Hasta La Ideas

The timber-framed rooms of this house in Osaka prefacture by Japanese architects Suga Atelier are on show to the street though a transparent facade.

Above: photograph is by Yuko Tada

Named House of Cedar, the building has a cross-bracing cedar structure that is exposed inside both of its two storeys.

The glazed front elevation comprises an assortment of small square and rectangular windows, including three that can be opened.

The entrance is located on the side of the house and is sheltered beneath a faceted first-floor bulge that contains the bathroom.

Earlier this year Suga Atelier also completed a house with a faceted concrete exterior – see it here.

See all our stories about Japanese houses »

Photography is by the architects, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here are a few words from Shotaro Suga of Suga Atelier:

House of Cedar in Osaka pref. in Japan.

This house is made by small size wood of cedar.

We developed in a way new structural system which uses old wooden frame technique and steel bolts to make a free and warm inner space.

Today wood is used for structural members or finishing materials.

We thought we have to find a better way of using woods to be with trees.

Above: photograph is by Yuko Tada

Because trees are important part of nature, and also people’s good friend from ancient period.

We use many smaller size simple woods and weave woods together to make free and pleasing space which is continuous to surroundings.

We can live in a better way with trees.

Illuminated installations inspired by the structures of microorganisms were created for the BUGA festival in Germany by Stoke Newington design studio Loop.pH.

Visitors could walk underneath the large, intricate structures that were made by weaving strong composite glass fibres.

Ground-level LED lights make the fibres appear to glow.

The festival took place in Koblenz, Germany, in May this year under the curatorial theme of Art Forms in Nature.

We have previously featured an illuminated canopy installed in the entrance to London’s Kensington Palace by Loop.pH as part of our Designed in Hackney showcase of creative talent in our local area.

See all our Designed in Hackney stories here »

LICHTSTROEME 2012

LICHTSTROEME returned to Koblenz, Germany after a successful first edition in 2011 during the Federal Horticultural Show (“BUGA”).

The curatorial theme was “Art Forms in Nature” and the curators Bettina Pelz and Tom Groll invited artists who work at the interface between nature and arts in their works. 10 large-scale installations were built from the Electoral Palace along the Rhine banks to the Kaiser Wilhelm I Statue to the Fortress Ehrenbreitstein. All of the sculptures, projections and interventions made use of artificial light as one of their materials, so that they could be seen after dusk.

Design studio Loop.pH used their Archilace technique on a new site-specific installation for LICHTSTROEME 2012 in Koblenz, Germany inspired by the work of Ernst Haeckel, one of the first transdisciplinary thinkers who bridged the gap between art and the sciences.

Micro structures observed in the natural world were blown up to architectural proportions to create an ephemeral and luminous outdoor installation that visitors could walk through and experience on a human scale. The built structures are based on Radiolaria – the intricate skeletons of mineral deposits left behind by ocean microorganisms. Radiolaria was first illustrated and depicted by Haeckel in the work ‘Kunstformen der Natur’ between 1899 and 1904.

Archilace

Archilace is lace-making on an architectural scale with strong composite fibres and is a method to craft space and reflect on the materiality and fabrication processes within the architectural practice. Archilace combines a parametric design process with a hands-on crafting technique. Weaving composite textile structures allows for virtually any imaginable surface to be created from a small number of parts. Recently discovered structures that were previously unbuildable can be fabricated by hand using a textile, curvilinear approach – breaking the rectilinear geometry of our built environment with a non-Euclidean geometry made from curved structural elements tangentially joined.

Loop.pH is a London based art and design studio intervening at an urban scale to re-imagine life in the city.

The studio was founded in 2003 by Mathias Gmachl and Rachel Wingfield, to form a new creative practice that reaches beyond specialist boundaries, mediating between digital & biological media and facilitating participatory environments and urban crafts.

Loop.pH are internationally recognized for the design and fabrication of ephemeral textile architecture and living environments. They create urban utopias informed by ecologically based parametric design and principles of community engagement.

The studio operates on the convergence between biology, ecology, architecture and design. Through intervention based work they create living environments, synthesising living materials and digital tools, and proposing an emerging new role for designers and artists working at an urban scale.

The studio explores the role of art and design in public space and society, and consults on creative strategies and future scoping for industry, start-ups and the public sector, with hospitals, schools and regeneration agencies all commissioning their work.

As a studio actively involved with education they lecture and deliver workshops internationally in a multidisciplinary context.

Their artwork can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY, the V&A Museum, London and Lord Norman Fosters Private Art Collection, Geneva.

Dezeen Wire: new Royal College of Art dean of architecture Alex de Rijke will steer students away from proposing unrealisable “paper architecture” and instead focus on how their ideas could be built (+ movie).

In an interview with Dezeen at the RCA Show 2012 last month, de Rijke said: “Historically [at the RCA] there’s always been a very strong agenda on paper architecture – the speculative, the work that is provocative but not necessarily make-able.”

In future, “Students will be encouraged to speculate not just about future uses or programmes or places, but actually speculate about how they will be built,” de Rijke says. “Material experiment will very much become part of the course.”

De Rijke, of UK firm dRMM, was appointed to the role in September 2011 following the retirement of Nigel Coates in May.

Watch him give a tour of work by this year’s graduates in our other movie filmed with him at the show and see all our coverage of Show RCA 2012 here.

Movie: tour of Architecture at Show RCA 2012
with Alex de Rijke
.

Architects Colboc Franzen & Associés have masked the facade and balconies of three apartment blocks in the south of France behind curved galvanised-steel grids.

Located in the port town of Sète, the three towers are connected by a podium that conceals a large undercroft car park behind a row of shops.

The two eight-storey towers are filled with private apartments, while the smaller six-storey block contains social housing.

This time last year Colboc Franzen & Associés completed a spiralling community centre in Lille – see it here.

See more stories about housing developments »

Photography is by Cécile Septet.

Here’s a project description from Colboc Franzen & Associés:

71 Council and Private Flats in Sète

The building plot lies on the thin strip of land between the Étang de Thau and the Mediterranean Sea on the northern side of the old town, close to the commercial port and its huge industrial facilities. How should we evoke the site’s past and at the same time, through architecture, forge a modern identity for this entrance point to the town of Sète and its emerging neighbourhoods? How should we respond to the titanic scale of the port, with the sea as the horizon, while also maintaining the old town’s way of living?

The project design is based on three blocks of flats set on a ground-floor base. The development comprises four distinct parts: 16 council flats in various configurations; 55 private two- and three-room flats; and shops and car parks to service all of the above. The base accommodates the shops and the car parks, whereas the blocks house the flats. The six-floor block of council flats provides a transition from the existing buildings around it and is therefore located at the centre of the project. The other two eight-floor blocks are thus free to demonstrate their autonomy. The block standing on the street corner marks the entrance to the old town while also looking out towards the commercial port facilities and future developments on the empty docklands. The block at the back is situated above parking spaces and gardens. It looks like a sculpted object in the middle of the ‘island’ and we therefore forget that regulations made it impossible to set the building against the existing party wall.

These blocks also embody a principle of ‘Mediterranean architecture’ that allows for a lifestyle adapted to the local climate: outdoor living protected from intense heat. There are balconies running along the façade and these outdoor extensions allow occupants to walk around the outside of their flats. A galvanised steel screen protects it during very hot weather and also provides a nice amount of privacy. It follows the curve created by the varying widths of the balconies. It lends harmony to the three blocks and makes them easier to interpret. They become gigantic steel cocoons whose materials remind us of the maritime world, while their shape is reminiscent of a ship’s stem and the wind in the screen slats sounds like the jangling of masts in a port. The screen also allow occupants to make appropriate their balconies without disturbing their neighbours, and to create a ‘homely’ feel while also enjoying the view and life in the town centre.

Making good use of the various slopes, the car park creates a man-made topography in the centre of the block of land and harbours a landscape of gardens and parking spaces. The effect is like shelly limestone and it is punctuated with beds of broken rocks and characteristic regional plants. The ground is protected by a layer of bushes and small trees, which provide shade as well as establishing the requisite distance between the flats and people using the car parks.

Client: Pragma
Location: Sète (34)
Budget: € 4,171,000 HT

Surfaces:
Plot surface: 2 956 m²
Usable area: 3 913 m²
SHON: 4 422 sqm
SHOB: 8 050 sqm

Team management:
Architects: CFA (Benjamin Colboc, Manuela Franzen, Arnaud Sachet)
Team: Faudry Ulrich, Guillaume Choplain, J. Von Spoeneck.

Mission: base + DET followed with architectural

Execution project manager: GP Consultants Engineering
Control office: SOCOTEC
Security coordination: SOCOTEC
BET Structure: SECIM
BET Fluids: HOLISUD
Geo technical engineering: EGSA BTP

Start of studies: August 2008 (Direct Drive)
Building permit: October 2009
Start of construction: March 2010
Delivery date: September 2011

Program: 71 units including 16 council flats with 370 sqm of offices and car park

Sustainable development:
– Certified ‘Habitat et Environnement’
– Certified CERQUAL
– HQE Green Building (targets 1 and 4-10)
– Dual-aspect flats
– Sun protection and control through slats
– Curve of the buildings allows sunlight to reach garden
– Green roof on offices

Focus sur David Closes qui propose ce mélange entre architecture ancienne et modernité avec le « Sant Francesc Auditorium ». L’architecte espagnole a repensé ce couvent appelé Sant Francesc, en auditorium. Situé à Santpedor, ce bâtiment est à découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.