This 25-metre wooden lookout in the Czech Republic by Mjölk Architekti is named Cucumber Tower in an attempt to discourage association with phallic forms (+ slideshow).
Constructed from larch, the tower has a straight shaft with a curved top, which accommodates a rooftop viewing platform looking out across the Czech woodland and on towards Germany and Poland.
“We called it a cucumber due to a certain shape similarity, and also in order to avoid other vulgar associations,” architect Jan Vondrák of Mjölk Architekti told Dezeen.
The architects designed the tower before finding a site or a client. It was then commissioned by the mayor of the town Hermanice for a rural site along a Czech mountain range called the Ještěd-Kozákov Ridge.
The structure took three months to build and comprises a pair of staircases arranged in a double-helix foramtion. The exterior is made up of vertical, bolted lengths of wood and is supported by curved wooden slats, which act as cross bracing.
Five curved lengths make up a larch balustrade for the staircase and guide visitors to the top.
Photography is by Roman Dobeš.
Here is some information from the designer:
The Cucumber tower
One of our showcase projects was born shortly after our architecture office was founded.
We moved to a house on the Jested ridge and spent two weeks thinking about what we actually wanted to do as architects. And just like that, without a commission, without a specific setting in mind, we came up with the design of this observation tower.
Situating buildings in an open landscape is an unusual architectural discipline, yet in northern Bohemia it has a long tradition that we can take up with confidence.
Once the design was finished, we started looking for a customer. Naive, you say? Not a bit! Within a month we found an enthusiastic taker – the mayor of Hermanice, Mr. Stribrny.We found ourselves at a meeting of the town council in earnest discussion about how to carry out this project.
During the following couple of months, we received a building permit and secured EU funding for an extensive project involving the construction of a network of bicycle trails whose center point was to be the Hermanice observation tower.
Movie: in our next exclusive interview from Inside Festival, Aman Aggarwal explains how his studio Charged Voids combined traditional designs with modern construction techniques to create the interior of Tashya, a high-end Indian bridal store in Chandigarh.
Aggarwal says that the idea for the interior came from the Indian fashion industry itself, where the intricate embroidery of traditional craftsmen is still used in combination with modern industrial machinery.
“The concept emanated from the approach that has been dominant in the Indian clothing industry for quite a while now,” he explains. “You have these high-power machines and looms and everything, but you [also] have these traditional Indian craftsmen.”
He continues: “It’s not the same in the construction industry [where] the artisans are losing work. So the store is actually an attempt to revive those craft practices and integrate them with the modern construction industry.”
The store interior makes extensive use of jalis, traditional wooden screens with ornate patterns cut into them.
“We started with four motifs, which are the basic elements of a lot of jali patterns,” Aggarwal says. “Then we started using those motifs on different scales. The jalis we designed, which were actually cut using a laser, were a combination of all these motifs at different scales.”
Charged Voids combined these jali screens cut using a computer-controlled process with traditionally crafted decorative metalwork. “We wanted these craft practices of India to come into the mainstream of construction,” Aggarwal claims.
The store also features a number of private lounges, where those less interested in shopping can take a break.
“Bridal wear in India is a big thing,” Aggarwal explains. “It’s always a big family affair where you have eight to nine people coming in just to select a couple of dresses. The focus was to get the people who are really interested to shop and the people who are not really interested to entertain them in a different place.”
This movie was filmed at Inside Festival 2013, which took place at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from 2 to 4 October. The next Inside Festival will take place at the same venue from 1 to 3 October 2014. Award entries are open February to June 2014.
Competition:Dezeen is giving readers the chance to win a set of Christmas cards printed with wintery images of London‘s Modernist architecture by designer Stefi Orazi.
The cards depict the Barbican Estate, Centre Point tower, Golden Lane Estate, 2 Willow Road terraced housing, Brusnwick Estate and the penguin enclosure at London Zoo, all in the snow.
Brunswick Estate
Orazi’s greeting cards can be purchased from her online store.
2 Willow Road terraced housing
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Modernist London Christmas cards” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
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Golden Lane Estate
Competition closes 2 December 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
French studio Perraudin Architecture has constructed a family house out of solid stone, claiming the material is “cheaper and faster” to build with than concrete.
Architect Marco Lammers said limestone had been chosen for economic reasons. “Stone itself is not an expensive resource,” he said. “Its manufacturing is. Therefore, the greater its mass, the lower its price and the greater its qualities.”
The house is located in Croix Rousse in Lyon – a dense former silk-weaving district – and is positioned in a small backland plot behind an art gallery.
Perraudin Architecture designed the building to match the typical local architecture, which features solid stone walls and windows large enough to fit silk looms through.
“Massive stone – when used with intelligence – allows to build cheaper and faster than ‘classical’ construction methods like […] concrete,” the architects claim.
Lammers told Dezeen that using stone for load-bearing construction is far more efficient than applying it as a cladding material and creates energy-efficient buildings without high price tags.
“When used constructively in its raw massive form, stone is load-bearing, has great qualities of thermal mass, absorbs and releases surplus humidity, does not degrade and thus literally makes timeless architecture,” he said.
“Arguably, the least intelligent use of stone thinkable is to cut it in thin slices and to hang it decoratively on structural walls,” he added.
The two-storey residence has an L-shaped plan that wraps around a small garden and swimming pool. Both floors feature floor-to-ceiling windows, and the stone walls are left exposed on the inside as well as the outside.
Ground floor spaces are arranged in a sequence where large family rooms are broken up by utility areas such as bathrooms and closets. These smaller spaces sit within compact stone volumes that support the flat roof overhead.
The architect added: “As stone is a subtractive rather than additive material, the domestic landscape architecture has a vocabulary of rifts, carvings, cracks and recesses.”
Here’s more information from Perraudin Architecture:
Massive stone house, Lyon – Croix Rousse, France
This single family house finds itself in the hearth of Croix-Rousse, one of the densest neighbourhoods of Europe. The quarter is heavily marked by its thousands of former home-workshops of the “canuts” – the silk weavers of the 19th century Lyonnais silk manufacturing.
An urban tissue of high, massive stone buildings with large window openings carrying heavy oak floor structures that allow for the high open spaces needed for the Jacquard looms that were used for weaving the silk tissue.
Axonometric diagram
Located in a hearth of a housing block at the back of the art gallery it extends, the possibilities to build are strictly limited by complex urban regulations. Therefore, the envelope of the house follows exactly the authorised maximum volume, with its spaces ‘carved out’ of this given envelope.
Exploded axonometric diagram
Within this rigid shell, the spaces are positioned one after the other forming a continuous scenic route. Due to the limited depth of the maximum envelope, the layout is organised as alternating service and served spaces, with the service-spaces (bathroom, storage, stairs, toilets…) forming massive blocks of stone that support the roof. With its reinforced contrast between mass and emptiness, between lightness and darkness, with its pierced and recessing mass, the playful and liberated inner world contrasts strongly with the outer world blocked in regulation.
Axonometric diagram of stone structure
Being closer to physical geography than to architecture, the service blocks arrange themselves in a route connecting and separating one living space from another. As stone is a subtractive rather than additive material, the “domestic landscape architecture” has a vocabulary of rifts, carvings, cracks and recesses.
Isometric detail
The service blocks define by contrast the living voids, orienting them towards the small garden they surround. The freshness generated by the basin completes this architectural geography.
Ground floor plan
Structurally, all floors are supported by the service blocks, with each block uniquely built up out of massive – structural – stone. The large blocks of dimension stone making up its masonry have been sculpted and assembled block by block after being cut precisely in the quarry. Delivered element by element, they were quickly mounted as if it were blocks in a toy building game.
First floor plan
About Perraudin Architecte and the use of massive stone as primary construction material
Perraudin Architecture is an office with a long history in forefront sustainable architecture – with as most notable example the Akademie Mont Cenis (Herne, Germany, 1999, awarded with the Holzbaupreis and the European Solar Prize, Prize for Solar Building and of the first large energy-neutral buildings).
Since 1998 the office rediscovered massive, structural stone as contemporary building material, starting to use a standardised module of large blocks of 2,00 x 1,00 x 0,50 meter of massive stone – or half of the unit size of stone as extracted directly from a quarry – as primary (structural) building material. Since, the office has proved the potential of massive stone as an elegant, sustainable, economical, and widely available local material in numerous of its buildings.
Most notable is the construction of 20 units of social housing in Cornebarrieu (project nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award 2013, the Equerre d’Argent 2011, and winner of the Prix Développement Durable – Concours d’architecture Pierre Naturelle 2011). It proves massive stone – when used with intelligence – allows to build cheaper and faster than ‘classical’ construction methods like the use of armed concrete, all the while using very limited energy to extract and place (dry construction!) and having great tectonic and tactile qualities.
As each building we had built so far was based on the rather strict geometric base, this massive stone house in Lyon was the first project to allow us to demonstrate the extreme flexibility of stone, exploiting to the maximum its plastic qualities.
This chair by Copenhagen designer Thomas Bentzen for Danish design brand Muuto has armrests made of folded plywood.
The Cover wood and plywood chair by Thomas Bentzen for Danish brand Muuto is made without any metal parts. Instead it is locked together by the bent veneer armrests.
“I aimed for a crisp and vivid expression in the plywood while looking for a solid and grounded look in the frame and base of the chair,” said Bentzen. “Three years of play and hard work in the making has resulted in a light yet strong armchair, playing and taking the moulded veneer to its extreme.”
The chair comes in ash or oak, lacquered in black, grey, dark grey, red, green or natural.
Copenhagen designer Bentzen started his own studio in 2010 and is co-founder of design collective Remove.
This “bioclimatic” house on the edge of Lyon in France features a timber frame, cladding of larch and composite timber, and a planted roof (+ slideshow).
Lyon architects Tectoniques introduced a range of measures to maximise the environmental and thermal performance of the house -called Villa B – along a north-south axis, with plenty of glazing on the south facade helping with solar gain.
The house is built using dry construction methods and features a prefabricated modular timber frame built on a concrete slab with larch cladding covering the exterior.
Floor-to-ceiling windows on opposite facades provide uninterrupted views through the ground floor of the house and incorporate the doors that lead to patios on either side.
“Consistency is created between the building and the external spaces, which enhance each other,” said the architects. “Thus the living area becomes larger than the space delimited by the walls.”
Adjoining the building’s west facade is a garage covered in black composite timber panels that extends to create a canopy above the entrance to the main living space. Adjustable shutters function as a brise soleil to regulate the amount of sunlight reaching the interior during the warmer months.
An island in the centre of the open-plan ground floor houses utilities including kitchen appliances and units, a bathroom and access to the basement. Built-in storage covers the full length of this room, freeing up the rest of the floor space.
Wood is used throughout the interior, with furniture and storage constructed from pale wood panels. The floors are made from poured concrete and white plasterboard walls keep the spaces bright.
Four bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs are organised around a central circulation space at the top of the stairs.
For architects, designing a house is an adventure, but reality is often not as easy as foreseen. The site is complicated, the neighbours are unhappy, the unforeseen factors are really not foreseen, construction work is not as fast as planned, the ecological goals are difficult to reach, and the contractors are not as qualified as specified, and so on – the list is long. In this situation, the architect will be the arbitrator and the ground-breaker. In the end, the construction seems simple and natural.
The story of the Villa B. follows the classic scenario of construction on a bare site, at the edge of a city, in the middle of market gardens, on a strip of land that is well-oriented.
Averse to the stereotypes of the private housing development on the edge of which it is located, and inspired by the image of F.L. Wright’s Usonian Houses and Case Study Houses, the designers make use of the site’s potential to apply the basic principles of the bioclimatic approach. The house quickly takes the shape of a compact whole that presents a simple timber cube very open to the surrounding landscape. As always, Tectoniques avoided the temptation of designing this scheme with a predetermined form to match a desired image, but instead asserted a principle of “no design”.
The bioclimatic approach, a pure attitude to architecture
Benefiting from a long experience of dry construction and timber frame construction, and well-versed in environmental questions for more than twenty years, the firm chooses to design with a bioclimatic approach. It experiments with several options and technical solutions with which it builds a strategy.
Looking into different options for construction and thermal aspects, the firm investigates different technical possibilities for insulation, heating and air handling, from which it chooses a consistent solution that is appropriate for the family’s ways of life and their ability to adapt to induced behaviour.
Priority is given to a house that serves the users, the idea that they have of it, how they plan to live in it and how to make the site their own. This is the basis of the architect’s work: then the technology follows.
The scheme takes the form of a compact house, well placed in the middle of its site, with a high-performance envelope. Oriented north-south and very open on the south side to benefit from solar gain, the house divided space in two gardens with terraces with very differents and complementary uses and atmospheres.
The plan: through views and transparency, intermediate and multipurpose spaces
The plan is efficient, almost square, measuring 10 x 11m. Along the west of the ground floor is a garage finished in black pannels timber composite, extended by a canopy. Free and open, it is organised around a central core that contains the services: cellar, networks, shower/bath room, and kitchen. All the rooms form a ring around this hub. Uninterrupted through views and continual contact with nature are maintained by using sliding partitions and large glazed areas facing each other.
A strip of ancillary and storage areas runs along the full height of the west wall. The overall scheme creates a multipurpose space, open onto the south and north gardens and the patios. Consistency is created between the building and the external spaces, which enhance each other. Thus the living area becomes larger than the space delimited by the walls.
The house faces due south. Largely glazed, it benefits from solar gain, while being protected by brise-soleil adjustable louver sun breaks to control stronger sunshine in the summer, spring and autumn. Open onto the south and east, its upper floor is closed on the north, and the west side only has small openings for the showers and bathrooms.
Since the local climate is strongly contrasted, with peaks of heat and cold, this plan layout allows maximum occupation of the patios according to the seasons, sheltered from the wind. In the long term, a variety of intermediate and peripheral elements may enhance the existing and vary the spaces, according to the weather and the seasons, such as arbours, canopies, pergolas, etc.
On the upper floor, the system is reversed: the layout organisation starts from the core and opens onto the bedrooms. Following the principle of separation of daytime and night- time areas, the upper floor is occupied by four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The bedrooms face south and east, while the bathrooms open to the west.
In addition to the clearly-identified living areas, the house has intermediate and multipurpose spaces. This is the case on the ground floor, which, with its sliding partitions, can have several layouts; also, some rooms that are not set aside for any specific purpose can be reconfigured according to the time of day e.g. study-laundry-computer room or guest bedroom-study-music room. This adaptability is a response to the need to manage both privacy and communal life within the family home.
Simple structure
The construction is simple. It is a timber- framed house, erected on a concrete slab, with a concrete topping laid on the upper floor. The structure is a prefabricated modular system. The roof insulation consists of 40 cm thick expanded cellulose wadding, and the wall insulation consists of mineral wool with woodwool on the outside, giving a total thickness of 32 cm. The woodwool slows down warming and cooling of the house by a lagging effect.
On the ground floor, three large triple-glazed panels – with a fixed part and a translating (tilting) opener – run along the elevation at ceiling height and frame the landscape. They avoid interrupting the views by door and window frames, and they draw the eyes towards the outside. On the upper floor, in the bedrooms, low tilt-and-turn windows have a fixed window-breast at bed height.
On the facades, perforated larch cladding is fixed to double 5 x 5 cm wall plates to further increase the ventilation effect. The cladding gradually greys naturally, without any treatment, with uniform silvery tinges. Inside, a lining of knot-free, light-coloured polar panels is used with great uniformity for built-in cupboards, furniture and storage elements. Elsewhere, white plasterboard adds to the soft, brightly-lit atmosphere of the house.
South facadeNorth facade
Thermal strategy
Space heating is mainly provided by floor heating on the ground floor and the upper floor. It is supplied by a condensation gas boiler and solar panels. The double- flow ventilation system is connected to a glycolated ground-air heat exchanger laid at a depth of between 2.00 and 2.50 m to the north of the house, which supplies air at a constant temperature of 12°C. When necessary, the exchanger can provide additional ventilation at night. During cold peaks, wood-burning stove covers additional heating needs, calculated for the overall volume and instantaneously, particularly
for the upper floor. Waxed concrete and floor heating provide very pleasant thermal comfort. The concrete topping, which is chosen despite the timber structure, provides uniformity of floors on the ground floor and upper floor, in bedrooms, showers and bath rooms. In addition, the roof is planted with a sedum [stonecrap] covering, and rainwater is collected in an underground tank.
All of these systems require some control to function as well as possible. This is a technical matter that needs a certain degree of mastery, which is acquired empirically and requires the occupants to take an interest in them and to change their habits.
Tsutsumi & Associates has added a spiral staircase and glazed meeting rooms to an old factory in Beijing to transform the building into the headquarters of a furniture company (+ slideshow).
Beijing firm Tsutsumi & Associates renovated the entire four-storey building for Daxing Furniture, adding production facilities on the lower levels, a furniture showroom on the second floor, and offices on the third floor and mezzanine loft.
The staircase spirals up through a double-height void in the upper section of the building to connect the showroom with the offices. Glazed office cubes are positioned around the space, while an inclined atrium is visible on one side through a large internal window.
“I wanted to make [the space] as transparent as possible and emphasise the dynamics of the overhung loft volume,” architect Yoshimasa Tsutsumi told Dezeen.
Concrete slabs are left exposed throughout the building, creating gridded ceilings that are streaked with rows of angled spotlights.
The architects also installed a wall of living plants on the office floor. “This separates the white boxes from the background and softens the office space at the same time,” said Tsutsumi.
Photography is by Misae Hiromatsu.
Here’s a project description from Tsutsumi & Associates:
Daxing Factory Conversion
The factory building was converted to the head office of the furniture manufacturer.
The programs are factory for 1st floor , 2nd floor and half of 3rd floor, exhibition space for half of 3rd floor, office space for 4th floor. The exhibition space of 3rd floor is connected to the 4th floor through spiral stairs where the existing floor was removed. 5.5m ceiling height is enough to make skip-floor style, so that we aimed to realise three-dimensional office landscape.
The requested programs were conference room, meeting room, resting space, office space, vice-presidents room and so on. Comparatively public programs of these such as conference room were put near to the elevator hall, on the other hand office space was put on inner part of the floor. Office space was planned to open, whereas the rooms those were needed to be closed would be treated as a group of several volumes in the huge space.
The spiral staircase that was put in the centre of the floor connects the exhibition space of 3rd floor and office space of 4th floor and resting space of loft. When we enter from the elevator hall, we can see the conference room in tiers next to the void with spiral staircase. On the opposite side of the conference room across the void, there is small-sized meeting room and the volume of the resting space is flying over it.
After passing through this small-sized meeting room, there is office space with skip-floor where the sections are clearly separated by the floor height also the difference of eye level induce the communication between them.
When rising up to 1.2m level, we reach the back of the conference room in tiers. This conference room connects between entrance hall and office space, when not using conference room we can use this as shortcut.
Basic use materials are white EP paint on the wall, mortar finish on the existing floor, steel checkered plate on the skip-floor. Around some part like elevator hall or stairs, Corten steel was used to add rigid accent, on the other hand on the wide wall at the end of the entrance hall vertical plant was put to soften space.
Inside the landscape with various levels, white boxes are put as if to make village. There are some bypasses, hidden area and open area, alcove where we can look down the atrium, also we can overview whole area from the loft space. As if we walk inside the ancient village, we can enjoy sequential view here.
News: architect Zaha Hadid has hit back at critics who have compared the design of her Al Wakrah stadium in Qatar to a vagina, describing the comments as “embarrassing” and “ridiculous”.
Speaking to TIME magazine, Hadid said: “It’s really embarrassing that they come up with nonsense like this. What are they saying? Everything with a hole in it is a vagina? That’s ridiculous.”
She suggested that the comments would not have been made had the architect been male: “Honestly, if a guy had done this project…”
Earlier this week Zaha Hadid Architects unveiled the design for the stadium, which is one of several new structures that will be built to host soccer matches during the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Critics immediately compared the 40,000-seater stadium, which its architects claim is based on the curving lines of an Arab dhow fishing boat, to female genitalia.
The Al Wakrah stadium has been co-designed by AECOM and features a flowing roof designed to protect spectators from the worst of Qatar’s extreme heat.
“With its shiny, pinkish tinge, its labia-like side appendages and its large opening in the middle, the supposedly innocent building (“based upon the design of a traditional Qatari dhow boat”) was just asking for trouble,” wrote The Guardian’s Holly Baxter on the ensuing furore.
It is unusual for an architectural structure to be compared to a vagina; comparisons with the male organ are far more common.
The owner of this Madrid apartment moves between living and working spaces like a character in a computer game, using ladders that connect platforms inserted in a single tall, narrow space.
“[It] leads to an image that looks like those old computer platform games,” said Spanish architects MYCC, who created the live-work space in a 100 cubic-metre volume.
The architects described the volume as “an empty box waiting to be filled,” adding: “The idea of light and simple floors where it could be possible to easily jump from one to another was always in mind from the very first sketches.”
A mixture of ladders and staircases connect each of the platforms in the space, which is just 20 square metres in plan.
“Size, both horizontal and vertical, of every part gives a non-lineal path,” added the architects. “So, moving from one room to another is a kind of small physical effort.”
The entrance lobby steps up to the kitchen, then more stairs lead down to a living area on the opposite side.
A steel ladder mounted onto the side wall can be climbed to access a mezzanine study, while a sleeping area is tucked underneath.
A final set of stairs leads down from the living room into a bathroom located beneath the kitchen.
Walls, floors and ceilings are all finished in white, so the only splashes of colour come from items of furniture and framed artworks.
This singular urban shelter is just twenty square metres and nevertheless is one hundred cubic metres of volume. In such an enclosed space should a single person live and work. He will use his creativity and dynamism to make it his own sweet home.
A longitudinal section defines the project. The space highness has been used to accommodate several pieces, which are limited in volume but at the same time all are visually connected to each other. Even the bathroom is within sight.
The necessity to hold the programmed uses, each of them with specific characteristics and size, leads to an image which looks like those old computers platform games. The idea of light and simple floors where could be possible even easily jump from one to another was always in mind from the very first sketches.
Size, both horizontal and vertical, of every piece gives as a result a non lineal path. So, moving from one room to another is a kind of small physical effort.
Going up to the kitchen or getting down to the bedroom offers a stressed change and different sensation of the space, both any different unit and the apartment as a whole.
The apartment, even with its small size, wants to offer generous spaces and a big quantity of different pieces of use. The pieces that make it up, does not really have a fixed clearly defined use: the kitchen is a walk-through room to get the living. There are stands rather than stairs to go down the living, which is over a cellar-storage room. Then, it is possible to get the ladder to go up to the indoor sunny terrace, a place to be used as a study or a chill out. Also the central living room connects through four steps to the bathroom. This is an oversized kind of luxury room that holds even an in-situ cosy kind of hamman bath.
Construction and finishing are made in a direct and unadorned way and all is full of bright white.
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