Hasta La Ideas

Inside the new boutique hotel in NYC’s arts district

From the airy architecture of seaside retreat Basico to Distrito Capital’s urban focus, Mexico-based hotel group Habita has already made a name for itself for how it introduces high-design without disrupting surroundings. Opening today, 6 September 2011, Hôtel Americano, their first U.S. property, brings this elegantly light touch to New York City. The 56-room hotel both blends well into the scale of its “Way West Chelsea” neighborhood and firmly stakes a claim to its future. Designed for locals as well as out-of-towners, the destination offers a rooftop cafe and pool, basement bars and a street-level cafe in a section of NYC’s gallery district that has been one of the last to transform from its industrial past.

Like when the Ace Hotel opened to the East (as well as Habita’s property in Mexico City’s Condesa neighborhood), Americano’s arrival signals a new beginning for the area. With the elevated outdoor park, the High Line, opening nearby and a newly-constructed condo across the street, the new growth promises to reinvigorate an area formerly home to literally one restaurant and generally lacking housing and retail. And just how did the developers manage to balance the needs of the neighborhood with their ambitious new property? Let’s start with the building itself.

The work of Mexican architect Enrique Norten, a metal mesh-clad exterior creates a clean and striking facade whose clean lines integrates well with neighboring warehouse spaces while lending contemporary shine. By offsetting this facade from the windows, the size of the rooms inside feel a bit bigger—a welcomed detail for the more petite rooms on that side of the hotel. Across the hall, the larger accommodations feature a sitting area, fire places and bigger bathrooms. All rooms (designed by Arnaud Montigny) house wooden platform beds inspired by Japanese ryokans; beautiful wood cubes hold the beds in the bigger spaces.

For those who aren’t staying at the hotel, the Americano has a separate entrance so neighborhood visitors don’t compromise the experience for guests. A cafe near the front door provides Intellegentsia coffee (its first NYC outpost) and fresh-squeezed juices. Just behind the cafe, a restaurant will serve three meals a day indoors and on the back terrace.

On the roof, also open to the public and accessible via a separate elevator so as to not annoy hotel guests, La Piscine bar and grill will feature not only a seasonal menu but also seasonal decor—open and airy in the summer, glass-enclosed warmth in the winter.

Below the lobby, Bar Americano—a concrete tube of a bar, feels like a chic, modern subway station. Behind this space is El Privado, a small, warm living room with a bar that feels more like a kitchen, which as the name suggests is reserved for private functions.

A welcomed addition to our neighborhood, Hôtel Americano is now open for hotel guests and cafe customers. The additional spaces are set to open in late September or early October.

A sloping corridor coils around the inside of a house in Osaka to connect three staggered storeys.

The house was designed by Japanese studio Fujiwarramuro Architects and is located in a dense urban area.

Timber columns and criss-crossing metal braces support both the stepped and sloped floors.

The 25 metre-long ramp leads past clusters of rooms for each family member to a rooftop balcony with a skylight.

Another Japanese house previously featured on Dezeen is surrounded by staircases and slides, rather than ramps – see the story here and see all our stories about houses in Japan here.

Photography is by Toshiyuki Yano.

Here are some more details from the architects:

House of Slope

This residential project is built on a flag-shaped site in Osaka surrounded by densely packed buildings.

Even when faced with these challenging site conditions, we felt that it would be possible to come up with an interesting design solution based on a structure that appears to “float” in a large, open space.

By ensuring a continuous sense of spatial circulation through the flag-shaped portion of the site, the inhabitants of the house are able to “drift” through their favorite spaces like goldfish in a bowl.

The sloping structure that extends from the first floor through the second and up until the roof – covering a length of some 25 meters over approximately one-and-a-half revolutions – allows the family members to distribute themselves across its entire length, each occupying a different section of the building.

Several beams offer structural support for the wooden slope and spiral-shaped floors of the building, creating a residential space made up of ambiguously demarcated domains that are staggered apart yet also integrated with each other, thereby achieving a sense of breadth and openness.

Location: Sakai, Osaka, Japan
Principle use: single family house
Site area: 103.91 m2
Building area: 52.17 m2
Total floor area: 107.49 m2

Project architect: Shintaro Fujiwara, Yoshio Muro
Project team: Fujiwarramuro Architects
Structure: Timber
Photographer: Toshiyuki Yano

See also:

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House in Kitakami by Nadamoto Yukiko Architects	House in Nakameguro by Level Architects	Roof on the Hill by ALPHAville

Photo: Iwan Baan

“Once again, [landscape architect Piet] Oudolf’s selection of botanical material is superb. This summer it featured such flowering perennials as allium, catmint, coral bells, cranebill, rosemary, salvia, and yarrow, along with trees and shrubs including chokeberry, holly, magnolia, redbud, roses, sassafras, and shadblow. His random-looking (though deliberately composed) planting beds simultaneously pay homage to the wildness of the High Line in its gone-to-seed phase and seamlessly accommodate the many functional requirements of a heavily trafficked pedestrian concourse.

The new segment also remedies one of the few objections the first phase of the design raised among environmentalists: the use of ipê, a tropical wood that activists have deemed ecologically destructive and unsustainable. Since then, the designers have specified reclaimed teak, which possesses the same weather-resistant properties as the controversial earlier selection.”

–Martin Filler evaluating the recently opened second segment of the High Line in a post on The New York Review of Books’ NYRBlog

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Perception shifts as art and nature intersect at the Nevada Museum of Art

Promising “unexpected access to the invisible,” what exactly the Nevada Museum of Art’s current show Landscape Futures proposes isn’t immediately clear. On first blush, the work looks like the usual collection of forward-thinking designs. But here there’s a catch.

The exhibit’s range of large-scale installations, experiments and devices all concern themselves less with the design itself than with the viewer’s reaction to it. Two years in the making, Bldgblog editor Geoff Manaugh worked with the NMA to develop an exhibition that would reflect the intersection of art and landscape architecture contextualized by the ever-evolving scope of design communication. The resulting project surveys methods for architecturally inventing and exploring the human perception of and interaction with their environments.

This flip-flopped point of view comes from Manaugh’s desire “to look at the devices, mechanisms, instruments, and pieces of equipment—the technology—through which humans can learn to see the landscape around them differently.” Revising the concept of “landscape futures” he posits that maybe we don’t need to devise new landscapes, “but simply little devices through which to see the world in new and unexpected ways.”

Artists Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada’s interactive installation “Animal Superpowers” anthropomorphizes human sensory capabilities. Furthering the theme of human impact on environment, design firm Smout Allen’s Rube-Goldberg-inspired system visualizes a technological landscape that can adapt to our water needs.

An architectural commentary on the Arctic landscape, “The Active Layer” by experimental design group The Lateral Office consists of thousands of wooden dowels arranged to point out the tenuous geography in the North. “Embracing speculative scenarios in order to provoke new ways of thinking about the future” is at the heart of the exhibition, explains Manaugh.

Furthering the cause is the recently-launched Landscape Futures Night School, a series of event-styled lectures sponsored by Studio X in conjunction with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture under Manaugh’s current direction (along with Nicola Twilley). On hand at the debut installment was lecturer Liam Young, founder of the futuristic think-tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and fellow featured exhibition artist. Creating “living maps of moss,” Young’s “Specimens of Unnatural History” ecologically replicate the Galapagos islands as populated with robotic and taxidermy entities that simultaneously reflect a “cautionary tale” of the future and a throwback to the naturalistic height of the Victorian era.

Supporting the contemplative narrative of his work, Young presented a metaphysical tour-de-force of his expeditions, ranging from Chernobyl dreamscapes to invasive species in the Galapagos conducted under the nomadic studio group, Unknown Fields Division—a group devoted to “unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies.”

Landscape Futures runs until 12 February 2012 at the Nevada Museum of Art.

“Specimens of Unnatural History” images by Liam Young. All other images by Jamie Kingman.

The KwickScreen is an impressive design for a portable barrier selected as one of the UK finalists in the James Dyson Awards. Designed by Michael Korn, the concept was initially intended for hospitals but also has applications “in schools, universities, offices and exhibitions where openplan areas need to be divided up in a fast and flexible manner.”

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