Japanese practice k/o design studio has designed a bulbous silver building that adjoins a red-tiled rectilinear tower at the Senzoku Gakuen College of Music in Kawasaki (+ slideshow).
The freeform building, called Silver Mountain, houses new rehearsal halls, while the Red Cliff tower contains offices, a faculty lounge and student lounge.
“Free 3D form Silver Mountain and rectangular Red Cliff are designed depending on functional needs to be devoted for rehearsal hall and office, and located at the pivotal point of traffic of the campus, but intended to show the powerful outline of form and contrast of silver and red,” said architect Kunihide Oshinomi of k/o design studio.
A glass canopy spans the gap between the two buildings, which provides one of three pedestrian routes to the rest of the site.
The exterior of the Silver Mountain is clad in stainless steel plates in a pattern developed using 3D surface analysis to determine the most efficient combination of standard rectilinear tiles and irregular panels used to fill the gaps.
Inside the building, the curved walls create a smooth-sided cave-like foyer which leads to a rehearsal room contained in a central concrete core.
Further rehearsals rooms are located in the basement and on the first floor and feature undulating concrete walls that improve the rooms’ acoustic properties.
A faculty lounge on the ground floor of the Red Cliff building contains boxy armchairs and a separate meeting room, and adjoins a lounge area for students. The upper four floors contain offices.
First of all I wanted to avoid to be included into the category of architecture called as a ＊fragmentation or poetry dominant in Japanese cool design trend.
Therefore I intended to look back to the basic principles of architecture, which are form, space and material or colour.
Free 3D form Silver mountain and rectangular Red cliff are designed depending on functional needs to be devoted for rehearsal hall ＆ office, and located at the pivotal point of traffic of the campus, but intended to show the powerful outline of form and contrast of silver and red.
Silver mountain is carefully cladded with stainless steel plate based on precise computer simulation to maximise use of regular size plate. Red cliff is furnished as a random graphic patch-work of 3 different red colours of mosaic tiles.
Interior of Silver mountain is a purely exposure of back side of 3D free form and resulted to create spaces used for a lobby or foyer of each halls like a dramatic cave.
Rehearsal halls interior are also back side of 3D free form but flanked with exposed concrete waved wall for avoiding echo. First floor studio wall show interesting traces of the hitting pattern with this flanked wave wall and 3D free form.
Glass roofed space between mountain and cliff called as a Valley roofed with Cloud of glass is a main pedestrian root for this campus.
Location: Kanagawa prefecture, Japan Project: Silver mountain& Red Cliff Senzoku Gakuen College of Music Design: k/o design studio / Kunihide Oshinomi + KAJIMA DESIGN Photo: Nacasa & Partners / Atsushi Nakamichi Site area: 65,744,08 square metres Building are: 1,437,59 square metres Total floor area: 5,084,00 square metres Structure: reinforced concrete construction Construction period: 2012.04 – 2013.08
People could immerse themselves in a huge fabric cocoon at this interactive installation by architect and artist Sophia Chang (+ slideshow).
Sophia Chang stretched huge sheets of Lycra around frames to create the network of tunnels and enclosed spaces through the interior of the Invivia Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The structure extended between different entrances and wrapped around the base of the gallery’s spiral staircase. There were also a handful of openings, which framed windows to the spaces outside.
“The softened geometries of this expansive fabric insertion frame both people and their context, while confounding the experience of interior and exterior, wall and room, hiding and revealing places to be found and explored,” said Chang.
The inside of the space was separated into two disconnected halves. Visitors could occupy either sides, meaning they could see the silhouettes of other people behind the dividing layer of fabric.
According to the designer, the experience was intended to represent the feeling of being inside walls, in the space known as poché.
“Here poché receives a more ambiguous reinterpretation,” said Chang. “What could be understood as a wall or reminiscent space from one vantage point, becomes an inhabitable room from another.”
Photography is by Anita Kan.
Here’s a project description from Sophia Chang:
Suspense
Suspense is a recent architectural installation by Sophia Chang at the INVIVIA Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Allen Sayegh (co-founder of INVIVIA) and Ingeborg Rocker (co-founder of Rocker-Lange Architects) curated and sponsored the interactive installation, an unexpected fabric space that manipulates the architectural frame to blur the boundaries between inside and outside and piques the viewers’ awareness of their bodies in space.
The softened geometries of this expansive fabric insertion frame both people and their context, while confounding the experience of interior and exterior, wall and room; hiding and revealing places to be found and explored. Upon entering the piece, both occupant and environment are estranged, creating greater awareness of one’s self, one’s relation to others, and relationships to one’s surroundings.
The installation’s curved rooms are made from Lycra fabric that is suspended between rectangular frames, which capture moments of the original context and pull them into the suspended space. Visitors occupy both sides of the frames, creating playful interaction between those enclosed within the fabric and those outside.
Looking around, the smooth fabric surface breaks open to a view of an old stone wall, a glimpse of brick, a stair, or out to the street. The re-captured everyday appears distant and other.
The installation is conceived as multiple layers of poché. The term commonly refers to the space within walls, here poché receives a more ambiguous reinterpretation: what could be understood as a wall or reminiscent space from one vantage point, becomes an inhabitable room from another. The complexity of the curved forms precludes immediate understanding of the total piece and allows for the visitor’s perception of the space to shift as they continue to discover new places to sit, contemplate, walk, and watch within the gallery.
Neighbouring wall spaces are activated as people encounter each other through the fabric. The installation is an ‘open work’ (Umberto Eco) as it is not limited to a single reading or a predetermined range of readings but rather encourages multiple readings. With changes of light, occupation, and the flexing of the geometries, new realisations continuously become possible.
Architects Takero Shimazaki and Charlie Luxton have renovated a 1960s house outside London to create a modern home that features black-painted brickwork, large windows and a new angular roof (photographs by Edmund Sumner + slideshow).
Now named Aperture in the Woods, the old house had been vacant for three years and was desperately in need of repairs, but Shimazaki and Luxton chose to retain and modernise as much as possible of the houses’s original structure to preserve its simple character.
“Whilst the existing house was not a building of significant design importance, we felt there was a spirit there worth preserving and enhancing, being that of post-war British modernism,” they said.
New brickwork was added and the whole house was then painted black to hide the junctions between new and old.
“It was clear that no matter how carefully we tried to match the brick a homogenous finish would not be achieved,” said the architects. “Black was chosen to make the house recede into the shadows created by the surrounding woodlands.”
The architects increased the angle of the roof to heighten the ceiling in the open-plan living room and create a row of clerestory windows.
More new windows frame vistas of a nearby church, but also offer residents views of a wildflower garden planted between the house and the forest.
“Without any curtains or blinds, the house is a transparent black viewing box, its external walls reflecting or absorbing the surrounding nature throughout the season,” added the architects.
A glazed lobby provides a new entrance to the house. Inside, walls are painted white and are complemented by oak joinery and wooden floors.
Bedrooms sit on the opposite side of the house to the living areas, while a small office is tucked away at the back.
Aperture in the Woods, High Bois Lane, Buckinghamshire
A conversion of a derelict 1960s modernist house in the outskirts of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, the house has multiple aspects and is sited next to a local Church and surrounded by the Buckingham woodland.
Reflecting the economic downturn post 2008 and with a limited project budget, the design developed out of the architectural language of the original house; the owners and the architects working as much as possible to maximise the existing structure.
Most of the original brickwork was retained and added to. It was clear that no matter how carefully we tried to match the brick a homogenous finish would not be achieved. It was decided to paint the brick and the black was chosen to make the house recede into the shadows created by the surrounding woodlands. One half of the roof was raised to create a taller, sharper, pitch to the living room. Bedrooms were placed in the other half, retained at its original pitch, with an additional volume projecting into the garden to create a larger master bedroom. A new glass entrance lobby has also been added to open up the front of the house.
The family recently relocated from London to enjoy life within the Buckingham woods. The house is Phase 1 of 3 phases that will include additional spaces for quieter activities such as a study/guest house (Phase 2) and a green house (Phase 3).
Views of the house’s woodland surroundings were made through careful amendments to the existing openings, with additional apertures focusing on specific viewpoints including the church, immediate and distant woods and the newly planted wild flower garden to the front of the house.
Without any curtains or blinds, the house is a transparent black viewing box, its external walls reflecting or absorbing the surrounding nature throughout the season. The interior is realised in a light grey tone with all joinery including windows and doors in oak. The contrast of dark and light makes this building highly ephemeral and reflects the family’s aspirations for more dynamic living. The house is often used as a shelter for music events (with all the doors and windows open!), gatherings for local families and children as well as a quiet retreat for the family.
The project is a collaboration between Takero Shimazaki Architecture (t-sa) and Charlie Luxton.
Client: Jonathan and Ana Maria Harbottle Architect: Takero Shimazaki Architecture (t-sa) and Charlie Luxton Design Team: Jennifer Frewen, Charlie Luxton, Takero Shimazaki, Meiri Shinohara Structural Engineer: milk structures Approved Inspector: STMC Building Control Main Contractor: Silver Square Construction Solutions Ltd Single ply roof: Bauder
Dezeen Music Project: a choir of outdated computer equipment and games consoles performs a rendition of Carol of the Bells in this music video by Glasgow filmmaker James Houston.
Houston created the video as a Christmas e-card from The Glasgow School of Art, from which he graduated in 2008. “I thought it would be wise to do a song or a track,” Houston told Dezeen. “Music is the best way to get festive.”
He used speech synthesis on some of the machines to make them sing while the other consoles sound the four repeated notes from the tune of Carol of the Bells, a Christmas carol composed in the early twentieth century.
Houston wanted to continue his work using old technology to create sounds and images, and combine it with showcasing his old Christmas gifts: “The idea was to get a collection of old Christmas presents, stuff that I’ve been given over the years and try to make music out of that.”
All the machines are his own apart from a couple of items he sourced via Twitter. Old Apple Mac computers, a Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum + 1 and a SEGA Mega Drive are among the choir. The ensemble sings lyrics by writers Robert Florence and Philip Larkin about gaming at Christmas, which Houston did a lot as a child.
“Christmas for me is mostly about gaming,” he explained. “Each Christmas is delineated with whatever game I was playing at the time.” The video was filmed in The Glasgow School of Art school’s Mackintosh Library, where the machines were unpacked and arranged on a table among Christmas decorations before playing the festive song.
Opinion: as protests continue against private shuttle buses for tech company workers in San Francisco, Mimi Zeiger asks how designers and architects should engage with the fight.
When did the war between technology and urbanism now battling on the streets of San Francisco begin? On December 10, protesters blocked a private bus from commuting from the city’s Mission District to Google headquarters in Mountain View, 34 miles away. Over the summer, emotions ran high when tech entrepreneur Peter Shih posted his screed 10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition.
Perhaps the first battle cries sounded in February when in the London Review of Books writer Rebecca Solnit singled out the wifi-enabled, luxury buses shuttling Silicon Valley workers as a symbol (The Google Bus) of the growing inequity between the coders and the code-nots. Then again, a dispatch from a skirmish in 2000 over displacement of low-income tenants due to tech expansion was reported in the Los Angeles Times with the headline: Dot-Com Boom Makes S.F. a War Zone.
Architects and designers caught in the battle for San Francisco’s civic soul face a critical decision: “Which side are you on?” The question posed by David Taylor – an activist and programmer also caught betwixt and between – is not only critical, but also complicated. Practitioners design for clients on both sides of the divide. They build headquarters and affordable housing, high-end retail and public spaces. As such, one might think their role is agnostic, a service provided to a client. Yet Bay Area architects, only just recovering from the recession, also represent a constituency struggling to keep a toehold in the city and to keep a practice going. In which case, Taylor’s considered answer applies to tech workers and designers alike. He writes, “It is also the responsibility of the tech workers to own their privilege and engage in their communities and not just reshape them to be comfortable.”
If the call is to engage, rather than get comfortable, then where should this engagement take place? The question applies to San Francisco and other cities with strong tech economies.
On the surface, the fight seems to be about transportation and urbanism, or rather, why are private companies creating parallel systems for their employees rather than engaging in the messiness of civic life by investing in regional infrastructures and urban public space. But much of the underlying issues around booming gentrification and cost of living in San Francisco stem from housing inequity and the rise of evictions. More specifically, the Ellis Act, a California state law that functions as a rent control work around by allowing landlords to evict tenants and take properties off the rental market for a given period. When these properties return for rental or sale they are priced at market rate.
Demand for housing in San Francisco is extreme. A real estate round up in the San Francisco Chronicle lists a half dozen new apartment buildings hitting the market with rents starting at more than $3000 for a one-bedroom unit. Deals are brokered: an eight-story, 114-unit condo development with a $70 million price tag was given city sign-off in exchange for 14 below market-rate units elsewhere in the neighbourhood. While there is little financial interest for developers to mess with the current model, housing as a topic in itself is an area ready for a total examination and real engagement by architects.
Contemporary housing investigations tend to focus solutions on formal and material propositions abroad, in cities and countries in crisis. However, a design such as Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental housing, which helps residents build equity in impoverished areas by asking owners to build out 50-percent of their house, not only reimagines the process of making housing, but confronts the issue from a social and political standpoint. I don’t suggest that Aravena’s design is one-to-one applicable in a place like San Francisco, but rather use it as an example of how the redesign of policy, processes, and protocols toward a socially just end is a key point of engagement if architects are ready to address the problem. This also means that architects should lobby civic leadership, and demand more than the placemaking jargon typical of mayoral summits.
On the tech sector side of the equation, the headquarters and offices of the established internet-based companies and startups offer ample opportunities for architects and designers to apply their skills in new ways. Granted, Norman Foster’s scheme for Apple HQ, the spaceship in an orchard, has been roundly thumped for its anti-social tendencies. But the isolated Silicon Valley campus is no longer fait accompli. Airbnb, Pinterest (co-founded by an architecture school dropout), and Twitter are all located in San Francisco. In fact, tech tenants are putting pressure on commercial leasing, filling nearly a quarter of the city’s available office square footage.
In her New York Times op-ed What Tech Hasn’t Learned from Urban Planning, Allison Arieff, editor and content strategist for San Francisco urbanism non-profit SPUR, critiqued Twitter. Arguing that despite the company’s high-profile move into a vintage high-rise on a rough and tumble part of Market Street and the city’s belief that ample tax breaks would bring revitalisation to the impoverished area, Twitter had made little effort to connect to the neighbourhood. So while surrounding commercial rents rose, the quality of street life remained unchanged.
Just days after the Times piece, and almost as if in direct response to the issues the story raised, Airbnb announced that its new office in San Francisco’s SoMA district will be open to the public. In keeping with the company’s couch-surfing, community-based roots, a classroom will be made available nights and weekends for use by locals residents and organisations, SPUR will host a series of talks and programming, and Arieff will curate Airbnb’s library of books on urbanism, design, hospitality, sustainability, and computer engineering—all of which “will be accessible to the public on a weekly basis during Airbnb Library Open Hours.”
Airbnb’s outreach to the neighbourhood through programming and semi-public space offerings seems sincere enough, in spite of opportunistic timing. Yet the effort recalls POPS, Privately Owned Public Spaces, the beleaguered bonus parks, plazas, and atriums provided by high-rise developers in exchange for extended floor area. Made famous by the Occupy Movement, Zuccotti Park is one example. San Francisco got its first official POPS in 1972, a redwood tree grove designed by architect Tom Galli in the shade of the Transamerica Building. The park is open during weekday business hours.
In 2007, the San Francisco-based interdisciplinary design group ReBar mapped and evaluated the city’s POPS and asked, “should a public space under the unblinking eye of private ownership be called ‘public’ at all?” Their query took the form of maps, web-based field reports, and a series of “paraformances”: performance actions inspired by the crowdsourced reports. Today, the question is just as potent at Airbnb’s headquarters where all access is governed by the pleasure of a private company. As with the Google buses, tech investment into parallel systems, like bonus parks or community spaces, mirror civic amenities without actually supporting the public life of the city. Can design, then, productively provoke a deeper engagement?
As a former strategic designer for the Helsinki Design Lab and co-founder of the architecture and design practice Dash Marshall, Bryan Boyer sees opportunities for designers at the very intersection currently provoking conflict, the point between what he calls the “secluded innovation” of internally-minded tech culture and the urban realm.
“We’re seeing the growing pains of an entire industry that shot to global prominence at light speed and is still struggling to make sense of its new existence outside the garage,” he says.
Boyer is on the board of Makeshift Society, a co-working space for creative entrepreneurs in San Francisco (and soon in Brooklyn). He stresses that technological innovation cannot happen in isolation. “Architects have a real contribution to add here, which is to spend the long hours with potential clients and collaborators in the tech community to help them see the shadows on the wall of their garage. That entails more than just helping people make better choices about their physical environment,” he explains.
Boyer cites technology’s lessons: iterative design, full-scale prototyping, and the integration of data into decision-making as ways to influence and strengthen architectural processes. Ultimately, on a battlefield strewn with buses, garages, and quasi-public spaces there is no single side for designers to take. And no easy way to bow out of the fight, either.
Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic. She covers art, architecture, urbanism and design for a number of publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center. Zeiger also is editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.
Continuing our coverage of the recent explosion of tech company headquarters in San Francisco, here’s a look inside the offices of online property rental service Airbnb, which feature rooms modelled on eight of the company’s listed apartments (+ slideshow).
Airbnb currently offers rental accommodation in over 34,000 countries cities, but the company’s first ever listing was a San Francisco apartment, so the team’s in-house designers decided to transform one section of the interior into an exact replica of it.
They sourced items from various countries to furnish the spaces and even installed a bed in one of the rooms.
Other sections of the headquarters mimic properties from various other places around the world, including Reykjavík, Bali, Amsterdam and Paris, and are filled with casual seating areas where staff can interact.
“We asked ourselves, how can we create the sense of travel in an office?” explained Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky. “Simply having photos of listings and far off places was not enough. It is not just about recalling the memories, but about feeling that you’re there.”
Named 888 Brannan, the offices occupy a renovated 100-year-old industrial building. One of the structure’s original rooms was a conference suite modelled on the War Room in the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, which has been completely restored.
The office canteen features long communal tables where staff can hold informal meetings, while the walls are covered in over a hundred sketches relating to different employee experiences.
“We wanted to create a space that encourages our employees to move around, interact across disciplines, and see movement and activity,” said Chesky.
Another feature is a green wall that extends up one side of the main atrium.
Here’s the full design statement from Brian Chesky:
888 Brannan
The opening of 888 Brannan is an exciting moment for Airbnb because the building embodies what we value as a company: creativity, community engagement, and thoughtful design.
Joe, Nate and I started Airbnb when we saw the potential in something others had overlooked – the spare space in our apartment. In the same way, we saw massive potential in 888 Brannan. The building is a hundred‐year‐old city landmark that had been practically forgotten about, but we saw the opportunity to turn it into the perfect space for our growing company and community.
The first time we stepped into the atrium, we imagined looking up and seeing a cross section of the very homes that are featured on our site – immediately knowing, without seeing any logos or signs, that you were at Airbnb. We invested a lot into the space, learning about its history, and transformed it from a non-descript building into a physical representation of who we are and what we believe.
At the core of Airbnb is the connection between people and spaces. In designing 888 Brannan, we asked ourselves how we could use the space to encourage connections between people. All too often, office design doesn’t consider collaboration, creativity or spontaneity. At Airbnb, we wanted to create a space that encourages our employees to move around, interact across disciplines, and see movement and activity.
To achieve this, we wanted as many lines of sight as possible, both inside the building and to the neighbourhood outside. Not only is this visually interesting, but we believe it inherently creates connections. We also created spaces for these connections to develop. In an open floor plan, you typically have two types of spaces: desks and meeting rooms. We focused on creating a third shared space as well. Sofas scattered amongst the desks, the communal dining area, and project rooms with long standing tables all provide an opportunity for our employees to have casual conversations, spontaneous collaborations, or informal meetings.
Another key focus for our new home was to create a truly comfortable place for our employees, whose hard work is fundamental to everything we do. We believe investing in them is the foundation of our success. A lot of companies under‐invest in their office space, and therefore under‐invest in their employees and their growth. We believe that if our team is working in an inspirational and creative space, they will be inspired to create a better product and service for our hosts and guests.
One exceptional aspect of the new space is the ability to experience travel without leaving the building. We asked ourselves, “how can we create the sense of travel in an office?” Simply having photos of listings and far off places was not enough. It is not just about recalling the memories, but about feeling that you’re there. We replicated some of the most unique places on Airbnb to create this feeling. Each room, from Milan to Reykjavik, Bali to Amsterdam, not only celebrates our global community, but also lets everyone who visits them truly experience a different place.
In designing Airbnb’s new home, we wanted to create a place that would bring our mission to life, a place where people could instantly see what is at the heart of our company. At 888 Brannan, we are creating a space not just for our employees, but for our hosts and travellers, our neighbours and friends. Airbnb is creating a world where you can be at home everywhere, and everyone can be at home at Airbnb.
Karina Wiciak, of Poland studio Wamhouse, created the renderings of a restaurant to emulate a prison and called the design Poczekalnia, which means “waiting room” in Polish.
“Not only the interior but also the name of the restaurant itself is a kind of metaphor, because the prison itself can be euphemistically described as a kind of waiting room,” said the designer.
Orange fabric used for curtains and rugs references the bright uniforms worn by prisoners. The otherwise monochrome interior features whitewashed bricks walls and wooden floors, with black bars forming partitions and covering the windows.
These vertical bars are also used for the backs of chairs and the bases of tables. VIP tables are caged-in on all sides, accessed by doors with giant locks.
Lights are fixed into handcuffs and suspended from the ceiling on long chains, while chandeliers are formed from sets of keys.
The restaurant’s serving counter is also surrounded by bars, where a knotted length of orange material leads out of a barred window like an escape route.
Poczekalnia is the eleventh project of the collection “XII”, designed entirely by Karina Wiciak.
Poczekalnia (which in Polish means “waiting room”) is a restaurant inspired by the prison.
Not only the interior but also the name of the restaurant itself is a kind of metaphor, because the prison itself can be euphemistically described as a kind of waiting room.
The entire interior was done in white and black Pop Art colours, with the addition of orange fabric – as a characteristic element of clothing of convicts in prison.
Prison bars, and even the cells in which paradoxically the VIP rooms are located, are the main element of the design. The bar is also behind the prison bars, and the toilets are designed in the form of iron cages, enclosed with orange curtains and glass wall (outside).
Hanging lamps in the shape of handcuffs and a chandelier in the form of a key chain are another prison motives. Interiors are complemented by tables and chairs with motive of bars and a big key lock.
The project of “Poczekalnia” also includes:
» Table “kraty” (which in Polish means “prison bars”) » Chair “kraty” (which in Polish means “prison bars”) » Hooker chair “kraty” (which in Polish means “prison bars”) » Hanging lamp “kajdanki” (which in Polish means “handcuffs”) » Chandelier “klucze” (which in Polish means “keys”)
About the collection XII – entirely designed by Karina Wiciak
The collection “XII” will consist of 12 thematic interior designs, together with furniture and fittings, which in each part will be interconnected, not only in terms of style, but also by name. Each subsequent design will be created within one month, and the entire collection will take one year to create.
Here, visualisation is to constitute more than a design, which is thrown away after implementation of the interior design, but mainly an image, which has a deeper meaning and can function individually.
These will not be interiors made to a specific order, but designs based on the author’s fantasy and his fascinations of various sorts. It will be possible to order a specific interior design in the form of adaptation of the selected part of the collection, on the basis of exclusivity.
The author’s assumption was not to create trite, fashionable interiors, but non-standard places, full of symbols and metaphors, at the borderline between architecture and scenography.
Due to their nature, these are mostly commercial interiors, intended for use and reception by a larger group of people. Yet, it was not supposed to be an art gallery, in which art is merely watched, but places in which it could be put into use and to do virtually everything – depending on the purpose and function of the premises.
The author of the collection did not strive to artificially ascribe ideology to random ideas, but rather to make the entire design readable and coherent, and at the same time to design every item specifically for the given interior.
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