Hasta La Ideas

This school building in Bath, England, by local architects Mitchell Taylor Workshop features stone walls recalling the city’s historic architecture, alongside contrasting dark grey brickwork and window surrounds (+ slideshow).

The design by Mitchell Taylor Workshop was the winning entry in a competition for a humanities building at Kingswood School, to be built on the school’s picturesque Lansdown Road grounds.

Located within a designated conservation area and World Heritage Site, the materials used for the facility’s exterior had to meet strict planning regulations.

The use of stone references Bath’s historic buildings and the architects chose to add contrast by introducing a grey brick that resembles slate, a materials that is also part of the area’s architectural heritage.

“The choice of materials evolved from the desire to create a playful front and back tectonic narrative,” the architects explained. “After the planners had requested that stone be used, we then identified another heavily used material in Bath, slate, and argued that a long dark brick had the quality of a slate block, which they accepted.”

One of the two-storey building’s facades is angled towards an open grassy area and features gables clad in pale stone, contrasting with the tall grey windows that echo the front of the adjacent Ferens Building, built in 1924.

“The new design evolved to be a contemporary interpretation of both the Ferens Building and the local context of the world heritage site,” said the architects. “The form and proportion of the roof structure and openings is a response to the rhythm of the Ferens building’s facade, with the tall windows and perforated panels.”

Grey brick was used to clad the rear portion of the classroom facility, including a large gable end that combines with an angled wall to frame a tall glazed entrance.

An overhanging canopy on the opposite side of the building covers the main entrance, which leads to a central circulation area used as a conference, exhibition and social space.

Eight classrooms and three staff rooms are housed over two storeys in a pair of blocks arranged on either side of the circulation and display area.

The grey window frames that project from the southern facade provide solar shading and incorporate perforated panels covering windows that can be opened to provide ventilation in any weather.

Pupils in the upper-floor classrooms can look out across the lawn towards the surrounding countryside.

Photography is by Peter Cook.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Kingswood School, Bath, England

Mitchell Taylor Workshop were invited by Kingswood School to submit a proposal for a limited competition for the design a new humanities building in May 2012. The site is located on the school’s Lansdown Road grounds in Bath within both the Conservation Area and with a World Heritage designation. The winning scheme was to house eight new classrooms and three departmental resource areas and a flexible circulation space that could be used for exhibiting work and for external academic and conference functions.

The form and orientation of the building was generated from site constraints in maximising the natural daylight and ventilation into the classroom spaces whilst controlling solar gain. The building is aligned along Fonthill Road to the north-east and is effectively divided into two blocks with the southern elevation orientated to the immediate open space and the extraordinary views beyond. The internal spaces unfold from a large overhang which provides a covered canopy and connects to an internal triangular plan shaped circulation area which allows for the pupils to display and exhibit their work and as breakout and social space.

Adjacent to the new classroom site is the existing Ferens Building, built in 1924. The new design evolved to be a contemporary interpretation of both the Ferens Building and the language of the heritage buildings of Bath with defined fronts and backs. The form and proportion of the roof structure and openings is a response to the rhythm of Ferens building facade with the tall windows and perforate panels.

The choice of materials evolved from the desire to create a playful front and back tectonic narrative. After the planners had requested that stone be used, we then identified another heavily used material in Bath, slate, and argued that a long dark brick had the quality of a slate block which they accepted. The proposal evolved to incorporate the stone on the south with the dark brick on the north façade creating a unique architectural composition.

Our experience of working with independent schools has brought about an expertise in a variety of building types from libraries, to boarding houses, theatres to classrooms, sports halls to energy centres. The Independent Schools have a strong identity and aspire to reflect this within the built environment. Budgets and time constraints are also well defined but this should not restrict the aspiration to produce interesting and relevant architectural buildings and places.

Mitchell Taylor workshop developed their proposal working very closely with the staff and pupils of the school. The school wanted to occupy their new building at the start of the 2013/14 academic year which meant a design and construction period of little over 12 months. The budget resulted in a construction value of £1,700/sq.m which meant that both the design and construction needed to well considered, co-ordinated and efficient as well as making a positive contribution to the built and academic aspirations of the school.

Gross Internal Floor Area – 632m²
Form of Contract or Procurement Route– JCD ICD 2011
Cconstruction Cost Per m2 – £1640/m2
Architect – Mitchell Taylor Workshop
Client – Kingswood School

Structural Engineer – Mann Williams
M&E Consultant – King Shaw Associates Ltd
QS – Bishopston Stephens
Project Manager – Bishopston Stephens
CDM Coordinator – Anderson FM Consulting Ltd
Approved Building Inspector – Bath & North East Somerset Council
Main Contractor – Beard

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contrasts pale stone with grey brick appeared first on Dezeen.

Behind the brickwork exterior of the new Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, England, architecture studio Haworth Tompkins designed a curved auditorium built from 25,000 reclaimed bricks (+ slideshow).

Haworth Tompkins was tasked with designing a new home for the popular theatre, previously housed in an nineteenth-century chapel, to make room for an expanding programme. Working on the same site, the architects tried to retain some features of the original building.

“The biggest challenge was to win over those who were worried the character of the Everyman would be lost in a new building,” project architect Will Mesher told Dezeen.

“The original Everyman had an informal character, described as somewhere you didn’t have to dress up to go to, but could wear a ball gown if you felt like it,” he said. “We tried to retain this spirit in the new spaces.”

The walls of the old building had to be carefully dismantled so that the bricks could be reused within the new theatre. These now form the main wall between the 400-seat auditorium and its surrounding foyer.

Another distinctive feature of the new building is an animated facade where over 100 sunshades are etched with the portraits of some of Liverpool’s residents, taken by local photographer Dan Kenyon.

A glowing red sign in front references the original signage, while a row of large ventilation chimneys give the building a distinctive silhouette. The rest of the exterior is built from a typical local brick stock.

“It is a common material in the area, both in the nearby Georgian terraces and in the industrial and warehouse buildings to the rear, so brick serves to tie the theatre in with the surrounding streets,” said Mesher.

The building’s interior is laid out over split levels to negotiate a slope across the site. This means public spaces such as the bar and foyer are arranged over several storeys, creating a tiered route from the street to the auditorium.

A concrete structure is left exposed throughout these spaces and sits alongside a palette that includes black steel, oak and recycled iroko wood. “We looked for materials that would be robust and age well,” said the architect.

As well as the main auditorium, which features a thrust stage, the building accommodates a smaller performance space, a large rehearsal room, exhibition spaces and a writers’ room.

Photography is by Philip Vile, apart from where otherwise indicated.

Here’s a project description from Haworth Tompkins:

Everyman Theatre, Liverpool

The Liverpool Everyman is a new theatre, won in open European competition, for an internationally regarded producing company. The scope of work includes a 400 seat adaptable auditorium, a smaller performance and development space, a large rehearsal room, public foyers, exhibition spaces, catering and bar facilities, along with supporting offices, workshops and ancillary spaces. The entire facade is a large, collaborative work of public art. The design combines thermally massive construction with a series of natural ventilation systems and low energy technical infrastructures to achieve a BREEAM Excellent rating for this complex and densely inhabited urban building.

The Everyman holds an important place in Liverpool culture. The original theatre, converted from the 19th century Hope Hall chapel, had served the city well as a centre of creativity, conviviality and dissent (often centred in its subterranean Bistro) but by the new millennium the building was in need of complete replacement to serve a rapidly expanding production and participation programme. Haworth Tompkins’ brief was to design a technically advanced and highly adaptable new theatre that would retain the friendly, demotic accessibility of the old building, project the organisation’s values of cultural inclusion, community engagement and local creativity, and encapsulate the collective identity of the people of Liverpool. The new building occupies the same sensitive, historic city centre site in Hope Street, immediately adjacent to Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral and surrounded by 18th and 19th century listed buildings, so a balance of sensitivity and announcement in the external public realm was a significant design criterion. Another central aspect of the brief was to design an urban public building with exceptional energy efficiency both in construction and in use.

The building makes use of the complex and constrained site geometry by arranging the public spaces around a series of half levels, establishing a continuous winding promenade from street to auditorium. Foyers and catering spaces are arranged on three levels including a new Bistro, culminating in a long piano nobile foyer overlooking the street. The auditorium is an adaptable thrust stage space of 400 seats, constructed from the reclaimed bricks of Hope Hall and manifesting itself as the internal walls of the foyers. The building incorporates numerous creative workspaces, with a rehearsal room, workshops, a sound studio, a Writers’ Room overlooking the foyer, and EV1 – a special studio dedicated to the Young Everyman Playhouse education and community groups. A diverse disability group has monitored the design from the outset.

Externally, local red brick was selected for the walls and four large ventilation stacks, giving the building a distinct silhouette and meshing it into the surrounding architecture. The main west-facing facade of the building is as a large-scale public work of art consisting of 105 moveable metal sunshades, each one carrying a life-sized, water-cut portrait of a contemporary Liverpool resident. Working with Liverpool photographer Dan Kenyon, the project engaged every section of the city’s community in a series of public events, so that the completed building can be read as a collective family snapshot of the population in all its diversity. Typographer and artist Jake Tilson created a special font for a new version of the iconic red ‘Everyman’ sign, whilst regular collaborating visual artist Antoni Malinowski made a large painted ceiling piece for the foyer, to complement an internal palette of brickwork, black steel, oak, reclaimed Iroko, deeply coloured plywood and pale in situ concrete.

The Everyman has been conceived from the outset as an exemplar of sustainable good practice. An earlier feasibility study had recommended a much larger and more expensive building on a new site, but Haworth Tompkins argued for the importance of continuity and compactness on the original site. Carefully dismantling the existing structure, all the nineteenth century bricks were salvaged for reuse as the shell of the new auditorium and recycled the timbers of the roof structure. By making efficient use of the site footprint Haworth Tompkins avoided the need to acquire a bigger site and demolish more adjoining buildings. Together with the client team they distilled the space brief into its densest and most adaptable form.

Having minimised the space and material requirement of the project, the fabric was designed to achieve a BREEAM Excellent rating, unusual for an urban theatre building. Natural ventilation for the main performance and workspaces is achieved via large roof vents and underfloor intake plenums, using thermal mass for pre-cooling, and the foyers are vented via opening screens and a large lightwell. The fully exposed concrete structure (with a high percentage of cement replacement) and reclaimed brickwork walls provide excellent thermal mass, while the orientation and fenestration design optimise solar response – the entire west facade is designed as a large screen of moveable sunshades. Offices and ancillary spaces are ventilated via opening windows.

The building has taken almost a decade of intensive teamwork to conceive, achieve consensus, fundraise, design and build, and the design will ensure a long future life of enjoyment by a diverse population of artists, audiences and staff.

Architect: Haworth Tompkins
Interiors and Furniture Design: Haworth Tompkins with Katy Marks at citizens design bureau
Client: Liverpool and Merseyside Theatres Trust
Contractor: Gilbert-Ash
Project Manager: GVA Acuity
Quantity Surveyor: Gardiner & Theobald
Theatre Consultant: Charcoalblue
Structural Engineer: Alan Baxter & Associates
Service Engineer: Watermans Building Services
CDM Coordinator: Turner and Townsend
Acoustic Engineer: Gillieron Scott Acoustic Design
Catering Consultant: Keith Winton Design
Access Consultant: Earnscliffe Davies Associates
Collaborating Artist: Antoni Malinowski
Typographer: Jake Tilson
Portrait Photographer: Dan Kenyon

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built with old and new bricks appeared first on Dezeen.

DMOA Architecten has transformed a former hunting lodge in Belgium into a family home, retaining the eight piers of its original brick facade as a garden feature (+ movie).

La Branche was first built in the eighteenth century on the site of a castle in the woods of Heverlee, Belgium. Originally a home, it later became a hunting lodge but was left vacant 15 years ago.

DMOA Architecten refurbished two brick blocks and created a new one-storey volume that links the two. The eight piers of the original facade, which gave its name to the property, were retained as a free-standing screen in front.

“When you walk through the house you feel continuously that you are in a nexus between old and new,” said Luis Querol of DMOA Architecten.

The new flat-roofed single-storey volume holds the living and dining areas. It has custom-made windows and timber cladding in black-tinted afzelia.

Cupboards are made of smoked oak veneer, the floor is natural oak, and the kitchen is a combination of brown Corian and smoked oak veneer.

The new addition makes a U-shaped plan, connecting with the two brick gabled buildings that sit at right angles to it to form a central courtyard.

The house is now home to a family with four children, whose bedrooms are within the brick-built wings.

Floors and walls in the master bathroom are painted black.

Photography by Thomas Janssens. Video is by Luis Querol.

Here’s a project description the architect sent us:

La Branche

The project is a peaceful combination of old and new. The new part is a sober black canvas looking at the garden from behind the old walls.

In several places remnant parts of the old walls are kept as garden elements, an aspect that strengthens the atmosphere. When you walk through the house you feel continuously that you are in a nexus between old and new.

The project consists of the renovation of an old resting place for hunters in the woods of Heverlee (Belgium), transforming it in an comfortable and modern dwelling for a family with four children.

One of the three wings of the U-compositions was removed except of the facade wall, which remains with the name that gave title to the old refuge and now to its renovation “La Branche”.

The sides made of brick contain the private rooms of the family meanwhile the dark volume accommodate the living and the kitchen in permanent connection with the pool and the outside garden. The dark colours of the interior design contrast with the high brightness that gets inside through the large windows.

Project Title: La Branche
Architects: DMOA Architecten
Collaborators: Benjamin Denef, Charlotte Gryspeerdt, Matthias Mattelaer; Lien Gesquiere
Localization: Heverlee, Belgium
Site area: 2200 sqm
Floor area: 655 sqm

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hunting lodge by DMOA Architecten appeared first on Dezeen.

Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona uncovered barrel-vaulted brick ceilings during the renovation of this apartment in the architects’ home city (+ slideshow).

For the renovation of Casa Tomás, Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona separated the interior into areas that will be used most at night and those that will be active during the day, connected by a small intermediate room.

Architect Pepe Gascón told Dezeen they discovered the “lovely roof” when they demolished the existing plaster ceiling.

“We supposed there was this kind of roof in the apartment because most of the apartments and flats built in this period of time were built with this kind of construction,” Gascón said.

“In the Catalan language it’s called ‘volta catalana’ which means ‘Catalan arch’ and it was an easy way to build a roof with ceramic tiles, where the arch distributes the forces it receives to both sides,” he explained.

On one side of the apartment’s H-shaped plan, four rooms have been transformed into a single open-plan space for the living, dining and kitchen areas.

A bathroom on the opposite side of the apartment features green tiled walls that never meet the vaulted ceiling, but a row of glazed panels is slotted between to bring extra light into the space from above.

Two bedrooms are situated on either side of the bathroom, completing the side of the residence dedicated to night time.

The ceiling in the living area has been left exposed to show the red tones of the clay ceramic, while vaulted ceilings elsewhere are all painted white. A mixture of wooden boards and patterned Mallorcan tiles cover the floors.

Narrow terraces are positioned at each end of the apartment. The one at the bedroom end is screened by a steel trellis covered with climbing plants, while the second faces down onto the street.

Photography is by José Hevia.

Here’s some information from Pepe Gascón:

More Dualism, Less Monism

Louis Kahn divided spaces into two types: served and servant (where ‘servant’ refers not to domestic staff but to spaces serving other spaces). Marcel Breuer structured a considerable number of his single-family homes into a bi-nuclear scheme. The pre-existing H-shape of the Tomás home already favoured its spatial organisation into two living areas, as in Breuer’s plan: one part to be used for daytime activities – the social area – and the other for night-time functions – the private area. The connecting room was to be a servant space but also given its own character so that, rather than being relegated for use as a mere passageway, it could also function as a living area. The other two rooms would be served spaces.

Although these two served spaces are almost similar in terms of dimension and geometry, both are defined in completely opposite ways. The public part is clear space while the private section is divided. The former is open to the street and the latter closed off by the inner courtyard of the block. The main space extends outwards via a balcony, while the other area is filtered and separated from outside by a uniform glassed-in veranda where climbing plants partly screen the glass slats that close it off. The balcony acts as a kind of solarium before the living room, dining room and kitchen area. The veranda, however, is like a shade house in front of the dormitories thanks to the plant filter provided by the creepers.

Dimorphism is the term used in biology for the phenomenon in which two different anatomical aspects appear in the same species. This principle was used to “furnish” the served spaces of the house. In the public zone, it is by means of the free-standing bench in the kitchen. In the bedroom area, the bathroom is set out like one more piece of furniture since it rises from the floor and does not reach up to the joists or the vaulted ceiling. The bathroom can be understood in Kahn’s language as a servant space since it serves both bedrooms.

The same applies to the transversal strip comprised by the vestibule, the toilet and the storage space for household appliances – paved and finished with decorative tiles – which also serves the living-room, dining room and kitchen. Even the servant space connecting the two parts of the house is multiplied by adding a dual-level or, better said, a bi-vertical loft space.

The spatial result of this project is therefore a contrivance whereby opposites, symmetries and balances mediate served and servant spaces. This is a house structured in a bi-nuclear fashion which repeats dualities again and again or, in other words, it brings together in one very small home twofold, different and contrasting spatial characteristics: clear-divided, open-closed, extended-separated, broken up-filtered, above-below. In short, it is a project based on dualism rather than on monism, with Kahn and Bauer as its double references.

Architecture: LAB, Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona – Pepe Gascón & Víctor Sala (architects)
Client: Miguel Gayoso
Contractor: Constructora Montnegre (Tordera, Barcelona), Spain
Dirección de obra: LAB, Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona – Pepe Gascón & Víctor Sala (architects)
Coordinación de seguridad y salud: LAB, Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona – Pepe Gascón & Víctor Sala (architects)
Project area: 8000 m2
Cost: €73.000, 00

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renovated Barcelona apartment appeared first on Dezeen.

We’ve featured a few projects that utilise bricks in interesting ways recently, so we’ve collected some of our favourite brick-built projects from the pages of Dezeen onto a new Pinterest board. See our bricks Pinterest board »

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