Hasta La Ideas

A huge concrete beam appears to balance on its edge along the roof of this Hawaiian house by Californian architect Craig Steely (+ slideshow).

Constructed on the lava slopes of Hawaii’s most active volcano, the concrete house by Craig Steely is divided into two halves, connected by a long concrete beam that soars overhead.

Timber beams and battons make up the roof, which runs beneath the concrete beam.

The living areas and master bedroom are separated from two further bedrooms by a lap pool and a veranda, which is partially covered by the overhanging roof.

Floor-to-ceiling glass runs the length of one facade, allowing uninterrupted views into the surrounding Ohia forest and out to the ocean beyond.

The architect was influenced by the native vegetation when designing the house. “The Ohia’s brilliant red flowers, called the Lehua, are a striking contrast to the ruddy green leaves and shades of gray of the tree’s bark and the black lava” says Steely. “Like the Ohia, the gray concrete house blends into the existing landscape of lava and trees while splashes of colour in the house mimic the Lehua.”

The house is deliberately long and narrow so as to increase cross-ventilation, eliminating the need for the mechanical air conditioning.

The building incorporates a rainwater catchment system, which provides the house with cold water as well as a solar heating system for hot water.

Named Lavaflow 7, the house is the latest addition to a series of residences by Steely, all of which have been constructed on the rocky slopes of Hawaii.

Other concrete dwellings we’ve recently featured on Dezeen include a house composed of a cluster of concrete cubes, stacked up on a steep hillside and a rural house raised off the hillside on a pair of gigantic concrete columns.

See more stories about concrete design »

Here’s some more information from Craig Steely:

Located on five acres of dense Ohia forest, this cast-in-place concrete house frames indoor and outdoor living spaces along with views of the forest, the sky, and the coastline on Hawaii’s Big Island. It continues our exploration of a reductive architecture that enhances the experience of living in this compelling environment.

The main feature of the house is a concrete beam, 140 foot long, 48 inch tall x 12 inch wide running the length of the building with only three short concrete walls supporting it along its massive span. Laminated beams and wood planks make up the roof that hangs below it. The concrete beam allows for sizable spans of uninterrupted glass and covered outdoor space, which creates a permeable edge between the man-made and nature. These huge expanses of openness amplify the sensation of living in the Ohia forest.

Ohia trees are endemic to Hawaii. They are the first trees to grow on new lava flows. Lavaflow 7 sits on a 1955 lava flow on the slopes of Kilauea crater. The Ohia’s brilliant red flower, called the Lehua, are a striking contrast to the ruddy green leaves and shades of gray of the tree’s bark and the black lava. Like the Ohia, the gray concrete house blends into the existing landscape of lava and trees while splashes of color in the house mimic the Lehua.

The nature of the house is long and thin, with private and public areas divided by a lanai and bisected by a lap pool. The thinness of the house provides passive cooling through cross ventilation allowing for the elimination of mechanical air conditioning, consistent and diffused light quality in the rooms through out the day, and a view of the forest, sky, and ocean from every room. Other sustainable features include a rainwater catchment system that supplies all water used along with a solar heating system for domestic hot water. A loose distribution of spaces around the few solid walls creates a house that is equally open in all directions and welcomes nature in.

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Craig Steely appeared first on Dezeen.

News: architecture writer and founder of BLDGBLOG Geoff Manaugh has been announced as the new editor-in-chief of technology website Gizmodo.

The appointment comes as Gizmodo moves to broaden its focus from gadgets and digital technology towards architecture, urbanism and design.

Under Manaugh’s editorship, which begins in September, Gizmodo will look beyond the traditional definition of technology to analyse its place in the wider world, he told the New York Times.

“We want to push what technology means. It’s not just about gadgets you carry around in your pocket,” he said. “The city itself is the largest gadget that humans have made. You can talk about the ways cities are managed, the way governments function.”

The website will also move away from reviews of consumer gadgets, he said.

“That coverage is being done by so many people today. The idea will be to talk more about the culture of that technology.”

“We’ll also be spinning off the more gossipy stuff about Silicon Valley to another blog, Valleywag,” he added.

Manaugh made his name as a leading architecture blogger with BLDGBLOG, the website he founded nine years ago as a home for his writing on the built environment.

He was previously senior editor at Dwell and contributing editor at Wired UK, and has also taught at the architecture school of Columbia University in New York.

Gizmodo has also named Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan as its new design editor and brought retrofuturist Matt Novak on board, whose Paleofuture blog “looks into the future that never was”.

See more news about media »

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Gizmodo editor-in-chief appeared first on Dezeen.

This renovated apartment in Berlin features raw concrete ceilings and floors that combine oak parquet with decorative tiles (+ slideshow).

Local architects Marc Benjamin Drewes and Thomas Schneider teamed up to design the apartment for a couple and their children, creating two bedrooms, a bathroom and an open-plan living room and kitchen.

The project is named Box 117 and the architects refer to the two white-painted bedrooms and bathroom as “simple boxes” with a narrow shadow gap around the tops of the walls to highlight the edges.

The wooden parquet flooring runs down one side of the apartment beneath white-washed timber ceilings. The red and white cement tiles are positioned on the opposite side underneath the exposed concrete ceilings.

“The raw concrete ceilings are preserving the industrial character,” says Drewes. “Partly old with a wooden pattern, partly new with a smooth surface, the ceiling tells something about the history of the space.”

Each room has a floor-to-ceiling height of 3.4 metres, allowing for overhead storage and an elevated sleeping area in the children’s bedroom.

See more apartments on Dezeen, including one in Barcelona with tiled floors that reveal its historic layout and one in Paris with decorative wooden flooring.

Photography is by Christoph Rokitta.

Here’s a project description from Marc Benjamin Drewes:

Box 117

A couple with two little kids moved into this loft in a Berlin backyard.

A continuous space for a kitchen, living area and sleeping area for the parents surrounds two boxes in which you find the children’s room and the bathroom. This open layout creates the loft character of the space.

The children are sleeping in a niche above a litte storage next to the children’s room. That way one takes advantage of the clear height of 3.4m to create more living area. The sleeping area of the parents can be closed with a room-high sliding door. If the door is open it disappears behind the bathroom-box.

The oak parquet and the cement tiles on the floor are creating a basis full of character for the simple boxes with a limewash coat. A shadow gap all around separates these boxes from the existing elements of the space and all doors are flush with the wall to accentuate the simple form. The raw concrete ceilings are preserving the industrial character. Partly old with a wooden pattern, partly new with a smooth surface the ceiling tells something about the history of the space.

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and Thomas Schneider appeared first on Dezeen.

A pitched roof and six walls appear as a single block of concrete around these two residences in Geneva by Swiss architects clavienrossier (+ slideshow).

Named Two In One Villa, the building contains a pair of three-storey apartments separated by a party wall. Both have their own front doors and one is significantly larger than the other.

Grône-based clavienrossier gave the building a hexagonal plan to break down its scale, then used a uniform pale-grey concrete for all six elevations.

“The split geometry of the facades makes it difficult to get a grasp of the real size of the building, giving each individual facade a more domestic scale,” say the architects.

Larch-framed doors, windows and skylights puncture the walls and roof. Many of them are recessed to create balconies and terraces on every floor, but they follow a rectilinear grid rather than the angles of the walls.

Combined kitchen and living rooms occupy the ground floors of both apartments, while bedrooms and bathrooms are located on the first and second floors.

The site is flanked by woodland to the south and fields to the west, but has enough space for a large garden with a swimming pool stretching along one edge.

Another project we’ve featured by clavienrossier is a residence in the Swiss Alps where two concrete volumes sit atop the remains of a stone house. See more houses in Switzerland.

Photography is by Roger Frei.

Here’s some more information from clavienrossier:

Two in one villa
Geneva, Switzerland, 2012

The site is located on the edge of a residential zone on the outskirts of Geneva, flanked on its southern border by a forest and opening out to fields to the west. It sits right on the line between the city and nature.

The building, backed by a paved access ramp, is placed in the north-east corner of the site. The space between the building and the forest allows for a swimming pool and a large open garden.

The program includes two apartments of differing size, a continuous party wall separates the two.

A pitched roof over a diamond shaped plan, allows each apartment to have its own orientation. This distinct geometry allows for a greater degree of privacy for the residents and when viewed from the outside, gives the impression of a single unit.

The split geometry of the facades makes it difficult to get a grasp of the real size of the building, giving each individual facade a more domestic scale.

The exterior envelope of the building is entirely composed of integrally-coloured concrete, including the roof. Loggias built out of larch, perforate the facade and the roof of the building.

The building conforms to very high energy standards.

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by clavienrossier appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch design office Rietveld Landscape has built an arched foam screen with hundreds of building-shaped holes inside a disused chapel at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (+ slideshow).

Rietveld Landscape designed the screen as a reversal of its Vacant NL exhibition from the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, where a suspended model city was used to demonstrate the potential of 10,000 vacant government spaces in the Netherlands.

Here, the installation presents the “negative spaces” of the model city and stretches from the floor of the mezzanine all the way up to the ceiling. It will form a backdrop to a changing selection of objects from the museum’s collection of applied arts and design from the last two centuries.

“The blue window literally and figuratively sheds a new light on the space and complements the architecture of this medieval chapel,” says the studio.

The installation is on show at the Centraal Museum until 31 January 2014.

Rietveld Landscape is a design and research office based in Amsterdam. Its other projects include an installation that looked like a burning building and a criss-crossing bridge. See more architecture by Rietveld Landscape.

Photography is by Rob ‘t Hart.

Read on for more information from Rietveld Landscape:

Pretty Vacant

The installation Pretty Vacant by design and research studio Rietveld Landscape encourages visitors to take a fresh look at the empty spaces of the Centraal Museum. The blue window literally and figuratively sheds a new light on the space and complements the architecture of this medieval chapel. The window is based on the ‘negative spaces’ of Rietveld Landscape’s earlier installation Vacant NL, which was the Dutch submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010. The installation in the Gerrit Rietveld-designed pavilion in Venice showed the enormous potential of 10,000 disused public buildings in the Netherlands from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.

Rietveld Landscape’s work fits in well with the Centraal Museum aim to acquire work at the intersection of art, design and architecture. Rietveld Landscape is a young studio that represents in an outstanding way the new developments at this intersection. Museum Director Edwin Jacobs described them as “the talents in field of spatial interventions, without equivalent in any existing architectural or theoretical discourse. They are real new-thinkers in images.”

Through the acquisition of this installation by Rietveld Landscape with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the Centraal Museum has realised its ambition of adding Vacant NL to the ‘Collectie Nederland’.

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Rietveld Landscape appeared first on Dezeen.