Hasta La Ideas

A grid of chunky timber beams criss-crosses a void between the ground and first floors to allow light to circulate in this Studio Aula-designed house in Shiojiri, Japan (+ slideshow).

The client asked local firm Studio Aula to design a house in a typical urban neighbourhood that integrates traditional Japanese elements and makes the most of the existing garden.

A narrow plot informed the elongated footprint of the building, which also incorporates a ground-floor bedroom that projects out in front to accommodate the client’s elderly mother.

This bedroom helps to shield a secluded garden containing an old pine tree, as well as a series of stepping stones that create a pathway to the front door.

The entrance sits on a raised concrete plinth, which also supports a small wooden deck sheltered beneath a balcony and the house’s eaves.

A sliding door with vertical slits allows light and breezes to enter the interior and leads to a long corridor lined on one side with built-in storage.

The corridor continues from the entrance past the living area to a covered porch and parking space at the back of the property.

As the rear of the property faces a road, the architects built a storage space with a wall of slatted timber that references traditional Japanese screens and restricts views from the street.

“We created a multipurpose entrance to the north and the south garden that functions as a corridor and a storage space but also becomes a public space to connect inside with outside and to greet visitors,” the architects explained.

On the other side of the corridor is the open-plan living, kitchen and dining area, which can be screened off from the hallway by sliding across a door fitted with translucent panels.

The solid wooden beams form a geometric grid above this space, supporting bedrooms on the first floor.

Light enters this floor through windows and glazed balcony doors. It permeates the central void and the slatted balustrades and floors surrounding it.

Floors and ceilings throughout the house are made from wood that complements the structural beams and columns and provides a warm contrast to the grey tiles of the entrance corridor and the white walls.

Photography is by Ippei Shinzawa.

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Barber and Osgerby‘s architecture arm has designed two pop-up shops for the launch of Seek No Further, a new label from sportswear manufacturer Fruit of the Loom (+ slideshow).

Universal Design Studio has transformed a small gallery space on Redchurch Street in London and another space in Berlin’s Mitte district.

In London, the studio was faced with an unusual long and narrow 21 square metre space. An illusion of double depth was created with a mirrored back wall.

A single 6.5-metre-long rail suspended from the ceiling showcases the Seek No Further capsule collection created by Dorothée Loermann, former creative director of womenswear for Parisian fashion label Surface to Air.

In Berlin, the original 60-square-metre gallery space has been retained as a raw backdrop for a series of geometric shapes and plinths, some coated in soft pink silicone or royal blue flock as well as display blocks of yellow cast glass wax. These objects can be rearranged to transform the space for various events that will take place in the store.

“The brief from Dorothée Loermann was to create an effortless and fun environment with a particular focus on a tactile experience,” said Alexey Kostikov, senior designer at Universal Design Studio.

“Dorothée challenged us to put together an unconventional material palette using the materials that are not typically associated with retail interiors. We approached a small local mould-making workshop and went through a series of experiments with various materials and techniques. The design development evolved around those experiments.”

Both of the pop up stores will be open for four months.

Here’s some information from the designers:

The Stores – Berlin and London

The capsule collection will be available at the Seek No Further pop-up stores in London and Berlin from March 2014.

Universal Design Studio has transformed a gallery space in London’s Shoreditch and Berlin’s Mitte district into two pop-up stores for the launch of Seek No Further. With an emphasis on the process of making and reflecting the brand’s innovative approach to materiality and detail, the stores’ key message is simplicity.

Collaborating with artisans and art technicians, Universal have experimented with unconventional materials like glass wax, flock coating, cast concrete and silicone to create the handcrafted sculptural display pieces. In London, the capsule collection is displayed on a single 6,5m long rail suspended from the ceiling, set against the raw concrete wall.The long and narrow space of the gallery is further emphasised by the mirror-clad back wall, creating an illusion of double-depth.

In Berlin, set within the raw shell of the gallery, solid, bold geometric shapes form a varied landscape. In both stores, an understated monochrome palette is juxtaposed with royal blue flock coating, translucent yellow display blocks of cast glass wax and sculptural objects coated in soft pink silicone.

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British studio Jonathan Tuckey Design worked with a small team and a tight budget to build this timber-lined gatehouse for a west London primary school.

The new gabled structure provides an activities centre and crèche at the entrance to Wilberforce Primary School in Westminster and is the first of two new buildings by Jonathan Tuckey Design.

Project architect Nic Howett subsumed the roles of quantity surveyor and project manager to keep costs down, working only with a local builder and a small team of engineers to construct the single-storey building.

“The project was coordinated by ourselves, proving that good education buildings can be built for little money without the need for bureaucratic processes, framework agreements and multiple consultants,” Howett told Dezeen.

“All that is really needed are designers with a good level of care and sensitivity to design,” he added. “This could be a model for the way small-scale education work is procured in the future.”

Built around a simple timber frame, the exterior of the building is clad with corrugated fibre-cement panels, while walls and ceilings inside feature a continuous plywood surface.

A long rear wall provides a pin-up area where pupils can show off their work. This sits opposite a wall of glazing that opens the space out to a narrow playground.

Three skylights puncture the roof to bring in both daylight and ventilation, contrasting with the building’s predecessor, which Howett says was a dark portakabin that needed artificial lighting all year around. “It really was quite a depressing space for kids to be in,” he explained.

For the next stage of the project, the architects will give the school a new entrance building and community centre.

Interior photography is by Dirk Lindner.

Here’s a project description from Jonathan Tuckey Design:

A new after-school activities centre and crèche for a City of Westminster primary school in West London.

Envisioned as a new gate-house for the school this project was designed with two ambitions in mind: to provide the school with much-needed additional space and to help the school engage with the wider community.

The first phase of the project, which includes an activities centre and crèche, is designed to inspire young minds through the provision of generous natural light combined with intriguing volumes and shapes throughout.

An entire wall is given over to displaying pupils’ work; another is fully glazed and, as a sliding wall, allows learning and play to take place both inside and out. Materials were selected to deliver a completed building for £1600/m2. Profile sheeting was used externally whilst inside a plywood interior that needed little finishing was fitted. Both were detailed to give these materials a finely finished appearance. The materials ground the Annexe firmly in the context of the site whilst providing Wilberforce Primary with a durable building.

“I was impressed by the extensive research they had done. They clearly understood the needs of the staff and users of the building, and this was reflected in the design which was not only fit for purpose, but also beautiful” – Angela Piddock, Wilberforce Primary Headteacher.

Sustainability

The building is primarily timber, consisting of a timber frame and clad internally with FSC and PEFC certified plywood from sustainable sources. Externally the building is clad in Marley Eternit fibre cement profile sheeting, which achieves an A+ rating in the BRE Green Guide. The resulting lightweight structure meant that minimum foundations were required. Forbo Marmoleum flooring was used which achieves a Cradle-to-Cradle silver certificate. Openable roof lights in the building allow for all spaces to be naturally lit and ventilated.

The second stage is to complete the new entrance building to the site which houses a community centre that will give the school a welcome and revitalised presence on the street. This work is on going.

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Landscape architecture firm Martha Schwartz Partners references Bedouin carpets and sand dunes in teardrop-shaped landscaping for a green retreat in the centre of an Abu Dhabi business district (+ slideshow).

Martha Schwartz Partners designed Sowwah Square for a site at the heart of Abu Dhabi’s new central business district on Al Maryah Island, formerly known as Sowwah Island.

The 2.6 hectare public plaza features colourfully patterned granite paving and an assortment of plant-covered mounds. There are also granite seating elements, garden beds, sculpted hedges and rows of Indian fig trees.

“The inspiration for the square was derived from the nature and culture inherent to the Arabian Peninsula: dunes, traditional irrigation systems (falaj), oases, bedouin textiles and the popular use of formal clipped hedges in the United Arab Emirates, drawing connections with the French baroque château gardens,” said the architects.

Green mounds, a typical feature in the Al Maryah, feature patches of plants of different colours and textures. Species such as the Golden Ice Plant Lampranthus, which has bright orange flowers, are planted next to the Purple Lady Iresine, which features small purple foliage.

“All the plant species used in the project were selected for their hardiness, low maintenance and drought and heat tolerance,” the architects said.

The teardrop-shaped mounds are dotted through the square. Some form centrepieces to the granite benches, acting as wind shelters.

The polished grey-granite benches encircle the mounds and have grooves carved into their surfaces, allowing bubbling streams of water to run across them to offer visitors relief from the heat.

The benches come in six variations. Some have extended seats, while others have high backs or wider leaning space. At night, the base of each benches is illuminated.

The pavement is set with patterned sections of honed, flamed and polished granite, and extend outwards in layers to emphasise the teardrop shapes.

Sculpted hedges line the edges of low garden beds, with native grasses planted in the centre to sway in the wind.

Martha Schwartz is based in London. Her studio also recently completed a landscaped park in Chongqing, China, filled with faceted metal structures.

Here’s a project description from Martha Schwartz Partners:

Sowwah Square

Sowwah Square is the first development within the larger Sowwah Island master plan in Abu Dhabi and is intended to be the centre piece of the island development, providing a green retreat at the centre of the new commercial hub.

On the southern edge of Sowwah Island, the main urban space is located on top of a two-level retail podium and creates a landscape setting for the Sowwah Square complex. Future phases of the project will include a 5 star Business Hotel, serviced apartments, and additional retail complexes adjacent to Sowwah Square.

The inspiration for the square was derived from the nature and culture inherent to the Arabian Peninsula: dunes, traditional irrigation systems (Falaj), oasis, Bedouin textiles and the popular use of formal clipped hedges in United Arab Emirates, drawing connections with the French baroque château gardens. This merging of ideas is represented in a contemporary responsive design created a sustainable, cool and protected micro climate for users and a dynamic kaleidoscope of planting and patterned paving on the ground and viewed from the surrounding towers.

The Public Realm has been designed so that these future developments can be integrated into the landscape scheme. The podium landscape as a whole has been designed as one large plaza space, with each of the areas having a different character and function.

Sculptural mounds provide micro-climate environments as wind protection and cooling to the local surroundings. They also add a spatial intimacy, framing outdoor rooms, which mitigate the impact of the mega-scale skyscrapers in the site.

The structure of the square uses large constructed vegetated mounds that orchestrate outdoor rooms to shelter pedestrians from the Shamal, a strong north-westerly wind blowing over Persian Gulf and to provide intimate spaces amongst the towering buildings. Linking the mounds together, the decorative pattern like that of a traditional rug, weaves through the square.

To soothe people from the heat, water features are incorporated into long stone benches that wrap the mounds, providing playful and tactile experience. The surface texture is finished with ornate grooves creating a dynamic rippling effect. In order to maximise this limited resource, and reduce evaporation, the water is contained in narrow Falaj like channels as used in ancient irrigation system found throughout the Middle East. At night, the benches come to life with integrated lighting at the base that silhouettes the mounds and highlights the polished surfaces.

Innovative sustainable design has been instrumental in the project which has been awarded a LEED Gold certification. The steep angulated mounds contribute 1.45 times more green space than level planters and water consumption is reduced due to the vertical planting maximising 100% irrigation moisture.

The information gathered during the pedestrian, vehicular, and program site studies has been used to inform the landscape design strategy. The straight line pedestrian linkages and vehicular movements are used to structure the public realm and the design concepts have been used to infill the public realm structure.

Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE
Client: Mubadala Development Company
Architect: Goettsch Partners and Gensler Architects
Engineer: Oger International
Size: 2.6 Hectares
Status: Completed 2012
Environmental Rating: LEED Gold CS
Design Team: Martha Schwartz, Peter Piet, Matthew Getch, Nigel Koch, Christabel Lee, Thomas Griffiths, Liangjun Zhou, Rebecca Orr, Marti Fooks, Emily Lin, Christine Wahba, Hung-Hao Teng, Thomas Sudhoff

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Opinion: a Le Corbusier design for a customisable house inspired by the devastation of Flanders during the First World War has haunted architecture ever since, says Justin McGuirk.

Any major anniversary carries with it a baggage of minor ones, and so it is in 2014. When Europe marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War later this year, few people will be thinking about architecture. And yet it was the devastation of Flanders in the autumn of 1914 that inspired Le Corbusier to design the Maison Dom-ino, a standardised construction system for the reconstruction effort that was to come. That simple drawing has haunted architecture for a century. Indeed, it is far more relevant today than it was then.

The Architectural Association in London kicked off the commemorations last week with The Dom-ino Effect, a symposium dedicated to Corb’s idea. Fill a room with Le Corbusier scholars and the proceedings will tend towards the arcane, but I stuck with them, not just because I was presenting at the end of the day but because of what the Dom-ino represents: perhaps the first case in architectural history of a house designed as an open system, a “platform” – to use some Silicon Valley jargon – for residents to complete as they see fit.

Le Corbusier was just 27 when he conceived of the Dom-ino – so called because the houses could be joined end to end like dominos, and hyphenated to combine “domus” and “innovation”.

By November 1914, one fifth of the Belgian population was homeless. Corb’s solution was almost painfully simple: a standardised, two-storey house made up of concrete slabs supported on columns and a staircase. That was it – no walls, no rooms, just a skeleton. He hoped to patent the idea and make his fortune in partnership with his friend Max Du Bois’ concrete firm. This would be a housing assembly line, like the one Henry Ford had invented only the year before. But it wasn’t to be. Failing to find any backers, he was forced to abandon the idea.

More than one speaker last week pointed out that the Dom-ino model doesn’t actually work. First of all, the columns are too slender to support those slabs, and secondly, the placement of the staircase prevents the houses being joined end to end as the name implies. Moreover, Corb’s vision for the resulting houses was far from radical: traditional bourgeois facades concealing conventional bourgeois layouts. And yet, if you take his drawing at face value, as pure structure, it was a phenomenally bold idea. So bold, that no one recognised it, not even, at first, Corb himself.

Today, we are only too aware that most homes on the planet are built without architects. Go to the suburbs of Cairo, and you’ll find they are made up of thousands of medium-rise concrete frames, filled in with terracotta blocks. As Pier Vittorio Aureli, the symposium’s organiser, put it, “the Dom-ino has become an ever-present ghost in the contemporary city – it seems to be everywhere.”

If only his patrons had known that one day millions of houses would be built along similar lines, not just in Europe but in the slums of the developing world.

The London-based architect Platon Issaias argued that most of Athens is made up of Dom-ino houses. After the Second World War, the Greek government stoked the recovery by allowing families to sell plots of land to developers for a share of the resulting buildings. The polykatoikia, a multi-storey apartment block, is effectively a tall Dom-ino, built without an architect, in which every family has configured their own apartments. The model was so successful that it created a vast class of landowners – and, of course, debtors.

What is radical about Dom-ino is that it is merely the beginning of a process, one completed by residents themselves. It is, in other words, the abandonment of total design. The architect is no longer a visionary, just a facilitator.

That very idea was taken up by Stewart Brand in the 1990s in his book and subsequent BBC series How Buildings Learn. Better known as the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the original Californian techno-utopians, Brand took on architecture and argued that buildings work best when they evolve gradually and incrementally. As a critique of architecture it was not particularly potent, and yet, characteristically, he was ahead of the curve. Today, architects as diverse as Santiago’s Alejandro Aravena and London’s 00, designers of the Wikihouse, argue that what we need are self-empowering systems not finished houses.

“All buildings are predictions,” wrote Brand. “All predictions are wrong.” That is certainly true of Torre David, the 45-storey skyscraper in Caracas that was meant to be a financial headquarters but is now home to 3,000 squatters. The Torre, I have argued, picking up on an idea posited by the architects Urban-Think Tank, is a Dom-ino house extrapolated into a skyscraper – essentially a concrete framework, inhabited and transformed by an unexpected population. It is the Dom-ino on an urban scale, with its own retail and sports facilities, with corridors as streets. Life there is precarious, and yet the residents have something very few of us do: the right to determine the terms of their own existence.

As the Dom-ino was born out of crisis, so it seems to remain associated with it. Thus far, it sounds like the product of scarcity, the solution to a global housing deficit. And yet it has echoes in “high” architecture too. As Maria Giudici pointed out, OMA‘s unbuilt design for the Jussieu Library, with its skeletal, open framework, is reminiscent of it. Even more strikingly, look at SANAA‘s Rolex Learning Centre, a fluid landscape of nothing but floor, ceiling and columns. The rhetoric behind this building was one of chance encounters and the sharing of ideas, it was the language of social media. And this is where Corb’s drawing comes into its own, as a platform, in every sense of the word.

Ironically, Corb had Fordist standardisation in mind and yet produced the perfect architectural symbol for an era obsessed with customisation and participation. Stripped of architecture, the Dom-ino is pure system. It invites us to complete it and inhabit it in any way we desire. More than the specific system itself, it is that idea that is so relevant today. By the same token, the drawing is so open that we can read what we choose into it.

Image of Favela, a crowded Brazilian slum in Rio de Janeiro, courtesy of Shutterstock.

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian, the editor of Icon magazine and the design consultant to Domus. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank.

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obsessed with customisation and participation” appeared first on Dezeen.