Hasta La Ideas

Slideshow: this glass pavilion on the edge of a lake in Ontario, Canada, houses a studio, apartment and boathouse for a photographer and was designed by Toronto Studio gh3.

A dark granite plinth supports the glazed upper walls of the building, spanning the height between ground level and the water’s edge.

Boats are stored inside this supporting structure, while the studio and residence are located on the upper floor and mezzanine above.

During warmer weather the glazed walls of the building can slide open for ventilation, while more sliding walls provide separation inside the house between the studio and en suite bedroom.

You can see more projects in Canada here, including a group of plywood skating shelters.

Photography is by Larry Williams.

The text below is from gh3:

Photographer’s Studio over a boat house on Stoney Lake is a reimagination of the archetypal glass house in a landscape.

A continuation of thinking about this architectural ambition, the central conceit of the glass house is reconceived through a contemporary lens of sustainability, program, site and amenity.

The compelling qualities of simple, open spaces; interior and exterior unity; and material clarity are transformed to enhance the environmental and programmatic performance of the building, creating an architecture of both iconic resonance and innovative context–driven design.

The program envisions a building as north–facing window: a photographer’s live/work studio that is continuously bathed in diffuse and undiminished natural light.

The transparent facade—a continuous curtain wall glazed in Cradle to Cradle–certified Starphire glass—becomes the essential element in a photographic apparatus to produce images unobtainable in a conventional studio.

The availability and fidelity of north–facing light in the double-height space provide the photographer with unparalleled natural illumination, while the clarity of the glazing transforms the site and surrounding vistas into a sublime, ever–changing backdrop.

The compact glass form sits at the water’s edge on a granite plinth whose matte black facade dematerializes to suspend the building, lantern-like, on the site.

The granite’s thermal mass exploits the abundant solar input, eliminating the need for active systems on winter days, while the lakefront site allows the use of a deep-water exchange to heat and cool the building year–round through radiant slabs and recessed perimeter louvers at the floor and ceiling.

Sliding panes in the glass skin—three metres wide at the ground floor, and one and a half metres wide on the mezzanine floor—allow the facade become completely porous for natural ventilation, while an individually automated blind system, white roof, and deciduous hedgerow guard against excessive solar gain.

The continuous blind system additionally serves as a second aesthetic skin, transforming the interior into an enclosed, intimate space, and the exterior into a gently reflective mirror of the surroundings.

Entry into the site is facilitated through a minimalist landscape that deploys endogenous materials while leaving the greatest portion of the site in its evocative, glacier-scoured state.

A simple granite plinth serves as threshold for the south-facing entrance, where solid program functions and vertical circulation are arranged in a narrow, efficient volume.

From the outset, the goal was too accommodate the clients programme within a small footprint, so domestic functions are integrated into a furniture-like mezzanine assembly suspended above the main space, where bedroom, bathroom and closet are coextensive, and sliding fritted glass allows the whole to be concealed from the rest of the space.

Throughout the upper and lower levels, interior partitions are clad with seamless white lacquered panels whose reflective qualities diffuse light into every part of the interior and create complex layered views through the space.

Dezeen Screen: this animation from our series by architectural filmakers Factory Fifteen shows a swarm of equipment associated with British postal service Royal Mail colonising the sides of a building and configuring themselves into a temporary automated sorting office. Watch the movie »

Spanish architects MedioMundo have completed a bright red multimedia centre amongst a collection of towering apartment blocks in Seville.

The Cibercentro Macarena has a red-lacquered steel exterior, with shutters that fold away from windows like the gills of a fish.

Like its neighbours, the building is raised up on a series of pilotis, creating a sheltered Wi-Fi terrace underneath.

A glazed entrance lobby and two multi-purpose rooms are also located on the ground floor, while two more and an office occupy the first floor. Stairs lead up to a terrace on the roof that can be used for hosting events.

We recently grouped together all our stories about red buildings – see them all here.

Photography is by Fernando Alda. See more images of this project on Alda’s website.

Here’s some more text from the architects:

“A connecting point, a meeting point”

We are interested in investigating the conformation of a physical space which, devoted to virtual connexions and information, becomes a real ‘meeting point’. We want to propose through architecture the confluence of ‘sites’ for both virtual and material social networks.

Information Technology has re-configured the human being and its social relationship. Information has unfurled communication spaces and has given depth and thickness to the frugal daily time.

Which meeting places of these intangible spaces can be designed from the tangible production of architecture?

Spaces that might be considered part of the “future”, are already common places in our present that we usually enjoy and share in our homes and workplaces, where we spend our leisure and free times. These are spaces where re-invent the relationship between collective and private spaces, formation and information, communication and dialogue.

Only in counted occasions has architecture proposed a setting in which information and space interact. Sometimes attention to new information technologies has wandered between metaphoric formal exercises and pixelized communication prosthesis. The superimposition of matter and technology to incorporate these flows has created a complexity in the building that sclerosises it. That generates an unavoidable obsolescence that underlines it contemporariness condition.

This is the reason why our research is centered around architecture as the medium for multitude programmes: functions and timings, that means, being a programmable ‘hardware’. We study how to propose a pluripotential container where all flows of users and visitors may enter, where citizens may interact among others. That is, architecture that holds active social ‘software’.

We propose to do less architecture to make more ‘gathering events’ happen: a principle of basic ecology that makes integral sustainability possible as a constructive, economical and social objective.

All social centres are, more than a place, a process where new neighbourhood forms are articulated with ‘agents’ and ‘places’ that are nearby but also with others that are geographic and culturally more remote.

The new Social Cyber Centre Macarena Tres Huertas is a place where such categories as collective/intimate and informational/educative space will be re-proposed.

We think in such places ‘presence’ (citizenry) is more important than ‘permanency’ (buildings), where architecture, in this world of networks and meeting places, is a phenomena in transit. That is why the building is carefully set in its surroundings, put to the residents’ disposition.

DESCRIPTION

The Social Cyber Centre Macarena Tres Huertas competition was organized in the process’ frame of administrative decentralization and progressive establishment of the so called ‘tele-administration’, as the city government (EMVISESA) firmly aims to make available its advantages to all citizens. This implicitly demanded a new spatial medium to provide the local inhabitants with the necessary equipment for computing and information technologies.

Chance, necessity, environmental adaptation.
Almost as it happened to Darwing’s evolution theory, chance and necessity converged (the City Government demands and our research) interceded by local determinations: the surrounding characteristics and the restrained economic conditions.

The district Macarena Tres Huertas is characterized by its high density (eight-floor buildings) dwellings blocks supported by pilots that leave porches on the ground floors. This allows for visual transparency and free circulation among the gardens thus avoiding its perception as an opaque and stagnant space.

Therefore the new ‘Macarena Social – CyberCentre’ rests in this place generating a visual and transit transversal in order to optimize the accessibility to the surroundings paths and open areas.

The ground floor is released of programme in order to create a wi-fi plaza below the building, a small access garden, which together with a porch linked to a cafeteria and a multipurpose room, are offered as a wi-fi neighbours’ meeting and leisure room. Over these spaces, a volume lined with red lacquered sheet arises, where computer labs, workshops and offices are placed.

N-POTENTIAL PUBLIC SPACE:

The main idea is to raise to the power of three the former free spaces now occupied by the building by means of multiply n-times the tangible spaces: garden-wi-fi plaza; multipurpose and connected spaces on the 1st floor, and the flat roof, which is offered to the neighbours as a terrace to hold events and as river viewing point.

PROGAMABLE BUILDING

The new ‘Macarena Social – CyberCentre’ is designed as a programmable setting, where functional definition will depend on the timing of its uses and the users participation on the given spaces. Only by thinking in these terms, has a functional determination that could damage the survival and natural evolution of the spaces been avoided.

The requirements demanded initially (administration, services and installations) are all risen up and compacted into a nucleus on the first floor, allowing the rest of the space to be free and flexible rooms equipped with computer connections. On the ground floor, the garden and the porch leads us to the access control, a multipurpose room and a small cafeteria, tall in a close relation with the wi-fi plaza. Above it all, the terrace in offered as a motivation for activities and celebrations.

MATERIALS

The new building offers a simple but straightforward image.
Its materials are sincere, so it has a very important significance: red-lacked fold up steel sheet over thermal insulation and brick wall, leaving a ventilated area for climate control. The steel sheet has different perforation densities that allow different levels of privacy and even security. There are several intimacy gradients managed by the ‘gills’ over the windows (vertical lama or banderols that make the building breath), orientated to free spaces, preserving the windows and views to the dwellings’ privacy.

It is a statement on sustainability in terms of normalized construction, organized by structural units and standard module, with serial production process, controlled transport and executing time, that benefits the energy and emission control. The building follows passive construction on order to rationally deal with the extreme weather of Seville: make the most of thick isolation, natural ventilation and natural lightning.

Social – CyberCentre ‘Macarena Tres Huertas’ is a site where traditional categories meet to be re-defined: an advanced technological site, environmentally conscious, urbanly responsible and socially active.

Name Of The Project: Socialcybercentre Macarena Tres Huertas
Architects/Authors: Mediomundo Arquitectos Marta Pelegrín+Fernando Pérez
Programme: Socialcybercentre
Site: José Díaz Street. Sevilla
Competition Date: 2009
Recognizions: 1º Price
Phases: 2009 Compatition, 2009 Executing Projects, 2010 Construction
Contractor: Eurocon S. L. Construcciones
Cathegory: Social Facility
Superficie: 410 M2
Promotor: Sevilla City Government
Co-Designer Architect: Mario Ortega Gómez (Mog-Arquitectos )
Other Contributions: José Antonio Lubiano (Cost Control) Tedeco Ingenieros (Structure Calculation), Elías Pérez Lema (Installations) Fabio Orizia Pérez, Raúl Elías Bramón, Silvia Casitas
Consultants: Fabio Orizia Pérez, Raúl Elías Bramón, Silvia Casitas Montero, Ana López Ortego, Harold Guyaux (Office Team)
Translation: Vincent Morales.

Light permeates this civic hall designed by Magén Arquitectos in southern Spain through blocks of alabaster in the facade.

The building is constructed from translucent alabaster and opaque limestone that were extracted from native quarries.

The harsh geometry contrasts with the warmer, softer bamboo finish that can be found in the more significant internal spaces where the delegates gather.

White stone walls allude to the sobriety and plainness of traditional Iberian vernacular as well as referencing material groups from local quarries.

Three bands organise the spaces: the first and second hold the access, lobby, management and adminstration spaces while the third band holds less public spaces such as the auditorium and classrooms.

Photography is by Pedro Pegenaute

Here are some more details from Magen Arquitectos:

The Bajo Martin County is formed by nine historic populations in Teruel, located in the basin of the River Martin. Alabaster, which is extracted from quarries in the area, is one of its main resources, dedicated to both the export and cultural promotion, through routes, meeting craft and art activities, organized annually by the Center for Integrated Development of Alabaster.

The site is located on the outskirts of Hijar, capital of the county, along the national highway N-232 and the old abandoned silo. It was a dysfunctional urban environment, including existing industrial buildings, and the front of residential townhouses, just across the road.

The absence of urban qualities in the environment legitimizes a certain autonomous condition of the building, rising from the land to form a unified solution, clear and compact. Therefore, the necessary link of building and place, reinforced by its institutional character, not articulated from urban relationships with the immediate environment, but from references to geographical landscape, history and culture, present in their external configuration. The group of carved volumes on local materials -stone and alabaster, alludes, in an abstract and geometric way, to stone groups that occur in quarries in the area. The stone surfaces, opaque or translucent, exhibit materials and expressive features of alabaster in relation to the day or night lighting.

The ordered group volumes in the outside, compact, heavy and massive, is poured inside. The space pierces and perforates the solid volume, producing a dynamic system of voids, connected visually and spatially, diagonally, linking the three floors and articulating the circulation spaces, access and meeting. The continuity with the outside material and the presence of natural light into the interior through various gaps, strengthen the condition of the interior space as empty excavated, drawn from the section as a fundamental tool of the project.

The functional organization of the project is divided into three bands constructed parallel to the path. The first is the plenary hall access and, second, the lobby and areas of management and administration, and third, to the auditorium and classrooms. The distribution of plants distinguishes between the more public areas at ground and first floors, and more related to internal management and work in the second. In contrast to the stone walls inside the bamboo wood finish in the most significant spaces such as the plenary hall, underscores its public, institutional and representative.

A electronically controlled stone wall slides across the facade of this house in Warwickshire, England, to conceal a large window.

Designed by British architects Baynes & Co, Wickstead Lodge replaces a traditional vernacular house that formerly occupied the site.

The moving wall was created to overcome a planning requirement stating that the new house should have only small windows, like its predecessor.

Narrow gaps in the stonework let light pass through the wall into the dining room behind.

The whole of this lower floor was also set just below ground level so that the two-storey house wouldn’t be taller than permitted.

We also recently featured a house in Bath constructed from a similar pale stone – take a look here.

Photography is by Stuart Whipps.

The text below is a description from Adrian Baynes:

The project was a new house to replace an existing one.

The planning authority imposed considerable constraints in terms of massing, roof height, materials & design.

They wanted a replacement single storey house, with small windows, of traditional construction.

The client wanted a two storey, contemporary house.

The solution was to sink the building into the ground and create three gables so as to minimise the impact from the road.

However from the rear it is a substantial two storey development.

The biggest difficulty was the planners requirement for small windows to match those in the original house.

The answer was to install the largest double glazed window available and then construct a steel framed stone wall in front of it.

The stone was bonded in place so as to allow the light to penetrate through the joints.

However the entire wall was mounted on an geared electric motor powered track to allow it to move like a giant curtain.

By careful engineering the wall was mounted without any top support.

The building was constructed with stone gables & a matching brick, with terne coated stainless steel roof with roll batten joints to replicate a traditional lead roof.