Hasta La Ideas

This X-shaped house by architects Cadaval & Sola-Morales hangs over the edge of a hillside on the outskirts of Barcelona (+ slideshow).

Aptly named X House, the two-storey residence is based on a simple rectilinear form but features four triangular recesses that create the X-shaped plan. One of these recesses allows the structure to avoid a nearby tree, while two others provide windows that avoid overlooking neighbouring houses and the fourth lengthens the glazed facade to offer a wider view of the surrounding landscape.

“The form is not a priori, but an effort to give a unitary response that satisfies each of the questions that rose up in the design process,” explains Cadaval & Solà-Morales.

The walls without glazing appear as solid, undecorated concrete and were set using a single-sided formwork. “[The house] accumulates in its skin the diverse and continuous knowledge acquired within the process of construction,” say the architects.

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

Residents enter the house on the top floor by following a staircase around the edge of the pine tree and locating a door that is two metres below street level, alongside a garage for parking two cars.

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

A bedroom, bathroom and study occupy two arms of the cross on this floor and overlook a double-height living room on the storey below.

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

Downstairs, the living room and kitchen wrap around the facade to offer views out across over the hillside.

“X House uses form to qualify spaces of very different nature and provide them with an individual character, always incorporating landscape as a main actor,” add the architects.

Photography is by Sandra Pereznieto, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s some more information from Cadaval & Solà-Morales:

The Power of Form

The X House project aims to solve by the definition of a system, language, or even through a unique form, a number of inquiries that rise up when we read the specific given site: how to protect and give protagonism to an impressive pine, that is located on the top of the site, and that makes access and approximation to the house extremely complex from the street; how to avoid deciding between the views to the sea and those to the mountains, and allow both visions in opposite directions; how to neutralize through form the presence of the contiguous constructions, to build up a fake isolation that denies the neighbours; how to double the main views, permitting quality frontal views from the front and the rear of the house; how to resolve so many a priories with a simple movement that answers to all of the previous aims without prioritizing nor explicitly formulating a response to any of them.

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

The form, a unique form, is the result of a long process of search of individual answers to each of those challenges; thus, the form is not a priori, but an effort to give a unitary response that satisfies each of the questions that rose up in the design process. The X House is also a constructive exploration: a technique regularly used for the infrastructural construction such as bridges and tunnels, is here developed to meet the architectural scale, aiming to incorporate efficiency, and reduction of costs to the construction.

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

The use of a mixed technique based on the application of a high-density concrete allows projecting the material at a high pressure to a single-sided formwork, and to acquire high structural resistance in extremely short periods of time. Thus, it is possible to project continuous 6m high walls without the need to use a two-sided formwork (which would be the regular construction procedure). The house is therefore a living expression of the specific technique, and accumulates in its skin the diverse and continuous knowledge acquired within the process of construction.

The house is located on the upper part of a hill in Cabrils, in the outskirts of Barcelona. The site, with remarkable views and an important slope, is accessed from a single street located at the top of the site. The location of the house within the site responds to the aim to minimize excavation and optimize, within possible, the use of the non-occupied land.

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

The access to the house is two meters depressed from the street, and the project searches to empathise through the use of blank walls the desire to be anchored in the site and to disappear from the street; the project clearly prioritizes the façades and views overseeing the valley.

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

The house has two floors. The top floor, beyond incorporating a parking and allowing the access to the house, is conceived as a private suite of the owners: main room, with dresser and washroom / toilet, and spacious studio. In the lower floor there is a clear distinction between the front and the rear of the house; the front part has a totally open and public nature, build up with a living area in a double high space next to a kitchen-dining room articulated around a significant marble table, 8m long.

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

The rear part of the lower floor holds the rooms and service areas, which through the patios are given direct and protected views to the valley, the sea and the mountain.

Mainly, the project of the X House uses form to qualify spaces of very different nature and provide them with an individual character, always incorporating landscape as a main actor. Beyond the effective spatial arrangement at the front of the house, the views are the protagonist in each space. And learning from Dan Graham’s reflections, the image of the sea is always present when observing the mountain, and the mountain appears as a reflection when looking at the sea: a perceptive quality that enriches the experience of the house.

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

Name of the project: X House
Name of the Office: Cadaval & Solà-Morales
Project: Eduardo Cadaval & Clara Solà-Morales

Above: photograph is by Iwan Baan

Collaborators: Bruno Pereira, Pamela Diaz De Leon, Daniela Tramontozzi, Manuel Tojal Building Engineering: Joaquin Pelaez
Structural Engineering: Carles Gelpi.
Construction Company: TOPCRET constructions

Location: Cabrils, Barcelona, España
Area: 300sqm
Date: Project: 2009. Construction 2012

Above: site plan

Above: upper floor plan

Above: lower floor plan

Above: front elevation

Above: side elevation

Above: rear elevation

Above: side elevation

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Cadaval & Solà-Morales appeared first on Dezeen.

The Barcelona Pavilion as you’ve never seen it before: Spanish architect Andrés Jaque has filled Mies van der Rohe’s iconic structure with junk from its basement (+ slideshow).

Alongside domestic cleaning tools such as a vacuum cleaner, Jaque has found a number of items that reveal traces of the building’s history, not just from its reconstruction in the 1980s but dating back to its original opening in 1929.

The Barcelona Pavilion was dismantled in 1930, less than a year after its completion, but was reconstructed over fifty years later using black and white photographs as reference.

The basement area was deliberately created as a hidden storage and maintenance room. Most visitors to the pavilion are unaware of its existence, so Jaque imagined the things inside it to be like ghosts.

For the exhibition, entitled PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society, the architect presents each previously concealed item with a detailed description of its history. Several pieces of broken glass show early attempts to match the shade of the original windows in the Carpet Room, while a stack of cushions reveal how many visitors have sat on the iconic Barcelona chairs, wearing them out so that they need regular replacing.

A display of flags denotes the Federal Republic of Germany, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain and the European Union, all of which have been flown on the Pavilion’s flagpoles at different stages in its history.

Other items on show include a swinging door that had to be replaced after a breakage, salt once used to keep the pool water clear and cracked travertine from the pavilion’s floor.

The exhibition is the latest in a series at the Barcelona Pavilion, following an installation by Japanese architects SANAA and others by Ai Weiwei, Antoni Muntadas and Miralles-Tagliabue. It will remain open to visitors until 27 February.

See more stories about Mies van der Rohe on Dezeen »

Here’s some more information from Andrés Jaque:

Andrés Jaque. Phantom. Mies as Rendered Society Intervention at Mies van der Rohe Pavilion

PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society is an intervention created by Andrés Jaque at the Barcelona Pavilion, resulting from the research which Jaque has carried out over the last two years, at the invitation of the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and Banc Sabadell Foundation. A significant portion of the items which are safeguarded in the basement upon which the Pavilion was built have been distributed at different locations throughout the Pavilion space. This basement is presented as the Pavilion’s ghost (PHANTOM), which had never drawn the attention of people who came to visit and study the Pavilion, but for which Jaque acknowledges an important role in the emergence of his architecture as a social type of construction. The team responsible for reconstruction of the Pavilion of ‘29 thought that the basement would facilitate the control and maintenance of its installations. It also decided that entry should be made difficult so as to avoid its future use as an exhibition space in which Mies and the Pavilion were explained. In the end, the basement has been used to store all of the material witnesses which provide an account of the social fabric involved in a shared project: every day reinterpreting the May morning on which the Pavilion of ‘29 was first opened.

The basement, like the portrait of Dorian Grey, contains everything that makes it possible to see the Pavilion as a monumental collective construction. However, it is concealed so as not to diminish the illusion that the product was received directly from an enlightened hand, that of Mies, who worked in Barcelona in 1929. The basement still houses the phantom public: a reference to the well-known text by Walter Lippman ‘The Phantom Public’ (New Jersey, 1925), from the societies which contribute to creating the Pavilion on a daily basis.

Above: exhibition plan – click above for larger image

As Mies himself pointed out, architecture is built in such a way that what is visible conforms that which is hidden. The Barcelona Pavilion is an arena of confrontation organized in the form of a two-story building, in which two interdependent notions of the political lie in dispute.

Above: exhibition contents – click above for larger image

The well-lit upper floor revives foundational concepts of the political (in which the extraordinary, origins and essences lead the way for that which is common), while the dark basement was constructed using contingencies and provisional agreements. The upper floor is physically transparent, but it conceals the social pacts which occur inside, to provide access to an experience of everyday ‘incalculability’. The lower floor is opaque, yet it is the place where the contracts, experiments and disputes which construct the Pavilion gain transparency. The Pavilion constructs a belief through the way in which its two floors operate: ‘the exceptional emerges in the absence of the ordinary.’ The intervention is based on the suspicion that the recognition and rearticulation of these two spheres can contribute new possibilities in which architecture finds answers to contemporary challenges.

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by Andrés Jaque appeared first on Dezeen.

Polished mosaic floors reveal the original room layout of this renovated apartment in Barcelona by local studio Vora Arquitectura (+ slideshow).

During the refurbishment Vora Arquitectura removed several existing walls, before constructing wooden partitions that would highlight the contrast between new and old structures.

“We believe that refurbishment work must make the most of the existing elements,” said architects Pere Buil, Jordi Fornells and Toni Riba.

They added: “This is the case in the urban fabric, which is a conglomerate of different historical times. These different eras contaminate each other in a complex and ambiguous whole that can be touching.”

Only some of the flat’s colourful tiled floors were in good enough condition to be restored. Others were too badly damaged and needed replacing, but instead of aligning tiles with the new layout the architects chose to follow the outlines of rooms that existed before.

“Although the pre-existence was not of exceptional historical or heritage value, it was perfectly reusable and attractive,” said the architects. “It has led us to a strategy of reuse and transformation, with fuzzy boundaries.”

Brick walls inside the apartment are cleaned and painted white, while the wooden walls are coloured to match.

Each of the new partitions is made of several panels that can be opened and closed in various configurations.

Behind them, the architects have inserted a kitchen, a bathroom, a utility room and two bedroom storage areas.

Above: floor plan

The apartment is located in Barcelona’s Gràcia neighbourhood and was completed at the end of 2011.

Above: previous floor plan

Photography is by Adrià Goula.

Above: axonometric diagram

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by Vora Arquitectura appeared first on Dezeen.

Eslava&Sauras of Valencia has redesigned the European headquarters of Velcro in Barcelona, using the brand’s handy hook-and-loop fasteners to construct flexible screens and lampshades (+ slideshow).

“We wanted to convey the new values of the Velcro brand through the use of open, transparent spaces,” explain designers Luis Eslava and Lorena Sauras.”The goal was to achieve a creative, modern, and dynamic environment, including movable walls that combine spaces and a bright, upbeat atmosphere where white dominates a few splashes of colour.”

The designers used a spherical mould to build the red globe-like Velcro lampshades, which hang in the corridor and reception spaces.

Glass screens separate the reception from a small exhibition area, while Velcro pads on the wall display a map of the world.

Planting boxes line the edge of the long corridor, leading through to a row of three glazed conference rooms.

Here, the designers have used Velcro strips to create semi-transparent screens that can be easily adapted or moved to provide more or less privacy.

Other projects we’ve featured that use Velcro include a set of stick-like partitions and a collection of lighting.

Other well-known brand headquarters we’ve featured include the Amsterdam offices for drinks brand Red Bull and the headquarters of cake brand Sara Lee in Cologne.

See more office interiors on Dezeen »

Photography is by Jordi Adriá.

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by Eslava&Sauras appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Wire: Spanish lighting brand Santa & Cole has launched a lawsuit accusing the state of Qatar of copying street lighting devised for Barcelona by Catalan designer Beth Galí in 1996.

920 lights have been installed by the Ashghal public authority along Al Waab Street in Doha (top and above), which Santa & Cole claim are counterfeits of their Latina street lamps designed by Galí (below). They also claim the designs incude low-quality light sources that dazzle drivers and thin steel that represents a structural safety hazard.

Read more on the campaign website, Facebook page or Twitter.

See more stories about street lighting on Dezeen »

Here are some more details from Santa & Cole:

Lawsuit against Qatar due to counterfeiting 1,000 streetlamps and threatening the intellectual property of their designer

The public company Ashghal from Qatar forged the “Latina” streetlamp, designed by the architect Beth Galí, and manufactured and marketed by the company Santa & Cole. Nearly 1,000 forged units were installed on Al Waab Street, the main street in Doha.

Beth Galí has lodged a lawsuit in the Courts of Barcelona to report the case, in which she expressed her “full confidence in justice to resolve a large-scale forgery case that is threatening the creativity of professionals and European companies”.

BCD and Santa & Cole, as well as several personalities working in architecture and design in Barcelona, went to the courts to show their support and to make the facts public.

Javier Nieto, Chairman of Santa & Cole: “It is unbelievable that a country such as Qatar could commit such a serious case of forgery”
Pau Herrera, Chairman of BCD: “Protecting design as a factor of innovation is essential to create economic and social value in Europe”

One of the biggest cases of public counterfeiting in the history of Design

The architect Beth Galí, the Chairman of Santa & Cole, Javier Nieto Santa, and the Chairman of BCD (Barcelona Design Centre), Pau Herrera, invited the media to Courts of Law in Barcelona to publicly announce the large-scale forgery committed by Qatar.

The meeting, carried out at the doors of the Courts of Law in Barcelona, was held due to the lawsuit for pain and suffering lodged on June 29 by Beth Galí against Qatar, which forged the “Latina” streetlamp via the public company Ashghal in 2006, designed by her and manufactured and marketed by the company Santa & Cole.

This case of large-scale forgery is especially relevant as the offender is a sovereign state, in addition to the case being particularly large and the development of events.
The crime committed by Qatar can be seen along the 10 kilometres of Al Waab Street, the main street in the capital of Qatar, Doha, where the public company Ashghal installed approximately 900 forgeries of the “Latina” streetlamp.

Although the case is being made public now, the facts go back to April 2005, when Ashghal requested Santa & Cole to complete an entire lighting project for Al Waab Street for the 14th Asian Games (Doha, 2006). After the Qatari authorities chose the “Latina” streetlamp, which was adapted beforehand to meet the needs of the project, and having submitted five different projects with models and technical specifications, Ashghal requested a local company to make nearly 1,000 copies of the “Latina” streetlamp in 2006.

After six years of trying to reach an amicable agreement, and after the Qatari government refused the arbitration of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the case is now in the hands of the Courts of Barcelona and one of the largest acts of piracy in the history of design committed by a sovereign state is now being made public.

In this context, the claimant, Beth Galí, expressed her “full confidence in the Spanish legal system to resolve a blatant case of large-scale forgery” at the courts.
Supporting the business sector and design BCD (Barcelona Design Centre) and Santa & Cole, as well as other personalities working in the design and architecture sector in Barcelona, were with Beth Galí during the submission of the first lawsuit to show their support and to make the facts public.

Javier Nieto Santa, the Chairman of Santa & Cole, stated to the media that the “Latina” streetlamp case perplexed him, ensuring that “it is unbelievable that Qatar, a sovereign nation and member of the WIPO and the WTO, bound by the Paris Convention and the TRIPS Agreement, could commit such a large case of forgery, which undoubtedly shows a complete disregard for copyright”.

In this regard, Pau Herrera, Chairman of BCD, ensured that “protecting design as a factor of innovation is essential to create economic and social value, and represents one of the most important assets of professionals and European companies”. Herrera added that cases such as this one “do not only damage our business, but also the city model Barcelona wants to project”.

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1000 street lamps” appeared first on Dezeen.