Hasta La Ideas

Threefold Architects of London have converted a set of Grade II-listed warehouses into a family home just outside Bath, England.

Over the years, the former Apprentice Store has had four more buildings added to it and this new conversion connects them all by a series of stairs and walkways, which undulate around a central wall, creating a circulation route through the house.

Original features of the buildings have been restored, with the modern interventions separated from the existing structure.

Exposed wooden beams and trusses feature throughout the space.

A glazed wall on the south side of the house bathes the open plan living space in natural light and provides panoramic views out to the valley beyond.

The bedroom and bathroom are arranged across two floors by the entrance.

Photographs are by Charles Hosea.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

The former Apprentice Store – Threefold Architects of London have completed the restoration of a Grade II listed former store just outside Bath.

The Apprentice Store was an ancillary building to the adjacent DeMontalt Mill having been added to over 200 years evolving into 4 conjoined buildings.

It was on the English Heritage Buildings at Risk register and gradually slipping down the valley due to the unstable geology beneath.

The scheme strives to be true to the evolving history of the site, by restoring the historical and inserting an obvious new layer of contemporary occupancy.

A paired down palette of simple robust materials have been used to compliment the original fabric and industrial heritage of the building.

The design sought to knit together the 4 adjoined but unconnected buildings with a ribbon like circulation route, which undulates around the dominant central bath stone wall.

The circulation, aims to convey a sense that you are moving through the different buildings, establishing a series of visual connections across them.

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The house is entered from the north courtyard into a stone double height space, crossed by a bridge at first floor.

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Through a tight slot in the main spine wall, stepping onto the raised circulation ribbon you enter an open plan living space bathed in natural light, where you are confronted with the view of the valley dropping away below you.

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The private bedroom and bathroom spaces are arranged across two floors on the north side, divided by the double height entrance hall bridged by the ribbon.

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The new roof structure of the lean to connect sat high level to the bathstone spine wall.

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At the junction between the lean to and wall is a continuous rooflight, drawing sunlight down the wall the full length of the space.

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Tuscany Barn House by Julian King Architect	Double Family Home by Chris Lim	Haus + by Anne Menke and Winkens Architekten

Spanish studio Langarita-Navarro Arquitectos have completed a road-side restaurant and event space on a motorway junction near Zaragoza, Spain.

Called Lolita, it aims to rethink the typical pit-stop restaurant and provide flexible facilities for everyone from long-distance truck drivers to local students.

The building features a cluster of white-rendered and timber-clad forms that take their cue from nearby industrial buildings.

Lolita presents a blank facade to the approach road and car park while the dining areas are arranged to provide views onto a landscape of gravel and trees.

Photographs are by Miguel de Guzman.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

Lolita, infrastructure for events and meals
Km 45 A-122, La Almunia de Doña Godina, Zaragoza

Roadside restaurants are a rare species within the increasingly prestigious restaurant world. Such places superpose their condition as an infrastructure adapted to the commercial, informational and social flow of the road network on mythical scenarios taken from road movies and literature.

In recent years, their structures have evolved in order to offer services for large-format events without this having involved anything more than a change in scale.

The project rose to the challenge of changing this trend by building a structure capable of managing a programme subject to constant reorganisation, with the presence of a heterogeneous public and the expectation of diverse uses, a flexible space capable of setting itself up as a scenario for almost any type of activity. The aim was to transform a roadside restaurant into a versatile infrastructure for events and meals.

Lolita is located in La Almunia de Doña Godina, junction 270 of Autovía A-2, in a strategic position from a logistical point of view between the commercial routes of Madrid-Barcelona and Valencia-Bilbao, just a few kilometres from several towns and in the vicinity of the university campus of the EUPLA.

The building seeks to exploit a variety and mixture of activities, on one hand attending to the different groups of users and on the other to the diversity of lengths of stays, that can go from the 10 minutes spent by the occasional visitor on a coffee break to the lunch taken by the regular patrons that follow the commercial routes, the compulsory rest times of the haulage drivers, the afternoons of the students who take advantage of the Wi-Fi networks or the full day spent by guests at a celebration.

The project is configured as a cumulative space of experiences that, by linking two autonomous and differentiated systems, explores the compatibility of the open-plan model with one of specific and designated spaces.

The soft system configures a continuous space of irregular geometry perforated by patios where the camp-style grouping of furniture and the flexible lighting enable different ways of organising the space.

The interior is characterised by a patterned/semi-perforated concrete slab and by the wood, glass and polycarbonate of the walls. The façade is a variable-section double strip that establishes a dynamic and variable relationship with the exterior space, facilitating the full view of the surrounding landscape while in the interior creating a complex play of reflections and transparencies.

The rigid system is a build-up of specialised boxes made from 8-metre-long alveolar panels and brick walls that house specific and to some extent ritualised programmes.

In the interior the spaces are customised by combining the criteria of the programme with elements taken from popular culture.

The system is connected with the surroundings through well-chosen and fragmented vistas, generating a hermetic image that allows the large blind surfaces to be used as a support for road signage.

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In the project, the grouping of systems builds a new installation in the landscape that accrues images from nearby reference points (industrial premises, greenhouses, sheds, improvised lorry parks, road signs) to expand the concept of a road facility and thus situate it closer to that of a public infrastructure.

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Architects: María Langarita and Víctor Navarro
Collaborators: Marta Colón, Cristina Garzón

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Roberto González, Juan Palencia, Julia Urcoli
Structures: Mecanismo S.L.

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Mechanical: Inés Plaza
Surveyor: Fernando Cornago
Completion date: 2010

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Little Chef by Ab Rogers Design	Studio East Dining by Carmody Groarke	Nomiya temporary restaurant by Pascal Grasso

Work starts today on Maggie’s Centre Gartnavel, a cancer-care facility in Glasgow, Scotland, designed by Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

The single-story building consists of a ring of interlocking spaces.

The facility is the latest in an ongoing series of Maggie’s Centres designed by leading architects. See our earlier story about the centre designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.

See all our stories about OMA in our special category.

Here’s some more info from OMA:

Construction begins on Maggie’s Centre Gartnavel designed by OMA

Rotterdam, 9 November 2010 – Ground will be broken today for Maggie’s Centre Gartnavel, a facility in Glasgow providing emotional and practical support for people living with cancer, their families and friends. Designed by OMA, the building, which is located on the grounds of Gartnavel hospital and close to the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre, is one of several Maggie’s Centres in the UK and part of a pioneering project using thoughtful architecture and innovative spaces as tools for solace and healing.

OMA’s single-level, 534m2 building is a ring of interlocking, carefully composed spaces that provide moments of comfort and relief. With a flat roof and floor levels that respond to the natural topography, the rooms vary in height, with the more intimate areas programmed for personal uses such as counseling, and more open and spacious zones providing areas to gather and creating a sense of community.

Located in a natural setting, like a pavilion in the woods, the building is both introverted and extroverted: each space has a relationship either to the internal, landscaped courtyard or to the surrounding woodland and greenery, while certain moments provide views of Glasgow beyond.

The project, led by partners-in-charge Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon, and associate-in-charge Richard Hollington, will be completed in summer 2011. The Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres foundation, founded by Maggie Keswick Jencks and Charles Jencks, opened the first Maggie’s Centre in Edinburgh in 1996, and has since commissioned a series of innovative buildings designed by world class architects. The foundation approached OMA to design the Glasgow site in 2007.

On OMA
OMA is a leading international partnership practicing architecture, urbanism, and cultural analysis. The office is led by five partners – Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu and Managing Partner, Victor van der Chijs – and employs a staff of around 220 of more than 35 nationalities. To accommodate a range of projects worldwide, OMA maintains offices in Rotterdam, New York, Beijing, and Hong Kong.

Current projects under construction include the new headquarters for Rothschild bank in London, a major extension to the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University, the headquarters for China Central Television in Beijing, and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in southern China

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Office in the Woods by Selgascano	See all our stories on OMA	More architecture stories on Dezeen

Don’t blame George Ohr (1857-1918) for looking gobsmacked. The self-proclaimed “Mad Potter of Biloxi” is celebrated in a new museum designed by another master of curves, Frank Gehry. Founded in 1994 and boosted by a 1998 capital infusion from Jerry O’Keefe, the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art was building its new home in Biloxi, Mississippi when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Work on the 25,000-square-foot museum complex, which was decimated by the storm, recommenced thanks largely to deep-pocketed local casinos—hence the “IP Casino Resort & Spa Exhibitions Gallery”—and on Saturday, the Ohr-O’Keefe welcomed visitors to inspect the progress, now two-thirds complete. The $40 million project should be finished in 2012. Six pavilions, including a quartet of torqued steel gallery “pods,” are woven through a grove of ancient oaks. “We’re in the middle of trees,” Gehry said in an interview. “We couldn’t have continuous connectors or walkways. We didn’t have the money to connect everything, and you couldn’t make one big building because you have to tear down trees, so I came up with the ideas of these porches. So, if it rains, you run from porch to porch. And that seemed to be the model in Biloxi of the old house, with the porches, so that idea seemed to be kind of a local thing.” As for Ohr, Gehry is a fan of his “wiggly-woggly” work. “I was careful not to do anything that would mimic his pottery,” said Gehry, “Because it would look like a mimic.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Lori Garrett and Lira Luis are the recipients of the first annual Women in Architecture and Design Athena Awards. The inaugural honorees were selected by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the planning committee of the Women’s Leadership Development Summit, the New York City gathering at which Garrett and Luis received their awards from Martha Mertz, director and founder of Athena International. Criteria for the award included having demonstrated excellence, creativity, and initiative within the design professions; provided valuable service to improve the quality of life for others in her community; and actively assisted women within the design professions in achieving their full leadership potential and/or clearly served as a role model for young women both personally and professionally. Garrett is senior principal, vice president, and director of the higher education studio at Richmond, Virginia-based Glavé & Holmes Architecture, and received the Women in Architecture and Design Athena Leadership Award. Luis, a Taliesin grad and the self-described “Electric Force” behind organic architecture-focused Atelier Lira Luis in Chicago, was honored with the Women in Architecture and Design Athena Young Professional Leadership Award.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.