Hasta La Ideas

This holiday home on the southern coast of Nova Scotia perches on a row of narrow concrete fins just metres from the Atlantic Ocean (+ slideshow).

Designed as a holiday home for a couple by Canadian studio MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, the property is situated close to a small fishing village on a plot where a meadow meets the rocky coastline.

The clients asked for a sanctuary where they could look out at the sun setting over the sea, and the architects responded by designing the building as a “landscape-viewing instrument, with its side opened to the Atlantic Ocean horizon, and its end a focusing aperture to the sunset.”

The architects raised the building off the ground “to allow any rogue waves which might crest the granite edge to pass under the house,” but left one corner open to the elements to create a terrace overlooking the sea.

The exterior is clad in corrugated galvanised aluminium to provide a robust shield against the prevailing weather and the underside of the raised structure is covered in the same marine-grade plywood used in local boat building.

A series of broad wooden stairs lead to a covered opening with doors on either side connecting the master bedroom with the rest of the house. Large sliding barn doors can be closed to seal the building during storms.

The main living space is located next to the terrace and features glass walls that frame views of the ocean, while clerestory windows above the beds allow the occupants to look up at the sky and a low window provides views from the bathtub.

Interior finishes are kept deliberately minimal to focus attention on the views. “When seated in front of the warming hearth, the land between the house and the water’s edge disappears from view, and the plane of the polished grey concrete floor extends to the ever-changing surface of the ocean,” said the architects.

Photography is by Greg Richardson.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Sunset Rock

Place / Landscape

This home is dramatically sited along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, on the southern coast of Nova Scotia, a landscape defined by massive pieces of exposed granite, and the drama of the open ocean. Running parallel to the rugged the shoreline, the house grips the edge fulfilling the owners desire to have as intimate of a connection to the ocean as possible.

Its cantilevered end reaches out over Sunset Rock, its namesake and the owners most loved place on their site. Many evenings were spent viewing the spectacular local sunsets from this location, long before the idea of placing a house here was conceived. As a result the house is an extension of the rock, creating a landscape-viewing instrument, with its side opened to the Atlantic Ocean horizon, and its end a focusing aperture to the sunset.

Program

Built as a vacation home for a professional couple who fell in love with the local people and pace of life of this small fishing village, it is a retreat from the pace of the major metropolis in which they work. A sanctuary just steps from the ocean, it is a place in which to read, reflect, and write, while living within the remarkable view.

On approach, the house appears as a long metal blade marking the transition from meadow to ocean, its monolithic form punctuated by a generous stair leading to the framed view of the ocean horizon provided by the covered entry deck. A series of barn doors allow for the metal skin to be completed, providing protection of the windows from any storms that may come. And as a further consideration to its environment, the house lightly touches the ground, resting on a series of concrete fins perpendicular to the shoreline, engineered to allow any rouge waves which might crest the granite edge to pass under the house.
An asymmetrical bite out of the end of the form creates a sheltered viewing deck from which to enjoy the sunset, while above this an interior loft allows for inhabiting the steel structure, and provides a cocooning space in which to work with focused views along the shoreline.

The narrow floor plate provides excellent cross ventilation, while generous windows to the view invite the sun in to warm the thermal mass of the concrete floors. The main living area has walls of glass to the view, with no partitions above 8’, allowing for the full expression of the volumes sculptural nature. Body scaled bedboxes open upward without ceilings providing views to the ever-changing day and night sky through clearstory windows. The bathing room again responds to the theme of water, with a long, narrow low window for viewing the ocean waves while seated in the bathtub. The master suite is separated from the public spaces of the house by the covered deck allowing for retreat and privacy.

Craft / Building / Material

With its grey metal skin the house disappears within the blanket of fog which frequents the site. The durable and economical corrugated galvalume was chosen not only for its minimal beauty, but also to endure the environmental conditions of the houses proximity to the ocean. The underbelly of the house is protected by marine grade plywood, a material used extensively in the local boat building industry. The calm sculptural nature of the house, expressed both in its form and materials, are drawn from the vernacular and ethic of the local buildings used in the commercial fishery. Many of those involved in the building of the home were equally comfortable building a boat for lobster fishing as they are building a house.

The interior pallet is restrained, almost completely white except for the horizontal surfaces of concrete and granite, and the exposed steel structure. This allows the interior surfaces to be of minimal distraction and dissolve into the background as the power and immediacy of the ocean is invited in. When seated in front of the warming hearth, the land between the house and the water’s edge disappears from view, and the plane of the polished grey concrete floor extends to the ever-changing surface of the ocean.

The post Sunset Rock House on the edge of the ocean
by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

This boxy wooden house by Canadian studio MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects extends over the edge of a rocky outcrop on the Atlantic coastline of Nova Scotia (+ slideshow).

Only a small section of the house makes contact with the ground, as most of its body projects over the edge of the cliff towards the waterfront, supported underneath by a criss-crossing arrangement of steel I-beams.

MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects designed Cliff House as a weekend getaway. It is intended to “heighten the experience of dwelling in landscape” by introducing a feeling of vertigo to its residents.

“On approaching the cabin from the land, one is presented with a calm wood box with its understated landscaping, firmly planted on the ground, in contrast with the subsequent dramatic interior experience of flying off cliff,” said the architects.

Built to a tight budget, the building comprises a simple robust structure made up of steel trusses and timber portal frames, which are left exposed throughout the interior to avoid a buildup of condensation.

The architects explained: “In Atlantic Canada we have a cool, labile climate, characterised by constant wet/dry, freeze/thaw cycles, resulting in a very high weathering rate for buildings. Over the centuries we have developed an elegant, economical light-weight wood building tradition in response to our challenging climate.”

The main space of the house is a double-height living and dining room with windows on three sides and a wood-burning stove. A bathroom sits behind, with a mezzanine bedroom located above it.

The entrance is at the end of the building, alongside a south-facing deck looking out over the cliff edge.

Photography is by Greg Richardson.

Read on for a project description from MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple:

Cliff House

Landscape

This modest project is first in the series of projects to be built on a large (455 acre) property on Nova Scotia Atlantic Coast. It acts as a didactic instrument intended to heighten the experience of ‘dwelling’ in landscape. A pure, austere wood box is precariously perched off the bedrock cliff, ‘teaching’ about the nature of its landscape through creating a sense of vertigo while floating above the sea. This strategy features the building’s fifth elevation – its ‘belly’.

On approaching the cabin from the land, one is presented with a calm wood box with its understated landscaping, firmly planted on the ground, in contrast with the subsequent dramatic interior experience of flying off cliff.

Program

This efficient, 960 sq. ft. cabin functions as a rustic retreat. It is intended as an affordable, high amenity prototype-on-a-pedestal. Its main level contains a great room with a north cabinet wall and a compact service core behind. The open loft is a sleeping perch. A large, south-facing deck on the cliff edge allows the great room to flow outward. The cabin’s fenestration optimises passive solar gains and views, both out to sea and along the coastline.

Building

The project’s rich spatial experience and dramatic landscape strategy is contrasted by its material frugality. This is a modest project with an extremely low budget. A galvanised superstructure anchors it to the cliff. A light steel endoskeleton forms the primary structure expressed on the interior. The envelope is a simple, conventional, taut-skinned platform framed box. The ‘outsulation’ strategy allows the conventional wood framing system to be expressed on the interior, avoiding the need for interior finishes, and the problems typically associated with condensation in insulated wall cavities. The cedar shiplap siding on a ventilated rain screen creates an abstract modern effect.

In Atlantic Canada we have a cool, labile climate, characterised by constant wet/dry, freeze/thaw cycles, resulting in a very high weathering rate for buildings. Over the centuries we have developed an elegant, economical light-weight wood building tradition in response to our challenging climate.

The light timber frame has also become the dominant domestic construction system in North America. Despite its widespread use, its inherent high level of environmental sustainability, its affordability, and its subtle refined aesthetic, architects have been reluctant to embrace it. The research of our practice, however, builds upon and extends this often understated, everyday language of construction, often through modest projects like Cliff House.

The post Cliff House by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple
Architects is perched over a rocky outcrop appeared first on Dezeen.

This extension to a woodland home in Ontario by Canadian studio UUfie features charred cedar walls and a mirrored entrance (+ slideshow).

Japanese architect Eiri Ota and Canadian architect Irene Gardpoit Chan of UUfie designed the small cabin, named Lake Cottage, to add large living and dining rooms to a family house beside the Kawartha Lakes.

The structure has a steeply pitched roof covered with black steel, while its two gabled ends are clad with cedar that has been charred to protect it from termites and fire.

“Lake Cottage is a reinterpretation of living in a tree house where nature is an integral part of the building,” said the architects, whose past projects include an apartment with velvet curtains for partitions.

The entrance sits within a sheltered recess that spans the front of the cabin. Mirrored panels cover the sides and ceiling of the space, intended to integrate the building with the forest by reflecting the surrounding trees.

A living room occupies a rectangular central space, while the dining room forms a link to the existing house.

A staircase made from a single log leads up to the first-floor attic, where walls follow the steep angle of the roof. Rounded wooden shingles decorate one side and are visible from the living room through a row of internal windows.

Timber panels line walls, floors and ceilings elsewhere in the cabin, and a wood-burning stove keeps the space warm during cold winter months.

Photography is by Naho Kubota.

Here’s some information from UUfie:

Lake Cottage

Lake Cottage is a reinterpretation of living in a tree house where nature is an integral part of the building. In a forest of birch and spruce trees along the Kawartha Lakes, the cottage is designed as a two storey, multi-uses space for a large family. The structure composed of a 7 metre-high A-frame pitch roof covered in black steel and charred cedar siding. A deep cut in the building volume creates a cantilever overhang for a protected outdoor terrace with mirrors to further give the illusion of the building containing the forest inside.

This mixture of feeling between nature and building continue into the interior. The main living space is design as a self-contained interior volume, while the peripheral rooms are treated as part of the building site. Fourteen openings into this grand living space reveal both inhabited spaces, skies and trees, equally treated and further articulated with edges finishes of interior panel kept raw to show the inherit nature of materials used. This abstract nature of the interior spaces allows imagination to flow, and those spaces that could be identified as a domestic interior can suddenly become play spaces. A solid timber staircase leads to a loft which has the feeling of ascending into tree canopies as sunlight softy falls on wall covered in fish-scaled shingle stained in light blue.

Using local materials and traditional construction methods, the cottage incorporated sustainable principles. The black wood cladding of exterior is a technique of charring cedar that acts as a natural agent against termite and fire. Thick walls and roof provide high insulation value, a central wood hearth provides heat and deep recessed windows and skylights provide natural ventilation and lighting.

Lake Cottage is designed with interior and exterior spaces connected fluidly and repeat the experience of living within the branches of a tree.

Title: Lake Cottage
Location: Bolsover, Ontario
Architect: UUfie
General contractor: Level Design Build
Principal use: cottage
Total floor area: 65.00sqm
Structure: wood
Design period: 2010.1-2010.8
Construction period: 2010.10-2013.1

The post Lake Cottage with mirrored entrance
by UUfie appeared first on Dezeen.

Saunders Architecture of Norway has added a hotel and gallery on stilts to the picturesque Fogo Island in Canada, where the firm has already created a series of rural cabins for artists (+ slideshow).

Named Fogo Island Inn, the building is the latest edition to an ongoing arts residency programme being established on the Newfoundland isle. So far Saunders Architecture has completed four of six live-in artists’ studios and, most recently, this 29-room hotel and cultural attraction.

The building has an X-shaped plan comprising one two-storey volume and an intersecting four-storey block, both clad in timber.

Dozens of narrow columns support the protruding ends of the building, ensuring it has a minimal impact on the rocks, lichens and plants that make up the coastal landscape.

“The inn is completely tied to Fogo Island and traditional Newfoundland outport architecture by the way it sits in the landscape and the materials used throughout,” said the architects.

“The knowledge and skill of local carpenters and craftspeople were essential for establishing the details used throughout the buildings,” they added.

The smallest side of the building contains a series of public facilities, including an art gallery, a library dedicated to local history, a cinema, a gym and various meeting and dining areas.

The four-storey structure runs parallel to the seafront and accommodates the 29 guest suites. The majority of these come with their own wood-burning stoves, plus three of the rooms feature a mezzanine floor.

A deck on the roof of the building offers saunas and outdoor hot tubs, while laundry facilities and storage areas occupy an extra building nearby.

Here’s a project description from Saunders Architecture:

Fogo Island Inn

The Fogo Island Inn is a public building for Fogo Island with 29 rooms for guests. The building, located between the communities of Joe Batt’s Arm and Barr’d Islands on the Back Western Shore, is an X in plan. The two storey west to east volume contains public spaces while the four storey south-west to north-east volume contains the remaining public spaces and all the guest rooms and is parallel to the coast.

The public areas on the first floor include an art gallery curated by Fogo Island Arts, a dining room, bar and lounge, and a library specialising in the local region. The former president of Memorial University Newfoundland, Dr. Leslie Harris, donated the foundational material for the library. The second floor includes a gym, meeting rooms, and cinema. The cinema is a partnership with the National Film Board of Canada. The fourth floor roof deck has saunas and outdoor hot tubs with views of the North Atlantic.

All guest rooms face the ocean with the bed placed directly in front of the view of the Little Fogo Islands in the distance with the North Atlantic beyond. The room sizes vary from 350 square feet to 1,100 square feet. Guest rooms are located on all four floors with the 21 rooms on the third and fourth floors all having a wood-burning stove. The ceilings of the rooms on the fourth floor follow the slope of the roof and the three rooms on the east are double volume spaces with the sleeping area located on the mezzanine.

An outbuilding to the south of the inn contains service functions like laundry, storage, wood fired boilers, backup generator, and solar thermal panels on the roof. The required number and orientation of the solar panels dictated the form of the outbuilding and the angle of the roof. The space between these two buildings creates an entry court and frames the main entrance. Vehicle parking is off site.

The inn is a fully contemporary structure, built using modern methods. Ecological and self-sustaining systems were subtly integrated from the beginning of the project, incorporating the latest technologies to reduce and conserve energy and water usage. It is a highly insulated steel frame building and the windows have the equivalent rating of triple pane glazing. Rainwater from the roof is collected into two cisterns in the basement, filtered, and used for the toilet water and also to be used as a heat sink. The solar thermal on the outbuilding panels provide hot water for in-floor heating, laundry and kitchen equipment.

The inn is completely tied to Fogo Island and traditional Newfoundland outport architecture by the way it sits in the landscape and the materials used throughout. The building hits the land directly without impacting the adjacent rocks, lichens and berries. The exterior cladding is locally sourced and milled Black Spruce. The knowledge and skill of local carpenters and craftspeople were essential for establishing the details used throughout the buildings.

The interiors of the inn continue the incorporation of the traditional with the contemporary. The materials, history, craft techniques and aesthetic of outport Newfoundland are the starting point for what has become a long term and ongoing collaborative project between contemporary designers from North America and Europe and the men and women makers and builders of Fogo Island and Change Islands. The furniture, textiles and interior surfaces throughout the inn are reminders that you are on the Back Western Shore of Fogo Island.

The Fogo Island Inn is owned by the Shorefast Foundation, a Canadian charitable organisation established by Zita Cobb and her brothers with the aim of fostering cultural and economic resilience for this traditional fishing community. The project has been a collaborative effort now lasting over 7 years starting with the relationship between the Fogo Island based Shorefast Foundation and the Newfoundland born and Norway based architect Todd Saunders. This atypical collaboration continues to be a happy adventure and is a kind of miracle considering the typical client-architect relationship on a project of this scale and duration.

The post Fogo Island Inn by
Saunders Architecture appeared first on Dezeen.

Déjà auteur de l’installation « Forever Bicycles » diffusée sur Fubiz en début d’année, l’artiste chinois Ai Wei Wei a exposé une nouvelle version de celle-ci à Toronto. De superbes images de cette installation et de cette sculpture géante composée de plus de 3144 vélos, sont à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.