A curving timber-clad wall divides the work space from a multipurpose meeting room at the offices of domohomo architects in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Domohomo architects renovated an abandoned shop and transformed it into a compact office with a separate area that can function as a meeting room, classroom or events venue.
The addition of a bulging masonry wall clad in pale timber creates two distinct spaces; a light-filled office containing a large desk, and a smaller room that can be rearranged depending on requirements.
Openings including a hatch in the curving wall facing the office and a door in the other side allow the sequence of spaces to be visually connected and supplement the natural light reaching the back room from a large window next to the entrance.
“Everything seems continuous and uniform, but it is nothing more than a subtle game of steps and gates that, according to its opening, allows us to discover new stays or, simply change the spatial configuration,” explained the architects.
The original asymmetric floorplan has been turned into a regular oblong by adding fitted cabinetry along the entire length of one wall, which also provides the office’s main storage.
The architects employed a palette of simple and affordable materials, including fabric fixed loosely to the ceiling to create a series of inverted vaults.
Vertical wooden boards extend along one wall of the office, continuing over the partition and surrounding the meeting room.
“We consider wood as an optimum material to meet all our demands, both for the inner envelope and for the preparation of all the necessary furniture,” said the architects.
Wood is also used for the floors throughout the offices, and offers a warm contrast to the slick surface of the cabinetry and the white-painted brickwork which is visible on the rear of the curving surface and some of the other walls.
The architects sent us the following text:
Architecture studio in Santiago de Compostela
Our Architectural Studio, domohomo architects, is located in a former shop that had been in disuse in recent years, in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. It was the place we had chosen to develop our incipient profession, but we knew that the reform had to be governed by two very clear premises; on the one hand, the budget that we started was necessarily reduced and, on the other hand, we didn’t want to give up enjoying a warm and cosy stay to develop our daily task.
Delving into this second premise, we consider the wood as an optimum material to meet all our demands, both for the inner envelope and for the preparation of all the necessary furniture. Specifically, the front of cabinet that runs through the entire space takes special relevance, since he returned to the low a more orthogonal form and functions as a large container. In the end, thanks to the opening of booklet, we get that part of its interior to incorporate a general volume, depending on the needs of the moment.
In contrast with this smooth and straight forehead, the rest is defined by curves and contra-curves of white timber. Apparently, everything seems continuous and uniform, but is nothing more than a subtle game of steps and gates that, according to its opening, allows us to discover new stays or, simply change the spatial configuration.
This fact is by no means capricious, but it is due to a very clear desire. From the beginning, we wanted that this reform is not limited to our professional office but that could also serve physical support to other creators to publicise their work. Therefore, generated two distinct areas, where the most exposed part is unveiled for our jobs, while the rear is deliberately more indefinite, well can function as meeting room, small classroom or venue.
Spanish architects Josemaria de Churtichaga and Cayetana de la Quadra-Salcedo have built themselves a rural retreat with wooden walls, projecting terraces, and a brilliant yellow door and chimney (+ slideshow).
Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo designed Four Seasons House for a gently sloping meadow approximately 100 kilometres north of Madrid, which had sat dormant since the architects purchased it 12 years earlier.
“After 12 years of contemplation, we decided to build a tiny house there, a refuge, a piece of landscape as a frame, a small inhabited threshold with two views, east and west,” they explained.
The architects developed the design around a yellow colour palette in response to the hues of flowers, leaves, bark and lichen that they’ve spotted in the landscape across the changing seasons.
“This is a humanised landscape of meadows, walls, ash, streams – a small-scale landscape, minimal, almost domestic, and where absolutely everything happens in yellow,” they said.
Part-buried in the hillside, the two-storey house was built from chunky wooden beams that slot around one another to create alternating corner joints.
The family living room sits at the centre of the upper-ground floor and opens out to terraces on two sides. The first cantilevers out to face distant mountains to the east, while the second projects westward towards a landscape of rocks and brambles.
Timber-lined bedrooms and study areas are located at the two ends and feature built-in desks and cupboards.
Wooden stairs lead down to the partially submerged lower floor, where an open-plan layout creates a space that can be used as a separate guesthouse.
Here’s a project description from Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo:
Four Seasons House
This is a humanised landscape of meadows, walls, ash, streams, a small-scale landscape, minimal, almost domestic, and where absolutely everything happens in yellow.
In spring poke all yellow flowers. In the summer, yellow cereal is yellow harvested in a yellow Castilian heat. Fall only comes here in yellow, millions of tiny ash leaves that die in a lingering and dry yellow. In winter, yellow insists in glowing flashes of yellow lichen on the gray trunks of ash trees. And here every machine is yellow, the signs are yellow, everywhere yellows…
We bought a meadow in this landscape 15 years ago, and after 12 years of yellow contemplation, we decided to build a tiny house there, a refuge, a piece of landscape as a frame, a small inhabited threshold with two views, east and west.
To the west, a nearby view of rocks, moss, brambles and ancient ash. And to the east, the distant dawn over the yellow mountains.
This double view and the thinking body finished to draw the house. Everything is small, everything is short, everything has a tiny scale. From outside, the view slides over the house.
The eye only stops at a yellow gate guarding the doorway, and a yellow chimney that warms it, the rest is invisible. And when sitting, stopping in the doorway, the house disappears and the world continues in yellow.
Location: Berrocal, Segovia, Castilla y León (España) Architects: Josemaria de Churtichaga, Cayetana de la Quadra-Salcedo Collaborator: Nathanael Lopez Contractor: Pablo Campoverde Area: 150 sqm
The wooden base of this sofa by Swedish firm Note Design Studio extends outwards to become a side table.
The low table was formed by continuing the ash wood platform out from one end of the sofa, which is part of Note‘s Rise collection designed for Swedish furniture brand Fogia.
“The integrated side table becomes a bridge between the piece of furniture and the rest of the room,” said the designers. “A surface for a still life, a favourite book, plants or whatever you choose to have close at hand.”
Rounded soft cushions covered in quilted upholstery sit on top of the base. The collection is named Rise because the seat backs are shaped to resemble the sun coming up over the horizon.
Note created the range for use in both domestic and commercial settings. The high back is designed to shield the sitters from an open-plan office space that could be situated behind.
“It’s a sofa with is own expression,” Note’s Cristiano Pigazzini told Dezeen. “We got inspired by the shape of the rising sun to create a piece of furniture that stand alone, a elegant centrepiece for both home and public spaces.”
The sofas are available with or without arms, and the range also includes a footstool with a matching base and fabric.
Toshiharu Naka of Tokyo-based Naka Studio added an asymmetric roof with overhanging eaves to this house in a Japanese skiing village to create a huge sheltered terrace for residents (+ slideshow).
Located within a patch of woodland in Nagano Prefecture, Villa in Hakuba was designed to adapt to a dramatically changing climate that switches between heavy snowfall in winter and soaring temperatures in summer.
Toshiharu Naka said he wanted to create a house that could open itself up to the surrounding woods, unlike the typical houses of the area that are raised a metre off the ground to protect them from deep snow.
“As a result, these houses are visually and functionally separated from the surrounding nature,” he explained.
To avoid this, the architect built a large polycarbonate roof canopy that shelters both the house and patio from snowfall.
“This large roof, made of polycarbonate panels to bear the weight of severe snow, is transparent to gain a lot of sunlight onto the roofed terrace. So, we can enjoy time and light in the forest,” he added.
Three ladders are positioned around the edges so that residents can hang curtains around the terrace. In summer these are nets to keep out mosquitoes, while in winter they are made of plastic to keep the heat in.
Sliding glass doors connect the patio with the main family room, which accommodates living, dining and kitchen areas, but can also be transformed into a bedroom by extending the length of a built-in bench.
Stairs lead up to a small study on an intermediate floor, then continue up to a larger bedroom space on the first floor.
The bathroom is housed within a small shed at the centre of the terrace and residents can use one of the ladders to climb onto its roof.
Exterior walls are clad with pale cedar siding and a concrete floor slab enables a passive geothermal heating system that gently warms and cools the house.
Photography is by Torimura Koichi.
Read on for a project description from Toshiharu Naka:
Villa in Hakuba
This small villa is an environmental device, where we can find ourselves as a part of nature throughout the year.
This villa is built in Hakuba, famous for its international snow resort. In this area, many houses have ground floor, which is set at 1 metre high from the ground because of the deep snow. As a result, these houses are visually and functionally separated from the surrounding nature.
So, I set the large roof upon the site at first, which enables a floor continuous with the ground level. This large roof, made of polycarbonate panels to bear the weight of severe snow, is transparent to gain a lot of sunlight onto the roofed terrace. So, we can enjoy time and light in the forest.
These architectural components work as a passive system at the same time. The floor, continuous with the ground, gains geothermal heat to store the slab under the floor. Surrounding snow works as an insulation in an environment below the freezing point. The transparent roof builds double skin, which enables natural ventilation by sunlight in summer and avoids ice dam problem in winter.
Students from Łódź University of Technology in Poland built this delicate stacked sculpture to demonstrate the structural properties of curve-folded paper.
The Fragile Beasts sculpture was designed and built by 17 undergraduate architecture students from Łódź University of Technology during a three-day workshop with Suryansh Chandra, a senior designer at Zaha Hadid Architects.
“Curved folding isn’t just the aesthetic, it’s also the structure: it can lend substantial stiffness to fairly flimsy material,” explained Chandra.
The sculpture was designed using digital modelling software to determine the slender polyhedra forms, which were then subjected to scripts that broke them down into shapes suitable for curved folding.
Once the forms and net shapes of the irregular-sided polyhedra were determined, they were sent to a laser-cutting facility that transferred the design onto a series of flat cutout sheets in five hours.
The 0.5 millimetre paper was then folded and glued into shape by the students, who had no previous experience of curved folding.
“It never fails to amaze me how nicely this shape lends itself to fabrication and quick assembly,” said Chandra.
It took just five hours for the students to fabricate the components and arrange them in two stacked clusters that reach a height of 1.9 metres.
Zaha Hadid Architects has been exploring different applications for curved folding and thin-shell structures for several years through a series of academic workshops and commissions.
Its Arum installation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale resembled a huge pleated funnel made from folded metal, and was described by the firm as the first to combine its research into lightweight shells and tensile structures.
All images are courtesy of Suryansh Chandra.
Suryansh Chandra sent us the following details about the Fragile Beasts project:
Research Context
This sculpture was built as a part of a 3-day workshop on ‘Curved Folding’ at the Łódź University of Technology, Poland. The workshop explored the idea of curved folding as a design technique in Architecture, leading to some amazing outcomes that are pre-rationalized by their very nature. It continues the lineage of work on ‘Curved Folding’ and ‘Thin-Shell Structures’ started two years ago for ZHA’s Arum Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and further pursued through academic workshops.
Highlights of the sculpture
Curved folding isn’t just the aesthetic, it’s also the structure: it can lend substantial stiffness to fairly flimsy material: 0.5mm thick card paper in this case.
Ease of assembly: The whole piece was put together with 17 students in their 4th year of undergraduate Architecture program (and novices at curved folding) in a matter of 5 hours (the laser cutting was outsourced and took an additional 5 hours).
Dimensions: 1.9m tall x 1.35m wide (6’4″ x 4’6″), 0.5mm thick card paper.
Credits
Workshop Tutor & Sculpture Design: Suryansh Chandra; Senior Designer, Zaha Hadid Architects Code Group Assisting Tutor: Sebastian Bialkowski; Doctoral Candidate, Łódź University of Technology, Poland Workshop Organizer and Coordinator: Anetta Kepczynska-Walczak; Assistant Professor, Łódź University of Technology, Poland
Skryf consists of an adapted CNC milling machine on wheels, which van Bon controls with a laptop via a simple piece of software he developed.
“I can just type in text and it converts it to a code that the machine accepts,” he explains. “It writes letter by letter and in the four hours that I write per day it will write about 160 metres.”
Van Bon travels to different festivals around the world with Skryf and chooses new pieces of literature to write on the ground in each place.
“I’ve been with Skryf throughout Europe and once to Australia,” he explains. “In Eindhoven, I’m writing the poems of Merel Morre. She is the city poet of Eindhoven; she reflects on what is happening now in the city.”
Skryf’s carefully-written lines of poetry are destroyed by passersby or the wind almost as quickly as it can write them. Van Bon says that the whole idea behind the project is that the lines of poetry exist only momentarily.
“When you’re writing one [line of] text, another one is going away because people start walking through it,” he explains. “Once I’ve finished writing, I walk the same way back but it’s all destroyed. It’s ephemeral, it’s just for this moment and afterwards it’s left to the public and to the wind.”
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.
Maison&Objet 2014: Catalan designer Eugeni Quitllet has taken the silhouettes of famous modernist chairs and amalgamated them into the back of this bar stool.
Eugeni Quitllet‘s Masters Stool retains the sinuous forms of the chair he created with French designer Philippe Starck for Italian plastics company Kartell.
The three strands that form the back are derived from the recognisable outlines of Arne Jacobsen’s Egg chair, Charles Eames’ DSW seat and Eero Saarinen’s Tulip design. These intertwined shapes create a back support and armrests that flow into the seat and legs.
“The stool version is available with longer legs, the seat is smaller, but the inimitable graphic hallmark of its frame coming from the interweaving of three silhouettes is the same,” said the designer.
The proportions of the original chair have been altered to incorporate the smaller seat and the longer legs are braced by a square ring close to the ground, which doubles as a footrest.
Available in a range of colours, the bar stool can be used both indoors or outdoors. It was launched at the Maison&Objet trade fair outside Paris, which finished earlier this week.
News: Danish design brand Carl Hansen & Søn has changed its logo back to one originally created by legendary furniture designer Hans J. Wegner in 1950, in honour of the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Carl Hansen & Søn produces many of Wegner’s most iconic furniture designs and has once again adopted the logo created by the Danish designer shortly after he began collaborating with the firm.
“The 100th anniversary [of Wegner’s birth] offers Carl Hansen & Søn an ideal opportunity to return to Wegner’s original logo,” said the company’s CEO Knud Erik Hansen.
“With the new logo, we are adding another page to Carl Hansen & Søn’s history and visually expressing our transformation from a traditional production company into a modern design enterprise – still clearly referencing our 100-year furniture history, but now with a visual identity that matches the company’s present-day position as an internationally oriented design player,” he added.
The logo (main image) comprises a red circle surrounding the initials of the family-run company, which are written in a curving font that evokes the organic modernism popular in Scandinavia at the time of its design.
It was originally used from the 1950s until the mid-1980s, when the company commissioned a new logo with a blue square and a white letter C.
“Wegner’s logo is meaningful to us on several levels,” said Erik Hansen. “The logo visually expresses that at its core, the company is passionate about design and creativity. At the same time, the logo reinforces the strong ties that for decades have linked Wegner with Carl Hansen & Søn.”
The company was founded by Carl Hansen in Odense, Denmark, in 1908 and began collaborating with Hans J. Wegner in 1949. Among the classic pieces that Wegner created for Carl Hansen & Søn are the Wishbone, Shell and Wing chairs.
Wegner is known to have designed more than 500 chairs prior to his death in January 2007, over 100 of which have been put into production.
Here’s some more information from Carl Hansen & Søn:
Carl Hansen & Søn introduces new logo designed by Wegner
Carl Hansen & Søn has changed its logo to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Hans J. Wegner’s birth. The logo, designed by Wegner in 1950, revitalizes Carl Hansen & Søn’s visual identity to reflect a modern design company. The logo is one more testament to Wegner’s brilliant, visionary talent.
Carl Hansen & Søn is celebrating the 100th anniversary of Hans J. Wegner’s birthday by launching a logo Wegner himself designed in 1950. The round logo encircles the family-run company’s initials on a red background in soft, organically curved lines.
The logo was originally used from the 1950s until the mid-1980s, when Carl Hansen & Søn asked architect Bernt to design a new logo in the shape of a blue square marked with a contrasting, white letter C in reference to the initial letter in the company name.
The 100th anniversary offers Carl Hansen & Søn an ideal opportunity to return to Wegner’s original logo. “With the new logo, we are adding another page to Carl Hansen & Søn’s history and visually expressing our transformation from a traditional production company into a modern design enterprise – still clearly referencing our 100-year furniture history, but now with a visual identity that matches the company’s present-day position as an internationally oriented design player,” says Carl Hansen & Søn’s CEO Knud Erik Hansen.
Wegner’s timeless logo perfectly communicates Carl Hansen & Søn’s approach to furniture production – craftsmanship, quality and tradition reflected in long-lived furniture produced using the finest materials and with the utmost consideration for the environment. Knud Erik Hansen continues, “Wegner’s logo is meaningful to us on several levels. The logo visually expresses that at its core, the company is passionate about design and creativity. At the same time, the logo reinforces the strong ties that for decades have linked Wegner with Carl Hansen & Søn. Given the fact that the logo was originally designed by Wegner, it was just a question of finding the right occasion to reintroduce it, and what better occasion than Wegner’s 100th birthday?”
The story of the collaboration between Wegner and Carl Hansen & Søn dates back 65 years. In 1949, Carl Hansen & Søn, which today has over a century-long tradition of proud craftsmanship to its name, became one of the creative playgrounds Wegner would frequent over the years. The creative partnership produced a series of chairs that went on to become modern classics and treasured collector’s items around the world. Among them are Wegner’s iconic Wishbone Chair, Shell Chair and Wing Chair.
This year, Carl Hansen & Søn will also launch several new Wegner pieces. Both the furniture and the logo pay tribute to Wegner’s remarkable sense of design and craftsmanship.
Portuguese architect Álvaro Fernandes Andrade has completed a training facility for Olympic-standard rowers where angular white volumes snake across a tiered landscape of grassy slopes and dry-stone walls (+ slideshow).
The Pocinho Centre for High Performance Rowing is located in Portugal’s Douro Valley, a wine region that is classified as a World Heritage Site, so Andrade designed a structure with most of its body buried underground.
The building is divided into three zones that each accommodate different activities. The first and largest section is the accommodation, which comprises a total of 130 dormitories that stagger down the hillside.
The other two sections are labelled as “social” and “training” and are housed within the white-rendered concrete blocks that jerk across the surface of the complex like a huge faceted serpent.
“The two more dynamic and productive major areas impose themselves on the landscape, spreading out along several different levels in large white, formally dissimilar and volumetrically complex structures,” said the architect.
The entrance to the complex sits within a sunken tunnel. This runs parallel with the rows of staggered dormitories, which are revealed above ground as descending roof terraces with long narrow skylights.
“Terraces and clusters of buildings, abrupt, tense connections tearing through terraces, steep ramps, and stairs between walls, usually in the open, are all covered here in order to meet the needs of the program,” said Andrade.
Communal areas where resident athletes can relax are located at the highest point of the hillside to allow views out over the scenic countryside, while training and workout areas are tucked away behind.
Currently the facility accommodates training for up to 130 people, but could be extended in the future to allow this number to increase to 220.
Here’s a project description written by Álvaro Fernandes Andrade and translated into English by Jed Barahal:
High Performance Rowing Centre, Pocinho, Foz Coa, Portugal
Memory
The guiding principles and strategies of the project for the Pocinho Centre for High Performance Rowing play their part in a dense and inextricable mixture that includes the peculiarities and identity of a pre-existing, specific “place”, the characteristics and demands of a very recent program, and the needs and wants of the architectural act.
If we fall back on references that are closest to us, such as Fernando Tavora (with whom I was lucky to have studied in my first year of college, the last year he taught at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto), along with all that Siza Vieira thought and said (a lot) and wrote (not a lot, but much better designed and engineered), we need to appreciate the various meanings contained within this “place”, in particular as a cultural “thing” and, most notably here, the landscape of the Douro River Valley as a World Heritage Site, and the specific ancestral expression of man’s intervention and transformation of the landscape.
For the demands of a very recent program, as is this case of a complex developed specifically for training and preparing high performance, Olympic level athletes, there is no or very little “historical precedent to put the words in the mouth of the president,” as Sting put it a few years ago. For architects, in general, this only makes the challenge of the project more exciting. This case was no different.
As regards the needs and wants of designing (as if architecture were not also a conscious act of will and innovation), they in turn also played out within “pre-existing” requisites (such as ensuring “Mobility and Accessibility for All”, and the essential values of “Sustainable Development”), and those that materialised during the design process, such as the problem of taking on a large program (8,000 m2/84 rooms/approx. 130 users), with the prospect of future expansion (up to 11,500m2/170 rooms/approx. 225 users) in a possible subsequent expansion phase of the housing area, without a significant impact on size and the landscape.
In the resulting complex interaction, the decision to structure the program in three fundamental components (Social Zone, Housing Zone and Training Zone) merges with the (re-)interpretation of two elements of secular construction of the Douro landscape: the ubiquitous terracing, a recurring form of “inhabiting” this markedly sloping valley (read here “inhabit ” as “extracting bread from the earth”), and the large white bulks of the buildings set in the landscape, in particular of the large wine-producing estates, formally complex and varying in size (often resulting from building over a long period of time, due to successive changes in the requirements of working the land).
Between them we find terraces and clusters of buildings (often between them and the river as well), abrupt, tense connections tearing through terraces, steep ramps, and stairs between walls, usually in the open, are covered here in order to meet the needs of the program.
But the choice of structuring/separating the program into three distinct zones is also a help in the effort to place the most-used zones on the same level, while minimising eventual movements between levels, something that surely will not be foreign to the history of physical and spatial transformation of this valley, which we are only trying to reinterpret.
The above is also an expression of the typical understanding of the history of architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto… not as an end in itself, but as one more element brought to the drawing board/computer, in coordination with other design problems.
Concurrently, the set of aforementioned options, accepted or adopted, allowed for a more organised coordination of the principles of passive management of the building’s energy. In the housing area, used for longer periods of time with less physical activity, the “skin” exposed to the elements has been limited , and the structures leant up against and dug into the ground (as the Eskimos do with their igloos). Rooftop greenery reinforces this insulation. Complementing the use of passive solar energy, the rooms have skylights facing south, in search of the sun, taking into account the general Northern exposure of the entire complex. The walls of the rooms, in naked concrete, reinforce simultaneously the meaning of “land”, “home”, of protection, of this component of the program, and allow for optimal storage of solar thermal energy captured through the skylights which, during the heat of the Douro summer, are shaded from the outside.
As a bonus, stars can be seen from the beds. And in conjunction with the necessary windows and welcome natural light in the halls leading to the rooms, we have made it possible that, from outside, the shale terraces and what covers them “float”, consciously rejecting any direct imitation. Even the irregularity of the plans of the housing area, rather than contributing to the “irony” of imitation, serves the relationship between a systematic and repetitive component of the program (the rooms cells), and the need for close proximity of these with other areas, whether for servicing the rooms themselves (kitchenettes, small social areas, laundry rooms for individual use, etc.) or for services such as machinery, equipment, storage, etc. This irregularity has a role in the interplay between repetition and identity, fragmenting the protracted spaces and long visually undifferentiated corridors, punctuating them with limits of perspective and unique spaces as they expand.
However, even considering the above, this combination of conditions and design options does not prevent the quantitatively most significant component of the program from being “diluted” into the land/landscape, and the future expansion of the desired number of rooms at the centre from being carried out without major disruptions to the general logic of the project (also because the whole project has been developed taking into account the prospect of maximum use of the land).
It may be added, in reference to this component of the program, that in spite of the limited size of the housing area, all of the rooms built at the level of the access hall can be used by athletes in wheelchairs. Just by removing and placing the supports in the bathrooms of these rooms, athletes with physical constraints may choose their rooms, and they can lodge in the same areas as the rest of their team, without having to be relegated to some convenient corner, in rooms “for the disabled”.
Having defined the structures and the contours of the land, the site and the programmatic component of “lodging”, the two other more dynamic and “productive” major areas (Social Zone and Training Zone), impose themselves on the landscape, spreading out along several different levels in large white, formally dissimilar and volumetrically complex structures.
Adopting a language and expressiveness of their own, and emerging as the most visible components of the project, they express the meaning of project and transformation, in contrast with the “shyness” of the terraces. Developed in conjunction with research on the characteristics and physical needs of each of the programmatic components, they emphasise the particularities of the relationship of these with the setting.
The communal areas for rest and relaxation take over the higher levels and look out over the countryside. Turning their backs to these are the training and workout areas, in an attempt to reflect the logic of effort and concentration that high performance athletes know so well.
Along with these particularities, they also foster different interactions with the previously outlined principles, in interdependent relationships of cause and effect. Formal complexity coordinates the development of a specific image with, for example, the freedom to control solar exposure through windows between summer and winter, or from east to west. In other words, the ostensible randomness of shape actually guarantees direct exposure to the winter sun through glass, as well as shade from the excruciating heat of summer. An effort was made to insure respect for the particularities of this system of construction, an element that is inseparable from questions of language that come into play. With a system of construction that includes facades and ventilated rooftops, double thermal insulation, and a system of “dry-wall construction”, we have attempted to equate questions of sustainable development, allowing, for example, for the disassembly and recycling of materials at the end of their life cycle.
An engaging and exciting challenge for the architect, the centre was also a challenge in investigation of the forms and processes of the integration of the specificity of “new” themes, such as accessibility and sustainability, which we seek to define, indefinitely, as… architecture. Only architecture. Without labels. Without adding labels that only lessen it, such as “environmental”, “green”, “accessible”, or “sustainable”. If there is anything missing from this work of architecture, it is those who, I think, architects really work for: the people who will use it.
Zaha Hadid Architects is one of 11 international firms designing a studio apartment at a new McDonald’s charity house in Hamburg to accommodate the relatives of children receiving hospital treatment nearby (+ slideshow).
Set to open this summer, the latest in a series of Ronald McDonald Houses will be located near the Altona Children’s Hospital and will offer accommodation to family members who have travelled far from home to accompany seriously ill children.
Zaha Hadid’s design for Apartment 5 features built-in furniture, wooden fittings and recessed lighting, intended to create a “marine look” and make the space feel larger than it really is.
Described by the firm as “two half shells”, the room will have a wooden base created by parquet flooring and walls that curve up from the ground, and a clean white upper section.
“The wooden shell with its continuous curvatures – from the parquet floor to the inbuilt furniture pieces such as the floating bed and the elevated secretary – lends warmth and a tactile quality to all surfaces that can be reached, touched and played in,” said the architects.
“The inbuilt furniture and the position of the bed within the space leave a large floor space for the family to sit and communicate, and for the kids and siblings to play on,” they added.
Other studios designing apartments include Spanish office Estudio.Entresitio, who proposes a “neutral and cozy” room with furniture that folds away, and French architect Manuelle Gautrand, who has designed a nest-like space made up of wooden platforms.
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