Spanish architects Taller Básico de Arquitectura hoisted this pair of concrete laboratories in northern Spain onto red metal stilts (+ slideshow).
Taller Básico de Arquitectura used the red structures to create flat levels for the box-shaped labs, which sit on a gently sloping site at a technology park in Vitoria, close to Bilbao.
Two beams cross beneath each block so the columns sit under the middle of each external wall. Each wall features a single square window or doorway.
The square boxes sit at a slight angle to one another, almost touching but connected by a short bridge that’s glazed on the sides and above.
The first block contains two small rooms and places to sit, while the second is a single open research space filled with work benches.
Black window frames stand out against the clinical white interior.
Taller Básico de Arquitectura have also designed a university complex in Zaragoza with a facade of overlapping white scales.
Here’s some additional information from the architects:
Biokilab Laboratories
Two boxes in the air and a structure as architecture
The technologic Park of Vitoria colonises a little bit of nature. The quality of the site and its steepness make us question where to build. Two boxes made from air rise above the slope. The structure become architecture carries on its shoulders these boxes, showing a new plane.
We investigate new ways of entering new places. Our place appears on a new level, determined by a four-legged and colourful structure. Two hollow boxes of concrete inhabit this new place on the structure. The whole complex in a permanent flight reveals a new gravity.
Quadruped anatomies
The metallic structure that raises the boxes in the air is a quadruped structure. Its two horizontal elements form a cross inscribed in the square floor of the boxes. The sides of these floors measure twelve and thirteen meters respectively. The horizontal beams where the boxes rest avoid any interlocking.
Consequently, the structure is visible in its entirety. The ends of the beams join vertical elements, which become the legs of this quadruped anatomy. Legs are as wide as beams, managing a continuity that makes all the pieces be understood as a unique element. Different lengths of the legs let the slope remain unaltered.
The box is thought as a second structure that replaces walls with beams and roofs with double slabs. The vertical faces of the box are beams as high as the box. These wall-beams have only one hole, defined by the maximum dimensions that let the beams work properly. Outside, the concrete structure is visible on all faces of the box.
Inside, plasterboards cover the structure. The window frame, drawn as a single line, stays hidden between both sheets. The gap between sheets, both in walls and slabs, contains all building systems, as plumbing, electricity, voice and data. This net of systems solves the flexibility needed by the laboratory for its continuous transformation.
Opinion: in this week’s column, Sam Jacob argues against the resurrection of Crystal Palace in London and urges us to “resist the pull of loss and nostalgia”.
When the dead return, the world of the living is thrown into turmoil, as we’ve just seen in French TV show The Returned that’s been spooking out British audiences for the last eight weeks. In The Returned, the undead are not zombies out to eat your brain, but far more puzzling entities. They are confused themselves at their return to the living.
The blurry distinction between states of being alive, dead and undead might be tropes of supernatural dramas and horror films, but their questions are part and parcel of the everyday landscape of architecture and cities.
The original Crystal Palace was built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. Designed by Joseph Paxton, it was a huge iron and steel structure, itself a technological triumph of the Victorian age. It housed a vast assemblage of the bounty and riches of imperial Britain and the marvels it could produce. After the exhibition ended, its contents were distributed to seed the museums of Exhibition Road.
The structure itself was dismantled, transported and rebuilt in Sydenham where it failed to ever really settle. Despite boasting that it hosted the world’s first cat show, visitor numbers were poor. Its decline was dramatically ended when it burnt to the ground in 1936. The architecture gone, its presence remains in the huge plinth that sits at the top of the park and the name bequeathed both to the area and its football team. The building’s absence, even as its name is remembered, is ever present.
Despite not being here, the Crystal Palace remains highly significant architecturally. Crystal Palace exists as a foundation myth for a certain idea of British architecture. High-tech claimed it as an inheritance, as part of the tradition of glass-and-steel engineering that eventually became the Centre Pompidou, the Lloyds building and so on.
It also gave us another architectural thread that winds through Modernism: it was in the Crystal Palace that German architect Gottfried Semper encountered the structure that was to become his primitive hut. A colonial reconstruction of a native hut, in other words, acted as his cypher for the essential. That it should take the apogee of the industrial revolution – the immense wealth and reach of high colonialism – to invent this primitivism is odd in itself. Though of course, the idea of the primitive can only be conceived from a position of un-primitivism.
So what of the idea to reconstruct the Crystal Palace? Its own history of building and rebuilding on a different site suggests it might be a more likely subject than many for this treatment, but perhaps Semper’s Primitive Hut inside a crystalline industrialised structure might make us think twice.
Any return – of history, primitiveness or anything buried in the past – can only be as perplexing as the undead are to the living. What would you do with your reanimated great great great great grandma? And what would she do in the here and now, brought back without her consent into the present, only to die again?
Even something as outwardly simple as food: think of all those artisanal breads, of peasant food remade as luxury dining on heirloom fruit and veg. These returned artefacts are only possible because of a highly complex, super-refined culture. When these things return to us, they return in a drastically altered form. Even if they are entirely the same in ingredients, shape, size, texture and so on, they are completely different. Re-animation can’t bring back the original but rather invents a new form of the present.
These plans for the Crystal Palace are not unique. In fact, we are surrounded by zombie architecture, re-animated Frankenstein’s monsters: Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, the Dresden Frauenkirche, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House, to name but a few. The Euston Arch and The Skylon are just other examples of the past that threatens to resurface in the present.
The state that this returned architecture takes is an idealised version of itself. The Villa Savoye, for example, spent very little time as the house it was originally intended to be: it was a cow shed for longer and a derelict building for even longer. That we choose to return it to an imaginary state is hardly an innocent decision. Rather, it’s one loaded with a contemporary idea of what that particular building and architecture in general is. We remake history in our own image.
Buildings exist in a time as well as space. They rot, crumble, break and leak. They require constant repair. In our quest for the authenticity of historic architecture, we often find ourselves running into Theseus’s paradox. It runs like this: on his return to Athens, the hero’s ship was placed in dry dock as a monument and in seaworthy condition. Over time, pieces of the boat were replaced as it rotted. At a certain point, the paradox emerged: if none of the original material remained, was this still Theseus’s boat? As it is for classical philosophers, so it is for contemporary conservationists. Where, in other words, does architectural or historical authenticity reside?
There is already a replica of the Crystal Palace, but in Dallas, not south London. It houses a technology office and data centre and its lobby contains a reproduction of the Crystal Fountain. The Infomart, as it is called, was honoured with a visit in 1986 by that renowned British architecture expert Prince Charles. In promotional material, the Infomart’s developer was quoted with what must be some kind of garbled and/or fabricated anointment: “England’s parliament declared the Infomart official successor to the Crystal Palace.” This of course reveals how history itself can be made a commodity. The statement shows how the Infomart’s developer attempts to fold the aura of the original Crystal Palace into its spec development.
Behind the innocent claims of honouring the past and righting wrongs done unto culture by acts of god or the wrecking ball, there is always another agenda. History acts as a convenient alibi for contemporary motivations. Though it presents itself as an innocent act, philanthropic even, we should remember Churchill saying that history is written by the victors. History, in other words, is not something that happened in the past but a function of contemporary power. Reanimating its form in the present is equally a function of contemporary power.
We may mourn the past. We may feel intense sorrow at the gaping voids left in the present by things that have vanished, but we should resist the pull of these feelings of loss and nostalgia. The Crystal Palace functions perfectly well in its absence (perhaps even more so than if it were still here). Its return as a ghost, zombie or otherwise undead form of architecture should be seen for what it is: a ghoulish pull on our tender heartstrings in the service of large scale development. Its construction, like the Infomart in its cheap cartooning of history, would only make our sense of loss greater.
Our August World Design Guide update features Brazilian Design Week in São Paulo (pictured) and CU (Creatives Unfold) in Bangkok, plus we’ve added five new events.
Here’s the list of all the events happening this month:
Last week we announced our London Design Festival 2013 guide – so if your organising an event or exhibition and you’d like us to feature it for FREE, please get in touch via the email address below.
Faceted aluminium panels rise from the ground to form this pipe-shaped pavilion at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France by architects Jakob + MacFarlane (+ slideshow).
Jakob + MacFarlane created the geometry of The Turbulences by extruding grids created across FRAC art centre‘s courtyard by the existing buildings in the public. The faceted surfaces form tubes topped with glass panels and entrances are inserted under raised parts of the undulations.
The new pavilion was designed as a reception area to funnel visitors towards the exhibitions housed in the main buildings. A tubular metal structure supports the secondary system of panels that cover the building.
Pre-fabricated concrete slabs clad the lower portion as a continuation of the courtyard surface. These are replaced by aluminium panels higher up, some of which are perforated and light up with LEDs at night.
The FRAC Centre sent us the following information:
Jakob + MacFarlane have brought to the fore an emerging dynamic form based on the parametric deformation and the extrusion of the grids of the existing buildings. As a strong architectural signal interacting with its context, this fluid, hybrid structure develop likes three glass and metal excrescences in the inner courtyard, in the very heart of the Subsistances.
The principle of emergence is extended to the immediate surroundings: the courtyard is treated like a public place, a topographical surface which forms the link between all the buildings and accommodate the Frac Centre programme. This surface goes hand in hand with the natural differences in level of the site towards the building’s entrance, reinforces the visual dynamics of the Turbulences and stretches away towards the city in a movement of organic expansion.
The destruction of a main building and the surrounding wall on Boulevard Rocheplatte has made it possible to greatly open up the new architectural complex to the city. Thanks to its new urban façade, the Frac Centre is connected to the cultural urban network of Orléans, and the inner courtyard has been turned into nothing less than a square. The new architectural presence has become the point of gravity of the Subsistances site, a new structure, and a new geometry. The architectural extension comes powerfully across through its prototypical dimension, which echoes the identity of the Frac Centre and its collection.
The glass and steel excrescences of the Turbulences house a public reception area and organize the flow of visitors towards the exhibition areas, situated in the existing main buildings.
The critical dimension of the work, conveyed by its structural complexity, is transcribed on all the project’s scales. The tubular metal structure, reinforced by a secondary structure supporting the exterior covering panels (aluminium panels, either solid or perforated) and the interior panels (made of wood), is formed by unusual and unique elements. The lower parts of the Turbulences are clad with prefabricated concrete panels, which provide the continuity of the building with the courtyard. The apparent disjunction between the two architectural orders is offset by the impression of emergence given by the Turbulences.
The light, prefabricated structure of the Turbulences has been entirely designed using digital tools. All the building trades involved worked on the basis of one and the same modelling file. The structures were subject to a trial assembly in the factory where the tubes were welded, before the permanent on-site assembly.
In this project, the at once conceptual and surgical approach to the urban fabric developed by Jakob + MacFarlane redefines the site in order to incorporate in it new points of equilibrium, “shifting” the architecture and offering contemporary art a dynamic and evolving image.
The architectural intervention, with its complex, facetted geometry, stands out against the symmetry and sobriety of the Subsistances site whose period structures and materials are left visible.
As “living” architecture permeable to urban ebbs and flows, the Turbulences – Frac Centre thus becomes the emblem of a place devoted to experimentation in all its forms, to the hybridization of disciplines, and to architectural changes occurring in the digital age.
The Jakob + MacFarlane extension, conceived like a graft on the existing buildings, introduces a principle of interaction with the urban environment activated by a “skin of light” on the Turbulences, designed by the artists’ duo Electronic Shadow (Niziha Mestaoui and Yacine Aït Kaci), the associate artist and joint winner of the competition.
Their proposal consists in covering a part of the Turbulences, giving onto the boulevard, with several hundred diodes, thus introducing a “media façade”, a dynamic interface between the building and the urban space. Using the construction lines of the Turbulences, the points of light become denser, passing from point to line, line to surface, surface to volume, and volume to image. This interactive skin of light, integrated in the building like a lattice-work moucharaby, will function in real time and develop a state of “resonance” with its environment, based on information coming, for example, from climatic data (daylight, wind, etc.) as well as animated image scenarios devised by the artists.
The building’s surface will thus be informed by flows of information, transcribing them as light-images. These luminous signs, the result of a computer programme, implement the merger of image and matter, turning The Turbulencess into “immaterial architecture”.
News: the UK government wants to ban drivers from using Google’s augmented reality eyewear ahead of the 2014 release, amid safety concerns.
According to a report published by Stuff magazine, the UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) is concerned that wearing Google’s Glass headset whilst driving would be a dangerous distraction.
The government department responsible for the British transport system told the gadget magazine that it has taken pre-emptive steps to ban drivers from using the device.
“We are aware of the impending rollout of Google Glass and are in discussion with the Police to ensure that individuals do not use this technology while driving,” a DfT spokesperson told the magazine.
Should the law be approved, drivers caught using the glasses – which allow users to send and receive messages, take pictures and search the web hands-free – could incur a £60 fixed penalty notice and three points on their driver’s license, the same as for using a mobile phone.
“It is important that drivers give their full attention to the road when they are behind the wheel,” the Department of Transport spokesperson said. “A range of offences and penalties already exist to tackle those drivers who do not pay proper attention to the road including careless driving, which will become a fixed penalty offence later this year.”
The UK government banned drivers from using hand-held mobile phones in 2003, and has convicted millions of people since it was introduced.
German designer Philipp Beisheim has designed a stool and side table that you inflate with a hand pump like a rubber dinghy (+ movie).
The side table features a wooden top supported by an inflatable base, while the stool has a blow-up seat resting on wooden legs.
You can watch Beisheim pumping up the side table in the movie at the top of this post.
The blow-up parts of the products are made from a durable synthetic rubber called Hypalon, commonly used to make inflatable boats.
Beisheim took the side table to last month’s Blickfang designworkshop, where he told Dezeen: “It blows up in seconds. The material is a silicon-based fabric, which is actually used in the industrial area. It has a really strong structure, which makes the table a functional object.”
“Making inflatable furniture allows the user to interact with the object in a different way by blowing it up,” Beisheim said. “My inflatable furniture would be useful outdoors, camping, for temporary events or people with a small balcony without much space.”
These hyper-realistic computer renderings show a forthcoming concrete and glass house in Christchurch, England, designed by London-based Henry Goss Architects (+ slideshow).
Henry Goss Architects designed Staithe End for a site adjacent to a listed building and in a conservation area close to Christchurch harbour on England’s south coast, while the images were produced by sister company Goss Visualisations.
The house will sit right up against the listed property and border another building at a slight angle on the other side, so terraces and garden will also be angled to compensate.
An open plan living, dining and kitchen space will occupy the ground floor, leading out to the series of terraces linked by external staircases.
Two of the four bedrooms including the master suite will be located in the basement, across a sunken gravel courtyard from an artist’s studio topped with a green roof.
The other two bedrooms will be on the top floor, along with another living space at the back with a balcony overlooking the harbour and nearby Hengistbury Head Nature Reserve.
This steel-framed upper storey is to be clad with vertical strips of local larch on the street facade and will sit on top of the concrete ground and basement levels. Strips of glazing will separate these floors and the house next door.
“Pretty interesting job, this one, as the chances of it getting planning [permission] were virtually nil due to the historic environment, listed building, coastal flooding etc,” writes architect Henry Goss.” Somehow we got it through by a narrow margin at comity with full endorsement from the local planning authority”.
Construction is due to start later this year and the architects hope to complete the project in Autumn 2014.
This four bed private house on the banks of Christchurch Harbour represents a real coup and a major precedent for high quality contemporary architecture in the most sensitive of historic environments. Planning approval was gained largely due to the unusually progressive and enlightened planning authority in Christchurch, Dorset who champion all high quality design, contemporary or otherwise.
Sectional perspective
The dwelling is located in the centre of an important conservation area and adjoined to a listed building, part of which requires demolition to make way for the development. The uncompromising contemporary nature of the design was seen by the LPA as a positive aspect as it seeks to distinguish itself from the listed building thus providing a strong contrast in design that compliments and emphasises the design qualities of each.
Further constraints came in the form of coastal flooding. The solution was to treat the entire site as a tanked excavation including basement, courtyards and terraces which fall below the 4m AOD set by the Environment Agency.
A lightweight steel and glass box floats atop the exposed concrete ground work providing views across the harbour to Hengistbury Head Nature Reserve.
Natural light is brought into all parts of the plan at basement, ground and first floor by careful manipulation of levels and openings down the long narrow site. The result is a development which has an ambiguous relationship between inside and out, between built form and nature.
Footwear designer Liz Ciokajlo used natural fibres from coconut husks and flax to create this shoe collection (+ slideshow).
Liz Ciokajlo mixed fibrous materials with bio-resin to set each shoe in a continuous piece.
“In the women’s footwear world the materials are usually just leather or synthetics, so these other natural materials give a softer approach that is more feminine,” the designer said.
After experiments mixing a selection of fibres in various densities with bio-resin, she created firm but flexible materials to mould into shoes.
“By concentrating the fibres and adding binders, the properties and characteristics could change, producing both soft and hard material over one continuous surface,” said Ciokajlo.
Even though each design looks solid, the heels are hollow to reduce weight and allow air to flow up through holes in the insoles.
Wool felt lining protects the feet from the scratchy fibres used for the heels and uppers, and a couple of pairs are made entirely from this softer textile.
The felt was steamed and then moulded with gauze, a technique often used in millinery design. In some cases it was dyed to contrast with the muted colours of the natural materials.
Coconut husk mixed with latex was formed around a mould designed using computer software to create the heel and sides of one pair.
Shoes in hardened flax and sculpted hemp made in the same way also feature in the collection, along with leather elements.
Here’s the information sent to us by the designer:
Liz Ciokajlo is a footwear designer based in London with a background in a combination of product, furniture design and fashion accessories.
This year she finished her Masters in Fashion Footwear at London College of Fashion being the recipient of the Jimmy Choo Dato Cordwainers Award and was one of ten accessory designers in the world chosen to be a finalist in the International Talent Support Competition 2013.
The collection, called Natural Selection, aimed to objectify the shoe. The project started with the examination of how 3D printing could alter footwear architecture and identify new design constructions.
Observations were made that whilst the potential of this new technology offers many benefits the materiality was limited. There seems to be a lack of natural materials used. This lead to the critical theory 3D print is the right process but maybe using the wrong materials?
So practical research was made into the use of non-wovens as a potential material arrangement which could be developed by specialists to drive the materials used in 3D print.
A collection of varied natural non-woven materials were selected and applied to a methodology in a masters educational context. By concentrating the fibres and adding binders, the properties and characteristics could change, producing both soft and hard material over one continuous surface.
Innovative materials used in the product and furniture industries were “borrowed” and applied to fashion footwear raising further challenges as to what materials are acceptable, in a trend lead fashion context. The design form was the element unifying the collection.
As the project progressed it became evident, synthetic biology will converge with 3D print to offer solutions to these issues. A designer’s understanding of trends and emotional qualities of materials make them key to drive the new technologies in fashion and science.
British architect John Pawson’s minimalist remodelling of a church in Augsburg, Germany, includes slices of onyx over the windows to diffuse light more softly through the space.
Slices of finely veined translucent white stone were laminated to glass and installed in the choir windows. “The effect of this is to generate the optimum light conditions, screening out direct sunlight and bathing the space in a haze of diffused luminescence,” John Pawson architects explained.
The apse is the brightest space in the church, followed by the nave where the altar sits on a new podium. Lighting in the side aisles is more subdued, where clerestory windows and carved sculptures of the apostles maintain links to the church’s Baroque past.
At night the illumination comes from LED lights concealed in the choir apse, at the base of columns in the nave and in rings round the cupola domes overhead.
The floor and altar are finished in Portuguese limestone, while the dark stained wood of the pews, choir stalls and organ provides a strong contrast with the otherwise pure white interior.
The St Moritz Church was founded nearly 1000 years ago and has been transformed many times over by fire, changes in religious practice and bombing. After the Second World War only the baroque outer walls remained and the church was rebuilt by German architect Dominikus Böhm in a simplified post-war style.
“The work has involved the meticulous paring away of selected elements of the church’s complex fabric and the relocation of certain artefacts to achieve a clearer visual field,” said the architects.
John Pawson is celebrated for his minimalist architecture and the firm was asked to renovate the church after the parish councillors visited his Novy Dvur monastery in the Czech Republic.
The church of St Moritz has been through many changes since its foundation nearly a thousand years ago. Devastating fires, changes in liturgical practice, aesthetic evolution and wartime bombing have each left their mark on the fabric of the building. The purpose of this latest intervention has been to retune the existing architecture, from aesthetic, functional and liturgical perspectives, with considerations of sacred atmosphere always at the heart of the project.
The work has involved the meticulous paring away of selected elements of the church’s complex fabric and the relocation of certain artefacts to achieve a clearer visual field. Drawing on existing forms and elements of vocabulary, an architectural language has evolved that is recognisable in subtle ways as something new, yet has no jarring foreign elements.
St Moritz is laid out according to the clear linear principles of a Wegekirche and this spatial character, with its strong forward focus on the apse, is retained and reinforced in the current re-ordering, with the eye purposefully drawn through the nave to the apse, which is designed as a room of light, heralded by the Baroque sculptor Georg Petel’s figure of Christus Salvator.
A key gesture of the intervention is the quiet transformation of the apse windows, which must function architecturally as a source of light and liturgically as an expression of the threshold to transcendence. The existing glass is replaced with thin slices of onyx. The effect of this is to generate the optimum light conditions, screening out direct sunlight and bathing the space in a haze of diffused luminescence.
The treatment of the apse windows represents the culmination of a wider strategy for light, whose aim is to achieve a clear distribution of light, with the apse as the brightest area in the church. After the apse, the area of the nave where the liturgy is performed is brightest, whilst the side-aisles revert to more subdued light conditions. The Baroque clerestory windows, relieved of their former function of illuminating the artwork and decoration, now serve as indirect sources of light.
In line with the requirements of the Second Vatican Council, the altar is relocated to a newly created island in the nave, bringing the liturgy closer to the congregation and making it possible to site the principal liturgical landmarks – the altar, the ambo and the sedilia – on a single level.
Project: interior remodelling, St Moritz Church Location: Augsburg, Germany Client: Diocese of St Moritz Project architects: Jan Hobel, Reginald Verspreeuwen Completion: April 2013
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