Hasta La Ideas

Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura has completed a cultural centre in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, which is designed to look more like a machine than a building (+ slideshow).

Positioned alongside a library by Álvaro Siza and a leisure centre by Fernando Tavora, Eduardo Souto de Moura’s three-storey building is the final addition to a stretch of land between the Limia River and a new tree-lined public square.

Huge aluminium pipes and services clad the upper walls of the building, intended to reference the nautical aesthetic of the Navio Hospital Gil Eannes, a 1950s ship that is anchored nearby and used as a museum. Meanwhile, the recessed ground-floor elevations are glazed to allow views through to the river.

The plan of the building centres around a large multipurpose hall that can be used for sports, music performances, talks and other events.

This space is located at basement level, but is surrounded by wooden bleachers that lead up to the entrances and viewing corridors on the ground floor. Additional stairs and lifts lead up to administrative areas on the first floor.

The completion of the building marks the end of a five-year construction period. The two original constructors suffered bankruptcy and funding had to be subsidised by the local authority.

Eduardo Souto de Moura was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2011. His previous buildings include the red concrete Casa das Histórias Paula Rego museum and the Casa das Artes Cultural Centre in Porto.

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Photography is by Joao Morgado.

Here are some extra details from the design team:

Multipurpose Pavilion in Viana do Castelo

The building is implanted in the zone foreseen in the plan, aligned in the south side with one of the buildings projected by architect Fernando Távora.

In front of the north elevation it is foreseen an arborised square with alleys that mark the entries of the Pavilion. In this square will exist a slope that will make the access to level -1.

Formally the building is defined by a table where an aluminium box and every necessary equipments to the function of the different activities promoted in its interior will be placed. The whole image intends to be associated with the naval architecture, existing a relation with the image of the “Gil Eanes” ship.

The multipurpose pavilion will be a space directed to cultural and sport events. The main accesses will be situated in the north and south extremities. The service entrances will be made in the other elevations.

Its interior will be ample and permeable, existing the possibility of viewing the sea from the entrance floor. It is pretended that its transparency will be able to make it as lighter as possible in relation to the other buildings.

Author: Eduardo Souto de Moura
Locality: Viana do Castelo
Client: City Hall of Viana do Castelo
Collaborators: Diogo Guimarães, Ricardo Rosa Santos, João Queiróz e Lima, Jana Scheibner, Luis Peixoto, Manuel Vasconcelos, Tiago Coelho
Structural consultants: G.O.P.
Electrical consultants: G.O.P.
Mechanical consultants: G.O.P.

Building size: 8.706,7 sqm
Cost: €12.000.000,00

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by Eduardo Souto de Moura appeared first on Dezeen.

This apostrophe-shaped bridge in Hull, England, by London architects McDowell+Benedetti features a rotating mechanism so it can swing open to make room for passing boats (+ slideshow).

Scale Lane Bridge spans the river between Hull’s Old Town and the as-yet undeveloped industrial land on the east bank, creating a pedestrian route between the city’s museums and aquarium.

Working alongside engineers Alan Baxter Associates and Qualter Hall, McDowell+Benedetti designed the steel bridge with a slow movement so that pedestrians can continue to step on and off even when the structure is in motion.

The apostrophe shape creates two different routes across the bridge. The first is a gentle slope that stretches along the outer edge, while the second is a stepped pathway that runs along the inside.

A raised spine separates the two routes, creating a seating area overlooking the water as well as a lighting feature that points upwards like the fin of a giant shark.

The centre of rotation is a single-storey drum, with a restaurant inside and a viewing platform on the roof.

“The black steel bridge has a distinctive robust character and curving form, making it a memorable landmark that is unique to Hull and its industrial and maritime heritage,” said the design team.

The underside of the bridge is tapered upwards to allow smaller vessels to pass through without opening the bridge.

An installation by artist Nayan Kulkarni is also included, involving ringing bells and a pulsing light that are activated when the bridge starts to move.

“This has a practical purpose in alerting pedestrians to the imminent opening rotation and it heightens the drama of the ride,” added the designers.

Low-level lighting illuminates the walkways after dark.

McDowell+Benedetti has worked on several bridges in the UK. Others include a 130-metre long S-shaped footbridge in Yorkshire. See more bridges on Dezeen »

Photography is by Timothy Soar.

Here’s some extra information from the architects:

Scale Lane Bridge on River Hull in full swing

An innovative swing bridge over the River Hull has opened to the public, offering pedestrians the unique experience of riding on the bridge as it opens and closes to river traffic, believed to be a world’s first.

The black steel bridge has a distinctive robust character and curving form, making it a memorable landmark that is unique to Hull and its industrial and maritime heritage.

The winning entry in an international 3-stage design competition held in 2005, the bridge has been built to the original concept by the competition team, main contractor and M&E engineers Qualter Hall, architects McDowell+Benedetti and structural engineers Alan Baxter Associates. The scheme includes a new landscaped garden and square designed by landscape architects Grontmij with lighting by Sutton Vane Associates and an integrated public artwork by Nayan Kulkarni.

Located in Kingston upon Hull east of Hull city centre the bridge connects Hull’s Old Town Conservation Area to the undeveloped industrial landscape of the east bank. Designed as the first stage of a wider masterplan it will unlock the potential of the riverside to promote wider regeneration in the areas east of the city centre. Scale Lane Staith on the west bank has been re-landscaped with a series of stepped gardens leading to a new public square at the threshold of the bridge. The bridge provides a walkable route connecting the Museums Quarter on the west bank to Hull’s major attraction The Deep.

The River Hull has a tidal range of almost 7 metres and has exposed mud banks on the west side. The 16 metre diameter drum of the bridge sits snugly into the raised river bed on the west bank and cantilevers 35 metres over the water to the east side. The spine of the bridge arches up and over the river, allowing enough room for smaller boats to pass under without need to operate the bridge, and rotates using an electrical drive mechanism to open the route to river traffic when required.

The bridge’s sweeping form creates two generous pedestrian routes, one gently sloping and a shorter stepped walkway. The roof of the drum provides an upper viewing deck with a seamless steel balustrade, which gives the feeling of being on board a docked ocean liner.

The central structural spine of the bridge includes seating areas, creating a variety of places for people to pause on route to relax and enjoy the riverscape views. The spine rises into a back-lit rooflight which provides a marker for the bridge at night.

When activated the mechanical movement of the bridge is sufficiently slow to allow passengers to safely step onto the bridge from the west bank whilst it is rotating.

Artist Nayan Kulkarni has created a public artwork on the bridge, a sonic landscape in which to enjoy the riverscape. When the bridge opening is activated a new sequence of rhythmic bells is triggered which increases in urgency and combines with a pulsing light developed by lighting consultants Sutton Vane Associates. This has a practical purpose in alerting pedestrians to the imminent opening rotation and it heightens the drama of the ‘ride’.

At night low level fluorescents integrated into the parapet posts light the profile of the bridge and bring colour and sparkle to the blackened industrial riverscape.

Hull City Council is now actively seeking a tenant to occupy the restaurant space in the bridge hub. Once in place Scale Lane Bridge will become a lively animated public place at all times of the day, fulfilling the design team’s intention to create more than just a crossing but a destination in its own right.

At the official opening on 28 June 2013 Councillor Nadine Fudge, Lord Mayor of Hull and Admiral of the Humber, said: “It’s an honour to open this unique footbridge on behalf of the city, which links the Old Town to the east banks of Hull. Our Old Town has wonderful museums and attractions and it’s great that we’re able to add another experience for people to enjoy. Hull’s strong maritime history is echoed in the ships bells ringing as the bridge opens and we should be proud that we are continuing to reflect on our heritage.”

Jacquie Boulton, Area Manager at the Homes and Communities Agency said: “The opening of this bridge gives the city an excellent opportunity to connect the east bank of the river to the city centre creating opportunities for new economic development. It is great that we have been able to work with our partners to create a bridge that is not only useful to local residents and visitors to the city but is also such a fantastic design.”

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McDowell+Benedetti appeared first on Dezeen.

Long brick and wood volumes extend down the narrow plot of this house in Bondi, Sydney, by local architect Fearns Studio (+ slideshow).

While renovating a single-storey Victorian terrace, Fearns Studio filled the thin strip of land behind with a blackened wood cuboid on top of brick ground floor that’s painted white.

Under the pitched roof of the old house, a lounge faces the street and a bedroom behind is connected to a bathroom via a small courtyard.

These rooms are joined by a long corridor that leads from the front door to the large open-plan dining, kitchen and living area.

Ground-floor rooms are lit by skylights, as well as patio doors along the thin alleyway down one side of the house that leads to a courtyard.

“Skylight penetrations bring light into the centre of the plan, helping to define spaces within it,” said architect Matt Fearns.

Stairs behind one wall of the double-height dining space lead up to two more bedrooms, which both have a balcony and share a bathroom.

Kitchen units, tables and cupboard doors match the wooden window and door frames, which warm the neutral interior.

A guest bedroom and ensuite bathroom sit above a garage at the bottom of the garden.

More homes down under include a zinc-clad house with a sand dune-shaped body and a periscope-shaped extension to two terraced homes, plus we recently created a Pinterest board of all the best images of Australian houses.

Photographs are by Tom Ferguson.

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Read on for more information from the architect:

Bondi House by Fearns Studio

A renovation of an inner city, Victorian terrace house, the Bondi House was conceived as a first floor timber tube above a ground level brick box behind the retained portion of the house.

Skylight penetrations bring light into the centre of the plan, help define spaces within it and protect the privacy of neighbouring dwellings from upper level rooms while large glazed doors open new ground level interiors to unobtrusive garden courtyards.

Deep door reveals in the kitchen and living areas frame smaller spaces within the open plan with light and rhythm.

The doors themselves emphasise this further by sliding completely clear of their openings.

Warmth is given to the white plaster walls and ceilings and to concrete flooring with oak cabinetry, windows, doors and with blackbutt flooring through the remainder of the house.

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Fearns Studio appeared first on Dezeen.

This slatted structure by architects Plasma Studio looks like it’s crawling over an apartment building in the Italian Dolomites (+ slideshow).

Plasma Studio were faced with the dual tasks of adding a circulation space and a new family home to an existing block in the South Tyrol village of Sesto, close to the Austrian border.

“An under-utilised roof space gave way to an angular crown, connected to a ground floor reception space and architectural office by the host’s renovated spine,” said the architects.

Parametric software created an angular shape that folds around and on top of the original cuboid form, covered by thin strips of larch wood similar to the Strata Hotel the studio designed just down the valley.

The structure appears to grow out of the hillside, snaking up the back of the building as a series of faceted planes.

Two levels are housed inside the extension, which uses the sloping site so the lower floor nestles against the top floor existing building but opens out onto a garden on the same level behind.

Inside, bedrooms face on to a corridor lit by a glass chasm that extends up and over the building.

An open-plan living, kitchen and dining area are housed in the upper storey, which sits at a slight angle to the structure below to further differentiate it.

The large balcony on this level looks out to the forested hills and snow-capped peaks on the other side of the valley.

These two floors are linked by internal and external staircases, and also connect to the circulation core that provides access to each of the six apartments in the whitewashed building underneath.

Plasma Studio has also designed an apartment block with jagged copper balconies and angular LED street lamps.

More houses set in the rugged Italian landscape include a gabled home with stripy wooden walls and a holiday retreat that incorporates an enormous window frame into a reconstructed stone wall.

Photography is by Hertha Hurnaus.

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The architects sent us the project description below:

Paramount Residence Alma

This project was conceived to fulfil a two-part problematic: (1) Residence Alma -a Tyrolean guest house with 6 holiday apartments from the 1960s adorned with a pitched roof – was due for a common circulation and service core, and (2) the project architect, Ulla Hell, was looking for a new home for her young family of five in the mountain community of Sesto. The result: an under-utilised roof space gave way to an angular crown, connected to a ground floor reception space and architectural office by the host’s renovated spine.

Having already made their mark on nearby Residence Königswarte with the addition of the Strata Hotel in 2007, Plasma Studio sought to follow a similar skin organization. A timber strip section in larch wood was borrowed from the neighbouring Strata and extruded along two paths. The first stretches across the site, picking up the topography on either end of the building and climbing to enclose a third storey balcony. Here, the edge skirts around the existing footprint, leaving corners exposed to acknowledge its presence.

A second path draws the timber skin up from behind, folding around the chimney to return to the ground. Interstitial spaces between the exterior walls and wooden bands swell at ground level to offer sheltered outdoor living spaces. The design team employed parametric modelling software to optimize the density of these timber strips and their metal substrustructure, balancing budget, aesthetics, privacy and views. This approach allowed for flexibility throughout the design phase and output shop drawings for pre-fabricated elements at an efficient pace.

The Alma addition departs, however, from the Strata in its approach to volume. The practical constraints of a multi-room hotel structure called for a regular distribution of modules along a connecting spine. The perceived volume was achieved through horizontal sections around free-flowing terrace spaces. With the Alma, we took advantage of a more flexible program to create unique spatial conditions. These interior volumes are rendered legible from the exterior by the timber strips–an honest depiction of the playful activity within.

The interior of this family home is characterized by 360-degree views. Perhaps the most spectacular of these being a view of the sky through an incision over the central stair. This opening delivers an immediate reading of exterior weather conditions, collecting precipitation and receiving direct sunlight.

The main living spaces are split over two floors with first floor bedrooms off a skylit corridor, and an open plan kitchen, dining and family room encircling a fireplace on the second floor. By grouping functional elements in orthogonal cores, the surrounding space is liberated. The exterior walls of the main living spaces collapse inwards to catch light, views and varying degrees of enclosure.

All living spaces in the private residence have direct access to the outside through a series terraces or gardens. Its multiple access points include: a main entrance through an internal connection to the neighbouring house, a series of openings that follow the natural topography, and an external stair connecting the third floor terrace to the garden. Each inhabitant has come to find their own favourite route.

Limited material and colour palettes give strength to the space, with splashes of colour in the children’s washroom. The otherwise white walls provide a backdrop for an ever-changing display of shadows from the pleated roof above.

As the extension sits within the steep topography, substructural elements were developed in reinforced concrete, while the superstructure was built from prefabricated cross laminated timber (CLT) insulated with wood fiber and sealed with black bitumen. The outer skin in larch wood strips on a galvanized steel structure was determined according to cost and aesthetics by the aforementioned parametric model. A consistently limited colour code was applied to the exterior, allowing the volume to dissolve into the surrounding hillside when viewed from afar.

Through its use of form, materials and views, this newly completed addition flirts with its context at three scales. The first, and most immediate, with its host: as an addition to the Alma residence, it shares a newly renovated core, carrying the fractal geometry from the roof down to Plasma’s Italian office through the Alma’s cartesian skeleton. The second, with its neighbour: together the Strata and the Alma define the next generation of the family-owned hotel complex. And finally, with its terrain: the sculptural addition acts, not as a parasite, but as a mediator between the existing house and surrounding topography, extending from the landscape like a lichen.

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by Plasma Studio appeared first on Dezeen.

Spanish architects Taller Básico de Arquitectura hoisted this pair of concrete laboratories in northern Spain onto red metal stilts (+ slideshow).

Taller Básico de Arquitectura used the red structures to create flat levels for the box-shaped labs, which sit on a gently sloping site at a technology park in Vitoria, close to Bilbao.

Two beams cross beneath each block so the columns sit under the middle of each external wall. Each wall features a single square window or doorway.

The square boxes sit at a slight angle to one another, almost touching but connected by a short bridge that’s glazed on the sides and above.

The first block contains two small rooms and places to sit, while the second is a single open research space filled with work benches.

Black window frames stand out against the clinical white interior.

Taller Básico de Arquitectura have also designed a university complex in Zaragoza with a facade of overlapping white scales.

We’ve also featured an earthquake-proof research laboratory in Tokyo and the world’s first mobile research facility in Antarctica.

See more laboratory design »
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Here’s some additional information from the architects:

Biokilab Laboratories

Two boxes in the air and a structure as architecture

The technologic Park of Vitoria colonises a little bit of nature. The quality of the site and its steepness make us question where to build. Two boxes made from air rise above the slope. The structure become architecture carries on its shoulders these boxes, showing a new plane.

We investigate new ways of entering new places. Our place appears on a new level, determined by a four-legged and colourful structure. Two hollow boxes of concrete inhabit this new place on the structure. The whole complex in a permanent flight reveals a new gravity.

Quadruped anatomies

The metallic structure that raises the boxes in the air is a quadruped structure. Its two horizontal elements form a cross inscribed in the square floor of the boxes. The sides of these floors measure twelve and thirteen meters respectively. The horizontal beams where the boxes rest avoid any interlocking.

Consequently, the structure is visible in its entirety. The ends of the beams join vertical elements, which become the legs of this quadruped anatomy. Legs are as wide as beams, managing a continuity that makes all the pieces be understood as a unique element. Different lengths of the legs let the slope remain unaltered.

The structure of the box

The box is thought as a second structure that replaces walls with beams and roofs with double slabs. The vertical faces of the box are beams as high as the box. These wall-beams have only one hole, defined by the maximum dimensions that let the beams work properly. Outside, the concrete structure is visible on all faces of the box.

Inside, plasterboards cover the structure. The window frame, drawn as a single line, stays hidden between both sheets. The gap between sheets, both in walls and slabs, contains all building systems, as plumbing, electricity, voice and data. This net of systems solves the flexibility needed by the laboratory for its continuous transformation.

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Taller Básico de Arquitectura appeared first on Dezeen.