Hasta La Ideas

Bamboo poles were used to clad the facade and surrounding walls of this house in the Philippines by Swiss-Filipino studio Atelier Sacha Cotture (+ slideshow).

The family home in the city of Parañaque is located in a residential neighbourhood and was designed by the Philippines office of Atelier Sacha Cotture. It wraps a central courtyard to restrict views of the interior from adjacent properties.

“The courtyard solution has been chosen for its qualities of efficiency and privacy,” said the architects. “This typology was widely used during the Spanish colonial era here in the Philippines.”

The street-facing facade presents a uniform surface of vertical bamboo poles that incorporates doors to the garage and the house’s main entrance.

Explaining the choice of bamboo, the architects said: “It is a low cost and sustainable material that grows intensively locally. This material has been historically used in the country for the fabrication of handicrafts, native architecture and utilitarian objects.”

The material was treated to protect it from mould and pests, before being stained and varnished to enrich its natural tone and increase its resilience.

The bamboo-covered doorway leads from the street into a dark corridor clad in a type of local granite called Araal, which is also used to cover chunky supporting columns at the ground floor level of the house.

The corridor is illuminated by a shimmering chandelier suspended from the ceiling and opens onto an uncovered courtyard with a lawn at its centre.

A wood-decked pathway crosses a narrow pond to lead into a foyer. It continues through to the main living spaces, which feature sliding glass doors framed in locally grown mahogany.

These ground floor areas, including the dining room, living room and kitchen, overlook the courtyard and the pond that runs along its back edge.

An outdoor dining area is sheltered beneath a walkway that connects the study on the first floor with a garden on the garage roof.

The first floor can be reached by a staircase made from wooden treads that cantilever from the wall of the living room. A family room and two bedrooms are also contained on the first floor, with another staircase featuring a vertical bamboo screen ascending to the top storey.

The master bedroom on the top floor has a wall made from a mosaic of coconut bark tiles and sliding doors which lead onto a terrace that wraps around the corner and houses a separate salon.

Photography is by Luca Tettoni.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

House in Parañaque

Location

The house is located in the residential subdivision of Better Living in Paranaque City, Metro Manila. The area features a low density neighbourhood of houses and low rise buildings.

Program

The program is a 465sqm family house on a 360sqm lot. The entrance foyer, garage and service area face the access road while dining, living room and kitchen overlook the private courtyard. The first floor hosts a family room and a private quarter with two bedrooms along with a guest-office room with access to a roof garden. The master bedroom occupies the second floor with its own salon, changing room and bathroom.

Planning

The house has 250sqm of landscaped courtyard, accessible roof garden and terrace.The courtyard solution has been chosen for its qualities of efficiency and privacy. This typology has been widely used during Spanish colonial era here in the Philippines.

Materials

Bamboo is the chosen material for this project. It is a low cost and sustainable material that grows intensively locally. This material has been historically used in the country for the fabrication of handicrafts, native architecture and utilitarian objects.The bamboo poles are treated against moulds and pests then stained and varnished. They are protected by ledges that also prevent the direct sunlight from penetrating into the house, while on the top floor the layers of bamboos are doubled.

The courtyard is bordered by a pond running all its length with a vertical water feature facing the living and dining room. Small shells and crushed Adobe stone are incrusted into the render. At night, the wall lighted up from the pond.

The base of the main house and the entrance foyer is clad with Araal, local granite. All windows, cabinets and beds have been designed and fabricated with Mahogany wood, also available locally.

Stones for the bathrooms and living room come from the nearby island of Romblon. There is also a wall featured made of coconut bark in the master bedroom. Capiz is used for most of the lamps.

Energy

Electricity is partially provided by solar panels placed on the top roof.

Completion date: June 2011
Land area: 360sqm
Project area: 465sqm
Client: Private
Address: 95 Luxembourg St., Better Living subd. Paranaque City, Philippines
Styling and furnishing: Milo Naval

The post Bamboo cladding surrounds house in the
Philippines by Atelier Sacha Cotture appeared first on Dezeen.

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News: Architectural Association graduate John Naylor has won this year’s Foster + Partners Prize with his proposal to introduce bamboo to the construction industry in Haiti, which is still struggling to recover from the 2010 earthquake.

Presented annually to an Architectural Association diploma student who best addresses themes of sustainability and infrastructure, the prize is awarded to John Naylor for his Bamboo Lakou project, which combines a sustainable bamboo-growing infrastructure with the development of the vernacular “Lakou” communal courtyard typology.

Naylor explains that Haiti’s current construction practices contributed to the massive devastation caused by the earthquake, which caused the collapse of 280,000 buildings and killed 316,000 people, even though a far more powerful quake in Chile caused the deaths of just 525. “This was a disaster of Haiti’s lack of lightweight building materials, working practices, and construction, not nature,” he says.

As Haiti has massive deforestation, Naylor wants to establish a long-term bamboo planting strategy and then gradually introduce it as an earthquake-resistant replacement for concrete.

“In a proud culture such as Haiti, preaching a new form of building to the construction sector is riddled with problems,” he explains, citing low skills, lack of equipment and illiteracy as obstacles. “This rematerialisation of a construction industry and subsequent demand aims to engender bamboo growth in Haiti.”

Naylor proposes a four-stage strategy that will begin with assessing the existing stock of bamboo available. A small group of workers would learn the techniques and as the material became more widely available the systems could be introduced nationwide to construct thousands of new Lakou courtyard houses.

AA director Brett Steele commented: “John Naylor’s project demonstrates the ways in which infrastructural ideas and architectural imagination might today expand beyond the cliches of Modernism to become life itself, literally breathing life into communities, cities and entire countries, today and long into the future.”

Past winners of the Foster + Partners Prize include a community for scientists in the treetops of the Amazon rainforest and a sanitation infrastructure concept, also for Haiti. See more projects by Architectural Association students.

See more stories about bamboo in architecture and design, including prototypes for modular homes in Vietnam.

Here’s a project description from John Naylor:

John Naylor – Bamboo Lakou

At the local time of 16:53 on 12th January 2010 an earthquake of 7.0 hit one of the most densely populated suburbs of Haiti’s capital, Port au Prince.

An estimated three million people were affected by the quake. 250,000 residences, 30,000 commercial buildings collapsed, a million people homeless and 316,000 people dead. One month later an earthquake 500 times more powerful, hit central Chile resulting in the deaths of 525. This was a disaster of Haiti’s lack of lightweight building materials, working practices, and construction, not nature.

Set in the context of Haiti, a country with massive deforestation and threatened by earthquakes, only heavy concrete and cement are the building materials of choice. As an integral part of a wider reforestation strategy, this project merges a sustainable bamboo infrastructure along with the vernacular ‘Lakou’ communal courtyard typology.

This aims to encourage the physical use of bamboo in the Haitian construction sector. The material properties of bamboo provide design opportunities to provide resilience to hurricanes and earthquakes, and affords an assembly logic which intends to communicate a parallel understanding of bamboo’s application beyond the building site. This rematerialisation of a construction industry and subsequent demand, aims to engender bamboo growth in Haiti, a material with wider ecological benefits.

Introducing any new practice of working is difficult in any field. In a proud culture such as Haiti preaching a new form of building to the construction sector is riddled with problems. Low skills, lack of equipment and illiteracy, not to mention theft from a project, whether political corruption or material theft on site, all cause an environment not in a position to implement quality output which is all the more dangerous in Haiti, a site of huge seismic and natural threat. Materials in this location are defined by skill and natural resources. A lack of timber due to deforestation has resulted in concrete becoming the 21st Century vernacular and as a result any skills associated with construction have been aligned to work with concrete.

Initially the ‘Lakou’ courtyard house forms the fundamental urban block and this itself is broken into four stages.

(1) Occupational Strategy; which aims to determine a means of developing solutions of occupation for the local population grounded in the existing Haitian ‘Lakou’ typology of courtyard living.

(2) Material Strategy; looks at what is available in Haiti right now and speculates on how what is available can be compounded in the short term with bamboo. The typology and properties of materials will then determine any subsequent strategies.

(3) Structural Strategy; looks at how bamboo can be implemented into a structural system which allows for the Haitian vernacular ‘Lakou’ design to be implemented. The structural strategy also looks at the limits of design versus materials in seismic areas and tests compounds of materials as well as seismic building techniques to develop a low cost, easily buildable structural system with proven seismic credentials.

(4) Construction and Assembly Strategy; will produce an assembly logic explicit enough to work initially in a workforce mostly illiterate and yet can result in the successful implementation of aspects 1, 2, and 3. It is also designed that this logic has aspects of construction and material awareness which can propagate nationwide. This being either skill or outsourcing construction beyond the proposed new urbanism. This aims to create standards, knowledge, respect for the material and new economic opportunities.

This technical strategy forms an integral part of making a new timber and bamboo urbanism possible in Haiti. Through initially encouraging the physical use of bamboo in the Haitian construction sector at the building scale, the material properties of bamboo provide design opportunities to provide resilience to hurricanes and earthquakes, and affords an assembly logic which intends to communicate a parallel understanding of bamboo’s application beyond the building site.

This rematerialisation of a construction industry and subsequent demand, aims to engender bamboo growth in Haiti, a material with wider ecological benefits and lay the foundations of a new biodiverse dynamic Port au Prince.

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wins Foster + Partners Prize 2013 appeared first on Dezeen.