A wooden ladder and a pair of winding steel staircases link the rooms of this lofty house in Sapporo, Japan, by Jun Igarashi Architects (+ slideshow).
Named Case, the three-storey residence was designed by Japanese firm Jun Igarashi Architects to centre around a family living room with a seven-metre-high ceiling, from which residents can see into almost every other room of the house.
The first of two lightweight steel staircases curves up from the living room to lead to a wooden mezzanine just below the roof, which can be used as a study, a children’s playroom, or simply as a corridor.
Another staircase winds down from this level to a bedroom on a second mezzanine, while a third platform is positioned directly above and can be accessed by climbing a wooden ladder that clips around the edge of the floor.
All three wooden lofts are connected to ceiling by slender steel rods, which double as supports for handrails that extend around both the floors and the staircases.
A full-height partition runs along one side of the living room to separate it from the adjacent kitchen, but a large rectangular hole in its centre allows a view into not only this space, but the bedroom and storage level overhead.
Rather than adding simple doorways between rooms on the ground floor, the architects built three curvy corridors that extend out beyond the house’s rear wall. One leads to bathroom spaces at the back, while another sits at the end of a long and narrow entrance lobby.
Externally, the house is surrounded by vertical wires that the architects hope will become a framework for climbing plants.
Here’s a short project description from Jun Igarashi Architects:
Case
This house is located on the suburb of the city of Sapporo. The site is a typical suburban subdivision and height difference between the road is large. Footprint isdetermined by building coverage and wall retreat of the architectural law and the slope of the site approach.
I set the long corridor of entrance as a buffer zone (windbreak room) between the large heat load space.
Because of the site area is small, to set the buffer space into the inside is difficult. So I spread the thoughts and invent the space of growing plant on stainless steel wire around the house as the new type of buffer zone between outside and inside.
Location: Sapporo, Hokkaido Principal use: Private residence Design period: 2011 Construction period: 2011-2012
Architects: Jun Igarashi Architects Structural engineer: Daisuke Hasegawa & Partners Construction firm: Oooka Industry
Site area: 197.50 sqm Building area: 50.52 sqm Total floor area: 80.84 sqm Number of storeys: 3 above ground Structure: Timber frame
Cette maison appelée Veronica, a été construite en bord de mer à Lima au Pérou par l’architecte américain Luis Longhi. Elle mélange les formes rondes et carrées avec différentes matières lisses ou pierreuses. La lumière entre parfaitement grâce aux baies vitrées. Une belle construction à découvrir dans la suite.
Interview:Iwan Baan is the rock star of architecture photography, shooting buildings from helicopters and “living in a hotel 365 days a year”. With a new exhibition documenting his hectic schedule now open in Germany, Baan spoke to Dezeen about his unique lifestyle and technique (+ slideshow).
Iwan Baan
Iwan Baan started out as a documentary photographer but moved into architecture after a chance meeting with architect Rem Koolhaas. He has since become the most sought-after name in architectural photography and spends his life travelling the world to shoot buildings by names such as Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron and SANAA.
“It’s continuous travelling,” he said. “When you look on the map, it’s flying back and forth all over the world.”
Inflatable concert hall by Anish Kapoor and Arata Isozaki in Matsushima, Japan
Baan is known for eschewing the traditional approach of shooting buildings in isolation. He says his aim with every shoot is to capture the life both within and surrounding the built environment. “It’s still very much my interest to show what’s happening around these buildings, what people do there and what kind of role these projects have for people,” he explained.
For most shoots the photographer rents a helicopter to capture his subject from above. “It’s very important for me to give the larger overview and try to get some distance from the architecture. That really tells you where it is and that it’s not just a building that could be anywhere.”
Sanmenxia, Henan Province, China
The new exhibition, entitled 52 Weeks, 52 Cities, shows a selection of Baan’s photographs from the last year accompanied by short commentaries. “It’s really a view into a year of travelling with Iwan,” he said.
Subjects in the exhibition vary from glossy architectural projects to a settlement in Lagos where over 150,000 people live in self-built structures perched on stilts over a lagoon, a village in China where locals have excavated a network of underground caves to live inside, and a secretive Japanese shrine that is rebuilt every 20 years. It also includes the iconic shot of post-Sandy New York that threw the photographer into the limelight when it made the cover of New York Magazine in late 2012.
New York City, New York, USA
“Most people know my photography from the commissioned architecture work but there are also a lot of other places that fascinate me, that show how people are building informally. My work is about looking at all the different aspects of building and the built environment, from the very well-planned cities to what people build themselves out of necessity,” he said.
52 Weeks, 52 Cities is on show at the Marta Hereford gallery in Hereford, Germany, until 30 March.
Here’s a full transcript of the interview:
Amy Frearson: Your new exhibition is called 52 Weeks, 52 Cities. Are you on the road all the time, or do you get opportunities to go home?
Iwan Baan: I haven’t had a home for almost three years. I live in a hotel basically 365 days a year.
Amy Frearson: Talk me through how you go about shooting a particular place. How many cameras do you tend to take on a typical shoot?
Iwan Baan: I always get an idea very quickly about how I want to document a space from an architectural point of view. I work very light and I usually only want one camera with me. I don’t work with tripods or large cameras. It’s really all about capturing the life of these places. That’s what is important for me.
Larabanga, Northern Ghana
Amy Frearson: Do you try to shoot each project from the air?
Iwan Baan: More or less yes, it’s part of my visual language of describing projects. It’s very important for me to give the larger overview and try to get some distance from the architecture. Using a helicopter is always a good way to capture that kind of thing, and to give an architecture project its place in the city or landscape. That really tells you where it is and that it’s not just a building that could be anywhere.
Amy Frearson: Do you do all your own post-production on your images whilst you’re travelling?
Iwan Baan: Yes, but I do very little post-production on my images, usually only colour corrections, and I always do it right after the shoot.
House K by Sou Fujimoto in Osaka, Japan
Amy Frearson: Most architectural photography tries to present the building in isolation but your photos often capture the social and urban context as well.
Iwan Baan: Yes that’s very much the way that I take my commissions. They should be more than just architectural projects. They should be able to tell more about the story and the life around these buildings.
Amy Frearson: You didn’t actually start out as an architectural photographer did you?
Iwan Baan: Yes that’s right, I started out doing much more documentary photography. It was only eight years ago when I met Rem [Koolhaas] and fell into this whole architecture field. So it’s still very much my interest to show what’s happening around these buildings, what people do there and what kind of role these projects have for people. This exhibition tells that story by showing these unique areas and showing why these architecture projects are in these specific places.
Cairo, Egypt
Amy Frearson: Tell me about the exhibition.
Iwan Baan: Marta Herford approached me about nine months ago or so. I had worked for Marta Herford before, about three ago years on an exhibition of all the Richard Neutra houses all over Europe, which I documented. I came back about nine months ago and they asked me if I was interested in doing another exhibition. I thought, with all my endless travels, it would be interesting to show a diary of my last year of travelling. Not only showing the new architecture, but also all the other things that happen around it. It’s really a view into a year of travelling with Iwan.
Amy Frearson: Did you have an idea of what places you were going to be visiting across the year or did you work it out as you went along?
Iwan Baan: With my schedule, things always come up around a week before. It’s continuous travelling. When you look on the map, it’s flying back and forth all over the world.
Floating School by Kunle Adeymi in Lagos, Nigeria
Amy Frearson: Tell me about some of the cities and places you’ve captured over the year.
Iwan Baan: Most people know my photography from the commissioned architecture work but there are also a lot of other places that fascinate me, that show how people are building informally. I’m really interested in how people build themselves unimaginable living conditions, for instance in the slums of Nigeria, or in Lagos where people have built this whole city in water, basically in a lagoon. My work is about looking at all the different aspects of building and the built environment, from the very well-planned cities to what people build themselves out of necessity.
Toilet by Sou Fujimoto in Ichihara, Japan
Amy Frearson: Is there an underlying theme that ties all the photographs together?
Iwan Baan: All the pictures are really about telling the stories of why a project is very specific for a place, whether they’re very large, like a Zaha Hadid building in Azerbaijan that could only have been built there, to the tiniest project where I flew across the globe to Japan to photograph a toilet by Sou Fujimoto. I like telling these kinds of stories with my pictures.
Sanmenxia, Henan Province, China
Amy Frearson: Do you have any favourite photographs in the exhibition?
Iwan Baan: That’s hard to say, there are so many of these incredible places. One that comes to mind is of underground houses in China. It’s a whole region in the centre north of China, around Xi’an, where for centuries people have dug out these courtyard houses that are basically carved out of the earth. They could only do it there because of the special earth, it’s a kind of loose clay soil, so it’s easy to dig it out. These people didn’t have money to buy materials to build new houses, so for them the most logical step was to carve them out, since it is only manpower they needed to create these incredible houses.
At the most recent count, almost 40 million people live there. It’s one of those things that is so specific for this area and reveals a lot about how people build and live in these places. These kinds of things always fascinate me.
Shrine at Ise, Japan
Amy Frearson: Can you describe some of the more historical places that you’ve photographed?
Iwan Baan: One place that comes to mind was a couple of months ago. It’s the Ise Shrine in Japan. It’s an incredible story of a series of shrines in a village in Japan. They started building the first shrines there in the year 600, and since then they have rebuilt the shrines every twenty years. There’s this enormous tradition of craftsmanship, rebuilding all these frames every twenty years. I was very lucky to be there a couple of months ago during that whole rebuilding process and afterwards, when there were all these ceremonies there. So my pictures were really telling a story of this incredible architectural history, how people experience that, how people build it and how people have lived with it for 1400 years.
Nanping Village, Anhui Province, China
Amy Frearson: Did you find any of the places particularly challenging to shoot?
Iwan Baan: There’s a place in China, a series of incredible courtyard houses in the Anhui Province where I was last year. From the outside, you come into a village which is completely closed off. It only has narrow roads and you can hardly see any of the architecture, so it’s hard to document. When I came to this place I got a little frustrated about how I was going to shoot it, but then I found a doctor in a little village in the countryside and asked if I could tag along with him. I walked for two or three days with him and went to all these family houses. All the doors were open and I would step into all these incredible homes and was really able to photograph the life happening inside these places.
Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India
Amy Frearson: Can you tell me about any other countries you’ve been to?
Iwan Baan: Last January, I was with a whole team from Harvard University in India. There was an event that happens once every 12 years, it’s called the Kumbh Mela. It happens in the north of India near Varanasi, where the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers come together. It’s basically a big delta, but between December and April it’s dry season there so the water level drops.
Once every 12 years the Indians organise a festival there and it’s basically the largest human gathering in the world. Around 100 million people visit the site over a period of about a month and a half. It’s in this river bed that has dried out, so this piece of land about the size of Manhattan becomes available. They literally build a pop-up mega city for 100 million people there, including all the infrastructure. They build roads, they make electricity and there’s this whole city made out of bamboo sticks, saris and curtains. A city for 100 million people and after two months it disappears again.
Glass floors allow residents to look down from a dining table into a toilet inside this windowless concrete house in Shanghai by Chinese firm Atelier FCJZ (+ slideshow).
Yung Ho Chang of Atelier FCJZ originally designed the Vertical Glass House as an urban housing prototype for a competition in 1991. Twenty-two years later, the studio was able to realise the project as part of the West Bund Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art.
The building now functions as a guesthouse for visiting artists and architects. Closely based on the original design, the four-storey house has a glass roof and glass floors between each level, meaning that residents can look all the way up from the basement to the sky.
According to project architect Lu Bai, the house is a 90-degree rotation of the typical glass houses completed during the Modernist period, placing more of an emphasis on spirituality and materials.
“With enclosed walls and transparent floors as well as roof, the house opens to the sky and the earth, positions the inhabitant right in the middle, and creates a place for meditation,” he explained.
A single steel column extends up through the exact centre of the building. Together with a series of criss-crossing joists, it dissects the floors into quarters that each accommodate different activities.
On each floor, one of these quarters is taken up by a steel staircase that spirals down to the basement from a double-height second floor.
The house’s austere concrete walls were cast against wooden formwork, which was left rough on the outside and sanded on the inside to give a contrast in texture between the facade and the interior walls.
Each glass floor slots into a pair of narrow horizontal openings in the walls and the architects have added lighting along these junctions to create stripes of light on the building’s facades after dark.
The overall footprint of the house is just 40 square metres.
Here’s a project description from Atelier FCJZ:
Vertical Glass House
Vertical Glass House was designed by Yung Ho Chang as an entry to the annual Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition organised by the Japan Architect magazine in 1991. Chang received an Honorable Mention award for the project. Twenty-two years later in 2013, the West Bund Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art in Shanghai decided to build it as one of its permanent pavilions.
Basement plan
Vertical Glass House is a urban housing prototype and discusses the notion of transparency in verticality while serving as a critic of Modernist transparency in horizontality or a glass house that always opens to landscape and provides no privacy. While turning the classic glass house 90 degrees, Vertical Glass House is on one hand spiritual: with enclosed walls and transparent floors as well as roof, the house opens to the sky and the earth, positions the inhabitant right in the middle, and creates a place for meditation. On the other hand, Vertical Glass House is material: vertical transparency visually connects all the utilities, ductworks, furniture pieces on different levels, as well as the staircase, into a system of domesticity and provides another reading of the modern theory of “architecture as living machine”.
Ground floor plan
The structure erected in Shanghai in 2013 was closely based on the 22-years old design scheme by Chang and developed by the Atelier FCJZ. With a footprint of less than 40 square meters, the four-storey residence is enclosed with solid concrete walls leaving little visual connection to its immediate surrounding. The walls were cast in rough wooden formwork on the exterior and smooth boards on the interior to give a contrast in texture in surface from the inside out. Within the concrete enclosure, a singular steel post is at the centre with steel beams divide the space in quarters and frame each domestic activity along with the concrete walls.
First floor plan
All the floor slabs for the Vertical Glass House, which consists of 7cm thick composite tempered glass slabs, cantilevers beyond the concrete shell through the horizontal slivers on the facade. The perimeter of each glass slab is lit from within the house; therefore, light transmits through the glass at night to give a sense of mystic for the pedestrians passing by. All the furniture were designed specifically for the rooms inside the Vertical Glass House to be true to the original design concept and keep a cohere appearance with its structures and stairs. Air conditioning was added to the house.
Cross section
The Vertical Glass House will be operated by the West Bund Biennale as a one-room guest house for visiting artists and architects while serving as an architectural exhibition.
Original drawings
Office: Atelier FCJZ Principal Architect: Yung Ho Chang Project Architect: Lu Bai Project Team: Li Xiang Ting, Cai Feng
Original drawings
Location: Xuhui District Longteng Road, Shanghai, China Client: West Bund Building Area: 170 m2 Structural Type: Housing/Exhibition
Architects Mette and Martin Weinberg have overhauled a 1940s cottage in Denmark to create a modern home for their family, complete with timber-lined walls and cosy furnishings.
Weinberg Architects collaborated with fellow Danish architects Friis & Moltke on Villa Weinberg, situating it on a corner plot in Højbjerg, a residential area of Aarhus.
Polished concrete floors feature through the house and while some rooms have been painted white, the main living spaces are lined with oil-treated oak boards.
“We used the wooden boards to obtain a warm, cosy feeling to the living room – a social space,” architect Mette Weinberg told Dezeen. “They also help to form a close relationship to the garden space, in an atmosphere and material overhaul.”
Large windows frame views of the surrounding gardens, where flowerbeds are covered with bark chips to recreate the architects’ dream of a little house in the middle of a forest.
The main bedroom opens out onto a small inner courtyard, while a kitchen, study and extra bedrooms make up the rest of the ground floor.
A combined wooden bookshelf and staircase in the living room leads up to the first floor, where a large study and roof terrace also overlook the garden.
In contrast with the natural wood of the house’s interior, the exterior of the house is clad with black-painted timber panels.
Both outside and inside, the atmosphere is cooling and calming. As soon as the foot touches the ground of this protected corner-plot, a special feeling wraps itself around you like a soft shawl: A feeling of being pleasantly, mysteriously alone in one of the great forests of Finland – or perhaps of stepping into a universe, where Yin and Yang finally found their perfect balance and harmony. It is quite difficult to believe that actually you are in a very traditional residential neighbourhood, Højbjerg, situated in suburban Aarhus.
Until recently, this little corner-plot nested a small summer cottage, built during wartime in 1942 and later almost hidden behind tall trees. The cottage has now been integrated into a brand new, tall and very ambitious black beauty.
The walls are planked on the outside and the villa opens to its surroundings with windows that are perfectly proportioned for the double purpose of inviting nature in as well as creating a cozy and cooling private space.
The villa, which has been awarded the City of Aarhus Architecture Prize 2008, playfully breaks the strictly square shape of the plot in a careful orchestration of angles and split-levels.
The way it seems to organically grow into the rich vegetation of pine, temple-tree and rhododendron leaves the baffling impression on the beholder that this villa simply grew out of the ground!
Light and Shadow
It was the joint creative forces and dreams of architects Mette and Martin Wienberg that led to this exciting and untraditional framework around their family-life. Atmosphere was the keyword and contrast was an important tool: By creating a covered entrance in a quite strict style dominated by black wood and concrete, they wanted to enhance the experience of the movement from architectural serenity to the open garden – which is organically structured, but sharply defined by raised sleepers that frame and contrast the soft lawn which lies in their embrace almost like a green lake.
The plants and the trees are essential to the design: All the flowerbeds are strewn with coarse bark-chips in order to enhance the illusion of “The little house in the forest” and the natural mosaic of the foliage creates changing patterns of shadows and filters the light: This couple did not seek the great panorama, but rather a dynamic variety of intriguing views bringing a unique atmosphere to each and every room.
Project name: Villa Wienberg Location: Aarhus, Denmark Engineer: Tri-consult A/S Architect: Friis & Moltke A/S and Wienberg Architects/ www.wienbergarchitects.dk Area: 184 m2 Construction period: 2007-2008 Text by: Susanne Holte
This soil treatment centre in Copenhagen by Danish studio Christensen & Co was designed to resemble the mounds of earth being used to sculpt the landscape of a developing harbour-side community (+ slideshow).
Soil Centre Copenhagen is located on the coastal edge of Nordhavn, a new urban quarter underway to the north of Copenhagen’s centre. It was designed by Christensen & Co as a facility for decontaminating soil excavated from construction sites across the city.
The building has an angular profile, which slopes up from the ground to create the shape of two connected hills, and its outer walls are clad with rusty panels of pre-weathered steel.
“Soil Centre Copenhagen grows out of the landscape with its characteristic shape and rusty red facades,” said the architects. “The building has a distinctive silhouette against the vast horizon, and is an integrated part of the landscape and an obviously man-made object.”
The roof surfaces are covered with plants and grasses, intended to fit in with ponds and shrubs already present nearby. The architects also hope that in time trees and bushes will grow over the structure.
“In this sense the building makes up for the piece of the landscape it has occupied, and will help preserve the natural biodiversity of the area,” they said.
There are more plants inside the building, where the architects have added a living wall and a row of trees inside a double-height entrance lobby.
Offices and laboratories are arranged around this space, while garage and workshop areas are positioned on either side.
Wooden shelving grids are build into the walls to provide storage and seating areas in various spaces and skylights help to bring daylight through the interior.
Here’s a project description from Christensen & Co:
Soil Centre Copenhagen
Between the sky and the ocean
On the edge of Øresund, where the sky meets the ocean behind the Freeport and the Container Terminal lies Copenhagen Municipality’s new soil treatment centre, Soil Centre Copenhagen. It is here millions of cubic metres of dug up soil from construction projects and metro building sites around Copenhagen create new ground for Copenhagen’s new urban area Nordhavn.
The landscape at Nordhavn is flat and makes for a fascinating and ever-changing scenery, giant piles of soil and huge excavations. To the north-west of Soil Treatment Centre, Copenhagen, the landscape is contrastingly lush with little green hills, shrubbery and little ponds and lakes fringed with rushes. A wild nature site filled with sounds from birds, swans and mewing seagulls. It is also here the protected European Green Toad, has made a new home for itself.
With this very unique context Soil Centre Copenhagen grows out of the landscape with its characteristic shape and rusty red facades. The building has a distinctive silhouette against the vast horizon, and is an integrated part of the landscape and an obviously man-made object.
The facades are clad in stretch metal made from rusty weathering steel. On the roof tall grass and, in time, even smallish bushes and trees will grow. In this sense the building makes up for the piece of the landscape it has occupied, and will help preserve the natural biodiversity of the area. The weathering steel is protected by a red layer of rust, visually connecting it to the area and the ambitious environmental profile of the building.
The building consists of an office section for employees, laboratories, dressing rooms, two large workshops, garages and storage spaces. At the centre of the building the office section makes for a peaceful oasis with a view of the surroundings through the carefully placed windows, each offering beautifully framed views of the landscape or the waters of Øresund. At the same time, placement of the windows in the facade optimises the use of natural light, so the character and quality of that light becomes an integrated part of the architectural narrative.
A green and luxuriant interior
Two large indoor trees, along with the lush plant wall, create a green and delightful internal contrast to the dusty and rough exterior environment. A large number of roof windows shower the building with a pleasant light from above, and along with the facade windows, allows for some very good natural light conditions in the office section. The floor plan encourages interdisciplinary synergy between the centre’s very different departments ranging from engineers to excavator drivers.
The first DGNB certified building in Nordhavn
Soil Centre Copenhagen is the first DGNB certified building in Denmark built after the test phase has ended and the very first certified building in Nordhavn. It is a zero-energy building, which combines passive and active energy efficiency measures based on an overall view, which encompasses energy efficiency, building materials and social aspects. The design of the building results in an extremely low energy consumption and the necessary energy is provided using geothermal energy from the many kilometres of piping underneath the black asphalt in front of the building as well as solar panels and solar cells integrated into the slanting roof surfaces.
Soil Centre Copenhagen General contractor: CPH City & Port Development User: Copenhagen Municipality. The Technical and Environmental Administration Area: 1,800 m2. Architect: Christensen & Co Engineer: Grontmij
Ben Davidson of London studio Rodić Davidson Architects designed this garden shed in Cambridge, England, to the exact proportions of his grandfather’s old workbench and added pegboard walls for displaying a collection of handmade tools (+ slideshow).
The Garden Workshop is one of two wooden sheds that Rodić Davidson Architects has built at the end of Davidson’s garden. The other functions as a home office, but this one is used by the architect as a model-making workshop.
The building is designed around the size of two components. The first is a series of glazed panels the architect had been given for free by a contractor several years earlier, and the second is an old workbench originally belonging to his grandfather that he inherited after the recent death of his father.
“My grandfather was a carpenter by trade and extraordinarily talented; he should have been a cabinet maker,” said Davidson. “I recall many summers in my early teens, being packed off for two weeks to go and stay with my grandparents in Norfolk and spending the entire time with him in his workshop.”
“My father sadly died in 2012 and this led me to inherit my grandfather’s workbench and tools which had sat in the garage, unused and rusting, for almost 30 years since his death in 1985,” he added.
The building has a simple wooden box frame that is left exposed inside, fitting exactly around the old workbench.
The square recesses around the frame are infilled with pieces of lacquered pegboard that accommodate hooks for hanging the old tools, many of which Davidson says he made with his grandfather at the age of ten.
Modular wooden shelving boxes also slot into the recesses, while an extra workbench made from maple runs along one wall beneath a window.
Two skylights offer a view up to the sky through the canopy of an adjacent tree and a concrete base gives the shed its floor.
The exterior is clad with black-stained plywood over a layer of rubber waterproofing.
Photography is by the architect.
Here’s a project description from Rodić Davidson Architects:
Garden Studio, Cambridge
A black timber garden studio and model-making workshop
Hidden in amongst the trees at the end of a long garden in Cambridge, we have designed and built two separate timber-framed buildings for use as a home office/studio and a model-making workshop. The structures are clad in vertical black-stained softwood boarding of varying widths – wider on the studio and narrower on the workshop. On the studio, the cladding forms a continuous rainscreen and wraps the entire building. The larger studio building is very highly insulated (using 150mm Cellotex combined with Super Tri-Iso) and incorporates a super efficient air-source heat pump. Calculations indicate that the annual heating bill will cost less than £21 in electricity costs. The building is wrapped with a black timber rain screen over a complete wrapper of a rubber membrane for water-proofing.
Free glass
We moved to Cambridge in 2008 and, not long after having done so, I was offered – free of charge – some large Velfac glazed panels from a contractor that we were working with who had incorrectly ordered them for a new school. If I hadn’t have taken them, they would have gone in the skip.
The panels arrived at my new house in Cambridge on the same day that we moved in. For 4 years they sat in the garden under a blue tarpaulin.
Beautiful tools to restore and display
My father sadly died in 2012 and this led me to inherit my grandfather’s workbench and tools which had sat in his garage, unused and rusting, for almost 30 years since his death in 1985. My grandfather was a carpenter by trade and extraordinarily talented: he should have been a cabinet maker. I recall many summers, in my early teens, being packed off for two weeks to go and stay with my grandparents in Norfolk and spending the entire time with him in his workshop.
The two events – my father’s death and came together and led me to design and build the workshop. The design was led by numerous very specific criteria: The size of my grandfathers workbench, the size and number of glass units, the wish to not only store – but to display the wonderful tools (most of which my grandfather had made – indeed some we made together when I was 10).
The final briefing constraint was the wish to build the buildings under Permitted Development.
Floor plan
The design
The workshop is made using a timber frame on a concrete base. The frame is set out precisely so as to form internal square sections. The timber is cheap 6×2 softwood used for stud work. The frame was clad with ply (2 sheets on the roof) and then cross battened and clad again with staggered roofing battens (50x25mm). Internally, pegboard was cut and placed between the stud work squares and the entire internal space was then prepared and sprayed with 7 coats of Morrells satin lacquer. This was extremely time consuming. Birch ply cupboards were then fitted into the openings.
Cross section
A workbench was made from maple accommodating a lower platform for the Meddings pillar drill and a sink. The elevation above the workbench is fully glazed and north facing.
Two roof lights were installed which look up into the canopy of the lime tree over.
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This series of images by architectural rendering studio Hayes Davidson envisages how London‘s skyline might look in 20 years time.
Over 200 towers with a height of 20 storeys or greater are planned in the UK capital over the next two decades and Hayes Davidson has visualised how these new buildings will appear alongside existing skyscrapers such as Renzo Piano’s The Shard and Norman Foster’s The Gherkin.
Existing view of London’s skyline from Waterloo Bridge
The images were created for an exhibition opening later this year at New London Architecture (NLA) entitled London’s Growing… Up! which will chart the growth of tall building construction in London since the 1960s and look at the impact skyscrapers will have on the city in the near future.
“As London’s population gets bigger and bigger, and new development for London takes place within the constraints of the green belt, we have to increase the density of the city,” said Peter Murray, who is chairman of NLA and the exhibition curator.
“This results in our buildings getting taller. The huge number of towers in the pipeline will have a significant impact on the look of London.”
Future view of London’s skyline from Waterloo Bridge
The exhibition opens to the public on 3 April 2014.
Here’s more information about the exhibition from NLA:
London’s Growing… Up! The rise and rise of London’s tall buildings
London’s skyline is currently going through a massive change. Over 200 towers are planned in the capital in an attempt to meet the needs of the capital’s growing population. So how will London’s skyline change in the next 20 years?
This April, New London Architecture (NLA) – London’s Centre for the Built Environment will explore this new skyline with London’s Growing… Up! Through the use of images, video, models, CGI’s and visitor interaction, the exhibition will present a past, present and future view of London’s skyline as the capital’s developers focus on building upwards rather than outwards.
Existing night view of London’s skyline from Waterloo Bridge
There are over 200 towers, each more than 20 storeys, currently planned in London, around 150 of them new residential blocks. London’s Growing… Up! offers a timely exploration into this hotly debated subject.
Since the emergence of skyscrapers in London in the 1960s, the capital’s skyline has changed irrevocably. Visitors will explore the history of London’s high‐rise architecture through images, models and construction videos, witnessing how iconic structures such as the Barbican and Centre Point set a precedent for the future of the skyline. A series of panoramic views of London chart the ever‐changing landscape, from the 1960s through to the modern day and demonstrating how London will appear in 10 years time.
Famous structures including Canary Wharf, The Gherkin and The Shard are examined in the exhibition, looking at their context, their economic raison d’etre and the impact they have on our understanding of the city.
Future night view of London’s skyline from Waterloo Bridge
The exhibition will also explore the significant growth in high‐rise residential development. High‐rise residential was once only seen on council estates and glass skyscrapers were reserved for the business world, but the growing trend of luxury towers is currently providing the majority of new developments in the capital. Areas such as Nine Elms, Waterloo and White City will be explored, looking at why these new areas are attracting high‐rise development and how luxury and affordable residential can coincide in London’s new vertical city.
Visitors will be able to have their say on what should or shouldn’t be in the London skyline. Touch screen will enable guests to rewind time and fast‐forward to the future to see how London has, and will be, developed. Visitors will have the opportunity to remove or change the location of buildings they don’t like and even add buildings from other cities, making their own metropolis which will be posted onto the NLA’s Twitter feed.
Thursday 3 April – Thursday 12 June 2014 NLA, The Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT
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