Hasta La Ideas

Residents have to go careful on the roof terrace of this Portuguese house, where gaping chasms drop down to basement courtyards two floors below.

Designed by Lisbon studio ARX, the concrete house is situated outside the city of Leiria and comprises two floors, one of which is sunken into the ground.

Kitchens and utility rooms in this basement surround the two lower courtyards, while ground floor balconies and terraces overlook them from above.

A large open-plan living room is located on this ground floor, as are bedrooms that open out to a private L-shaped garden.

An external staircase leads up from one balcony to the roof, which offers a panoramic view of the city skyline beyond.

ARX also designed another house with courtyards cut out from the roof, which was popular on Dezeen back in July – see the story here and see more projects in Portugal here.

Photography is by Fernando Guerra.

Here are some more details about the project from ARX:

House in Leiria

The house is located in a “typical” peripheric urbanization of Pousos, a parish of the municipality of Leiria.

Situated east of the city and at high ground, it works as a sort of panoramic belvedere over Leiria.

So as to assure for more space and complete access to the faraway view, the owners also bought the three lots ahead, over the “cliff”, that were later gathered in a single lot.

Although each lot allowed for the construction of a basement and two more storeys, usually compacted and isolated in the centre of the lot, this assemblage allowed the possibility of having a lower house, which “embraced” flatter portions, with garden space.

When we went to the place the first time, the streets surrounding the lot had already been made and, because of the earth displacement necessary for the street making, the land rose suddenly, starting from the sidewalk, like a suggestive construction of a topographic nature.

On the surroundings, all the neighbour houses were already built and “circled” the lot in an “L” shape.

The conception of the house emerges directly from the way we observed this reality.

Dealing with a single-family house of large dimensions for local standards, we chose to divide the construction volume in two parts.

Half of the construction is buried, like a negative of the land, and assumed as being a part of it.

Over that half-land, a second volume is placed, long and flattened, in apparent white concrete. In the inferior volume are located the technical areas, the less used areas or those of support.

In the upper volume the socials areas gather around a main courtyard, and the bedrooms around a private second one.

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After all, the main characteristic of this house is the way its dialectical feature comes about: the underground, “natural” half of the building, its upper half, floating and “artificial”, and the life flowing between the two.

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One face, introverted, intimate, of shadow or reflected light; another, open, glowing, transparent, from where it is possible to enjoy the distant horizon.

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In the end, all that matters, as always in this kind of project, is to understand the life and personality of those who come to us in need of a house design, and try to give them a new meaning for everyday life.

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Owner: Private
Location: Pousos, Leiria, Portugal
Project-construction: 2006-11

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Architecture: ARX Portugal: José Mateus e Nuno Mateus c/ Sofia Raposo, Bruno Gonçalves, Pedro Jesus
Engineerings: SAFRE, Projectos e Estudos de Engenharia, Lda.
Contractor: Manuel Mateus Frazão

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Area: 1.010 m2

See also:

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House in Possanco by ARX with Stefano Riva	House for elderly people by Aires Mateus Arquitectos	House in Paço de Arcos by Jorge Mealha Arquitecto

Austrian studio [tp3] architekten have completed a stark white house in northern Austria with translucent sliding walls around a grassy courtyard.

A concrete base surrounds the ground floor of the three-storey House SL, which is set into the hillside between two towns.

The house wraps around part of the surrounding grass landscape to create a courtyard at first floor level.

White shutters slide over the windows of the main house.

Inside the house, a grey-painted staircase connects the first-floor living rooms with bedrooms above and a garage below.

Other houses in Austria from the Dezeen archive include one where three separate units are linked by glass passages and another made from concrete and raised up on legs – see more projects in Austria here, and see our recent coverage of Vienna Design Week 2011 here.

Photography is by Dietmar Tollerian.

The following few sentences are from the architects:

House SL, Engerwitzdorf, Austria

This building is located on a southern slope situated between the towns of Mittertreffling and Gallneukirchen.

The Mühlkreis motorway runs along the opposite hillside, and a dual carriageway along the valley, majorly compromising what is otherwise a beautiful area of land. This was also the starting point for the draft strategy.

The building was not positioned on the northern limit of the parcel but deliberately Verb as a ‘noise protection wall’ and as a ‘supporting wall’ to create a peaceful and even courtyard area facing towards the south. The courtyard opens on its western side, where it connects with the ‘natural’ garden that includes fruit trees.

The architectural configuration of the building takes reference to the traditional farm structures of the Mühlviertel with its tripartite arrangements, and the white and grey façades.

In our case, this is concrete and a polyurethane cover which stretches around the entire building and neighbouring building.

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Room Room by Takeshi Hosaka	House by 3+1 Architekti	Keyhole House by EASTERN Design

It’s hard enough to craft intelligent design criticism, let alone guide others in doing so, but Alexandra Lange excels at both. The Brooklyn-based critic, journalist, and architectural historian pens pointed reviews and thought-provoking observations on the visual world for Design Observer (“Stop That: Minimalist Posters” is among our recent favorites) and on her own Tumblr (Hello Kitty spotted in Lisbon!), and teaches design criticism in SVA’s D-Crit program and at New York University. Having co-authored the 2010 must-read Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle), Lange is preparing for the release of her next book, a primer on writing and reading architectural criticism that will be published next spring by the Princeton Architectural Press. In the meantime, she’s branching out beyond the built environment with Let’s Get Critical, her new shortform blog that cherrypicks reviews and essays from the wider world of culture. What makes a piece of writing worthy of appearing on the site? “Everything on Let’s Get Critical should be well-written, its point of view clear, its language hooky,” says Lange. We reined in our verbosity and formulated seven semi-lucid questions for the veteran critic and pied piper of quality criticism.

1. What led you to create Let’s Get Critical?
I’ve been writing and teaching architecture and design criticism for about six years now, and while I love it, the topic started to feel a little confining. I love movies and TV, prefer to read novels, follow pop culture. A person cannot live by architecture alone. At the same time, I felt like most sites about culture, like most sites about design, were purely celebratory. So I wanted to create a place for intelligent writing about intelligent work, where culture was front and center rather than secondary to politics or business or sports.

2. What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
Since I got my first iPhone in January, it is usually my email. But I still get the hard copy New York Times, so then I go downstairs to breakfast and try to read at least one section (I have two small children). I read it back to front, so I usually start with Arts, Dining, or Home. I feel that I get much more out of the paper than I do the Times online or on my phone. By the end of the day I have at least flipped through every section, so I see things in Business or Sports that I would never seek out.

I also think it is important for my kids to have an idea that reading the paper is something that you do every day. If all they see is me staring at my phone all the time, they don’t know what I am doing. Last spring, when the Times was writing about Turn Off the Dark every day, my son got very interested in the news about Spiderman, which I thought was great.

3. What’s the best thing you read over the summer and why?
Not the best, but one that I still think about, and one which relates to culture and criticism: Tina Fey‘s Bossypants. Why, I thought after I read it, do you have to be as fabulously successful as Tina Fey to be listened to when you speak about the way women, and particularly mothers, are treated at and treat work? There’s a terrible silence in architecture about how it really is for women, and I think we all need to be bolder and more straightforward about talking about our children, the trade-offs we make, what we can and can’t do. If no one listens until you have a cult hit, there’s a problem.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Dutch studio architecten|en|en have created a home office in Eindhoven by wrapping a garage in corrugated aluminium.

Tiny perforations pierce this ridged metal exterior to make it partially see-through.

Daylight filters into the room through a south-facing skylight that separates the new and existing roofs.

Shutters fold back from the facade to reveal sliding glass doors that lead onto a projecting platform outside.

The refurbished garage is now named Studio R-1 and is used as a workplace for a furniture designer.

Other interesting buildings on Dezeen clad in corrugated metal include an artists studio in Australia, a steel-clad gallery and studio in France and a film storage bunker in England.

Photography is by Post & Van Leeuwen.

Here’s a few more words from the architects:

Studio R-1

A Villa build for a former Philips executive in a green suburb of Eindhoven named ‘Schuttersbosch’ gave designer Hugo de Ruiter the perfect possibility to combine living and working with the existing indoor garage used as studio space.

“I don’t want to feel like I am working in my garage” was the main goal of the assignment. The solution was found in adding a mask-shaped volume to the existing garage. By covering this with a perforated corrugated aluminium skin  as mono material for the walls and the roof, a subtle continuation of the clay-roofing of the existing home arises. A  collar of galvanized steel that acts as a terrace boundary highlights the disengagement of existing and new.

On the interior the addition provides extra floor-space and height. An abundance of daylight can enter the studio through a south faced strip of glass dividing the addition from the existing roof.

Architect: architecten|en|en
Location: Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Client: Hugo de Ruiter Design
Project year: 2011

See also:

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Duncan Terrace by DOSarchitects	Extension by Cut Architectures	The Jewel Box by Fraher Architects

A Tale of Two Terminals JFK’s Terminal 6, designed by I. M. Pei of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, and the TWA Terminal designed by Eero Saarinen.

On last night’s episode of Pan-Am, we learned that there was a time when a cyan stewardess uniform could not only save one from death at the hands of the Stasi but also afford entry into champagne-laden government functions (at least when President Kennedy was involved). Nowadays, dacron separates and a name badge tend to impede one’s progress, and the golden age of air travel? Its icons are being demolished. Such is the fate of Terminal 6 at New York’s JFK Airport. Designed by I.M. Pei with fetching all-glass mullions, it opened in 1969 as the National Airlines “Sundrome” and was vacated three years ago, when JetBlue decamped to the shiny, Pepsi-sponsored land of wonders that is Terminal 5.

“The boarding gates are already piles of rubble,” wrote David W. Dunlap in a recent post about Terminal 6 on The New York Times‘ City Room blog. “The main pavilion, whose white steel roof seems to float ethereally over cascades of diaphanous green glass, is expected to come down by the end of October.” But all is not lost. Eero Saarinen‘s curvilinear TWA Terminal is getting a second life. The designated city landmark has been undergoing extensive renovation under the auspices of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the direction of Beyer Blinder Belle. Next Sunday afternoon, the swooping site will welcome visitors as part of Open House New York. Arrive by 1 p.m. to catch a talk by project manager Charles Kramer of BBB and James Steven, the PANYNJ’s manager of JFK Physical Plant and Redevelopment.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.