Hasta La Ideas

Come for the proto-cubism and Mayan sea creatures, stay for the Renzo Piano maquette! Such is the range of works now on view at the Kimbell Art Museum, which recently unveiled the final design by Renzo Piano Building Workshop for a major new museum building located to the west of its iconic Louis Kahn-designed home. The Fort Worth institution is offering visitors a glimpse of its future with a detailed scale model of the new building (pictured at right, click for an enlarged version) now on display in the museum lobby. “The model is beautiful,” says Kimbell director Eric M. Lee. “It will provide visitors with a clearer understanding of how the new building relates to the Kahn building and how it will be positioned in the landscape.”

Expected to open in 2013 and cost $125 million, the Kimbell’s Piano-designed addition will consist of two connected structures: the first, facing and echoing the west front of the Kahn building and the second, running parallel in the rear. The front pavilion will welcome visitors into a spacious, travertine-clad lobby, with major exhibition galleries extending to the north and south. A third gallery, as well as an auditorium, library, and education center, will be housed in the rear pavilion, which will be topped with a green roof (the recreational possibilities are endless…Kimbell kickball, anyone?). In addition to the green roof, which reduces heating and cooling demands, photovoltaic panels on the lobby’s floating glass roof will shade direct sun, filter daylight, and generate enough power to offset up to half of the carbon produced by the building each year. “I see designing for energy savings as the only proper, contemporary way to build, not as an ‘add on,’” said Piano in describing his approach to the Kimbell’s new building, which will require only a fourth of the energy consumed by the Kahn building.

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This three-storey house in Ekoda, Tokyo, has undergone a renovation by Suppose Design Office to create six apartments, including the transformation of a rooftop conservatory into a bathroom.

House in Ekoda has two flats on the first floor, three on the second, while the third forms a penthouse with a glazed roof-terrace.

The first and second floors have independent access via external stairs, while the roof-terrace is accessed either by an internal ladder or external spiral staircase from the second-floor terrace.

On the first and second storeys the ceiling has been removed to expose the steel-frame construction.

The second floor is the most spacious and will accommodate the landlord.

More about Suppose Design Office in our special category.

Here’s some more from the architects:

House in Ekoda

This is a renovation project of a house in Ekoda, which is a third floor- apartment in old steel construction. Before, the 1st and 2nd floor was for rental, and the third floor was for an owner of the building.

Each floors have their own entrance and exit, and they all have different floor plans. After the renovation, it was planning to rent all floors for customers. Because the building was getting old, and it was not a high quality building, we proposed the project to keep the quality and create the space more attractive.

First of all, all floors at the 1st floor was took out to avoid humidity because of the continuous footing.

The ceilings at the second floor were also removed, except the one in a room at the center of the floor, with sound proof work for neighbors.

For the 3rd floor, it was added external walls insulations with water proof work. The glasshouse at the rooftop was renovated as a big bathroom.

The common points of the renovation for the all rooms was to remove something, not to add as normal renovation, without changing a big part of the plans.

We considered carefully how to remove parts of the house, and also what should be kept. The renovated house shows different faces of its new characteristics in keeping its memories of the past for the last decades.

We were seeking and challenged new ways of renovation that would be getting more demand in the society from now.

The space coexisting with the one in old and new stay naturally, which is something like a vintage denim pants with a new shirt, and creating comfortable space with well mixture of the two styles.

See also:

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House in Minamimachi 3 by Suppose Design Office	House in Kodaira by Suppose Design Office	House in Obama by Suppose Design Office

If it wasn’t made obvious by the near-weekly links we post to the writing of the Chicago Tribune‘s resident architecture critic, Blair Kamin, we’re big fans. While it’s always great to read his column and blog for the paper, it’s all the better when he has his own material to talk about and heads out on a press tour. His new book has just been released, Terror and Wonder: Architecture in the Tumultuous Age, which looks back at the business of building since 2001, ranging from terrorist attacks, an engineering disaster in the wake of a hurricane, and the booms and busts in construction and real estate. We’re eager to grab a copy and dig in. In the interim, he’s an interview with Kamin from the Tribune and here’s a bit from his appearance on Marketplace earlier this week:

…there were a lot of predictions made right after 9/11 that proved untrue. The skyscraper certainly didn’t succumb to the terrorist attacks. In fact, the world went on the greatest skyscraper building boom in its history — with more skyscrapers, with more formal invention being built than in any time in human history.

The larger point here is that this building boom in large cities gave us what I call “urbanization without urbanity.” Where there was an incredible surge of building, but there was also a cityscape that wasn’t necessarily humane.

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“Architecture is art. I don’t think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it’s polluted by life, and by the complexity of things.”

–Renzo Piano

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Israeli firm Chyutin Architects have won a competition to build this museum that will bridge over a sunken garden in Jerusalem.

The Museum of Tolerance will sit on the border between the built-up city and Independence Park.

The museum, which houses a theatre, hall, restaurant and exhibition spaces, is clad in stone with a curtain wall of glazing facing onto the park.

The sunken garden will be accessed by sloping grass terraces and house the remains of a Roman viaduct.

Here’s more from the architects:

The Museum of Tolerance is located at the heart of modern Jerusalem, in its rejuvenated city center, on the borderline between the spacious Independence Park, and the urban built environment. The location is a meeting site of three main streets which differ in character and function. Hillel street: a bustling commercial zone; Moshe Ben Israel street: a road crossing the park; and Moshe Salomon street- Nachalat Shiva’s pedestrian mall, a tourist hub, full of restaurants and shops.

The buildings surrounding the museum site have diverse architectural characteristics, representing the history of Jerusalem architecture from the 19th century up today. We wanted the MOTJ building to be integrated into the landscape without overshadowing the preexisting urban setting on the one hand, while asserting its own unique character on the other, an iconic structure that reflects transparency and openness and generates visual interest at close and distant views. The MOTJ is to act as a bridge between the different architectural styles present in its location on one hand, while stylistically using contemporary architectural language and exploring advanced technology and materiality. We wanted the MOTJ building to stand in the warm embrace of the urban fabric and the park around it, shinning as a jewel set to the skyline of Jerusalem.

The MOTJ building is planed to host a variety of different activities: exhibition spaces, an education center, a theater, a multipurpose hall, offices, a restaurant, a gift shop, etc. The activities are diverse in the types of visitor communities they serve, in their operating hours, in their environmental requirements and in their interaction with the urban context. The developed building concept answers the requirements of each specific activity, encouraging undisturbed access for the various communities to their appropriate destinations.

We designed an elongated structure which traces the southern and eastern borderline of the site. The structure orchestrates the three surrounding streets, into a coherent urban space-a new public square for the rejuvenated city center of Jerusalem. The design of the public square incorporates several different elements: a sunken archeological garden, enclosing the remains of the roman aqueduct discovered at the site’s center, a terraced amphitheater, a grove and various public paved areas, for the various activities of visitors.

The building is divided into two horizontal wings: a three floors floating upper wing which hosts the theater and social meeting spaces, and a two floors lower sunken wing which hosts the children and the adult museums exhibition spaces- the so-called “dark box.”. The entrance floor is located at the level of the public square hosts a restaurant and gift shop The entrance floor is leading up to the floating wing or down to the sunken one. A four-leveled lobby connects the floating wing and the sunken one. Part of the floating wing is suspended over ground level, creating a gap, a doorway, from the built city to the park. Pedestrians who are relaxing in the public square or walking towards the park may be enticed to enter the MOTJ building and experience it.

Building

The archeological garden serves as an outdoor space for the sunken wing, contributing to the activities of the exhibition spaces. The garden is connected to the street level by a terraced slope which can be used as a seating area for outdoor performances. It has 1200 seats capacity.

The architectural language of the MOTJ building sets it apart from its backdrop as a visual icon, while still maintaining continuity in terms of building height and materials with the urban fabric around it. The location of the building on the borderline between the city and the park dictates the design of the building facades. In accordance with municipal regulations, the building facades towards the city are stone-clad, and they exist in dialogue with the 19th and 20th century stone houses beside it.

Stone clad

Towards the park, the structure has glass facades, which relate to the glass park façade of the future courthouse. The stone structure floats over the gap and the glass walls of the building’s entrance. This allows for visual continuity between the city and the park, preventing the building from becoming an impenetrable barrier. The design of the facades, the roof and underbelly as a geometrical envelop that connects folded stone-clad planes may be understood as echoing the geographical form of Jerusalem as a city surrounded by mountains.

The differences in design between the city and park facades diversify and enrich the structure’s visual appearance. Walking around the building may create an element of surprise.

See also:

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