Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: developing “living architecture” could help humanity survive, claims senior University of Greenwich lecturer Rachel Armstrong, who is investigating how we could grow a city in space.

“The world in which our cities are situated is lively,” says Armstrong. “A living city could confer survival strategies and some form of adaptation to our buildings.”

Living buildings could “absorb pollutants and carbon dioxide,” she claims, and even offer better protection against natural disasters.

“In an age when we’re faced with repeated flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, I think that to design for instability is a really powerful thing.”

Armstrong, who is also a senior TED fellow and founder of research group Black Sky Thinking, is currently investigating how we would grow cities from soils as part of a project called Persephone. Led by the Icarus Interstellar foundation, the ambition of the project is to achieve interstellar space travel by the year 2100.

“Persephone is the design and engineering of the living interior of a starship,” Armstrong explains. “This is a world ship. It contains human inhabitants and therefore the interior of this space needs to support these peoples for the duration of their journey, and that could be hundreds, potentially thousands of years.”

She continues: “The architectures within this space will be grown from the bottom up, using the soils. The soils themselves will not be made inert like they are on earth – like bricks. In Persephone the culture would be to keep the liveliness of everything. So we will be extruding structures from soils. In some ways I can think of them being like the caves in Cappadocia in Turkey.”

While Armstrong admits the realisation of such a “world ship” is far off, she believes research into biological buildings and construction methods is important for life on earth.

“This might seem quite esoteric and ‘out there’,” she says. “But Persephone is essential for us because it asks us questions about what survivability and sustainability is on our planet right now.”

The music featured in the movie is a track called Everything Everywhere Once Was by UK producer 800xL. You can listen to more original music on Dezeen Music Project.

The movie features additional footage from Dan Tassell’s The Battersea Experiment.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

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could save the human race appeared first on Dezeen.

Behind the traditional ceramic-tiled facade of this nineteenth-century building, Portuguese studio OODA has completed a modern renovation to create 14 studio flats (+ slideshow).

The building in Porto dates from 1895 and was originally designed as a home, but was turned into an office and service building in the late 20th century. It lost many of its original features in the process, including wood flooring – now concrete – and a skylight above the stairwell.

It has now been converted back into a residential building by OODA with 14 studio flats and three one- or two-bedroom apartments. The apartments range from 28 square metres to 105 square metres, and are aimed at young people and students.

An automatic pivoting door provides access for cars from the street to the DM2 Building, and OODA clad it in stone to camouflage it among the building’s exterior when the door is closed.

“The client’s objective – which drove the intervention – was to cater for the younger market as the building is near universities, hospitals, the art district and the nightlife area,” architect Diogo Brito told Dezeen.

The apartments all feature contemporary details such as folded metal staircases and built-in storage, and mezzanine levels for sleep or work areas to maximise the small footprint of some of the apartments.

Black floor-to-ceiling cabinets help to differentiate the kitchen as a separate area in the open-plan apartments, and also helps to visually recede them in the room.

The communal corridors are covered in oriented strand board (OSB), which the architects chose partly for its affordability, and to add warmth to the building’s interior.

“We used it because it is a cheap material, and we thought it would be an interesting and warmer contrast to materials such as glass, concrete and light,” said Brito.

At the back, a patio designed for parking has been landscaped using grass and paving with the same triangular pattern found in the ceramic Azulejo tiles at the front.

“In Portugal it is quite common and traditional to use tiles in facades,” said Brito. “Our idea was to make this part of the conceptual process, using its configuration to generate other new features of the building.”

Beneath the patio, a separate, sunken apartment has been built for the client’s son, with a small, private courtyard at its front. A rectangular concrete structure protrudes through the front window, and is designed to serve a range of purposes.

“The client’s first idea was to place a mini-bar there, which then shifted to storage, and then to a place for TV and music devices,” said Brito.

The renovation is part of a wider regeneration taking place in Porto at the moment, which saw construction projects drop significantly following the global financial crisis.

“The recovery of abandoned buildings has become the new major task for the market,” said Brito. “It’s a process that is now in full throttle, but there is still a lot to be done. This building is one of many that our office is doing.”

OODA was co-founded by Brito, who previously worked as an architect at Zaha Hadid, and Rodrigo Vilas-Boas, who has worked with both OMA in Rotterdam and Álvaro Leite Siza in Porto.

Photography is by João Morgado.

Here is some more text from OODA:

DM2 Housing, Porto, Portugal

One of the most demanding tasks in Porto nowadays is the intervention on the major amount of old and historical buildings of Porto’s downtown. This project is a renovation of a 20th century building to convert to a 17 housing unit for students and young people in general.

The DM2 Building, located in downtown Porto (priority intervention zone), in the area of protection of the National Museum Soares dos Reis, is dating the nineteenth century and their original composition the property was intended for a single dwelling taking ornamental and construction of the whole characteristics of the buildings at the time, both in functional layout as an ornamental and aesthetic.

However, a later change occurred in the late twentieth century, the building has undergone a profound change taking place inside caused by the modification of use required.

The property became divided by several independent floors with features framed in services and trade and lower floors have been completely redesigned and trace assets were hidden in part and/or removed from the particular frames original, wood structure of the floors (now concrete) and traditional skylight at top of stairs. Indeed, the draft D.Manuel intended to rebuild the property, returning the initial function of integral housing, recovering traces of hidden identity, reinterpreting traditional elements and giving the building a new sense of contemporary housing program with a set of typologies ace current market needs.

So Manuel II building as a whole distributes 17 apartments T0 and T1 types, ranging in size between 28sqm and 105sqm, spread over 5 floors and are accompanied by a landscaped patio intended for parking.

The rehabilitation now completed, restores the original residential function, underlines the unique formal and constructive characteristics and adapt to a contemporary urban reality of the city of Oporto.

Size: 1,100 SQM
Team: Diogo Brito, Rodrigo Vilas-Boas, Francisco Lencastre, Francisca Santos, Lourenco Menezes Rodrigues

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behind tiled facade in Porto appeared first on Dezeen.

This house in the Swedish seaside town of Mölle by Stockholm studio Elding Oscarson has an upper storey clad with roughly sawn Douglas fir and a lower section that is entirely transparent (+ slideshow).

When developing the design for the Mölle house, architects Jonas Elding and Johan Oscarson set out to reestablish the architectural experimentation they say dominated the town at the turn of the last century.

“Experimentation has been overpowered by conservation,” said the architects. “Our ambition has been to recover Mölle’s dormant architectural tradition, extrapolating it into the twenty-first century, while providing a house for generations to come.”

Referencing the nearby Villa Italienborg, which features a striking chequerboard facade, the designers chose oversized planks of Douglas fir to create a cladding unlike any other in the town.

These horizontal boards wrap all the way around the building, punctured at intervals by an assortment of square and rectangular windows.

To contrast, the ground floor level features floor-to-ceiling windows with slender frames, offering residents uninterrupted views towards the surrounding garden and coastline beyond.

“The building expresses both contrast and tenderness in relation to site and context,” said Elding and Oscarson.

The house has three storeys – two above ground and one below. Three wings make up the plan, framing a pair of garden terraces and a driveway at the building’s entrance.

Living, dining and kitchen spaces occupy the entire ground floor. All furniture is free-standing so as not to obstruct views through the glass walls, and includes a kitchen island. Heating is provided by a wood-burning stove in the middle of the space.

A spiral staircase leads to floors both above and below. Upstairs, three bedrooms are arranged around an extra lounge, while the basement accommodates a fourth bedroom and a sauna.

Photography is by Åke E:son Lindman.

Here’s a project description from Elding Oscarson:

Mölle by the Sea

Mölle is an extreme location with regards to topography and landscape, as well as history and aura. Around the turn of the century 1900, Northern Europeans were migrating to “Sinful Mölle” – where men and women were allowed to enjoy each other’s company at the same beach – leaving a trace of eccentric and experimental architecture from the first half of the 20th century.

However, from that point in time and onwards, experimentation has been overpowered by conservation. Our shared ambition with our client has been to recover Mölle’s dormant architectural tradition, extrapolating it into the 21st century, while providing a house for generations to come suited an open-minded family, presently with one child.

The building expresses both contrast and tenderness in relation to site and context. Its volume has been kept low, without any plinth or pitched roof. Facing Öresund, the terraced site has an ocean view, but the building questions the convention to turn all rooms towards that same view – the site has many qualities all around, with stone and brick walls, vegetation, and an old ice cellar semi-submerged into a hill.

The building’s shape divides the site into different exterior spaces and provides a softly divided sequence to the interior. Not immediately perceptible, the graphic form of the plan results in a building volume that rather reads as a fragmentised whole – from some angles striking, from other angles neat.

On the ground floor, a pilotis space wrapped in low iron glass, with sliding doors and undivided panes of up to almost 7 metres wide, the garden and its stone walls frame the interior space. The upper volume is resting on a slender steel structure in an abrupt collision between glass and saw finish douglas planks in jumbo format – a facade which is the first of its kind, just like Mölle’s most famous house “Villa Italienborg”, with its chess-board ethernite shingles facade, was back in the days.

Architect: Elding Oscarson
Project team: Jonas Elding, Johan Oscarson, Yuko Maki, Gustaf Karlsson
Textile: Akane Moriyama
Location: Mölle, Sweden
Client: Private
Area: 300 sqm

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seaside house in Mölle appeared first on Dezeen.

Stones and shells from the seashore fill the walls of these eight contemporary British beach huts that London office Pedder & Scampton designed for the seaside town of Southend (+ slideshow).

Pedder & Scampton‘s design won a competition organised by Southend Council to develop “a new generation” of beach huts that offer a modern alternative to existing huts found along the local beaches.

“We have always enjoyed beach huts ourselves, and this fantastic site and simple project gave us a great opportunity to think imaginatively about materials and form,” architect Gill Scampton told Dezeen.

“We took the traditional elements of beach huts to be a strong rythmic repeating form, variation within an overall form, strong use of colour and individually customised spaces,” she added. “We wanted to propose an update for a traditional building form that responds to the very particular character of the site.”

The colourful doors and shutters of the eight huts reference the typical painted wooden structures that have been a popular fixture at many seaside resorts since the nineteenth century.

“The strong colours and industrial scale of the numbers respond to the scale and character of the Thames Estuary, which call for something more robust than the usual pastel colours,” Scampton explained.

Traditionally, beach huts are situated above the high tide mark and used as a place to shelter from the sun or wind, change into swimming gear and store personal belongings.

Rather than the linear formation found on many beaches, Pedder & Scampton’s huts are arranged along an existing concrete promenade at an angle to one another, creating individual private terraces in the spaces between each one.

The huts are constructed from prefabricated components that allowed them to be assembled quickly on site during the winter months.

Timber frames support walls made from recycled timber pallets, with plywood used to clad the internal surfaces and translucent polycarbonate sheeting covering the exterior.

The cavities between the two layers are filled with pebbles, gravel, glass chippings, shells and other recycled materials, which are arranged in layers to represent the tidal drift on the beach.

These materials provide thermal mass, as well as privacy and security, and can be seen through the translucent outer surfaces. They also provide additional strength and stability, which enabled the huts to withstand the strong winds of recent storms that damaged many of the traditional beach huts in the area.

Gaps left between the level of the infilled material and the roof create clerestory windows that introduce natural light into the huts.

The angled arrangement of the structures creates spaces through which the sea can still be seen from a promenade that runs along the rear of the site.

The sloping roofs create an irregular rhythm and are planted with sea-hardened sedum and other plants that can also be seen from the promenade.

Local publication the Southend Standard has reported that more huts are planned for a location nearby after the initial eight sold for more than £27,000 each. The design was developed in collaboration with structural engineers StructureMode.

Photography is by Simon Kennedy.

Here’s a project description from Pedder & Scampton:

New beach huts at Southend on Sea

Brits are set to enjoy a late spring heatwave according to the Met office, which is good news for those lucky enough to have bagged one of the eight new beach huts at Southend, designed by London practice Pedder & Scampton.

The British love affair with the beach hut has never been healthier. Bidding for the 7-year leases of the huts at East Beach was fierce given their location just an hour and a half’s drive away from London and perfect for last minute weekend getaways.

Pedder & Scampton’s competition-winning design responded to an ambitious brief from Southend Council calling for ‘a new generation’ of beach huts. It updates the traditional format with an eco-friendly design featuring green planted roofs, recycled materials and a distinctive slanted shape that gives each individual hut its own private terrace.

Coloured doors and shutters create variety and a feel-good vibe within the bold repetitive structure. The walls of the huts – which are built on the existing raised concrete promenade with great views of the sea – are formed from recycled timber pallets bolted into timber frames and faced with tough translucent polycarbonate sheeting to the outside and plywood to the inner faces.

The wall cavities are then filled with layers of pebbles, gravel, glass chippings and shells, laid in drift layers visible through the plastic, giving the huts a beautifully tactile seaside aesthetic.

The simple, robust interiors allow for customisation, and can be painted or fitted out by tenants, looking to create a home-from-home to make a brew or read the papers in, whist still enjoying the tang of the salty air.

The freeholds remain with Southend Borough Council who, through local agents Haart, are now actively seeking interest from prospective tenants for a potential Phase 2 of the development, which already has planning permission.

Pedder and Scampton beat more than 40 other entrants in the competition, which was launched in August 2012. The designs were developed with structural engineers StructureMode.

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makeover from Pedder & Scampton appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Danish firm 3XN has been selected as preferred architect to design a new headquarters for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

3XN was chosen ahead of 11 competing architects, including OMA, Toyo Ito and Amanda Levete, to develop its design for a new administrative home for the organisation governing the Olympic Games, to be built on a 24,000-square-metre site on the banks of Lake Geneva.

The new campus would consolidate the IOC‘s existing operations around Lausanne, creating offices for up to 500 employees.

The brief called for “a building that clearly reflects the values of IOC” and that could “serve as a catalyst for collaboration and interaction for the IOC Staff and Olympic Movement Stakeholders”.

“This is an incredible honour for our studio,” said 3XN principal Kim Herforth Nielsen. “The Olympic Movement has many expressions that are about people coming together in the best possible way.”

“We have designed the new IOC Headquarters as a physical expression of the Olympic Movement and its values expressed through architecture,” he added.

The design will be revealed after the IOC has made a final decision on the plans, following negotiations with the Swiss authorities.

Photograph of Lausanne, Switzerland, is courtesy of Shutterstock.

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headquarters for the Olympics appeared first on Dezeen.