Hasta La Ideas

Copper louvres shade the glazed upper storeys of a police station in France that emerges from behind a cobbled stone wall.

The building was designed by Paris architects Ameller, Dubois & Associés on a medieval World Heritage Site in Provins.

Local white stone set into concrete provides the cobbled wall around the building’s ground floor and surrounding car park.

The two copper-fronted upper floors feature large focal windows, which face out from meeting rooms inside.

All the standard facilities of a police station are contained within the building, as is a gym.

In the past on Dezeen e’ve also featured a concrete police station in Seville  – see our earlier story here.

Photography is by Luc Boegly.

Here’s a description from the architects:

Police Station of Provins

Located on a triangular parcel next to the entrance to the city, the Police Station of Provins is part of the creation of a new civic center close to the historic neighborhood.

The police station is on the edge of what is essentially a pavilions zone within proximity of the Northern gate to the medieval city of Provins. A site which, in 2001, was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List. This highly symbolic position gives the building an important status: it must maintain the continuity between the residential quarters of the North and the historic center of the South, and be worthy of such on all its faces, including when seen from above.

This urban continuity is favored through the use of a single continuous base. From there, a compact form rises, lifted off, highlighting the presence of the building in its environment.

The base – which includes the retaining wall, the groundfloor and the parking lot – is on the outside a concrete wall covered with local white stone. The green roof helps soften the building when seen from a higher point. Artificial lighting, integrated within the outside wall, punctuates the base. This sheath cinches the functionality of the building with an air of nobility. It ensures its protection and its relation to the city’s history.

The storeys seem suspended above, emphasizing the contemporary character of the project and reaffirming clearly its vocation as an important public service. The lifted form contains two plateaus freed from each other, filled with various modular offices and locales. That leaves space for a continuous glass sheeting of the outside surfaces that filters natural light through to the offices via transom windows. The more confidential quarters are wrapped in thick concrete, pierced here and there with glass openings to let light in. The front (or Western side) faces the promenade, and is made of glass dressed with copper slats angled slightly downwards, making it an extension of the roofing surface. Its treatment, in contrast with the thick mineral sheeting of the other three facades, emphasizes the frontal aspects of the police station, at once open to the city but protected.

The building is seen at once as a city gate, a link and an institution.

This compact building favors the synergy between services while letting them be independent. The operational costs are reduced. The building materials require little maintenance. The metal slats of the principal facade ensure natural lighting and spectacular views but good protection from the sun while maintaining the confidentiality of the work going on inside. This metallic wrap has been set 60 centimeters from the facade to leave space for a path for maintenance crews.

The patio and the loggia that run alongside the promenade bring light and some plant life to the heart of the police station. The central patio is a reference point and a meeting place that serves as a cohesive element between the services; it lights the interiors further, creates transparencies, and breathes in some space.

The construction kept in mind the evolution of the building, relying on structures held up with posts and beams that leave room to move around and reshape interior spaces. Services can be added, relocated, enlarged all while conserving the spatial structure, the natural light and the fluidity of the general organization at each level.

Area: 2130 sqm
Interior: Holding cells, reception, administrative offices, gym.

See also:

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Mobile Police Station by Gesamtkonzept	Police station in Seville by Paredes Pedrosa	Civil Courts of Justice by Zaha Hadid

I stumbled on these photos of the ginormous sets from James Cameron’s 1989 film, The Abyss, which were left derelict in the North South Carolina abandoned nuclear power plant where they were filmed. In stark contrast to Cameron’s most recent film, Avatar, which is almost entirely CGI, The Abyss was almost entirely filmed in real-scale with real sets.

In most cases, the lifetime of movie sets is extremely brief. Entire cities and vehicles are used for a matter of mere months before being torn down to make way for the next movie production. However, as is apparent in this case, the left-behind sets became a sort of surreal architecture wherein a real version of a fake structure becomes real over time. I suppose this would be like building a life-sized model of a skyscraper that wouldn’t actually house anyone inside.

An absolutely fantastic and candid making-of documentary shows a lot of the set construction that went into the filming of The Abyss:

(more…)

Visitors enter a theatre in Huelva, Spain, below a bulky concrete cafe that rests upon backlit glass walls of purple and blue.

Refreshments for the Theatre in Almonte are served inside this concrete first floor block.

Beyond, a single auditorium surrounded by standard wardrobes and dressing rooms occupies the majority of the two-storey building’s interior.

Timber partitions, staircases and benches furnish the lobby, whilst the auditorium has a timber floor.

The theatre building is located on the site of a former winery and nestles amongst existing buildings, facing onto a public square.

A cultural centre in Madrid also features a projecting concrete face – see our earlier story here.

Photography is by Fernando Alda

See more images of this project on Alda’s website.

Here are some more details from the architects:

New Theatre in Almonte, Huelva, Spain.

The building is located on the site of an old winery.

It has the challenge of integrate the existing old buildings, declared as cultural interest, and being part of a cultural complex of a total of three buildings and a common space.

This space turns into the main place of the town and an important meeting area.

An opportunity to work on light, material and space. The path chosen to work on these concepts, is the contrast.

Contrast between outside and inside, between old and new, including a monumental scale and human scale.

And the journey as the thread that sews and explains the intervention.

A large area covered with large proportions and controlled height works as a high threshold.

A monumental scale lobby welcomes the visitor showing the scale of a public building.

Location: c/ Antonio Machado de Almonte, Huelva, Spain.

Architect Authors: Juan Pedro, Donaire Barbero – Donaire Arquitectos

Architect Team: Jesús Núñez Bootello, Carmela Domínguez Asencio, Tibisay Cañas Fuentes, David Rapado Moreno, Ignacio Núñez Bootello, Beatriz Hacar Hernández, Celine Nelke, Delia Pacheco Donaire, Pablo Baruc, García Gómez

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Engineering: Javier Drake Canela, Guillermo Márquez Villanueva, Alfonso Buiza Camacho

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Client: Junta de Andalucía, Diputación de Huelva, Ayuntamiento de Almonte

Contractor: Procondal S.A.

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Project year: 2004

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Construction: 2010

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Budget: 3.676.000 € (1.125,60 €/m2 )

Project Area: 3.265,70 m2

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Museum of Liverpool by 3XN	Auditorium by Estudio Barozzi Veiga	Neighbourhood Centre by Colboc Franzen & Associés

Fifty offices you wish you worked at in one comprehensive book

Focused on the intelligent collaborations between architects and interior designers, Total Office Design explores contemporary workplaces that are as visually striking as they are functional. The book categorizes the offices by budget—small, medium and large—with comprehensive floor plans, insightful texts and nearly 425 vibrant photographs accompanying the 50 total spaces.

The smaller offices show that size doesn’t matter. One clear standout is the creative solution Dutch architects Alrik Koudenburg and Joost van Bleiswijk devised for the temporary 100-square-meter workspace of Amsterdam-based agency Nothing. Limited to a €30,000 budget, the office is built primarily from industrial strength cardboard. The inexpensive, recyclable material was laser cut and assembled simply by slotting the pieces together, without the need of any chemicals or glue and further pushing the boundaries of sustainable office design.

We are still impressed with the skate ramp at Comvert‘s cinema-turned-office in Milan, but another mid-size favorite we found in the pages of Total Office Design is the striking South Korean subsidiary of Berlin-based company Platoon. As a organization that aids in cultural development, Platoon‘s Seoul office reflects their enthusiasm for sustainable construction. Architects Graft + Baik Jiwon designed the space from modular shipping containers, but avoided the typically tinny and claustrophobic effect of the metal units by replacing the walls with floor-to-ceiling glass. By using the containers as an exoskeleton, they were able to make a bold statement about repurposed design while keeping the project under the $2 million budget.

Also worth noting is our personal favorite is the headquarters of Milan board sport company Comvert. This cavernous old cinema was transformed into a joint retail space and lofted wooden bowl for skateboarding.

With an exterior reminiscent of dazzle camouflage used during WWI to confuse enemies, the impressive facade of Copenhagen’s Saxo Bank HQ makes it our top pick from the large-scale office designs. The 200 million DKR budget allowed studio 3XN to spare no expense on the interiors either, which takes a calmer approach more on par with quintessential Danish style. A combination of wood, steel, stark white walls and high ceilings encourages “interaction and knowledge sharing throughout the company.”

Total Office Design sells for £25 through Thames & Hudson, and stateside through Amazon.

One half of an extension to a house in north London is surrounded by frameless glass, whilst the other half is encased in slatted timber.

Designed by local studio DOSarchitects, the extension provides a new bedroom, kitchen and living room at the rear of the listed terrace in Islington.

The ridged iroko wood creates chunky pilasters around the bedroom, while the open-plan kitchen and living area is separated from the garden by nothing but glass.

Glass doors open both rooms out to the garden beyond.

This is the second timber and glass extension to an Islington house recently featured on Dezeen  – click here to see our earlier story about a larch-clad extension with a flower-covered roof.

Photography is by Carlo Carossio.

Here’s a project description from DOSarchitects:

Duncan Terrace. Islington, London.

Our clients’ brief for this project was to add a modern ground floor extension to their Grade II listed Georgian terraced house in Duncan Terrace, Islington. More specifically, they wanted this extension to contain an extra bedroom, a kitchen and a living space which would act as a connection between the house and the garden whilst also respecting the existing Georgian Architecture.

Our response, which obtained full conservation and planning approval, was to create a split volume that, on one hand wouldn’t compete with the existing Architecture and on the other offered a direct link to the house’s surrounding:

The first and more solid volume takes the form of a wooden box which, like a piece of Japanese origami, envelops the bedroom and literally brings a natural element (Iroko wood) from the outside world to the inside.

The second volume, entire in glass, brings natural light into the new living space and acts as a visual link between the Georgian house, the wooden box and the garden. The high tech structural glass used for this volume, moreover, acts as a contrast to the beautifully handcrafted timber slatted detail which envelops the adjacent volume.

Together they sit, comfortably, solid, transparent, old and new.

Approached by a private client, whose requirements were to have one extra bedroom, to be protected from the elements and at the same time to be connected with the external natural land space: we responded with this little gem.

Here, the more private space, the newly added bedroom, which is the protected part, is to merge and become part of the existing vegetation by joining the trees and plants. Whereas the more public part, is to still have a connection with the exterior landscape, but in a more public and exposed way, having a direct link, visual and physical.

Wood was the natural choice for the cladding of the volume, as it relates directly with its live surroundings and vegetation. Details such as the Olive tree, of the same age of the house, 150 years old, are only one of the connections between the interior and exterior.

Project credits

Architect: DOSarchitects
Engineer: Fluid Structures
Joinery and Cladding: Holloways of Ludlow
Project Manager: Alex Bardi
Building Contractor : Federico Amorosi & Bros

See also:

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The Jewel Box by Fraher Architects	Folly by Baumhauer	Roman Road conversion by Anarchitect