Hasta La Ideas

Maybe we’ve been too reactionary over the past couple of years when it’s come to news of the struggling architecture industry. We’ve sounded the alarm bells whenever the AIA‘s Architecture Billings Index plummets and felt sorry for all those sad graduating architecture students, but maybe it was all for naught. Reason being is that the Australian is reporting that “an architect working for the US government,” Kaz Miura, had to shell out a record-setting $36,890 for rounds of shots at a bar in Tokyo. There’s explanation of how this all happened, how one can spend that much on alcohol in an evening, but it involves a leather drum at an establishment whose theme likely wouldn’t fly here in the States, and we don’t understand it entirely. Not that we entirely care either, as the meat of the story, to us, is how an architect in 2010 can so relatively-nonchalantly blow close to $40,000 on booze for people he doesn’t know and not be a Gehry or a Stern or a Hadid (the paper quotes him as saying “No bonus. No windfall. I’m just paying for it out of my pocket and hoping that my wife understands,” which seems decidedly less than how we would have reacted in that situation, which is, “Oh sweet lord, what have I done?!” followed by pounding our head against the bar until we passed out). So either this architect in particular has done very well for himself in the midst of a recession, Tokyo is the place to make lots more money in the business of building than it is over here, or we’ve been completely wrong about how difficult this recession has been on the industry. Whatever the case, we need a shot.

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Beijing studio Sunlay Design have designed this building to house the headquarters for a technology park in Huainan City, Anhui Province, China.

The building will consist of two structures – a tower block and a two-pronged cantilevered building – which will be connected by a glazed walkway on the second floor.

The building will comprise a five-storey office building, an exhibition centre, an underground car park and a public square.

Construction is due to start in 2011.

All our stories on buildings with cantilevers »

The following information is from Sunlay Design:

Chinese architects office SUNLAY DESIGN shared with us their project for the HuaiNan Animation Technology Industrial park.

Located in HuaiNan city, AnHui province in China, this project mainly is a headquarter for the park that is going to be built. The building’s consists of 2 architectural parts connected by a flowing bridge on the 2nd floor.

West part – a 5 storied office building with a height of 23.1 m, total area 5500 sqm. – East part – a 2 storied exhibition center with a height of 18.45 m, total area 2800 sqm. – A public square with an area of 780 sqm and an underground parking space with an area of 3200 sqm , through which people can find access to both building parts.

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Building Concept :

The idea of the building’s massing and spaces comes from the melting ice cubes. Ice cubes tend to creat a soft connection between each other as they melt down.

This concept starts with normal boxes through which architects get integrated and fluent spaces by disasemble and reconnect those boxes with curved surfaces. This kind of space organization brings the building much more complexity and diversity.

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Ice Cube Pattern :

Architects took the cladding gaps as part of the designning elements while they confronted with the cladding division problem, same to the massing, concept for the cladding also came from ice cubes. Ice cubs present an edge-to-center colour gradient due to the refraction happend as light beam comes through.

Edges always seem darker and more solid than it appears in the center. Architects tried to get the same effect by controling the gaps’ distance and dencity, following expansion images are the final result for claddings.

Panel typology

Inorder to creat an gray-tuned gradient pattern, there are 3 different sizes of pannels padding to each surface, pannels with size 2 will be randomly put between pannel 1 and pannel 3 inorder to creat a smooth transation.

Panel 1,2,3 will be used for facade surfaces wile pannel 2,3,4 will be used for curved surfaces, hence there will be 4 pannel sizes in total.

Surface Optimization :

The building is mainly consists of 11 facaded surfaces and 14 curved surfaces that will be covered by cladding. 2 of these curved surfaces will be double curvature surfaces while 12 of them were optimized to single curved surfaces inorder to make cladding division and manufacturing easier to go.

Location :

The project is located in the far east to the industrial park which faces the south of ShunGeng mountain and takes a tunnel to get access to the center of the city.

Program :

B1: parking, staff restraunt and mech rooms
1F: exhibtion and sales center
2F: offices, meeting rooms and muti-functional rooms
3F: offices, meeting rooms and archive rooms
4F: offices, meeting rooms
5F: guest rooms

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Landscape :

Treated as an extension of the building, paving that surround the architecture is designed to embrace the connection part of the building where cladding tries to touch the ground, standing infront of the building, people will find cladding pattern gradiently change in to paving pattern, which makes the building and landscape a integrated whole.

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Structure solution :

The 2 parts of the building use individual structure system connected by a bridge on the 2nd floor. Both parts of the building use steel structure.

The maximum cantilevered part length is 20 meters, where there are enhanced bracing and steel beams for those cantilevers at the end of each part.

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Dove of Peace by Sunlay Design	FRIEM Headquarters by Onsitestudio	More architecture on Dezeen

This residence in Beijing by Beijing Matsubara and Architects was built around a smaller house that was already on the site.

Called Y House, the project involved encasing an existing two-storey house with pitched roof inside a larger three-storey structure to provide more space on either side of the old building.

The original pitched roof is visible inside the top storey with a flight of steps installed on each side.

The architects intend the clients to use the north part of the house, which has natural ventilation, during the summer and the south side, equipped with basic heating systems, during winter.

Photographs are by Misae Hiromatsu.

More residential architecture on Dezeen »

The following information is from BMA:

Y House design Description

This is a detached house project locating at Changping ward, the suburb of Beijing City.

The site is on the slope facing to the south, surrounded by the mountain in the north side, and has the good natural environment.

This is not a new construction but the renovation project of the old concrete structure house that was built 5 years ago.

We add the new floor and flat roofing to extend the floor area.

Originally the house was 2 stories (250 sq. m.) with angled roof, and the exterior wall was covered by white tiles.

Our new design changes it as the house of 3 stories (770 sq. m.) with flat roof, and the exterior wall is covered by gray blocks with outer insulation.

Building plan was simplified as “C” form at the same time by us.

17 meters width and 16 meters depth of the plan is rather large for one family (4 persons).

We proposed the sustainable lifestyle using this largeness. In the summertime, habitants live at the north part of the house with natural ventilation.

In the wintertime, they live at south part of the house equipped with the basic heating system.

For keeping the comfortable inner circumstance, we do not provide the high-spec air conditioning for all interior space, but provide the minimum equipment for adequate place.

Habitants can find the comfortable space and choose the living place according to the season.

This is a sustainable architecture especially for the place that has plenty of land such as China.

Project name: Y house
Design: BMA Beijing Matsubara and Architects

Architect: Hironori MATSUBARA, Norio KATSUTA, Zhichao LI, Daijiro NAKAYAMA, Xiaoli LI
Address: Changping district, Beijing, China

Site area: 1200 sq. m.
Building area: 245 sq. m.

Total floor area: 770 sq. m.
Structure: concrete frame structure (partly wall structure)

Design period: Dec. 2007- Feb. 2008
Completion period: Nov. 2009

Construction: LI Qiyun
Client: individual

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A House in a Church by Ruud Visser Architects	House K by Yoshichika Takagi	More architecture on Dezeen

London firm Studio 54 Architecture have completed a glazed entrance with grey brick steps connecting the ground floor and garden of this London terraced house.

The project involved removing a conservatory from the rear of the property and excavating the site to create wide steps made from long grey bricks.

New doors above this lead from the kitchen to a red cedar balcony while a small flight of steps links the garden to a smaller new entrance on the landing.

Garden storage under this smaller flight of steps is accessed from the wider staircase.

The information below is from Studio 54 Architecture:

Belsize Crescent NW3

Our Clients wanted to reconfigure the rear of their house at the upper and lower ground floor levels to provide a better relationship to the garden.

A recently built conservatory simply added to the sense of dislocation from the outdoors.

Above: before

The conservatory was demolished and a large volume of earth was excavated.

Above: before

We designed a wide and generous access from the lower ground floor up to the garden, linked to the lower ground floor by new glazed doors.

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A new balcony at the Upper Ground floor level links the kitchen to the garden via a shallow line of steps over a garden store.

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A new entrance is provided from the stair landing.

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The pallet of materials we used was deliberately simple: for the walls and paving the Petersen Kolumbia long brick with a horizontal raked joint in the vertical plane and for the balcony and doors: western red cedar.

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Project completed: September 2010

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Stairs-House by y+M Design Office	Bar Guru Bar by KLab Architecture	More architecture stories on Dezeen

Mount Angel Abbey Alvar Aalto Designed Library from Matthew DiTullo on Vimeo.

My brother Matthew and I are both slight nerds when it comes to Modern architecture, with the capital M. Our most recent excursion was to the Mount Angel Abbey Library, designed by Alvar Aalto. About an hour outside of Portland, The Mount Angel Abbey is nestled in the bucolic rolling farmland of Oregon. Surrounded by more expected neo-gothic structures of the monastery, the almost unassuming library gives little away from its elegantly simple one story entry. The interior sharply contrasts with a soaring 3 story vaulted interior. It was completed in 1970, and Aalto and his wife also designed all of the furniture.

If you go, be sure to make another stop at the nearby Oregon Gardens to see the Gordon House, the only home in Oregon designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Gordon House is the largest Usonian home built by Wright. At just over 2000 sq ft, it is quite small compared to many of his other residences, but his use of space makes it seem much larger. Originally designed for a farmer and his family, the original owners lived in the home for over 30 years.

The buildings are both stunning, but the amazing part are the staff at both who are passionate about the structures and their stories. If you find yourself in Portland, this is a worthy day trip.

Video by Matthew DiTullo, Music by Aphex Twin.

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