Hasta La Ideas

Concrete bricks create geometric patterns on the facade of this house in Québec by architects Kariouk Associates (+ slideshow).

Architect Paul duBellet Kariouk describes the arrangement as a “basket-weave” and it explains how it “takes a very coarse industrial material and makes something graceful out of it.”

“We came up with this pattern by buying a stack of the blocks and just playing with them in the office,” DuBellet Kariouk told Dezeen. “The use of small and large blocks creates a more varied shadow pattern that also helps to break down the scale of the house.”

The entrance sits at the base of a tall and narrow window, and leads into a double-height corridor that spans the length of the two-storey house.

Two bridges cross the corridor on the first floor, including one that is actually a suspended bathtub.

This bath belongs to the first floor bedroom, which is located beyond a dining room, kitchen and living room.

The family’s children use the rooms on the ground floor, which include two bedrooms and a television room.

Other residential projects we’ve featured in Canada include a glass photographer’s residence and a timber-clad extension.

See more projects in Canada »

Photography is by Photolux Studios, Christian Lalonde.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Chelsea Hill House

Design Challenge:
The logistical challenge was to create within a small home a segregation of spaces for the very different habits (privacy, acoustical, tidiness, etc.) of teenagers and adults while avoiding choppy spaces.

Design Solution:
The house is conceived as a very simple masonry volume: “the foundation of the family” which overlooks a beautiful river valley. The spaces most used by the teenagers, their bedrooms, a TV area, and sports equipment storage, are all placed on the ground level. Durable surfaces such as a radiant concrete floor are used throughout this level.

The formal areas of the house, the living area, dining area, kitchen, but also the master bedroom and bathroom, are all located upstairs and, as such, are given the most privileged views. Here, as well as on the stairway that leads to the main living level, more rich materials such as wood floors and glass railings are introduced with higher ceilings.

While all of the noisy and messy areas fall out of view by being placed directly beneath the living areas, the two levels are joined by the double-height entryway and hallway below. In this way, the primary living level is perceived to float lightly above the serene vista beyond. Though the home is constructed of fundamentally simple, industrial materials, one significant “cushy” indulgence was included: a bathtub suspended in the double-height space that looks over the valley. This tub, sunken in the floor, is accessed from the master bedroom and, if needed, is closed off from the adjacent living area by a sliding frosted-glass screen.

Ground floor plan – click above for larger image

Architectural team: Paul Kariouk, Chris Davis, Susan Gardiner, Cedric Boulet
General contractor: Sabean Custom Building (Stephen Sabean)
Structural engineering: The Paterson Group (Zbig Kisilewicz)

First floor plan – click above for larger image

Location: Chelsea, Québec
Project dates: 2006-2008

Second floor plan – click above for larger image

The post Chelsea Hill House
by Kariouk Associates appeared first on Dezeen.

Shanghai architects Polifactory have developed a concept for a rammed earth house that generates energy from a lake on its roof.

Designed for a rural site in Vancouver, the self-sustaining HOUS.E+ would use turbines embedded in the walls to produce electricity from water being pumped through a system of pipes.

Additional electricity would come from photovoltaic panels on the rooftops of five blocks that rise above the water and any excess power could be fed back into the national grid.

Rooms would be set 2.5 metres below ground level, where they would be heated in winter and cooled in summer from an underground pump that uses the surrounding earth as a heat source or sink.

Two courtyards at this level would let daylight down onto the sunken floor, while more natural light would filter in through skylights.

Inhabitants would also be able to harvest their own food by cultivating an ecosystem of fish, seafood and plants beneath the surface of the water.

Polifactory developed the concept for a competition organised by The Architecture Foundation of British Columbia for a redesign of the typical regional house.

We also recently featured a self-sustaining house in rural China, which you can see here.

Here’s some text from Polifactory:

Hous.E+ is designed to combine new and old techniques in order to create a not only a resourceful building regarding energy efficiency and sustainability but also well equipped to actively respond to future demands of smart grid systems where energy surplus is distributed and agriculture within the city is a reality.

Above: solar energy and geothermal heat exchange

Designed for a competition in Vancouver, called “100 Mile House”, this project is more than just a concept, but reality with a twist. Therefore, it is based upon existing smart technologies, but goes a step further on solutions that haven’t been explored so far. In this house water is not only stored and re-used but also is part of a cycle that generates power throughout a series of wall embedded micro hydro-turbines. Unnecessary transportation of materials is avoid making a significant difference into the overall carbon foot print emission balance.

Above: hydropower

Hous.E+ is build upon a rammed earth wall technique that is unaffected by rain, fire or pests, plus it doesn’t require any further finishing. The walls act like breathing structures, allowing air exchange without significant heat loss, working naturally as a thermal mass, storing heat in winter and rejecting in the summer, eliminating the need for air conditioning.

Above: aquaponics healthy food growth

Hous.E+ is set to produce more energy than it consumes.

The post HOUS.E+
by Polifactory appeared first on Dezeen.

Our interview with the artist about sand-blasted books, ethereal paintings and a transcendental point of view

Examining evolution through the dual lens of spirituality and science, Montreal-based book sculptor Guy Laramée creates miniature landscapes from antiquated paperbacks. Drawing upon over three decades of experience as an interdisciplinary artist (including a start as a music composer) and an education in anthropology, Laramée carves out an existentialist parallel between the erosion of geography and the ephemeral nature of the printed word.

Laramée also evokes notes of nostalgia and the passing of time with his paintings of clouds and fog. A self-professed anachronist, Laramée takes inspirational cues from the age of Romanticism and the transcendentalism of Zen, exploring “not only what we think, but that we think.” Laramée’s distinct, conceptual medium and thematic study of change has involved him in such contemplative projects as the “Otherworldly” exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design and an impromptu collaboration with WIRED UK.

We caught up with Laramée during his recent exhibition, “Attacher les roches aux nuages” or “Tying Rocks to Clouds”, at Expression: Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinte in Quebec, to learn more about his process and philosophy.

What inspired the ideas for your book sculptures and what is the process that is involved in creating them?

The bookwork came in the alignment of three things: a casual discovery, my undertaking of an MA in anthropology and the building of La Grande Bibliothèque du Québec. The undertaking of this grand library fascinated me because at that time (2000) I thought that the myth of the encyclopedia—having all of humanity’s knowledge at the same place—was long dead. I was, myself, going back to school to make sense of 15 years of professional practice and was, once more, confronted with my love/hate relationship with words. Then came this accident, so to speak. I was working in a metal shop, having received a commission for a theater set. In a corner of the shop was a sandblaster cabinet. Suddenly, I had the stupid idea of putting a book in there. And that was it. Within seconds, the whole project unfolded.

Please tell us a bit about your collaboration with Wired UK and creation of the Black Tides project.

Tom Cheshire, one of the associate editors of WIRED, wrote me one day, saying that he loved my work and inquiring about my future projects. Off the top of my head and half jokingly, I told him that I had the idea of doing a piece with a pile of their magazines (that was not true). He picked up on the idea and suddenly, a pile of magazines was being shipped to my studio. I had had a lot of offers for commissions—all involving my work with books—and I refused them all because they all made me so sad. People were trying to use my work to fit their agendas but the collaboration with WIRED truly inspired me because it fit perfectly with a project I had on my bench for a while, and for which I had found no outlet. The Great Black Tides project is the continuation of The Great Wall project. It gives flesh to a short story written in the mode of an archeology of the future.

The first piece that came out of this project is WIRELAND. It is both ironic and beyond irony. It is ironic that a high-tech magazine would include such a low-tech work in their pages—and foremost a type of work that looks so critically at the ideologies of progress. And it is beyond irony even, because the piece is beautiful. It is beautiful for mysterious reasons but I like to think that the way Tom Cheshire trusted me was a big factor in the success of the enterprise. So if there is a message in all this, I would like to think that it is this: never stop relating to people who defend worldviews, which seem to contradict yours. There is a common factor beyond all points of view.

In addition to your sculptures, you also paint. Please tell us a bit about your painting process and what inspires your fog series.

The 19th century painter and emblematic figure of Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich, said, “The eye and fantasy feel more attracted by nebulous distance than by that which is close and distinct in front of us.” That sums it up all very nicely. What is blurred and foggy attracts your eye because you want to know what is behind that veil. It is a dynamic prop to set you in motion.

Your work frequently explores themes of the ephemeral, surreal and nostalgic. What draws you to these themes and influences them?

The Great Nostalgia is my main resource. It is not nostalgia about a lost golden age (which never existed). It is the nostalgia, here and now, of the missing half. We live between two contradictory and simultaneous worldviews: the participant and the observer. I work along the thesis that all of humanity’s joy and sorrow come out of this basic schism, something most of the great religions (Buddhism, Sufism, etc.) evoke abundantly.

My work is existential. It may depict landscapes that inspire serenity, but this is the serenity that you arrive at after traversing life crisis. You can paint a flower as a hobby, but you can also paint a flower as you come back from war. The same flower, apparently, but not really the same.

Could you please share your thoughts on the theme of the Guan Yin project and how it manifested in the exhibited pieces?

Originally the project was a commission for a local biennale here in Quebec, an event that celebrates linen. The theme of that biennale was “Touch”. I started with used rags, the ones that are used by mechanics and that are called “wipers”. I started by sowing them together without really knowing what I was doing. I was attracted to the different shades of these rags. They are all of a different grey, due to the numerous exposures to grease and the subsequent washings but meanwhile, my mother died. I was with her when she gave her last breath. Needless to say, that gave the project a totally different color.

So, I decided that this project would help me pass through the mourning of this loss. I decided against all reason—you don’t do that in contemporary art— that I would carve a statue of Guan Yin, the Chinese name for the Bodhisattva of compassion in Buddhist lore. It took me four months. I had never carved a statue in wood. Finally, the statue came out of a syncretic version of the original. It is still faithful to one of the avatars of these icons but there is a bit of the Virgin Mary in there. Then, I built an altar over the statue and put the altar on this 16×16 feet tablecloth made of 500 used rags. The piece was first shown in an historic Catholic church which was almost a statement about the possibility of an inter-faith dialogue—even if that was far from my concern at the time when I put it up there. To me, these rags, with the hands of these women over them, became the metaphor of our human condition. As a Japanese proverb says, “The best words are the ones you did not say.”

“Attacher les roches aux nuages” will run through 12 August 2012 at the Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinte.

Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinte

495, Avenue Saint-Simon

Saint-Hyacinthe (Quebec), J2S 5C3

Lost in Motion est la nouvelle vidéo proposée pour “National Ballet of Canada” par Krystal Levy Pictures. Réalisée par Ben Shirinian, cette création permet de mettre en avant la chorégraphie et la performance du danseur Guillaume Côté. Une vidéo à découvrir dans la suite.

Previously on Fubiz

• Nikon – Set Your Pictures Free
• McDonald’s Reflective Billboard
• OK Go – Skyscrapers

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Slideshow: this small twisted tower is one of the six artists’ studios that Saunders Architecture of Norway are constructing on Fogo Island off the coast of Canada.

The three-storey Tower Studio is the fourth and most recent folly to be completed and like the others it has a painted wooden exterior and a whitewashed interior.

The floors of the building incrementally rotate, so that a terrace on the roof is turned away from the ground floor by 180 degrees.

These twists also create a faceted recess at the entrance, which unlike the other exterior walls is lined with white-painted spruce.

A large triangular skylight allows light to flood into the studio on the middle floor, while a mezzanine overlooks it from above.

On the ground floor is a small kitchen powered by photovoltaics panels, a wood-burning fireplace and a composting toilet.

A narrow boardwalk leads out from the building’s entrance to the main road, creating access for nothing larger than a wheelbarrow or bicycle.

We published the first of the studios when it was completed this time last year. See images of it here.

Photography is by Bent René Synnevåg.

Here’s a longer description from Saunders Architecture:

Tower Studio

Shoal Bay, Fogo Island, Newfoundland

The Tower Studio is dramatically situated on a stretch of rocky coastline in Shoal Bay, Fogo Island, Newfoundland. The studio’s sculptural silhouette leans both forward and backward as it twists upward. For the average visitor to the island, this windowless black tower, more often than not, provokes a quizzical response and the enviable question, “What’s that?”

For the locals, they know that this structure is a project of the Fogo Island Arts Corporation – an art studio opened in June 2011. The Tower Studio’s official opening was one of the most festive and included: a roaring bonfire, flares dramatically shot from its rooftop terrace and the recorded sounds of local whales as a background score.

Perched on a rocky stretch of shoreline, there are no roads to the Tower Studio, it can only be reached by hiking along the shore from the adjacent community or walking on a narrow wooden boardwalk consisting of weathered planks that hover just slightly above a bog that features an abundance of cloudberries, known locally as bakeapples.

From a distance the wooden boardwalk reads like a tether strap, linking the stranded Tower Studio to the lifeline of a busy stretch of road. The boardwalk, a mere twelve inches wide, is a vital component to the story of the Tower Studio, it provided an even track for wheel barrows to bring building supplies to the construction site without disturbing the delicate ecosystem of the Newfoundland bog and the lichens that grow on outcroppings of rock.

The boardwalk is a testimony to the holistic thinking that is part of the Shorefast Foundation mindset that connects the dots of economic, cultural and ecological sustainability at both the macro and the micro level. Now that its purpose has past, the boardwalk will soon disappear in order to minimize the impact on the surrounding landscape of the Tower Studio’s construction.

As one approaches the studio, its south-facing entry area is angled back thirty degrees. Overhead a triangulated section of wall leans forward to shelter the double glass doors below. Both the soffit and the angled entryway, clad in horizontal boards of spruce are stained white in sharp contrast to remainder of the building’s windowless exterior of vertical plank siding painted slate black.

The Tower Studio is comprised of three levels with an overall height of thirty-two feet. Its entry area is equipped with a kitchenette, a compost toilet and wood- burning fireplace. Its second level is a studio, day lit by a generous skylight that faces northward. A mezzanine overhead, juts into the double height volume of the studio. Aside from the geometric complexity of the space, the second feature that adds to a sense of disorientation is the elimination of architectural detail and the fact that all vertical, horizontal and inclined surfaces, clad in smooth plywood, are painted a brilliant white.

The only relief from the stark interior is a sliver of the exterior visible through the studio’s sole skylight. A slightly angled wall opposite and parallel to the skylight provides the perfect viewing surface upon which a body can recline and enjoy the view. One can imagine the magical effect of resting against this surface during a moonlit evening with the audible roar of the North Atlantic and force of the wind against the exposed surface of the tower. From the studio level, a narrow ladder (also painted white) leads past the mezzanine level to the underside of a roof hatch. As one passes through the horizontal opening and stands on the rooftop deck, the view of the ocean and the rocky windswept terrain is spectacular. From the roster of studios recently completed, it is generally agreed that the building of the Tower Studio by the local crew of carpenters was one of the most challenging. Although the basic premise of the Tower’s geometry is a simple one – the plan rotates one hundred and eighty de- grees to the roof plan – the construction of the facetted form proved to be a little more complex. In order to figure out the framing diagram, a series of wooden models were constructed. Ultimately a large-scale model was fabricated to mini- mize any on-site confusion.

The story of the Tower Studio is not complete without referencing two structures that support it. The first one is a ‘standalone’ array of solar panels situated about fifty feet to the west of the studio’s main entrance. Because all the studios are located on isolated sites without access to the utilities of electricity, water and sewer, they are equipped with photovoltaic panels, compost toilets and water cisterns.

The other structure necessary for the Tower Studio’s success is its ‘fraternal twin’ – a restored traditional house in the nearby village where the artist lives while he/she is not working in the studio. All the Fogo Island studios follow the same model in which the studio is paired with a Saltbox – a traditional Newfound- land house, where the artist abides when not fixated on his/her most recent art project. The restoration of the traditional Saltbox house and the new construction of the architecturally provocative studios has created an interesting dynamic that brings the local vernacular architecture face-to-face with the multi-faceted expressions of contemporary culture.

As the architect, Todd Saunders, has explained, the fact that the renovated houses were part of a vernacular way of building increased the level of architectural experimentation allotted to the studios. In contrast to the renovated houses, located in the middle of the villages, the studios are situated about a fifteen-min- ute walk on the villages’ periphery. The artists experience both the warm hospitality of their neighbours, as well as, the cool refuge of their studios. Because the studios are outside the local villages, their architectural character is both seemingly familiar and uncannily ‘strange’. In some sense the studios ‘fit in’, but more importantly they stand out.

At times, the stark abstract forms of the studios painted black and/or white seem to disappear into the foggy weather, typical on Fogo Island. Disappearance may be an interesting addition to the lexicon of Saunders’s architectural production that focuses on playful geometries that generate dynamic forms that are strangely familiar. This series of architectural projects on Fogo Island does encompass the vernacular within the production of the new. More importantly, it forms a contemporary sensibility that is vital to reframe, re-situate and rejuvenate any traditional culture, in order for it to meet the opportunities and challenges of the twenty-first century – head on.