Hasta La Ideas

Dutch studio Barcode Architects has renovated a house in Belgium to make room to display a collection of hunting trophies.

Named Markthuis, the two-storey residence has been reconfigured to create a central atrium, helping to bring more daylight onto a double-height “exhibition wall” of paintings and antlers.

Barcode Architects replaced the original staircase with a freestanding wooden structure that folds back and forth through the atrium between clear-glass balustrades.

A frosted glass wall separates the staircase from the entrance lobby just in front, where a bearskin rug is spread across the floor.

Beyond the atrium, most of the original partitions have been removed to create a large open-plan space on both storeys. At ground-floor level, this room functions as reception room for entertaining guests, while the floor above is used as a general living and dining room.

“From any point in the villa there is a clear view out, to the sky and the green,” says Barcode Architects. “Combined with the ‘lofty’ floor plan, it delivers the house with a unique transparency and quality.”

Other recently completed house renovations include a converted stable block in England and an overhauled townhouse in the Netherlands. See more renovations on Dezeen.

Photography is by Christian van der Kooij.

Here’s some more information from Barcode Architects:

Barcode Architects ‘Markthuis’ is completed

Barcode Architects design for the extension and renovation of ‘Markthuis’ is completed. The design is driven by the desire to optimise the daylighting in the house and the wish of the client to reserve a prominent place for his large collection of art and hunting trophies.

In order to maximize the spatial experience most of the interior walls are removed to remain with one open living space extending over the first two floors of the villa. Downstairs are comfortable spaces for receiving guests while on the upper first floor more intimate and private areas with an open plan kitchen, study, and lounge area are situated.

A large atrium connects the two layers and provides space for an exclusive, double high exhibition wall with an impressive amount of artefacts. The wooden staircase is placed as a freestanding piece of furniture within the vide, on one side guided by a 6 meter tall piece of glass. The glazed element separates the kitchen and the entrance lobby from the rest of the house and offers exciting plays of light and shadow.

Notice: Barcode Architects
Location: Belgium
Stage: Realized
Client: Private
Area: 400 sqm

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Barcode Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

A five-sided pavilion made from pale sandy brickwork leads inside this former textile factory in Kortrijk that Belgian studio 51N4E has converted into an arts centre.

The Buda Art Centre accommodates studio and exhibition spaces for artists in residence across all three floors of the old Budafabriek, the last remaining structure of the Desmet-Dejaeghere textile factory on Buda Island.

The architects were keen to retain traces of the building’s history, so they left much of the interior unchanged and concentrated on inserting just two new pentagonal spaces.

The first pentagon is the pale-brick entrance pavilion, which contrasts with the dark red tones of the existing factory buildings. The structure twists away from the neighbouring facades and points out towards the road, but it has no roof, encouraging anyone inside to look straight up to the sky.

“The shape [of the pavilion] creates a friction between the existing buildings and the new intervention,” 51N4E‘s Paul Steinbrück told Dezeen. “Even though it gets very close to the surrounding buildings, it doesn’t touch them at any point. It is not an open space and not a building.”

Above: photograph is by Paul Steinbrueck

For the second pentagon, the architects hollowed out a space at the centre of the factory to create a triple-height atrium connecting all three floors. A new staircase winds around the walls, while clerestory glazing and a large skylight brings natural light through to the studios and galleries. “The vertical space creates a visual understanding of the building,” added Steinbrück.

Stairs also lead up to the roof the building, where an expansive roof terrace offers a view of the River Leie and the city skyline beyond.

“The Buda Art Centre is a new type of cultural space,” conclude the architects. “Making reference to its past, it remains a workshop of production. The warm palette of colours and the series of rather informal spaces invite people to appropriate and discover the building for their own production, exhibition and casual interaction.”

Above: photograph is by Paul Steinbrueck

Also this week, Czech studio Atelier Hoffman revealed images of a riverside coal mill converted into a studio and exhibition space. Other artists’ studios we’ve featured include a pointy gallery and studio in Japan and a series of cabin-like studios on a picturesque Canadian island. See more artists’ studios on Dezeen.

Photography is by Filip Dujardin, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s some more information from 51N4E:

Buda Art Centre
51N4E

The last remaining textile factory on Buda Island – an area destined to become the cultural heart of the city – has been transformed into studios and exhibition spaces for artists in residence. This large volume, situated in the middle of a city block, has been adapted through two main interventions.

Above: photograph is by Paul Steinbrueck

The first hollows out a large void in the centre of the building, bringing daylight deep into the vast floor plan. This pentagonal void houses a public staircase that gives access to a diverse range of spaces on four levels: a laboratory for manufacturing, multifunctional spaces of varying sizes and lighting conditions, music venues and a roof terrace. The biggest part of the structure is reused. Besides saving resources, the reuse allows for a large cultural building within a limited budget.

The second intervention adds an open pavilion as an entrance hall from the street. Built from the yellow brick discovered in the original interior, this pavilion becomes the new facade of the complex: the tip of the iceberg. The pavilion itself functions as an antechamber, giving a foretaste of events inside.

The Buda Art Centre is a new type of cultural space. Making reference to its past, it remains a workshop of production. The materials and details make it an approachable space for all kinds of activities and users. The warm palette of colours and the series of rather informal spaces invite people to appropriate and discover the building for their own production, exhibition, and casual interaction.

While the majority of the building is hidden from its surrounding context, the roof terrace provides a sudden confrontation with the city of Kortrijk. The building is a tool to look, not an object to look at. It avoids becoming an image but instead creates an environment.

Project name: Buda Art Centre
Name of building in use: Budafabriek
Location: Kortrijk, Belgium

Programme: exhibition & event facilities, artists’ studios
Built surface: 4.240 m²
Budget: € 2.000.000

Design period: 2005 (competition) – 2007
Construction period: 2010 – 2012

Above: section – click for larger image

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by 51N4E appeared first on Dezeen.

Belgian design studio Pinkeye has combined a laundrette, a cafe and a hairdressing salon to create a place where customers can get a drink or a haircut while waiting for their washing.

Located in Ghent, Wasbar is the first in a chain of stores proposed in different Belgian cities. Washing machines line the edge of the room, while pastel-coloured cafe furniture fills the centre and two hairdressing stations are located at the back.

Pinkeye developed the concept searching for a better solution to the “garish strip-lighting” and “soundcloud din” of everyday laundrettes. At Wasbar, visitors are free to relax while they wait for the end of the washing cycle.

Each washing machine has a name inscribed on the wall above it and all the pipes are tucked away out of sight. “There’s nothing about a washing machine which says it has to stand in an unpleasant space,” explains Pinkeye’s Ruud Belmans.

Before the renovation, the building was used as a bookshop. The architects restored the original parquet flooring and added a coat of lacquer.

An assortment of mismatched drawers are mounted onto the walls, displaying price lists and acting as shelving for plants.

A graphic logo emblazoned with a clothes peg and a bottle opener is also printed onto the walls. “For us it was important to create a solid identity,” said Belmans, explaining how this is integral to rolling the project out in other cities. “A couple of pieces of vintage furniture doesn’t cut it,” he added.

Another recently completed laundrette is Splash in Barcelona, where neon lights create the impression of a nightclub. We also recently featured a laundry building converted into a house.

See more architecture and interiors in Belgium »

Photography by Arne Jennard.

Here’s a project description from Pinkeye:

Sometimes a solution is so obvious that it makes you wonder how on earth nobody came up with it before. Wasbar, a brand-new launderette/meeting place, is a fine example: while their dirty laundry spins, the people of Ghent can enjoy a drink with friends or get a new hairdo in one of the two hairdresser’s chairs. The all-in-one concept was elaborated by Pinkeye.

The property that Wasbar occupies was formerly a bookshop. Its worn-out parquet floor was given a fresh coat of lacquer, while the ceiling with its decorative mouldings was left intact. The technical aspect presented the biggest challenge. “A launderette primarily requires plenty of brainwork and preparatory work: you need extra power to keep everything running and we wanted to hide the pipes and wiring from view,” Pinkeye’s creative director Ruud Belmans explains. The pipes and wiring are ensconced in the cellar, leaving just the rows of sleek machines in the space above. “There’s nothing about a washing machine which says it has to stand in an unpleasant space.”

Wasbar is perfectly suited to the student or young professional who is cramped for space – something that is not unknown in this Flemish city of students. ‘What does the student want?’ wondered the young, ambitious proprietors, Dries Henau and Yuri Vandenbogaerde. To spend their time more usefully, I mean more enjoyably, than sitting in a cheerless, bare space with garish strip-lighting in the midst of a ‘soundcloud’ din of whirring machines.

So Wasbar is quite the opposite: cosy and convivial. The washing theme plays the lead role in the elongated interior. The 18 ‘grand old ladies’, the washing machines that bear the names of a grandma, are lined up proudly along the wall. The tumble dryers take the names of grandpas, all crowdsurfed via Facebook.

Opposite the washing machines stands the colourfully tiled bar, with a collage of wooden drawers in various types of wood mounted on the wall, all recycled from discarded furniture from grandma’s day. The contents of the drawers serve as a display for the food menu, the washing prices and washing possibilities, the haircut options and so on. Some of the drawers have been reborn as alternative planters.

Besides employing this kind of upcycling, Pinkeye conceived a palette of toned-down salmon pink, pistachio, cornflower and royal blue, as well as a graphic identity in the form of a two-fold logo: a clothes-peg crossed with a bottle-opener. They created lampshades from coat-hangers and colourful clotheslines playfully break up the space. Second-hand chairs were given a lick of green or blue paint. Fashion designers Black Balloon created dapper laundry bags so that you don’t have to trawl through the city with a transparent plastic bag full of personal wares.

“For us it was important to create a solid identity,” says Belmans. “The concept will probably be rolled out in other cities in Belgium, which makes a distinctive image important. Then a couple of pieces of vintage furniture doesn’t cut it.” The designers have even thought about the potential laundry errors of the inexperienced washer: as a warning there are examples of what happens if you throw a red sock in with a white T-shirt or give your woollen sweater a hot wash.

Wasbar taps into the social trend of people wanting to commune again, to meet face-to-face instead of whiling away an hour with ‘wassups?’ on an iPhone. You can even practice your riffs on the Wasbar piano. And if you really want to, then you can stay in touch with the virtual world via wifi.

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by Pinkeye appeared first on Dezeen.

Shimmering aluminium skin and a gaping mouth give this ice rink in Belgium by architects L’Escaut the look of a whale (+ slideshow).

The architects describe their design as a “round, fluid and generous shape” that evolved to take the form of “a sea monster, a whale covered with 200,000 aluminum scales”.

The ice rink is located in the city of Liège and forms the new wing of the recently constructed Médiacité shopping complex that sits beside the river in Longdoz.

A protruding window with softly curving edges gives the whale a large eye, while the open mouth provides an entrance for cars to the parking area below the building.

The pedestrian entrance to the ice rink is located within the shopping centre and there are no additional windows, aside from a few small portholes along one edge.

The 1200-spectator ice rink fills the interior of the building and is large enough to host international competitions in speed skating, ice hockey and figure skating. Recycled seating furnishes the arena and was salvaged from the interior of an ice rink, just a short drive away in Coronmeuse.

Glue-laminated timber beams and joists give the structure its curved profile and wrap around a recreation room and cafe on the edge of the rink.

Brussels studio L’Escaut designed the building in collabotarion with local architects BE Weinand.

Whales have provided the inspiration for a number of designs in recent years, including a flying hotel proposed in France and a whale-shaped cultural complex in Hungary. We also recently featured a staircase concept inspired by a whale’s spine.

Above: exploded diagram – click above for larger image

Photography is by Marc Detiffe.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Olympic Ice Rink of Liège

At the root of the project: a round, fluid and generous shape, as a metaphor of a universe of ice. As its construction progressed: a sea monster, a whale covered with 200,000 aluminum scales.

Public/Private

The new ice rink of Liège is embedded into a crevice of the Médiacité, private real estate development project which came to redevelop a former industrial site on the right bank of the Meuse. It inherits several constraints that it clarifies in an autonomous and unitary form, until incorporating the access to the mall’s car park in its climax: the whale’s head.

As the opacity of the building is essential to insulate it from the heat, it is its entire body, by its nature, its material and its shape that means the relational dimension it wants to maintain with its environment. Moreover, the composition of its outer shell (on the mass-spring-mass principle) achieves a noise attenuation of 50db and protects the residents of the adjacent street.

Apart from a succession of portholes to the street sidewalk that suggest the activity of the strange object, the only transparent opening in the façade, is this bay as big as an antechamber that realizes a frank and larger indoor/outdoor contact.

On the one hand, the public building is integrated into the multitude of store names of the mall, as the main entrance is located at the “gallery” side. On the other hand, through its secondary entrance, it is inserted at the back of the service street of the shopping centre, giving a more positive urban value to this dead end. This “public mammal”, stranded behind a scene dedicated to consumers, plays with the shimmering of its metal skin and the glare of its white interior to attract citizens and encourage them to skate.

The whale’s head above the car park entrance

The main access to the car park of the mall is located at the only “end cap”, identity pointer of the rink. This dome is the most curved and spectacular area of the façade, where the careful scheme of the scales is revealed. This volume rises gently to allow cars to go. A load bearing element straight out of the 70’s reminds us of the glorious past of Liège, a time when car was queen in town planning as in some architectural projects (residence Simenon and its included petrol station, residence Belvedere with its architectural ramp). Today, it is no longer welcome, but it is still omnipresent in the city. Why should we deny it? Let us honor it by adding the atmosphere of New York in the 20’s and its “diners”.

The interior space of the rink focuses on the heart of the matter: functionality, economy and pleasure.

Guided tour

In the Médiacité, at the entrance to the ice rink, a white light shower of 1000 lux indicates the direction of the world of ice. Once past the airlock chamber, we dive into an ambient temperature of 16 ° C all year round.

In the whale’s stomach

Upon arrival in the foyer, the whole rink and volume of the building is visible through a transparent metal wall. Here you can sometimes have a hint at amateurs, sometimes hockey teams or figure skaters. The skating area is directly accessible from the foyer. We get our skates, pull them on and are ready to slide!

The “wood room” adjacent to the rink is a recreation room with a solid oak flooring. One can enjoy Liège waffles, perhaps even Lacquemants in October? As visitors, walking along the metal wall until the end, we are reaching the first floor and its cafeteria. On the way, by looking through the mesh, the kinetics of storage is shown: skate drying and sharpening.

While climbing the stairs, we discover the dome and a large window with rounded edges, and finally the carcass of a marine mammal… Ah yes, the whale!

If we’re coming by car, we quickly identify that it is the glued laminated timber structure completely laid bare before our eyes that creates the strange shape previously penetrated. Are we inside the Venturi’s duck?… The scales ratio is therefore increased tenfold. Just a quarter turn to the right and the rink, surrounded with its 1200 seats, presents itself to our eyes. The inhabitants of Liège will recognize the seats of the former ice rink from Coronmeuse, hosted in the “Grand Palais des fêtes”, built for the Universal Exhibition of 1939.

During events, the cafeteria is transformed into a XXL taproom, integrating the walkway along the façade that merges with the rink volume: the domestic scale of the bar is then confronted with the massiveness and the emotion of a hockey match or a figure skating gala.

Thirsty racehorse

The pleasure of the skater, the player, the spectator and the visitor is made for by the space, but also by the performance of this tool: an outer shell with an insulation factor of K22, equivalent to a passive house; 2 refrigeration units developing 1000kW coupled with 4 sets of air coolers; a ventilation system of the room with a flow rate of 60,000 m3/h for dehumidifying the air of the rink; 80 spotlights ensuring a perfect homogeneity of 1200 lux during matches and competitions, particularly when broadcasted.

Formidable engineering was necessary to allow this sea monster to perform at a high level, but also to reuse consumed energy: heat pump, ventilation system and hot water tank recovering a part of the heat produced by the refrigeration units, a piping system as a Tichelmann loop to better distribute the cooling liquid under the rink and thus consume less.

During the preliminary studies, a connection to the heating system of the shopping centre was also considered to carry away part of the generated heat. It can still be done later if the centre wishes.

Place: Longdoz district, Liège (Belgium)
Program: Olympic ice rink with 1200 seats /1800 skaters on ice.

Client: City of Liège
Funding: SPW Infrasports
Process: competition
Technical control: SECO
Project authors: L’Escaut-BE Weinand (Momentary Association)
L’Escaut Architectures: David Crambert, Annelies Kums, Michael Bianchi, Olivier Bastin Claire Laborde, François Lichtlé, Deborah Vanderlinden, Tilman Gappa

Structure: Bureau d’études Weinand: Yves Weinand, Arianit Shevelli
Fluids: BET Nicolas Ingénieries
Acoustics: CAPRI acoustique
Health and Safety Coordinator: SIXCO
General contractor: Moury Construct
Timber structure: Lamcol
Cooling production: Axima Refrigeration
Electrical system: Balteau
Finishing: Keppenne

Surface areas: 6700 sq m
Duration: 2007-2012

The post Olympic Ice Rink of Liège
by L’Escaut appeared first on Dezeen.

A la demande de l’agence belge Canada Gent, l’artste Kevin Devroo nous propose de découvrir un travail typographique de toute beauté. Alliant avec talent lettres et matériaux, le rendu de ce projet appelé « Iconic » rend hommage au design avec des créations 3D du plus bel effet. A découvrir en images dans la suite.