Hasta La Ideas

Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey mapped sight lines along the narrow streets of the London School of Economics campus to generate the faceted red brick structure of the university‘s new student centre (+ slideshow).

The Saw Swee Hock Student Centre consolidates all of the university’s student facilities under one roof at the LSE‘s historic Aldwych campus. Designed by architects Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey, the seven-storey-high building has an irregular faceted shape informed by the angular geometries of its site and surroundings.

Walls angle inwards along the eastern facade to give the centre a recessed public entrance that lines up with approaching streets to the north, south and east.

“The public space at the threshold of the student union, on axis with St Clement’s Lane, creates a place of exchange; a spatial bowtie that intertwines circulation routes, splices visual connections between internal and external movement, and pulls pedestrian street life into and up the building,” said the architects.

“Like a Japanese puzzle, our design is carefully assembled to make one coherent volume from a complex set of interdependent component parts,” they added.

Red brick was used to construct the walls of the building using a typical flemish bond. In some places the material forms solid walls, while in others it creates perforated screens across windows.

“The perforated planes are constructed from a single leaf of brickwork with spaces in the flemish bond pattern to allow light to both infiltrate the interior spaces and filtrate out at night to create a pattern effect,” said the architects.

Spaces within the building accommodate a variety of functions, including an events venue, a bar, a cafe, a gym and dance studios. There are also prayer rooms, offices and multimedia facilities.

Designed to resemble a “lived-in warehouse”, the building has an exposed structure that combines steel columns and trusses with concrete floor slabs.

Floor plates differ in shape and size on different floors. Angular stairwells are positioned at three corners of the building, while a spiral staircase is positioned near the entrance.

“Space flows freely in horizontal plan and vertical section, with stairs gently twisting and slowly turning to create a variety of diagonal break-out spaces at landings and crossings throughout the building,” said the architects.

An assortment of windows and skylights ensure that each corridor receives daylight, and an events hall in the basement can be naturally lit though a row of clerestory windows.

The building will open next month, but its surrounding landscaping is not set to be finished until the summer.

Photography is by Dennis Gilbert/VIEW.

Here’s a project description from O’Donnell+Tuomey Architects:

Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, London School of Economics

Client Brief

The brief was to bring student facilities together under one roof. The multi-functional building includes a venue, pub, learning café, media, prayer, offices, gym, careers, dance studio and social spaces. The brief asked for the “best student building in the UK” and had the aspiration for BREEAM Excellent rating. The design achieved BREEAM Outstanding.

Planning Constraints

The site lies within the Strand Conservation Area. The context was complex and the site was restricted by surrounding building lines. Specifications were closely monitored by Westminster planners, who supported the ambition for a contemporary design integrated with its setting. Throughout the building process, the planners maintained a commitment to the enduring quality of carefully crafted construction.

Street Life

The site is located at the knuckle-point convergence of narrow streets that characterise the LSE city centre campus. The faceted facade operates with respect to the Rights of Light Envelope and is tailored to lines of sight, to be viewed from street corner perspectives and to make visual connections between internal and external circulation. The brick skin is cut along fold lines to form large areas of glazing, framing views. Analysis of the context has influenced the first principles of a site specific architectural design.

Embodiment

The building is designed to embody the dynamic character of a contemporary Student Centre. The complex geometries of the site provided a starting point for a lively arrangement of irregular floor plates, each particular to its function. Space flows freely in plan and section, with stairs turning to create meeting places at every level.

Construction, Colour and Atmosphere

London is a city of bricks. The building is clad with bricks, with each brick offset from the next in an open work pattern, creating dappled daylight inside and glowing like a lattice lantern at night.

The building has the robust adaptability of a lived-in warehouse, with solid wooden floors underfoot. The structure is a combination of reinforced concrete and steelwork. Steel trusses or ribbed concrete slabs span the big spaces. Circular steel columns prop office floors between the large span volumes and punctuate the open floor plan of the café. Concrete ceilings contribute thermal mass with acoustic clouds suspended to soften the sound.

There are no closed-in corridors. Every hallway has daylight and views in at least one direction. Every office workspace has views to the outside world. The basement venue is daylit from clerestory windows.

Inclusive Design

The building is designed with accessibility and inclusive design as key considerations. Approaches are step free. Floor plates are flat without steps. Circulation routes are open and legible with clearly identifiable way-finding. Services are located at consistent locations. The central wide stair was carefully designed to comply with standards and details agreed with the approved inspector.

Architect: O’Donnell+Tuomey Architects
Executive Architect: O’Donnell+Tuomey Architects
Structural Engineer: Dewhurst Macfarlane and Partners/Horganlynch Consulting Engineers

Services + Environmental Engineer: BDSP
Security / Fire / Acoustics / Transport & Logistics / Venue: Arup
Catering: Tricon Foodservice Consultants
Access:David Bonnett Associates
Archaeology: Gifford
Project Manager: Turner & Townsend

Quantity Surveyor: Northcroft
Planning Consultant: Turley Associates
Party Wall Consultant: Anstey Horne
Building Control Consultant: Carillion
CDM Coordinator: Gardiner & Theobald
Main Contractor (D&B): Geoffrey Osborne Limited

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student centre at London School of Economics appeared first on Dezeen.

A labyrinth of brick walls, arches and courtyards are protected from flooding behind a man-made embankment at this open-air community centre in rural Bangladesh (+ slideshow).

Designed by Bangladeshi architect and URBANA founder Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury, the complex functions as the centre for a charitable organisation. It offers training programmes for the poorest individuals in Gaibandha, a town where most of the community are employed in agriculture.

The Friendship Centre is built on low-lying land surrounded by fields. Despite the threat of flooding, the cost of raising the building above the flood plain was too great so instead the designers created their own defence by building up the earth surrounding the site.

Each building within the complex is constructed from a uniform brickwork, creating a maze of pavilion-like structures. Each block has the same height and every rooftop is covered with grass.

“In the extreme limitation of means was a search for the luxury of light and shadows, of the economy and generosity of small spaces and of the joy of movement and discovery in the bare and the essential,” said Chowdhury.

The architect also compares the project to some of the ancient Buddhist monasteries constructed elsewhere in the region. “Simplicity is the intent, monastic is the feel,” he added.

Rooms are divided into two zones to separate reception and training rooms from dormitories and other more private quarters. There’s also a library, a conference room, a prayer space and a small shop.

Large openings in the walls bring natural light and ventilation through the buildings, while a sequence of small courtyards and pools allow cool air to circulate.

Excessive rainwater is collected in some of these pools and pumped into a nearby pond, while a complex network of septic tanks and wells prevents sewage mixing with flood water.

Other projects designed to combat possible flooding include a floating house in New Orleans and a whole neighbourhood in Copenhagen.

Here’s more text from the design team:

Friendship Centre

The Friendship Centre near the district town of Gaibandha, Bangladesh, is for an NGO which works with some of the poorest in the country and who live mainly in riverine islands (chars) with very limited access and opportunities. Friendship uses the facility for its own training programs and will also rent out for meetings, training, conferences etc. as income generation.

The low-lying land, which is located in rural Gaibandha where agriculture is predominant, is under threat of flooding if the embankment encircling the town and peripheries break.

An extensive program with a very limited fund meant that raising the structures above flood level (a height of eight feet) was not an option: nearly the entire available fund would be lost below grade. Being in an earthquake zone and the low bearing capacity of the silty soil added further complications. The third and final design relies on a surrounding embankment for flood protection while building directly on existing soil, in load-bearing masonry. Rainwater and surface run-off are collected in internal pools and the excess is pumped to an excavated pond, also to be used for fishery. The design relies on natural ventilation and cooling, being facilitated by courtyards and pools and the earth covering on roofs. An extensive network of septic tanks and soak wells ensure the sewage does not mix with flood water.

The ‘Ka’ Block contains the reception pavilion, offices, library, training/conference rooms and pavilions, a prayer space and a small ‘cha-shop’. The ‘Kha’ Block, connected by three archways, is for more private functions and houses the dormitories, the dining pavilion and staff and family quarters. The laundry and drying shed is located on the other side of the pond. There is no air-conditioning and the entire lighting is through LED and energy efficient lamps.

As in construction, so in conception – the complex of the centre rise and exist as echo of ruins, alive with the memory of the remains of Mahasthan (3rd century BC), some sixty kilometres away. Constructed and finished primarily of one material – local hand-made bricks – the spaces arc woven out of pavilions, courtyards, pools and greens; corridors and shadows. Simplicity is the intent, monastic is the feel.

The centre serves and brings together some of the poorest of poor in the country and, by extension, in the world, yet in the extreme limitation of means was a search for the luxury of light and shadows of the economy and generosity of small spaces; of the joy of movement and discovery in the bare and the essential.

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Chowdhury/URBANA appeared first on Dezeen.

If we imagine a world without Smartphones, then it’s easy to picture this Just 5 Brick Phone by Art Lebedev Studio as a must-have. However, we do live in the world of Technicolor so a large-key, monochromatic graphics-display phone sounds a bit off. Or does it? Specs like retractable antenna, radio, alarm clock, flashlight, calculator, calendar, handheld meter, only one game – “Race” and mapping are nostalgic. The winner of course is the one-week battery power. Will you trade this for your iPhone or Samsung Galaxy?

Designer: Art Lebedev Studio

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(Retro Brick Phone was originally posted on Yanko Design)

Related posts:

1. Brick: the exhibition
2. Not Another Brick In The Wall
3. The Best Brick for the Job

La marque Lego a installé le 23 mai sur Times Square à New York un chasseur X-Wing issu de l’univers « Star Wars » en grandeur nature. Composé de plus de 5 millions de briques, cet objet de 20 tonnes a demandé près de 17 000 heures de travail par une équipe de 32 personnes. Une installation à découvrir en images.

London practice Allford Hall Monaghan Morris used pale brick walls, gabled roof profiles and domestic furniture to make this London hospice look like an oversized house (+ slideshow).

The North London Hospice was designed to provide support and treatment for patients with a life-limiting or terminal illness, within a less clinical environment than a hospital ward.

“We wanted to give the building a domestic quality,” AHMM‘s Paul Monaghan told Dezeen. “This is a healthcare building that does not feel institutional or clinical. And this was the aspiration, that people feel at home in this building.”

The architects added a pale brick to give a uniform appearance to the exterior walls. “Brick, of course, has strong associations with the idea of a home,” added Monaghan. “Its use also enabled us to blend in with the adjacent suburban semi-detached houses, although its lighter tone was intended to subtly highlight the building’s public nature.”

The main volume of the structure comprises two prominent gables, both three storeys in height, while a single-storey extension accommodates extra rooms at the rear and frames a south-facing courtyard.

Visitors arrive through an entrance on the eastern facade. There’s no reception, to avoid the feel of an institution, so this route leads directly to an informal lounge at the heart of the building.

From here, visitors can walk through to a daycare room at the back of the building, or find their way to treatment rooms on either of the two lower floors.

A kitchen and dining room is located within the second gable on the western side of the building and opens out to the private courtyard.

North London Hospice is the latest in a string of domestic buildings designed for patient care, following a number of Maggie’s cancer-care centres to complete in recent years. See more stories about healthcare buildings.

Allford Hall Monaghan Morris is best-known for its Stirling Prize-nominated Angel Building and Westminster Academy, also both in London. See more London architecture on Dezeen.

Photography is by Tim Soar.

Here’s a project description from AHMM:

North London Hospice

The North London Hospice provides a new uplifting base for the North London Hospice charity that incorporates a range of new services and encourages patients to drop-in for a chat, join in creative therapies, undergo treatments or simply relieve their carers.

Completed in May 2012, the building fulfils the aspiration to increase the provision of palliative care in Enfield in a contemporary, beautiful and non-clinical environment. Over the course of three years the client, architect, design team and user group worked closely to develop a brief and building that meets and exceeds patient needs by creating a special place for them in the heart of their community.

Set in a suburban residential area of north London, the building form is that of an overscale house – utilising pitched roofs and traditional brick construction. Located on a prominent corner, the two north facing gables form the main accommodation linked by circulation spaces and a single storey extension to the rear.

A generous entrance canopy receives visitors into a meet-and-greet space, leading through to a large multi-purpose daycare room and open plan kitchen and café area which frame a south facing courtyard. Smaller rooms for creative therapies, a hairdresser, and rest room support the key ground floor spaces. The first floor houses clinical, interview and teaching activities, with the pitched second floor providing flexible administrative facilities. All the upper rooms have generous views overlooking allotments to the south and playing fields to the north.

It was important to both the client and architect that the building felt light and airy and created a domestic sense of wellbeing so as to avoid any negative institutional connotations. The simple palette of brick and timber and muted colours all contribute to a calm and gentle environment for patients and carers.

Client: North London Hospice
Client Representative: Procore Project Solutions Ltd
Architect: Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
Main Contractor: Pavehall Plc

Landscape Architect: BB UK
Quantity Surveyor: Equals Cost Consultancy
Structural/Civil Engineer: Elliott Wood Partnership LLP
Services Engineer: Atelier Ten

CDM Coordinator: Total CDM
Landscape Contractor: Gavin Jones Group
Acoustic Consultant: Paul Gillieron Acoustic Design
Ecological Consultant: John Wenman Ecological Consultancy LLP
Highways/Traffic Consultants: JMP Consultants
Approved Inspector: Guy Shattock Associates

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Allford Hall Monaghan Morris appeared first on Dezeen.