Hasta La Ideas

This house in Toronto by Drew Mandel Architects features pale grey stone walls and an overhanging top storey (+ slideshow).

Home to a family of four, the two-storey residence sits at the edge of Cedarvale Park, a steeply sloping ravine surrounded by woodland.

Drew Mandel Architects used locally quarried stone blocks in three different sizes to create irregular courses on the building’s exterior. To contrast, zinc clads the cantilevered first floor and richly coloured walnut covers a selection of surfaces inside the house.

“The restrained and limited material palette avoids unnecessary ornamentation in order to focus one’s attention on the site, natural light, and movement through modulated open spaces,” say the architects.

The volume of the house is broken down into modules, which step back and forth on both floors to create two patios at ground floor level and a vegetable garden on the roof.

The architects explain this as a “pushing and pulling” that mediates between the residential context at the front and the woodland area at the rear. “The sculptural expression solves programmatic requirements, maximises views, provides natural light, and enhances the promenade and transition from suburban streetscape to very primal forms of nature,” they add.

A glazed single-storey block at the back contains the living room and offers a view back towards the park.

The overhanging first floor cantilevers out beside it and hovers above an outdoor swimming pool. To support the weight of the cantilever, the architects added a single concrete wall and a series of concealed trusses.

A double-height dining room is positioned at the centre of the house and splits the first floor into two wings. A mezzanine corridor runs between.

Other Canadian houses completed in recent years a house built with concrete bricks in Québec and a timber-clad house on a hillside.

See more architecture in Canada »

Here’s some more information from Drew Mandel Architects:

Cedarvale Ravine House
Toronto, Canada

The Cedarvale Ravine House is a 3350 square feet home for a family of four that is located at the edge of the Toronto Cedarvale Ravine. The ravine system, the most distinctive feature of Toronto’s geography, comprises of extraordinary arteries that flow through the city giving unique access to the wilderness. This infill house sits on a typical mid-town residential neighborhood street, but opens to protected woodlands at the rear of the property. The building mass is formed by pushing and pulling the desired volume across the site. It is further manipulated with void spaces. The sculptural expression solves programmatic requirements, maximises views, provides natural light, and enhances the promenade and transition from suburban streetscape to very primal forms of nature.

The circulation of the house weaves through a modulation of intimate and expansive spaces and courtyards that lead to a glass-enclosed single-storey space at the rear of the property. This is the kitchen and family room, the heart of the house. It also defines the south edge of the courtyard. This volume has been pushed down to one storey in order to permit light to the interior and views out to the ravine. Large expanses of glass dematerialise the monolithic stone building and dissolve boundaries between the interior and exterior.

The building is clad in custom local Ontario stone masonry units. 2″, 3″ and 4″ tall stone courses are laid in an irregular sequence. The random lengths of stone range from 1′-0″ to 4′-0″ and intend to emphasise the horizontal lines of the building.

Above: site plan – click for larger image

At the second floor, a zinc-clad cantilevered superstructure frames views from the inside and gestures to the woodlands. It floats above and beyond the main stone volume and allows the re-naturalised ravine plantings to be brought farther into the site. A lap pool reflects light into the space under the second floor cantilever where a family can enjoy outdoor activities around the pool and barbeque.

Above: ground floor plan

The reaching superstructure is the structural feature of the project. Its one storey high trusses are embedded in walls and are supported on an exposed slender column. Column supports are reduced by diffusing the overturning forces into both the roof and floor diaphragms. A series of space-defining vertical planes and a mass concrete wall are used for lateral resistance. The floating rear volume is complimented by a carport cantilever reaching to the front property line. Its structure is a three-point steel framing system with wood infill, sitting on cantilevered concrete walls.

Above: first floor plan

The private areas located on the second floor feature operable floor-to-ceiling glazing with sliding interior wooden shutters. The system allows one to control sunlight, privacy, air flow, and noise as desired.

Above: long section one – click for larger image

The second floor diverges into two wings separated by a double height dining space and its adjacent open courtyard. This connection space is traversed by a bridge that leads to access to a green roof.

Above: long section two – click for larger image

It contains a vegetable garden for family meals, while insulating the one-storey family room-kitchen below. Both the courtyard and the green roof spaces support the local conservation authority’s interest to have the rear of the property re-naturalised as part of a larger ravine stewardship program. With much of the rear planted, these green spaces provide additional amenity space and more complex and modulated volumes. The ravine is brought to the foreground at the second floor spaces.

Above: elevation – click for larger image

The restrained and limited material palette of stone, walnut, and concrete avoids unnecessary ornamentation in order to focus one’s attention on the site, natural light, and movement through modulated open spaces. The Cedarvale Ravine House provides opportunities to celebrate the everyday rituals of residential life and enhances the slow unfolding experience of a special site.

The post Cedarvale Ravine House
by Drew Mandel Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Created as a way to honor innovation and impressive new structures in architecture, the Architizer A+ Awards today announce their finalists and open up voting to the public on the much anticipated popular choice award. Judged by 200 jurors including Cool Hunting co-founders Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten, each…

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Spanish practice F451 Arquitectura has completed a faceted house and studio for an artist that folds out from a hillside in Gijón, Spain (+ slideshow).

The two-storey residence is divided into four sections, which include living quarters, a double-height atelier, a guesthouse and a car parking garage.

A staircase stretches through the centre of the house and functions as a buffer between the home and studio, which sit on different storeys.

“The merging between the house and the atelier happens in such a way that every space has double orientation, lighting and ventilation,” says F451 Arquitectura.

At the lower level, the double-height art studio is top-lit from a row of north-facing clerestory windows.

Corrugated metal panels are exposed on the ceilings of every room.

Rooms in the living quarters are arranged in a line, with an open-plan living and dining room first, followed by a storage area, a bathroom and a bedroom.

The garage is located underneath, while the guesthouse is positioned at the back of the studio.

Walls are constructed from plaster-covered clay blocks to help to keep the house insulated, plus a layer of grass covers the roof.

Other houses that include studios for artists include a rural wooden cabin in Nova Scotia and a building with a wall of wooden scales in South Korea.

See more artists’ studios on Dezeen »

Here’s a project description from F451 Arquitectura:

Single family house and atelier for the artist Lara Rios

This project hybridizes two typologies: the modern house and the industrial shed with north light from above. The program specificity, with 4 autonomous but interrelated units – house, guest apartment, atelier and garage- together with the slope from the terrain design the frame where we integrated both types into a single volume.

This integration modified the regular use of some of the spaces of the original type based in the new relationship with its immediate surroundings. The house does not land on the ground but changes the relationship with it as the plan progresses. The volume emerges from it in one of the extremes, aligns the house with the garden in the central area and finally detaches itself in the west side.

The open hallway that appears in the central area where the house and the atelier merge is designed as exterior and roofed space. It becomes the area of relationship of the different programs and works as a climatic regulator for them.

The energetic efficiency of the proposal and its landscape integration are two major considerations for the constructive solution of the project. The merging between the house and the atelier happens in such a way that every space has double orientation, lighting and ventilation. The construction is based on a metal corrugated plate exposed in the interior, with a thermal layer of 10cm that covers all the volume and with an exterior finished of flexible stucco on fiber reinforced resins. The vertical walls are made of honeycomb clay block that reinforce the thermal insulation from the outside and increases the interior thermal lag. In the guest apartment the thermal blanket is substituted by a garden roof that establishes continuity between the garden and the building and provides a similar insulation.

Above: concept diagram – click above for larger image

Architects: F451 Arquitectura: Santi ibarra, Toni Montes, Lluís Ortega, Xavier Osarte & Esther Segura
Design team: Juan Gándara, Oriol Vives, Jordi Ribó
Interior design; Laia Isern
Structure consultant: Manuel Arguijo
Quantity surveyor: José Piedra

Above: lower level plan – click above for larger image

Location: Gijón, Spain
Surface: 395 m2
Construction: Cejoysa
Steel works (structure & furniture): Alfer

Above: upper level plan – click above for larger image

The post House and Atelier for Lara Rios
by F451 Arquitectura appeared first on Dezeen.

Interview: earlier today, London studio Softkill Design unveiled plans for a 3D printed house. We spoke to Softkill’s Gilles Retsin about the viability of printed architecture and how he intends to print a plastic dwelling in just three weeks.

“When we started this research, it was a kind of science fiction,” he says. “It’s not actually that far off any more.”

Amy Frearson: Tell us how the project came about.

Gilles Retsin: The prototype, ProtoHouse 1.0, started as academic research at the AA Design Research Lab. That was the very first time that someone completely designed a building through 3D printing that was considered a house, where all the elements of a house, which means structure, cladding, interior, finishing, were printed.

So the ProtoHouse 1.0 was the first prototype for a 3D printed building. It’s obviously not printed in reality but that’s the first ever design for a completely 3D printed building.

We [Softkill Design] have been working for the past few months on making a market-friendly version. It’s a much smaller, much cheaper construction so you can work through the problems. When I say small scale, I am talking about something that is roughly around eight metres wide and four or five metres long.

Amy Frearson: So this will be the first 3D printed house?

Gilles Retsin: I mean, we call it a house for marketing purposes but it’s only 8 by 5 metres. So it’s a small house.

Above: the Radiolaria pavilion by Andrea Morgante of Shiro Studio was printed on Enrico Dini’s D-Shape printer in 2009.

There have been a number of others, like Enrico Dini, who printed a kind of building structure [using his D-Shape printer], calling that a house. But it’s just not a house from a design point of view because it’s really only two or three metres and it’s not actually an entire building. If we manage to build ProtoHouse 2.0 it will hopefully be the first actual 3D printed house on site.

Amy Frearson: What material are you building it with?

Gilles Retsin: Our approach is different from the current approach [to 3D printing buildings]. We’re building it off site, so we’re constructing it in a factory, in a normal 3D manufacturing [facility], so we’re not moving a printer on site. The existing research and precedents always focus on transporting a big 3D printer on site, which basically is because they’re using sand or concrete. We are working deliberately in a factory and we are using laser-sintered bioplastic.

Amy Frearson: It will be built in pieces. How many pieces will there be and how big will they be?

Gilles Retsin: It’s around eight pieces. The pieces are transportable in a small van, which means they’re about 2-2.5 metres long and about one metre [wide].

Amy Frearson: How much will it cost?

Gilles Retsin: We have to remain confidential about this. However, the cost balance of material, time, and logistics in a growing industry means the cost of the Protohouse could be a viable competitor to traditional means of manufacture and build in the relatively near future.

Amy Frearson: Do you have a site?

Gilles Retsin: No, the design is not site-specific. You can basically pop it up where you want. We will have to choose one site, but it is not designed for a specific location.

Amy Frearson: When are you going to start?

Gilles Retsin: We are hoping to have the first prototype out in the summer. An actual built prototype as a finished commercial product will probably take longer than a year to fully develop.

Above: ProtoHouse 2.0 by Softkill Design, which will the first 3D printed house if built this summer as planned.

Amy Frearson: How long will it take to build?

Gilles Retsin: On the current machines it would take up to three weeks to have all the pieces fabricated. Assembly on site is a one-day job, if the site is prepared before hand.

The building is designed to be in pieces so you don’t need any bolting, screwing, or welding on site. Imagine a Velcro or button-like connection. The pieces are extremely light, and they just kind of click together so you don’t need any other material.

Amy Frearson: How viable is 3D printing as a building method?

Gilles Retsin: When we started this research, this was a kind of science fiction. Everyone on the architecture scene was saying ‘you guys are doing science fiction and it’s only going to be possible in 50 or 60 years’.

But then when we were sitting at the table in front of one of these 3D printing companies, these guys were like ‘yeah, no problem, let’s start up the research, let’s push it’. They were asking us ‘what do you think, could it take five years or ten years to come on the market?’ So it’s not actually that far off any more.

The big difference between 3D printing and manufacturing on site is you skip the fabrication part. You don’t need people on site to handle something, you don’t need transport, and it’s mainly the actual printing of objects that is probably going to be, for a few years, still more expensive than a normal mass-produced product.

The big difference is that you can skip the entire art of constructing on site. The construction happens on the computer, in the design, and it prints out assembled. So you skip a large part.

Amy Frearson: Is it affordable compared to traditional construction methods?

Gilles Retsin: The price of 3D printing is still a big problem for large volumes. You pay for the amount of material used and not for the volume of material. We’ve developed a method that can generate extremely thin and extremely porous structures. So we can make a large volume without using a lot of material, and that’s actually something that is completely unique to 3D printing.

It’s only now with 3D printing that you can achieve a strong structure which is fibrous. This fibre structure basically wraps it up using less material than a normal structure. That makes it cheaper again.

Amy Frearson: How do you reduce the amount of material without reducing structural integrity?

Gilles Retsin: We have a process called structure optimisation, which means you go through a series of operations that make your structure more feasible. And more feasible means less material. So you’re aiming to use the smallest amount of material to achieve the strongest structure. And if you push that through to the extreme – if you keep optimising, optimising – you get something that is extremely fibrous; extremely thin.

Until now no one has managed to actually build this kind of structure because it’s impossible with current manufacturing methods. It’s only with 3D printing that you can actually achieve that kind of highly optimised structure.

Amy Frearson: Are 3D printers big enough to produce larger buildings?

3D printing technology is getting exponentially cheaper, and the machines are growing in size. In Germany there’s a company called Voxeljet and these guys have a 3D printer which can print out structures between two and four metres. There is Materialise in Belgium who have printers which are printing between two or more metres I think.

Right now they are only two or more metres because there’s no demand for bigger printers. But the printers are scalable.

Above: Softkill are racing against Dutch architects Universe Architecture who hope their Landscape House, unveiled last month, will be the first 3D printed house.

Amy Frearson: Universe Architecture are planning to 3D print a house too. What do you think of that project?

Gilles Retsin: We actually don’t even consider that a 3D printed building because he is 3D printing formwork and then pours concrete into the form. So it’s not that the actual building is 3D printed.

Amy Frearson: Fosters + Partners recently announced plans to 3D print lunar dwellings.

Gilles Retsin: Yes, that’s another precedent. They’re using a similar kind of technology to Enrico Dini. So that’s one of these printers that deposits material. In their case it’s moon dust, whereas on Earth they are using sand.

If you’re making something on the moon, it makes sense that you transport a printer to the site and use the materials available on the site to build a specific structure. And your printer will be bigger than your building but that’s kind of feasible because you’re in this really extreme situation where it’s necessary to have a big printer and to use only the materials that are immediately surrounding.

Above: last month Foster + Partners announced plans to 3D print lunar dwellings.

The thing is that on Earth the situation is completely different. It’s much more about how quick you can build something and it’s much more about a kind of freedom that you want to embed in the printing. So that’s why it makes more sense to print in a factory off site. The printers that you use on site can only print and build something vertically. So they put one layer on one layer and build up the structure vertically whereas if you print off site you’re not operating in that vertical extreme, so you have much more design freedom.

And then, on a more technical level, the printers in the factory at the moment are much more precise. These highly fibrous structures are only 0.7 millimetres thick. It’s impossible to print those with stone, because there’s not enough structure or strength or integrity in sand. So it’s in the factory environment that you can go into stronger materials like plastics or metals.

The post 3D printed houses are
“not that far off” appeared first on Dezeen.

Architecture for Humanity understands that for design lovers, a good greeting card (among other things) is hard to find. And so the nonprofit is kicking off its annual “I Love Architecture” campaign with a selection of e-cards that allow senders to simultaneously declare their love for the recipient and one of eight iconic structures, from the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower to Herzog & de Meuron‘s Beijing Bird’s Nest and the Castelvecchio Museum, renovated by Carlo Scarpa. The buildings were selected because they are emblematic of architecture’s unique “merging together of learned skills and individual practice,” according to Architecture for Humanity co-founder Cameron Sinclair. Got a special someone who you love even more than Louis Kahn‘s National Parliament of Bangladesh? Click here to select a card that you can share online or download and e-mail with a custom message.

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