Hasta La Ideas

Découverte des projets conçus par le bureau d’architecture Herzog & De Meuron Architects qui ont dévoilé tout récemment leur dernier complexe situé en Suisse à Bâle. Ce « Convention Center » propose un nouveau hall, doté d’un design et d’un rendu incroyable à découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.

This gabled steel shed surrounded by crops is a self-sufficient farmhouse in Ontario by architects Studio Moffitt (+ slideshow).

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

Surrounded on every side by corn, wheat, barley and hay fields, House on Limekiln Line is a two-storey house on a ten-hectare estate in Huron Country.

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

Studio Moffit used galvanised steel cladding to make reference to the local agricultural vernacular. Wooden decks are positioned on three of the four elevations and include one that branches out like a jetty.

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

The house was completed on a design-and-build contract, which involved architect Lisa Moffitt living on-site during the construction process.

“To me, the most interesting aspect of the project was moving to the site, acting as general contractor and working with local farmers to build it,” Moffitt told Dezeen. “It was a very satisfying experience collaborating with honest, hard-working ‘people of the land’.”

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

The residence is entirely off-grid and generates all its own electricity and heating using solar panels on the roof, as well as from passive heating systems. Windows are triple-glazed to prevent heat from escaping, while the concrete floor acts as a thermal mass.

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

In the warm summer months a canopy helps to shades the southern elevation from direct sunlight, while windows on every elevation can be opened to encourage cross-ventilation. Water is sourced from a well beside the house.

Other farmhouses completed in recent years include a contemporary interpretation of a traditional Hungarian peasant house and a house on a sheep farm in Tasmania.

See more architecture in Canada, including a curvaceous pair of twisted skyscrapers.

Photography is by Gabriel Li, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s some extra details from Studio Moffit:

House On Limekiln Line, Huron County, Ontario, Canada

The House on Limekiln Line sits on a 25 acre farm lot in Huron County, Ontario. The site is in constant flux due to shifting diurnal and annual conditions tied to weather, cultivation and occupation. The house sits lightly on the land while registering and amplifying specific conditions of this vast productive landscape: it frames expansive views of the shifting crop quilts adjacent to the house and it acts as a datum to an existing topographic shift on the site. The house is calibrated to allow views into and through the house, facilitating an interior visual spatial expansion. An extended south deck and west deck walk offer threshold spaces that extend this experiential choreography while also mediating between enclosure and exposure and extending seasonal exterior occupation of the site.

The house is off-grid and utilises a number of sustainable measures. These measures reduce both operational and embodied energy consumption, and are integrated into a cohesive design. Siting and orientation facilitate passive heating and cooling. A generous south deck overhang blocks summer sun while allowing winter sun to heat the concrete thermal mass floor. Evenly distributed operable windows facilitate summer cross-ventilation and stack effect heat purging. Triple glazed windows, a highly insulated envelope detailed to reduce thermal bridging, and the use of high efficiency appliances ensure that energy consumption required to service the house is low.

The house offers back to the cultural landscape in which it sits. The architectural language of the exterior, a monolithic galvanised steel shed, is informed by the local agricultural vernacular to ensure visual coherence within the landscape and to facilitate construction with locally available and sourced materials. As a design-build project, construction was completed largely by local farmers familiar with agricultural building practices.The rich dialogue with local craftsman ensured that the house is rooted in the building practices and conventions of context while also offering the community exposure to innovative resource and energy-conserving construction practices.

Above: floor plans – click above for larger image and key

The interior of the 925 sf house is composed of a core of service spaces floating within the shed shell. Carefully calibrated views into and through this core ensure that, despite its limited footprint, the house is visually expansive. This experiential choreography, along with careful siting, with crops growing to enclosure, allow the house to act as a place of observation, a space that defers to and reflects back the annually and diurnally shifting landscape beyond. Creating a dialogue with and respect for the local culture and landscape encourages a sense of stewardship towards the larger ecological and environmental processes of the vast agricultural landscape in which the house sits.

Above: long section

The post House on Limekiln Line
by Studio Moffitt appeared first on Dezeen.

Windows are hidden behind timber screens that fold back in all different directions at this family house in Israel by architect Pitsou Kedem (+ slideshow).

The louvred panels fold around two of the house’s elevations and sit flush with the white-rendered walls to create a completely flat facade. They screen every window to moderate light and privacy levels inside the house.

Each screen is mounted to either a hinge or a pivot on the side or on the top, forming a mixture of doors and canopies. They can be opened in any combination to open or close different rooms out to the garden.

“We can achieve a composition that is balanced, dynamic, haphazard, closed or open within the same framework,” explain the design team.

Pitsou Kedem designed the two-storey house for a family living in Kfar Shmaryahu, Israel.

Behind the timber screens, the house contains an open-plan living room, dining room and kitchen that wrap around a staircase at the rear. Four bedrooms occupy the floor above.

The rear elevation is fully glazed and recessed, creating a sheltered first-floor balcony and a ground-floor terrace below.

Pitsou Kedem’s studio is based in Tel Aviv. Past projects include a furniture showroom for B&B Italia and a refurbished apartment with a vaulted stone ceiling. See more architecture by Pitsou Kedem.

See more architecture and interiors in Israel, including a house with two matching concrete blocks.

Photography is by Amit Geron.

Here’s a project description from Pitsou Kedem:

The arrangement of objects in a given space or a defined format in order to give meaning to the placement and arrangement of the items, the result of the relationship between the object and the framework of the artistic creation.

A private, family residence in an urban environment. From without, the building does not reveal that it is a home. It resembles a mold or an artist’s canvas or an almost two dimensional frame within whose area various openings have been placed and which are enveloped with a dynamic system of wooden, linear strips.

The planar distribution of the “picture” or, in this case the front façade, creates a non-symmetrical composition which pulls towards the flanking faces in an attempt to suggest that this is, in fact, a three dimensional mass. The arrangement of the objects (the openings) is always fixed and allows for one central and permanent composition.

The ability to reverse the balanced composition into a dynamic one is made possible thanks to the design of a system of smart blinds that allows the blinds to be lifted upwards whilst they are folded into what resembles a roof. All the rails and fixtures are hidden and so, when the façade is closed the dynamic and changing possibilities hidden in the residence’s façade are not apparent.

All the openings open separately and so allow for different compositions. At any given moment and for whatever reason (privacy, protection from the sun) the relationship between the object and the plane can be changed. Thus we can achieve a composition that is balanced, dynamic, haphazard, closed or open within the same framework.

Movement through the house is accompanied (thanks to the flexible blind system) by different views of the outside, some exposed and bare, others undisguised and others framing a section of landscape especially designed for it. This selfsame changeability and flexibility also allows control of the amount of sunlight and natural light entering through the openings and into the homes spaces. These spaces are characterized by a restrained use of materials and form so that the light penetrating the space creates a sense of drama, movement and dynamism which seems to breathe life into the souls of the silent walls.

Thus, in effect, the system of relationships between the street and the structure composed of changing, but two dimensional compositions on a framed and flat plane develops, for the user of the house’s spaces, an open area that incorporates abstract or tangible images with volume.

The relationship between these same volumes (the walls, the stairs, the various partitions and the different elements in the house) and the space, create, through the structures changing façade and the dynamism of the blinds, changing compositions, sometimes controlled and sometimes random with a new and different experience being created each time for the user and those living in the home.

Above: site plan – click for larger image

Design: Pitsou Kedem
Design team architects: Pitsou Kedem, Irene Goldberg, Raz Melmaed
Project: Private home
Plot size: 1500 square meters. Built-up area: 600 square meters

 Above: ground floor plan

Above: first floor plan

Above: section

The post Kfar Shmaryahu House
by Pitsou Kedem appeared first on Dezeen.

News: relaxing planning restrictions on the green belt would destroy London’s vitality “even more surely than it would despoil the countryside,” architect Richard Rogers has warned.

“I do not say this as a rural nimby, though I treasure England’s natural landscape, but as a defender of cities,” writes Rogers in the London’s Evening Standard newspaper, arguing that the city’s mix of jobs, shops, restaurants, parks and nightlife acts as “a magnet to people from across the globe.”

“Letting the city sprawl would undermine this mix and intensity, reversing the rebirth of city-centre living,” he warns, saying suburban sprawl not only leads to “social atomisation” but becomes “environmentally disastrous” as car journeys displace public transport.

To solve the UK’s housing crisis, architects, planners and developers “need to show ingenuity” by redeveloping thousands of hectares of brownfield land as well as empty offices and houses across the country – but simply converting buildings is not enough, he argues.

“It will not create homes or communities unless intelligent urban design and planning also create the schools, shops and public transport hubs civilised life demands.

“And why should we rush to convert office blocks when we already have three-quarters of a million homes in England lying empty, and sites with planning permission for 400,000 more?”

According to homeless charity Shelter, the government’s plan to build 150,000 “affordable” homes – priced below market rates – over four years will provide less than a third of what is needed, with over 1.7 million households currently on local authority housing waiting lists.

UK planning minister Nick Boles recently called for an area of countryside twice the size of Greater London to be built on in order to solve the growing housing crisis.

In the US, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg last year announced plans for “micro-unit” apartments to help solve the shortage of small homes in Manhattan, while San Francisco city chiefs have voted to allow the development of apartments as small as 20 square metres.

Rogers’ firm recently completed a set of six-sided apartment blocks beside the Tate Modern art gallery in central London – see all projects by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.

Photograph by Andrew Zuckerman.

The post Allowing greenfield development would
“wreck” London – Richard Rogers appeared first on Dezeen.

The latest from IN-TENTA, this urban architectural installation called ALL-IN-SQUARE appears to be hand created just for the unique waterfront space where it lives, but in actuality it’s composed of simple, moveable modular elements including granite benches, metal “cocoon” seats, soft lighting, bike stands, granite floor coverings and square pop-ups for shelter, shade or use as a kiosk. Everything a common ground needs for a custom aesthetic, but with less expense and more efficiency.

The trapezoidal-shaped pieces can be combined in multiple ways for a variety of needs and outdoor leisure activities. Incorporating technological and ecological aspects, thin photovoltaic solar films are located on the roof of the metal plate of the microarchitecture as well as the ‘cocoon’ elements to supplement electricity to items like lighting and public wi-fi. ALL-IN-SQUARE is fully built in a factory and then transported to the final location. It is specifically designed to be installed with a minimum impact on the environment. 

Designer: IN-TENTA

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(Urban Microarchitecture was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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