Faceted white walls frame the entrances to this monochrome auditorium in rural New South Wales by Australian architects Silvester Fuller (+ slideshow).
Silvester Fuller designed the auditorium building as a flexible events space for the Anglican church of Dapto, a small town south of Sydney.
The building is sandwiched between the existing town hall and primary school, creating a community hub and meeting place that is close to the town’s church.
“Locating the auditorium between these two facilities presented the opportunity to create a central hub, from which all the primary event spaces in both the new and existing buildings are accessed,” said the architects. “This hub becomes the campus meeting place.”
Large pre-cast concrete panels give a textured surface to the exterior walls. These are painted black to contrast with the white entrances, which are clad with sheets of fibre cement.
A paved terrace between the car park and the building leads visitors towards the main entrance, which comprises a concertina-style screen of glazed doors and windows.
The doors can be folded back to the edges of the entrance, opening the hall out to its surroundings.
The 500-seat auditorium is located at the back of the building and has an entirely black interior.
Silvester Fuller’s Dapto Anglican Church Auditorium is the first of a new generation of buildings for the Anglican Parish of Dapto. The design is a response to the changing functional and social direction of the church and it’s relationship with the community.
Intended to complement nearby St Luke’s Chapel, the auditorium offers a theatre-like venue for a broader range of event types. No longer a place devoted solely to Sunday worship services, the new church building is required to support a range of events held in the morning, afternoon and evening, 7 days a week and catering to a broad spectrum of the local community.
The organisational strategy for the site involved the relocation of vehicular traffic to the site perimeter, allowing for a fully pedestrianised centre. The new auditorium was then to be located on the site with minimal intervention to the existing buildings. For this reason the perimeter plan of the new auditorium is bounded by the two existing buildings; a preschool and church hall. Locating the auditorium between these two facilities presented the opportunity to create a central hub, from which all the primary event spaces, in both the new and existing buildings are accessed. This hub becomes the campus meeting place.
Once the perimeter mass of the new building was defined, circulation spaces were carved out of the mass, informed by the flow of people from the parking areas to the building and subsequently in and around the two primary spaces; the auditorium and foyer. This subtraction of mass defines voids which connect these spaces to each other and the landscape. The secondary support spaces then occupy the remaining solid mass. The requirements of the individual spaces called for a delicate balance between generosity and intimacy, with some spaces open to the landscape and others completely concealed from it.
The external facade responds to two conditions: where the primary mass has been retained the facade surface is dark, earth-like and roughly textured. In contrast the subtracted void areas are bright, smooth and crisp surfaces identifying the building entrances and acting as collection devices. Once inside the building, the entry into the main auditorium is an inverse of the exterior, presenting recessed darkened apertures acting as portals which then open into the 500 seat theatre. The theatre is a black-box with a singular focus on the stage. There is provision for a natural-light-emitting lampshade to be built above the stage at a later date.
A modest budget demanded construction simplicity combined with spatial clarity and efficiency, to produce a building that is easily understood whilst standing apart from its context. The new building aims to establish a new design direction and focus for the Parish and is envisaged as stage one of a master plan of growth.
Site: 9546 square metres New building: 1155 square metres Auditorium capacity: 500 people Parking capacity: 118 cars, 10 bicycles Design phase: 2008-2009 Construction phase: 2010-2012 Client: Anglican Parish of Dapto & Anglican Church Property Trust Council: Woollongong City Council Architect: Silvester Fuller Project leaders: Jad Silvester, Penny Fuller Project team: Patrik Braun, Rachid Andary, Bruce Feng
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the penultimate stop on our Dezeen and MINI World tour is Eindhoven. In our first video report from the city, co-founder of Dutch Design Week Miriam van der Lubbe explains how the small industrial town has become one of the leading centres for design and technology in the world.
“Eindhoven is actually a very small city compared to the big capitals in Europe or the world,” says van der Lubbe. “It’s a group of about seven villages that grew together into Eindhoven.”
It is also not a very pretty one. “The centre of Eindhoven really got destroyed [during the Second World War],” Van der Lubbe explains. “They built it up in the fifties and it became a really ugly city. In Eindhoven, it can only get better.”
Despite its size, the city has been a site for technological innovation since the industrial revolution, thanks almost entirely to Dutch electronics giant Philips.
The company was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 and, although it moved its headquarters to Amsterdam in 1997, its blue logo still adorns many of the buildings in the city.
Once Philips moved out, many people were afraid Eindhoven would become a “non-area”, Van der Lubbe says. In fact, the creative industries were quick to take advantage of the large amounts of cheap space Philips left behind.
One example Van der Lubbe takes us to is Strijp, a former Philips industrial complex that is now one of the central areas of Dutch Design Week.
“Strijp is a major part of Eindhoven centre actually,” says Van der Lubbe. “The owner of Strijp bought these industrial buildings and gave them to the creative people.”
An abundance of designers ready to take up these former industrial spaces graduate each year from Design Academy Eindhoven, which has gained a reputation as one of the foremost design schools in the world.
“It grew out of Philips, because they saw that design was an important aspect of products,” she says of the school.
“It used to be that as soon as people graduated they left. But now they’re coming back because they see that there’s something going on here that’s interesting.”
There is still an emphasis on science and technology in Eindhoven. Van der Lubbe takes us to the High Tech Campus on the outskirts of the city, where many technology companies are based, as well as Eindhoven University of Technology.
Having design, industry, science and technology in such close proximity is the key to Eindhoven’s success, says Van der Lubbe.
“There is a huge opportunity for Eindhoven because it has all these aspects in it,” she says. “It has the academic world, it has science, it has the creative world, it definitely has industry.”
“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out and there is so much more that can actually happen here. I really believe that.”
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.
Opinion: on his return from Dutch Design Week, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs argues that “something special is happening” in Eindhoven, a dowdy post-industrial sprawl that was recently named “the most inventive city in the world”.
I’ve seen the future and it’s a small, ugly town in the south of Holland.
I’ve been in Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week for the past few days and the energy, creativity and imagination I’ve come across has been a revelation. Not only designers but entrepreneurs, civic leaders, restauranteurs and musicians are buzzing with an excitement and optimism that is both rare and genuine. They feel something special is happening in their city.
The trip is part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour and even though this is the smallest and least attractive of the cities we’ve visited this year – other stops have included New York, Singapore and London – it’s been by far the most interesting.
“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out,” says designer Miriam van der Lubbe in our first MINI World Tour report from the city. “And there’s so much more that can happen here”.
That accolade was based on research by the OECD, which found that the area leads the world in “patent intensity” – the number of patent applications per capita – a recognised way of measuring innovation. Eindhoven files 22.6 patents for every 10,000 people. San Diego, which is second on the list, files only 8.9.
It’s an incredible turnaround for a city that, in the eighties, feared it was staring into the abyss when Philips, the electronics giant that was the dominant economic and social force in Eindhoven, as good as abandoned the city with the loss of 30,000 jobs (out of a total population of around 200,000). Things were so bad the city seriously considered changing its name – “eind” is Dutch for “end” – lest people take it too literally.
Fearing the fate of Manchester, where the loss of heavy industry blighted the city centre for years, Eindhoven moved quickly to reinvent itself, giving abandoned Philips buildings to creative people who, true to the local spirit of hard work and cooperation, self organised and got on with building their own future.
Local authorities and developers around the world now commonly use such “creative seeding” to add buzz to an area to aid gentrification (and ultimately sell real estate) but in Eindhoven there appears to be a more equitable social construct to the way this is carried out.
Annemoon Geurts, the founder of Kazerne, a new creative industries hub in a former barracks in the city centre, told me that the city had offered her non-profit organisation an “erfpacht”, or social lease, on the building, meaning it would benefit from the value they added during their tenure. And with a 40-year lease, something that would be unheard of in short-term, money-grubbing London, they have an incentive to make long-term improvements.
Eindhoven’s design credentials are well known. Dutch Design Week (unofficial slogan: “What you see here today is what you’ll see in Milan in two years”) is one of the best curated and most vibrant design weeks. Design Academy Eindhoven is a serious contender for the title of world’s best design school and an increasing number of its stellar alumni (Piet Hein Eek, Kiki van Eijk, Joost van Bleiswijk and Formafantasma to name just a few) have remained in the city, running thriving studios.
But designers on their own can’t achieve much; if they aspire to more than just being another wannabe on the design-fair circuit they need an infrastructure of industry, R&D and other creative disciplines around them with whom they can make bigger ripples.
And Eindhoven has these in abundance. ASML, the world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer, is based in Eindhoven. A drive through even the dullest industrial estate in the city reveals companies specialising in cryogenics, photovoltaics and biotechnology. RPI Paro, the advanced print-on-demand printing facility that produced our Print Shift magazine, is based in Eindhoven. So is Shapeways, one of the leading 3D printing companies, who we interviewed for the Print Shift project.
These complimentary sectors tend to open their doors to creative minds, rather than turning them away, ripping them off or viewing them with suspicion, as is the common experience other cities including London. Designers in the city talk of an openness towards new ideas and a willingness to experiment that permeates industry, academia and the city government itself.
Interdisciplinary collaboration – so often an empty cliche – appears to be an everyday reality in Eindhoven and they even have a special term for it. Proeftuin, which literally means “experimental garden” or “test bed”, is a form of collaborative working between people of different disciplines that has been adopted by the city. Proeftuin was used to generate the city’s (alas, unsuccessful) bid strategy for European City of Culture 2018 and would also have formed a key part of cultural activity in 2018, had it won.
The attitude is most perfectly encapsulated by Dutch Design Week ambassador Daan Roosegaarde’s concept for removing smog from urban skies using an “electronic vacuum cleaner”, which he revealed in Eindhoven this week. Here a designer, researchers and politicians came together to address a real problem and found that between them they had the ingredients to do something about it.
In this case Eindhoven cannot claim these elements as its own: Roosegaarde is based near Rotterdam; the university is in Delft and the politicians are in Beijing. But Eindhoven can stake a convincing claim to the spirit, and that spirit offers a bright future.
Architects Agnieszka Preibisz and Peter Sandhaus have unveiled a conceptual skyscraper for Berlin with a twisted figure-of-eight structure that curves around elevated gardens and is held up by cables.
Agnieszka Preibisz and Peter Sandhaus, who are both based in Berlin, developed the design to contribute to a new masterplan being put together for the eastern quarter of the city.
“The state of society in the twenty-first century requires that we develop new visions for living in densely populated inner cities,” Preibisz told Dezeen. “This process inherently triggers an essential confrontation of material and social values, and so there is a nascent yearning for an architecture that offers a high degree of potential for community.”
Describing the building as a “vertical garden city”, the architects have planned a network of gardens and greenhouses that would slot into the two hollows of the figure-of-eight, intended to serve a growing desire among city dwellers for self-sustaining gardening.
Residences would be arranged to encourage neighbours to interact with one another, fostering a sense of community that the architects compare to social networks.
“While in social networking, the border between the public and the private spheres is being renegotiated, architecture and urban planning of cities such as Berlin lags behind these significant social and demographic changes,” they explain.
Named Green8, the tower is designed for a site on Alexanderplatz. The architects are now consulting with an engineering office to assess the viability of the structure.
Here’s a project description from the architects:
Green8 Concept
How Do We Want To Live?
While trying to answer the query of how and where to house, many modern families today are torn between the desire for a pulsating urban life and the craving for a lifestyle in harmony with nature.
Our identification with and our desire for a free and urban life style defined by short distances to work, excellent public transportation, and proximity to cultural and commercial amenities, does not need to end with the decision to start a family or with retirement from active professional life.
Current trends towards a ‘sharing-spirit’ and a new participation in the community life counteract the anonymity and isolation in the metropolis. While in social networking, the border between the public and the private spheres is being renegotiated, architecture and urban planning of cities such as Berlin lags behind these significant social and demographic changes.
The unease with the global imperative of continued growth propagated by financial markets, seems to be spreading. Confidence in industrial food production finds itself nowadays significantly eroded. At the same time also the mass production of organic and healthier food has its limits and fails to appease growing groups of customers.
The longing for self-sustaining gardening and for knowing about the origins of what one is eating, are the most important reasons for the current boom in urban gardening.
What do these developments mean for architecture and urban planning? How do we want to live and house in the future?
As an integrative solution to this dilemma, the architects Agnieszka Preibisz and Peter Sandhaus are proposing project Green8 for a vertical garden city on Alexanderplatz in Berlin.
The residential high-rise structure is based on a business model of a cooperative collective. It envisions a self-determined community encompassing all generations. With its generous greenhouse and community spaces Green8 offers to organise not only the food production but also the sport and leisure activities, as well as the care of children and seniors.
Green8 reflects a dream come true: living in the centre of the city with breathtaking panorama views, while having one’s own vegetable garden at one’s doorstep.
Thanks to its cooperative and integrative principles, this housing concept is economically efficient. This form of home ownership is free from many constraints of real estate or land speculation, and the long term costs are lower than those of conventional homes.
Portuguese studio DNSJ.arq has completed a cluster of three white houses on the outskirts of a small town in southern Portugal (+ slideshow).
Located just outside Aldeia do Meco, the first of the three houses was designed by DNSJ.arq as a home for the clients, while the other two function as rentable holiday homes.
Two of the houses are located on a flat section of the site close to the street and the third house is positioned behind them, slightly further up the hill.
Architect Nuno Simões said the team decided to arrange each house in a different composition, “almost like a jazz improvisation.”
“We decided to make the bigger house for our client – in the hilly side of the land with the swimming pool – and the other smaller two for rent,” Simões told Dezeen.
“The two smaller houses, which have a more congested situation, were for living mainly on the patios, while the larger house faces a small river with a glimpse of the ocean,” he added.
Each house has brick walls that coated with white render, as well as poured concrete floors. All three open out to patios on two levels and feature their own private swimming pools.
A garage connects the two smaller houses. A pathway leads to the third house, which is twice as big and boasts more bedrooms and a spacious kitchen.
The intervention that is proposed is located within the urban perimeter of Aldeia do Meco. It is a narrow strip towards sunrise/sunset, flat up to about half of the land and thereafter acquiring an pending until the river bordering the west.
The settlement program includes the construction of three houses, two for rent and a residence for the owners.
The first two houses are grouped together (Casa 1 and Casa 2) on the flat part and closer to the street and settled the other house (Casa 3) on the ground to the west.
This house adapts to the topography, adjusting to the presence of existing trees, and enjoying the views through a system of terraces that extend the house outdoors. Unlike Casa 3, Casa 1 and Casa 2, more exposed to neighbouring buildings, enjoy a more intimate relationship generated by a system of courtyards.
Important starting point was the impossibility of any sophistication constructive opting for current building systems.
The banality of the building grew into a minimal architectural lexicon composed of white unequal volumes, but similar in nature. This game was complemented with the austerity of the chosen materials.
Table legs extend up to look like tree trunks and branches at this cafe in Tokyo by Japanese studio id (+ slideshow).
The interior, graphics and products were designed by id for the Ki cafe, named after the Japanese word for tree.
The monochrome space features black steel poles that resemble the shapes of bare trees.
The poles form the legs of the tables, which sit on a wooden floor.
Hats and coats can be hung from the branch-like hooks.
Small plates of sugar in the shape of transparent leaves sit on the surfaces.
The bricks of the facade are painted white, while a black graphic showing the cafe name is printed onto the large windows.
Here is more information from the designers:
Cafe Ki opened in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo in Japan, designed by Japanese design office id. Ki means a tree in Japanese. It is a cafe where coffee and pastries can be enjoyed in a space like a yard or a forest.
The pure white space enhances the coffee colored trees. The “tree” standing inside the café takes a role as a table leg made of steel. Hats and coats can be hung on the highly extended table legs.
Although a large number of people can sit around the big table, it can maintain a sense of comfortable distance while sharing the table with a different group since wooden branches help to divide the space on the table.
Moreover, the leg of the table randomly stands and those who sit down can freely choose a place where to sit. The grove where trees are randomly standing brings a deeper impression from front to back than actually it is.
Japanese design office id designed for Café Ki not only the interior but also, the graphics, uniform, website and original products.
These night shots by New York photographer Andrew Prokos capture some of the buildings designed by late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in Brasília (+ slideshow).
Andrew Prokos topped the Night Photography category at this year’s International Photography Awards with the series, which documents buildings such as the National Congress of Brazil and the Cathedral of Brasília after dark.
“I became fascinated by Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings as works of art in themselves, and the fact that Niemeyer had unprecedented influence over the architecture of the capital during his long lifetime,” said Prokos.
Niemeyer, who passed away last year, completed a series of civic and government buildings in the Brazilian capital over the course of his career, following the appointment of Juscelino Kubitschek as president in 1956.
As well as the congress building and cathedral, Niemeyer also designed the Palácio do Planalto – the official workplace of the president – as well as the National Museum of the Republic and Itamaraty Palace.
“I found the city fascinating from a visual perspective,” Prokos told Dezeen. “At its best the Niemeyer architecture is elegant and inspired; at the other end of the spectrum there are structures that are straight out of the Soviet era.”
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