation is now a frequent occurrence in Paris and its surrounding suburbs, an exercise in architecture that requires thinking of new concepts of living, interchanging private life and public life. Blur is therefore a transparent environment made up of spaces that never totally discloses its fragile privacy. It is formed of a continuous succession of concrete and glass symbolising a period that combines work and pleasure in a single movement.

On the ground floor the former boutique fronted by a shop window has been turned into a sitting-room/library with a storefront, directly connected to the specifically created garage: the owner is devoted to his motorbike, it is therefore no surprise that he has placed a mirror above his books to be able to keep an eye on his pride and joy from the comfort of his armchair!

The bookshelves designed by Paul Coudamy are based on a wooden structure into which the architect has fitted pivoting metal boxes. The principle enables greater storage capacity and the façade is permanently redefined as books are sought out. There is a set of suspended boxes levitating between the ground and the ceiling, some inside and some outside.

Metal and wood are repeated for the oak staircase connecting the ground floor and the first floor in an open-sided bespoke spiral, a natural upward surge into space. It forms a beautifully designed raw metal backbone to the building cutting a contrast with the vernacular tone.

Lastly, the bathroom upstairs that Paul Coudamy has created combines both dry and wet areas. He has used a composite trompe l’œil partition in a permanent state of condensation as a border that will always be dry/wet. It is again continuity between two functions, spaces and visual impressions.

During the last Furniture Fair in Milan, Jean Nouvel made an appeal to reconvert and to make work premises and residential accommodation more inseparable: the natural movement of urban aesthetics exploding with vitality to adapt to new space constraints.

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a home by Paul Coudamy appeared first on Dezeen.

Italian architect Andrea Dragoni has extended a cemetery in an ancient Italian town by adding rows of monumental travertine walls with public plazas and artworks slotted in between (+ slideshow).

Andrea Dragoni was tasked with adding a new tract to the historic Gubbio necropolis, which is located just outside the town at the base of Mount Ingino in the Apennines.

The towering stone walls are laid out in sequence, intended by the architect to reflect the linear arrangement of the old town and its surrounding landscape.

“The contrast between void and solid resumes the rhythms found in the medieval town of Gubbio,” Dragoni told Dezeen. “The voids in this composition, as in many of my projects, play a central role. They become architecture with a strong poetic and spiritual reaction.”

Four equally sized courtyards are positioned at intervals between the walls. Italian artists Sauro Cardinali and Nicola Renzi created large site-specific artworks to occupy each one, plus large square skylights were added to frame views up to the sky.

“These spaces were inspired by James Turrell’s Skyspaces and are designed to be enjoyable public areas, independent from the cemetery, offering an opportunity to pause and reflect,” said the architect.

“The sky thus framed opens the mind to the reign of the invisible, allowing sight and thought to abandon Mother Earth’s gravity and acquire a more aerial and spiritual dimension,” he added.

Walls and floors are made from travertine – a form of limestone typically used in Italian architecture – and contrast with the brick structures of the original complex that can be spotted through one of the central corridors.

“Travertine was used by the Etruscans for all the most important public buildings of the Renaissance,” said Dragoni. “It is a tribute to this tradition that I wanted to reinterpret the material to emphasise the gravity of the volumes of the cemetery and their strong abstraction.”

Photography is by Alessandra Chemollo, apart from where otherwise stated.

Read on for a project description from Andrea Dragoni:

Extension of Gubbio Cemetery

The enlargement of the Gubbio cemetery is the result of studies of a new model of public building. On the one hand, it has developed the latest phase of growth of the monumental cemetery in Gubbio, one of Italy’s most important medieval cities. On the other hand, it intends to redefine its meaning and centrality within the structure of the city.

The plan is in an urban structure consisting of linear stereometric blocks arranged in such a way as to reflect the rural layouts that characterise the surrounding landscape and the historic city.

This concept of urban settlement is emphasised by the inclusion of large square enclosures designed to be open spaces that provide the structure with spatial rhythm.

These spaces were inspired by James Turrell’s Skyspaces and are designed to be enjoyable public areas, independently from the cemetery, offering an opportunity to pause and reflect. These are cubic “squares of silence” having open ceilings that evoke windows open to the sky. The sky thus framed opens the mind to the reign of the invisible, allowing sight and thought to abandon Mother Earth’s gravity and acquire a more aerial and spiritual dimension.

This relationship with the sky intends to define space that is also time, in such a way that you can find yourself again, a space that thrusts the horizon upwards like a metaphor of the boundaries of heaven, the last horizon of our life in a modern city.

At the same time, opening to the sky, it re-interprets Leon Battista Alberti’s window, a window that is like a threshold, imagined by the great Renaissance architect as the only architectural artifice able to “instil the peacefulness” evoked by the celestial void that, descending from above, takes us back to the imperturbable state of the soul without which overcoming the adversities of life is impossible.

The atmosphere of these “squares of silence” is made more suggestive by a series of permanent site-specific artistic installations that capture the changing effects of light and shadow from dawn to dusk. These installations were created by two important Italian artists (Sauro Cardinali and Nicola Renzi), with whom collaboration began during the initial stage of the project.

This contribution, strongly linked with architecture, helps to define a new space for silence and meditation within the city.

William Richard Lethaby said that human beings cannot understand the world as a whole. They must first move away from it, and only after having achieved this detachment can they achieve understanding.

In this sense a building can be seen as a model of the world; it represents an order we cannot directly experience in the world, but at the same time it makes perceptible, within the limits of a building, that which exists in the world.

Project: Andrea Dragoni, with Francesco Pes
Collaborators: Andrea Moscetti Castellani, Giorgio Bettelli, Michela Donini, Raul Cambiotti, Antonio Ragnacci, Cristian Cretaro, Matteo Scoccia
Client: Comune di Gubbio
Site-specific art work: Sauro Cardinali, Nicola Renzi
Structural design: Giuseppe Artegiani, Marco Bacchi
Plants Design: Italprogetti (Moreno Dorillo, Elvisio Regni)
Safety coordination: Claudio Pannacci
Director of works: Francesco Pes, Paolo Bottegoni
Maquette: Giuseppe Fioroni

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public plazas and site-specific artworks appeared first on Dezeen.

Japanese artist Kohei Nawa filled a dark room with billowing clouds of foam for this art exhibition in Aichi, Japan (+ slideshow).

Kohei Nawa used a mixture of detergent, glycerin and water to create the bubbly forms of his installation, entitled Foam.

Described by the artist as being “like the landscape of a primordial planet”, the large cloud-like forms were pumped up from the floor in eight different locations, creating a scene that was constantly in motion inside an otherwise black room.

The artist experimented with different quantities of the three ingredients to create a foam stiff enough to hold a shape without being affected by gravity.

“Small cells bubble up ceaselessly with the slight oscillations of a liquid,” said Nawa, explaining the process. “The cells gather together, totally covering the liquid as they spontaneously form a foam, an organically structured conglomeration of cells.”

“The risen volumes of foam link together and reach saturation, but continue to swell, occasionally losing vitality and spreading out over the ground,” he added.

The exhibition was presented in Autumn 2013 as part of the Aichi Triennale, an art exhibition in Nagoya, Japan.

Photography is by Nobutada Omoto.

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a cloud-like landscape of soapy bubbles appeared first on Dezeen.

Bright red walls contrast with vivid green lawns at this art and culture centre in Portugal by Lisbon architecture firm Future Architecture Thinking (+ slideshow).

Located in the town of Miranda do Corvo, Casa das Artes is made of three differently sized volumes that are painted red all over to help the building stand out as much as possible from its surroundings.

Asymmetric roof profiles were intended by Future Architecture Thinking to correspond with the angular rooftops of nearby houses, as well as with the irregular geometries of the distant Lousã Mountains.

“The proposal is based on a contemporary language that is structurally very strong through the continuity between the facades and the roof,” said the architects.

“The slopes of the roof look for identification with the city rooftops and the use of the strong colour is intended to create a building which is immediately recognisable by the public,” they added.

A chimney-like skylight stretches up beyond the roof, drawing evening sunlight from the west down to a covered terrace at the building’s entrance.

The largest of the three volumes accommodates the stage of a 300-seat auditorium, while seating extends back into a second block positioned behind.

This block also contains the auditorium foyer, which doubles up as a split-level gallery for temporary exhibitions, while an independent cafe is housed in the third and smallest block.

Photography is by João Morgado.

Read on for more information from Future Architecture Thinking:

Casa das Artes in Miranda do Corvo

The Casa das Artes (House of the Arts) in Miranda do Corvo expresses the meeting between two identities, rural and urban, in a landscape marked by the Lousã Mountains.

The building features a contemporary and volumetrically expressive language. The sloping roofs establish a dialogue with the geometry of the mountain landscape, in an analogy to the village rooftops. The dynamism achieved through the continuity between facades and roof is accented by a strong red colour, emphasising its design and highlighting the building through the surrounding landscaped area vegetation.

More than a building, the Casa das Artes pretends to be an iconic landmark, celebrating the place where people meet, where culture and art happens, a space capable of promoting and stimulating creative activity, increasing the population quality of life.

The project was conceived by creating versatile spaces, technically suitable for different kinds of events, in order to serve all segments of the population.

The deployment area was optimised to favour landscaped spaces, allowing the creation of an amphitheatre for outdoor events, integrated in a garden which is a public space for the village, with several spaces and inviting pathways for leisure.

The building consists of three volumes reflecting different sorts of use: the first one containing the stage areas, the second comprising the audience and foyer, and the third with a cafeteria and a future museum area, which constitute a visually independent volume.

The proposed diversity of accesses for the building attempts to emphasise the characterisation of this site as a public space, while allowing the public direct access of specific places, such as the museum area and cafeteria, independently, without passing through the auditorium.

The main entrance is through the foyer. This space may function as exhibition area which can be divided into two by a short flight of stairs. From here depart two paths to an auditorium for nearly 300 people, with a motorised orchestra pit and six technical levels, properly equipped for holding theatre performances, opera, concerts, conferences or lectures.

The cafeteria can operate independently from the rest of the building, or even serve as an entrance point providing access to the auditorium. This space has a covered terrace with a skylight oriented west, channelling sunset light into its interior. The terrace area gives access to a multimedia room. The facade of the museum area is facing the northern part of the garden where one of the main entries is located and the outdoor amphitheatre.

Client: Municipality of Miranda do Corvo
Location: Miranda do Corvo, Portugal
Area: 2.360 sqm

Architect: FAT – Future Architecture Thinking
Project Team: Architect Miguel Correia, Architect Cláudia Campos, Architect Sérgio Catita, Architect Patrícia de Carvalho, Architect Miguel Cabral, Architect Margarida Magro, Architect Sara Gonçalves, Architect Telmo Maia, Architect Gabriel Santos, Architect Hilário Abril, Engineer José Pico, Landscape Architect Sara Távora
Builder: TECNORÉM – Engenharia e Construções, S.A.
Year: 2010/2013

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by Future Architecture Thinking appeared first on Dezeen.