Hasta La Ideas

Slovenian studio Arhitektura d.o.o. have completed a gabled house with a crisp white silhouette just outside the medieval town of Škofja Loka.

The three-storey residence was designed with the same dimensions as the farm building that it replaces and occupies the same position on the inclined site.

The front entrance to the building leads onto the middle floor, while the entrance to a garage is located further down the slope on the level below.

Sliding panels of glazing infill a recessed wall on the middle floor and open the living and dining room out to a terrace that the architects refer to as the farm courtyard.

Windows elsewhere around the house take the form of long horizontal strips.

See more architecture and interiors from Slovenia here, including a scaly apartment block.

Photography is by Marko Zoranovič.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

The presented single-family house is built in the village of Suha, in the suburbs of a famous medieval town, Škofja Loka in Slovenia. The building is built as a replacement structure on the site of a former farm building which represented the eastern side of a unified space of a farm courtyard. Due to the cultural heritage regulations the new building has a gabled roof and follows the gauges of maximum allowed building dimensions of the demolished structure. The investor of the new building is the farm owner’s son, who is academically educated and therefore has very urban housing needs in terms of the program of the house, which is located in a traditional rural area.

The immediate location of the house is situated on the edge of the Sora River slope, turning towards the direction of the river in the south and west, from where it has beautiful panoramic view of the medieval castle built high over Škofja Loka town. The building has a basement, a ground floor and first floor. It is positioned perpendicular to the river slope. In this way the basement opens towards the lower river terrace, while the ground floor is open – with a wide glass surface – towards the farm courtyard, which lies on the upper river terrace. The first floor with the sleeping rooms is facing east. Building’s public access is from the south side via accessible route, offering both access on foot and access with a car to the garages located in the basement. Along the longer, east side an external staircase leads to the main entrance.

The west side of the building is immersed into the existing grassy slope, where the Japanese-style garden stairs lead to the grassy surface in front of the living room on the ground floor of the object. In this way the building is well integrated into the site.

Such position of the building maintains the urbanistic image and roundedness of the farm courtyard which is surrounded, like a large atrium, by the homestead owner’s buildings and the new houses of his children. The cross-section of the building is in the shape of the letter ‘Z’ with the ground floor completely open towards the courtyard on the west side of the building, while the first floor faces towards the east side of the building. The program division of the building into floors is simple and logical. The basement floor features a large garage, a storage room, fitness, sauna, a boiler room and a utility room. From here the stairs lead to the ground floor and further to the first floor. The ground floor is a long, rectangular shape. On its narrower, north side, the staircase and main entrance are located, along with the doorway and a toilet. The remaining large unified space is dedicated to the program of kitchen, dinning room and living room. This space opens through a 12-meter-wide unsupported window to the ‘atrium’ of the house from where picturesque views open to the river and the old town. This is actually a ‘balcony’ room with a view.

From the ground floor the staircase leads to the first floor and into a longitudinal corridor along the west side, featuring a long, panoramic window which allows views of the town panorama. The east side of the corridor is dotted with the sleeping and ‘working’ rooms of children and parents with corresponding bathrooms. The entire eastern side of the corridor is lined with wardrobes. The parents’ bedroom has a separate bathroom and a south-facing panoramic window which allows picturesque views of the surroundings from the level of the bed.

The building construction is made of reinforced concrete, the partition walls are brick and the roofing is made of wood. Above the ground floor, a more complex bridging is realized for the purpose of the large ground-floor panoramic window. The external load-bearing walls are insulated with 25cm thick insulation, on which white plaster is placed. The zinc roof is light grey in colour. A glass projecting roof is installed over the building’s main entrance. The green ‘terrace’ in front of the living room is equipped with a wide walking surface made of teak wood.

The heating is a combination of under-floor heating, recuperator, heat pump and two geothermal bore holes. The low energy house has minimal electric energy consumption. Because of its low energy consumption, the house has apertures only where they are needed, or where additional views of the surroundings are thus enabled.

Architectural design: Arhitektura d.o.o. (Peter Gabrijelčič, Boštjan Gabrijelčič)
Construction: 2010-2012
Client: private
Location: Suha / Škofja Loka, Slovenia
Structural engineering: Navor d.o.o.
Building costs: 450.000 eur

London architects Featherstone Young have completed this day centre for homeless people in east London.

Built for charity Providence Row, which provides food, clothing and showers to London’s homeless, the new Dellow Centre centre provides space for activities to encourage self-expression and learning.

It incorporates a bicycle workshop on the ground floor, art studio and performing arts space on the first floor and offices for the charity at the top.

The new structure sits across a courtyard from the charity’s headquarters, completed in the 1980s, and is surrounded on three sides by tall neighbouring buildings.

Stripes of green and yellow perforated panels clad the top and ground floor, while the zig-zagging facade in between angles the large windows away from the street and towards the headquarters opposite to visually link the two.

The upper storey has a zig-zagging terrace that follows the line of the facade and a bright yellow, irregularly shaped skylight crowns the building.

Featherstone Young previously designed the London offices for advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy and a house cantilevered over a river in Wales.

Photographs are by Tim Brotherton.

Here’s some more information from Featherstone Young:

Dellow Centre by Featherstone Young

Client brief

Featherstone Young were appointed by Providence Row to design a new arts and activity building as part of their day care facility in Wentworth Street in London’s East End. Providence Row is a homelessness charity that provides support to homeless people in Tower Hamlets (one of the UK’s most deprived districts) and the City of London. The Dellow Day Centre provides essential services such as food, clothing and showers, helping to restore users’ health and dignity.

The new building will allow Providence Row to operate a range of structured and meaningful activities for their users. The ground floor will house a bike workshop, enabling users to develop their skills and set them on the first steps towards employment. The first floor will contain an art centre for visual and performing arts activities, allowing users to express themselves creatively and develop their artistic skills. Providence Row will use the top floor for office space, while other parts of the building will contain storage and archive facilities for the charity.

Concept/solution

Featherstone Young were keen to create a thoughtful yet functional building that uses its landlocked site to its full advantage, in order to accommodate as many uses as possible in the limited space available. Because the building (on the site of a former storage building) faces the main day centre across an under-used courtyard, Featherstone Young also wanted to find a design solution that could animate the courtyard and improve connections and flow between the two buildings on the site as a whole.

The main feature of the building is its single-aspect angular façade. Likened to a mask the faceted blinkered windows take cues from the pod windows at Featherstone Young’s award-winning SERICC crisis centre in Essex, offering privacy to those within whilst also providing essential visibility for staff by designing a permeable façade. Above and below the main faceted level are vivid green and yellow perforated cladding panels to the ground floor workshop and the second floor. The building is topped with a colourful, irregular-shaped rooflight that provides a fun and lively aspect for those working in the surrounding higher buildings.

Conceptually, this mask elevation is intended by Featherstone Young to act as a visual metaphor for Providence Row’s users and to confront the invisibility of homeless people. The striking, colourful building challenges passers-by to ignore what was previously an anonymous space, while its appearance is a visual reminder that homeless people, like the new building created to serve them, can have great depth of character and dignity.

At ground floor level, the large workshop doors open out onto the courtyard, bringing natural light into the workshop and encouraging activity to spill out onto the courtyard towards the main Dellow Centre building. Behind the workshop, large storage spaces have been created for clothing and equipment. Inside, the space is functional and robust – a design approach that is continued throughout the new centre.

A simple staircase leads from the ground floor to the first floor, where the main space is the art studio. Here the large full-height timber-framed windows flood the room with natural light – ideal for art activity during the day. The faceted windows face away from the street and across the courtyard to the main centre – giving privacy for users, valuable passive surveillance for staff, and creating a positive relationship with main centre. This space can also be fully blacked out for film screenings. Other spaces on this level provide further storage and archive facilities for Providence Row.

On the upper level, an open plan office space leads onto an external terrace, where a zig-zag balcony follows the line of the first floor windows. Like the ground floor, a colourful facade gives this level a lively feel, and the palette is repeated in bold vertical stripes along the length of the external wall. A small private meeting room accessed from the main room is lit from above by the large and colourful funnel-like rooflight.

Throughout the building, an emphasis has been placed on creating a series of robust, flexible and functional internal spaces. Lighting and services are simple and basic, and the building is designed to be easy to use and maintain.

Planning/budget constraints:

The site is a small, landlocked site, accessed via a small private courtyard. It is landlocked on three sides by tall buildings (a building immediately adjacent to the centre has recently been demolished and will be replaced) and faces the main Dellow Centre which was built in the 1980s. Featherstone Young’s design response was a building that could project its own strong character alongside its neighbours, animate the underused courtyard and enliven the otherwise bland setting.

The client brief had originally been for a two-storey building, although Featherstone Young were also encouraged to explore options for three storeys in order to maximise use of the site. Planning consent was granted for three storeys after the trustees saw the additional possibilities of a higher building. With a strong design concept the building has withstood the rigours of tight cost constraints and was completed on budget.

Here are some photos from a walking architectural tour of Reykjavik in Iceland, taken while we were visiting for DesignMarch last month.

The first building on the tour was Harpa Concert and Conference Centre situated right by the harbour.

It was designed by Copenhagen studio Henning Larsen Architects and Icelandic studio Batteriid Architects in conjunction with artist Olafur Eliasson.

The facade of the building is made of a steel honeycomb-like framework with glass panes of different colours set within it.

Each pane of glass reflects the surrounding activity within the city and harbour, resulting in the facade appearing to change colour.

The interior is a multi-functional space containing four concert halls as well as a cafe and shop.

This building was published on Dezeen last year after its completion – you can see the story here.

The tour then took us across downtown Reykjavic where we saw a variety of buildings such as the copper-clad Supreme Courts of Iceland designed by Icelandic architects Studio Granda…

…as well as the parliament building and its more recent glass extension (above).

The final building on the tour was Reykjavic City Hall, built on the shore of Lake Tjornin.

At one entrance you walk beside the Lake and on the other pools of water surround the walkway.

The exterior of the building features living moss walls amongst the concrete facade.

The City Hall is also designed by Icelandic architects Studio Granda.

Inside the building is a space for exhibitions, a cafe and offices on the upper floor.

These photos were taken with the Pentax K-01 camera designed by Marc Newson, which was kindly given to us by Pentax for the trip. Watch Newson talk about the design in our interview on Dezeen Screen.

Dezeen also went on a tour of Icelandic design studios while at DesignMarch – see photos from the tour here.

How is it possible that the man responsible for so many of the iconic buildings that make up the New York City skyline, a man credited not only for designing the first art deco skyscraper, but for designing the very first skyscraper, period, is not a household name? Ralph Walker is probably the most overlooked American architect, though the new exhibition, “Ralph Walker: Architect of the Century” seeks to finally give the man his due. Not that Walker wasn’t known and respected in his time, but he has since been overshadowed by his contemporaries Raymond Hood, who designed Rockefeller Center and William van Alen, who designed the Chrysler Building.

The free exhibition is held in the lobby of the Walker Tower by appointment only, but it’s worth the extra effort to reserve a private walk through. Models of the structures Walker is most famous for dot the room alongside replicas of his sculptural entries to the 1933 Chicago Fair and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. His Chicago Fair entry, by the way, was never built because it was deemed too expensive. In fact, Walker spared no expense on any of his projects. “A skyscraper,” he said, “is not a building, but a city.”

Walker began working as an architect at the dawn of the Machine Age, when steel frame structures extended a building’s verticality beyond anything the world had ever seen before. And as construction was remarkably fast, competing firms treated skyscrapers like a veritable space race (half a century prior to the actual one), rushing to reach higher heights than the competition.

Of course, Walker and his firm got there first with the Barclay-Vesey Telephone Building (now the Verizon Building at 140 West Street). It’s perhaps most notable for using the 1916 Zoning Resolution to its advantage by implementing setbacks, or tiered sections, a style now commonly associated with art deco architecture, though at that point it was simply known as moderne.

Walker’s brand of humanist architecture used form, texture and ornamentation to connect emotionally with pedestrians at street level. He felt that a façade should act like a drape hung over a building. The ziggurat-style setbacks began not just as a way to create texture and break up the form, but to establish his skyscrapers as structures that allowed their occupants to literally take a step back from the street and city life.

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Architect John Pawson reveals a photographic scrapbook of inspiration

In his career architect John Pawson has designed monasteries for Cistercian monks and constructed boutique shopping locales. He has sketched concepts for yachts, created lounges for Hong Kong airlines, and has even published the deliciously simple cookbook “Living and Eating” (previously on CH). Bringing a sharp eye for minimal design, the architect has embraced a wide range of production, fed by limitless sources of inspiration. At a young age, Pawson began obsessively photographing such inspiration for his own projects, and it’s a habit he continues today. From more than 250,000 images Pawson selected 130 pairs of pictures to create “A Visual Inventory” as a glimpse into the architect’s creative process.

Billed as little more than “snapshots” by Pawson himself, the collection is not so much about flawless photography as it is the interplay of lines and textures that feed an architect’s eye. “Mine is a scattergun approach,” he writes. “When I take a picture, there is always a reason in my mind, but a camera, when it is used as freely as mine, it is a tool for plurality, catching everything from previously undetected elements of repetition to unregistered details of narrative incident.”

The book builds off of the concept of an “inventory”, both in the traditional sense of a collection of assets as well as a list of preferences, attitudes and interests. Some may be surprised that Pawson—an unflinchingly minimalist architect—draws from such an eclectic mix of influences. His sources include biological phenomena, human refuse, archaelogical architecture and swaths of formless texture.

The collection essentially details the mind of an architect, and can be thought of as a kind of sourcebook for designers. Each photograph is accompanied by a short blurb that calls out Pawson’s personal reaction to the image. Selections are laid out in pairs that speak to each other, which becomes especially interesting when combinations are unexpected: railway tracks reflect dead leaves suspended in spider webs as tree roots mirror the contrails from a fleet of airplanes.

“A Visual Inventory” is available from Phaidon and on Amazon.