Hasta La Ideas

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban developed these timber and earth houses for the rehabilitation of a Sri Lankan fishing village that was swept away during the 2004 tsunami (+ slideshow).

Developer Phillip Bay asked Shigeru Ban to design a prototype house that could be built cheaply using local materials and would be suitable for the tropical climate. The house was to form a template for the construction of 100 replacement homes in Kirinda.

“This was not going to be a traditional disaster relief effort where we go in and make homes really fast and leave,” said Bay. “I wanted to treat this like a development project.”

Ban’s design comprises a single-storey structure with walls made from compressed earth blocks and a pitched roof made from locally sourced teak and coconut wood.

Each house has two bedrooms, a hall and a sheltered courtyard, which residents can use as a dining room, social space or simply as a place to repair fishing nets.

Adaptable wooden screens divide the rooms, to suit a Muslim lifestyle. “This is the first time I’ve worked for the Muslim societies,” said Ban, “so before I built the houses I had a community meeting to find out what has to be carefully done depending on the generation, for example, we had to separate the man’s space and woman’s space.”

Ban also designed furniture for the residence, using wood from the rubber trees that are common to the region.

The Post-Tsunami Housing was completed in 2007 but was recently named as one of 20 projects on the shortlist for the Aga Khan Award 2013. Other projects on the shortlist include an Islamic cemetery in Austria and a reconstructed refugee camp in Lebanon. Five or six finalists will be revealed later this year and will compete to win the $1 million prize.

Shigeru Ban has also worked on a number of other disaster-relief projects. He devised apartment blocks made from shipping containers for victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 and was one of several high-profile architects involved in the Make It Right housing project in New Orleans. See more architecture by Shigeru Ban.

Photography is by Dominic Samsoni.

Here’s a project description from the Aga Khan Award organisers:

Post-Tsunami Housing

This project provides 100 houses in a Muslim fishing village, in the region of Tissamaharama, on the southeast coast of Sri Lanka, following the destruction caused by the 2004 tsunami. Shigeru Ban’s aim was to adapt the houses to their climate, to use local labour and materials to bring profit to the region, and to respond to the villagers’ own requirements through direct consultation. For example, kitchens and bathrooms are included within each house, as requested by the villagers, but a central covered area separates them from the living accommodation, as stipulated by the government. The covered area also provides an entertainment space from which women can retreat to maintain privacy. Local rubber-tree wood was used for partitions and fittings, and compressed earth blocks for walls.

Location: Kirinda, Sri Lanka (Asia)
Architect: Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo, Japan
Client: Philip Bay
Completed: 2007
Design: 2005
Site size: 71 m2 for each house – Total site area: 3’195 m²

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by Shigeru Ban appeared first on Dezeen.

The homes of 27,000 Palestinian refugees will be replaced as part of this reconstruction project underway at Nahr el-Bared, 16 kilometres outside of Tripoli, Lebanon (+ slideshow).

First established in the 1940s to accommodate refugees from the Lake Huleh area of northern Palestine, the 19-hectare Nahr el-Bared refugee camp was almost entirely destroyed during the 2007 conflict between the Lebanese Armed Forces and the extremist group Fatah Al-Islam. Thousands of families were forced to abandon their homes and seek temporary refuge at another nearby camp.

In 2008 the United Nations Relief & Works Agency embarked on an ambitious project to replace the buildings that had been destroyed. Working alongside the community-based Nahr el-Bared Reconstruction Commission, the team developed an eight-phase masterplan for 5000 houses, 1500 shops and six school complexes.

The reconstruction includes the replacement of all infrastructure for the camp, including water and sewage networks as well as electricity.

The agency has also been able to increase the amount of public space around the buildings from 11 to 35 per cent by introducing a system of independent structures that can be extended up to four storeys.

The first families began returning to their homes in 2011 and the first three completed schools opened to students later the same year.

The Nahr el-Bared reconstruction is one of 20 projects on the shortlist for the Aga Khan Award 2013. Five or six finalists will be revealed later this year and will compete to win the $1 million prize. Other projects on the shortlist include an Islamic cemetery in Austria and a museum of paper in China.

Here’s a short project description from the Aga Khan Award organisers:

Reconstructing a camp of 27,000 refugees which was 95% destroyed during the 2007 war involved a planning effort with the entire community, followed by a series of eight construction phases. Limited land and the exigency of recreating physical and social fabrics were primary considerations. Established in 1948, the camp followed the extended-family pattern and building typology of the refugees’ villages. In a layout where roads provided light and ventilation, the goal was to increase non-built areas from 11% to 35%. It was achieved by giving each building an independent structural system allowing for vertical expansion up to four floors on a reduced footprint.

Location: Tripoli, Lebanon (West Asia)
Architect: United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA), Nahr el-Bared Reconstruction Commission for Civil Action and Studies (NBRC)
Client: United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA), Beirut, Lebanon
Completed: 2011
Design: 2008
Site size: 190,000 sqm

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Refugee Camp appeared first on Dezeen.

Australian office Kennedy Nolan Architects used recycled bricks, concrete and rough-sawn timber to construct this courtyard house near the beach in Melbourne.

Merricks Beach House functions as a holiday home and is available to rent on a short-term basis, so Kennedy Nolan Architects was asked to create a flexible building with a structure durable enough to accommodate regularly changing occupants.

The single-storey house is arranged over three staggered levels that respond to the natural slope of the site. Rooms are laid out on a U-shaped plan, creating a large courtyard on the western side of the building.

Half of the house is given over to social spaces, on the assumption that temporary residents spend more time entertaining and are likely to have children around. To the south, a kitchen leads out to a dedicated barbecue deck, while a sunken living room opens out to the courtyard and a “bunk room” can be used as a second lounge.

Two bedrooms are lined up along the eastern side of the building and sit beside a single bathroom. There’s no need for much storage, so each room contains just the basic furnishings.

The recycled clay bricks were used to construct the lowest sections of the house’s walls and are visible both inside and outside the building. In most places they are painted white, but the architects left two unfinished circles to reveal the original colour.

Timber wraps over the tops and corners of the walls, while windows are slotted into gaps between the two different materials.

Merricks Beach House is one of several new houses in Melbourne featured on Dezeen recently. Others include a residence clad in slabs of travertine and a house with the silhouette of three little buildings. See more houses in Australia.

Photography is by Derek Swalwell.

Read on for more information from Kennedy Nolan Architects:

Merricks Beach House

This small house at Merricks Beach has been designed as a weekender that is available for short term rental. It needed to be an economical build and tough enough for the knocks of a rental market. It is two blocks from the beach. It has no views and had no existing trees on the site.

There are the usual line-up of rooms required, and in this instance it is a modest list; but what becomes a more interesting conversation is how you live differently in the weekender.

» No one needs to ‘own’ a bedroom
» No one needs to shower and leave quickly in the morning
» What you need to store is completely different
» You arrive and unpack; you leave & pack
» You spend more time with others; having guests stay over is common
» There always seems to be more children than adults!
» It is a place to enjoy each other

A courtyard typology ensures maximum privacy and access to northern winter sun, yet in this straightforward floor plan a number of ‘in-between’ spaces have been considered.

The bunk room which is located on the north edge of the internal courtyard has no doors and the king single bunks sit within their own alcove. This spacefeels dark and private and becomes a second living room when the house swells with people. Within this space thereare different places to be. There is no need for walls or doors. Light forms the threshold.

The coastal weekender is not just a summer dream. In winter the hearth is central to this house. Located between the kitchen and living room, a slow combustion fireplace defines another ‘in-between’ space. There is time here in the colder months to pull up a chair, chat or read. In summer this space dissolves into the open corner of the central deck.

A slight fall across the site allows for the house to have 3 levels. The living pit sits below the central timber deck. It is a soft floor that allows you to be low and look out over the skillion roof to the trees in the surrounding area. The pit edge becomes another of these in-between places. It is a place to sit and wide enough for a futon for an afternoon nap in the winter sun. The edge curves to become the hearth for the fire, finishing in a ledge for the television.

The materials of the build are a big part of what this house is about. It is not a precise build. It feels raw and tough. A language of masonry, concrete and timber was developed. The white painted brickwork to both interior and exterior walls is never punctured by windows. They are always walls, solid and straightforward. There are two moments where a circle has been left, telling the story of the recycled red bricks that the house is made from. The structural concrete slab, rough-sawn timber cladding and concrete block screen wall have been expressed with similar simplicity.

Location: Merricks Beach, Melbourne, Australia
Architects: Kennedy Nolan Architects
Project type: New house
Completion Date: May 2012
Site area: 850sqm
Floor area: 155sqm
Project Team: Rachel Nolan, Patrick Kennedy, Michael Macleod

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Kennedy Nolan Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

This social housing complex in Ibiza by Spanish office Castell-Pons Arquitectes features two jagged apartment blocks arranged around a central courtyard (+ slideshow).

The pair of three-storey buildings accommodates 14 apartments, each with either two or three bedrooms, and every residence has its entrance within the oval-shaped courtyard rather around the perimeter of the complex.

“In Mediterranean culture the transition between public and private spaces has always been understood as something sequential,” says Castell-Pons Arquitectes. “The intermediate spaces, like the interior courts or the covered streets, the porches or the pergolas, have a very important role as spaces where people interact.”

Six apartments are located on the ground floor and a staircase leads up from the centre of the courtyard to eight more on the two upper floors.

The rooms of the apartments fan out around the site, giving jagged edges to the outer walls.

This arrangement creates more windows, allowing residents more control over light and natural ventilation.

“We tried to give a response to the complex surroundings by raising a building with its own geometry,” add the architects.

Painted red panels are lettered A to N to identify each residence, while gridded steel balustrades surround the balcony corridors.

See more housing developments on Dezeen, including an apartment block on the Canary Islands and a renovated tower block in Paris.

Photography is by José Hevia.

Here’s some more information from Castell-Pons Arquitectes:

14 Official Protection Housing, Can Cantó, Ibiza

The project combines the preexistences and the urban development conditions, to interact with the users’ way of life.

City: Interaction architecture – surroundings

On the one hand, we tried to give a response to the complex surroundings by raising a building with its own geometry. A volume with different heights that takes the most advantage of solar orientation and ventilation where the game between emptinesses, hollows and interior court gets the maximum use of the space.

The only central core leads to all the housing. The use of exterior covered gangplanks facilitates the crossed ventilation and the facades’ liberation, and also leads to the use of an exterior dynamic skin where the principal areas are located. Thanks to its spiral form the differents housings are allowed to have free exterior spaces such as terraces and gardens.

Way of life: Interaction architecture – user

In Mediterranean culture the transition between public and private spaces has always been understood as something sequential, where the intermediate spaces, like the interior courts or the covered streets, the porches or the pergolas, have a very important role as spaces where people interact.

With this intention, the building access is promoted from both streets generating a traffic between them and giving to the interior court the aptitude to stir the social life into action between the neighbours.

Economy and sustainability taking the most advantage of the passive systems, but also promoting the social values and comfort typical of our architecture.

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by Castell-Pons Arquitectes appeared first on Dezeen.

Four courtyards penetrate the rectilinear volume of this concrete library in Ibiza by Spanish architects Ramon Esteve Estudio (+ slideshow).

Completed in 2010, Biblioteca Sant Josep is a single-storey public library in the village of Sant Josep de sa Talaia.

Ramon Esteve Estudio slotted courtyards into recesses on three of the building’s four elevations. One accommodates the entrance approach, while the other three are filled with plants and trees.

Every window faces towards a courtyard, rather than out the building’s perimeter. “This library is a small closed universe in which light and green penetrates under controlled conditions,” say the architects.

The outlines of the courtyards continue through the inside of the building, generating the curved shapes of four reading rooms with a communal lobby at the centre.

One of the curved spaces contains a children’s library, while another houses the multimedia room. The third has an area for magazines and newspapers in its corner and the fourth includes the lending desks.

The board-formed concrete walls remain exposed both inside and outside the building. Books are slotted into plain white bookshelves, while circular lighting fixtures are dotted across the ceilings.

The spaces behind the courtyards are filled with offices and storage areas.

Other libraries featured on Dezeen include a converted house in Mexico and a university library with robotic book retrieval system in the US. See more libraries on Dezeen.

Photography is by Diego Opazo.

Here’s some more information from Ramon Esteve Estudio:

Sant Josep Library

The library is a detached building within green surroundings splashed with trees that penetrate into the openings of the building. It is a prism box where the interior fragments with planes that flow between the spaces of the layout of the library. Between two fissures, the building opens to the exterior and allows the interior spaces to reach out to the vegetation that surrounds all of the building.

The building is composed of two different rooms, part of the functional design: the multi-purpose space, the children’s one, the general background, and the space for magazines, newspapers, music and images.
The soul of the library is the books that accompany the walls that form the structure that organizes the different areas.

The surroundings give unity and include all of the space of the different areas, marking the limits but maintaining the continuity and fluency of the spaces.

The building opens to the exterior through polygonal courtyards that generate intersecting views between rooms and fleeting views of the environment. A large amount of skylights of different diameters filter a similar, neutral, clean light, generating a warm atmosphere that encourages reading and reflection.

Architect: Ramon Esteve
Collaborator Architects: Esther Broseta, Rubén Navarro, Olga Badía
Collaborators: Silvia M. Martínez, Tudi Soriano, Patricia Campos, Estefanía Pérez
Building Engineer: Emilio Pérez
Promoter: Ajuntament d’Ontinyent
Construction company: Díaz-Sala
Works manager: Manuel Pamies
Project: 2008
Completion date: 2010

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Ramon Esteve Estudio appeared first on Dezeen.