Hasta La Ideas

A huge concrete beam appears to balance on its edge along the roof of this Hawaiian house by Californian architect Craig Steely (+ slideshow).

Constructed on the lava slopes of Hawaii’s most active volcano, the concrete house by Craig Steely is divided into two halves, connected by a long concrete beam that soars overhead.

Timber beams and battons make up the roof, which runs beneath the concrete beam.

The living areas and master bedroom are separated from two further bedrooms by a lap pool and a veranda, which is partially covered by the overhanging roof.

Floor-to-ceiling glass runs the length of one facade, allowing uninterrupted views into the surrounding Ohia forest and out to the ocean beyond.

The architect was influenced by the native vegetation when designing the house. “The Ohia’s brilliant red flowers, called the Lehua, are a striking contrast to the ruddy green leaves and shades of gray of the tree’s bark and the black lava” says Steely. “Like the Ohia, the gray concrete house blends into the existing landscape of lava and trees while splashes of colour in the house mimic the Lehua.”

The house is deliberately long and narrow so as to increase cross-ventilation, eliminating the need for the mechanical air conditioning.

The building incorporates a rainwater catchment system, which provides the house with cold water as well as a solar heating system for hot water.

Named Lavaflow 7, the house is the latest addition to a series of residences by Steely, all of which have been constructed on the rocky slopes of Hawaii.

Other concrete dwellings we’ve recently featured on Dezeen include a house composed of a cluster of concrete cubes, stacked up on a steep hillside and a rural house raised off the hillside on a pair of gigantic concrete columns.

See more stories about concrete design »

Here’s some more information from Craig Steely:

Located on five acres of dense Ohia forest, this cast-in-place concrete house frames indoor and outdoor living spaces along with views of the forest, the sky, and the coastline on Hawaii’s Big Island. It continues our exploration of a reductive architecture that enhances the experience of living in this compelling environment.

The main feature of the house is a concrete beam, 140 foot long, 48 inch tall x 12 inch wide running the length of the building with only three short concrete walls supporting it along its massive span. Laminated beams and wood planks make up the roof that hangs below it. The concrete beam allows for sizable spans of uninterrupted glass and covered outdoor space, which creates a permeable edge between the man-made and nature. These huge expanses of openness amplify the sensation of living in the Ohia forest.

Ohia trees are endemic to Hawaii. They are the first trees to grow on new lava flows. Lavaflow 7 sits on a 1955 lava flow on the slopes of Kilauea crater. The Ohia’s brilliant red flower, called the Lehua, are a striking contrast to the ruddy green leaves and shades of gray of the tree’s bark and the black lava. Like the Ohia, the gray concrete house blends into the existing landscape of lava and trees while splashes of color in the house mimic the Lehua.

The nature of the house is long and thin, with private and public areas divided by a lanai and bisected by a lap pool. The thinness of the house provides passive cooling through cross ventilation allowing for the elimination of mechanical air conditioning, consistent and diffused light quality in the rooms through out the day, and a view of the forest, sky, and ocean from every room. Other sustainable features include a rainwater catchment system that supplies all water used along with a solar heating system for domestic hot water. A loose distribution of spaces around the few solid walls creates a house that is equally open in all directions and welcomes nature in.

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Craig Steely appeared first on Dezeen.

This family house in Mexico City by local architect Paul Cremoux conceals a three-storey wall of plants behind its slate-clad facade.

Concerned about the lack of sustainable construction in the country, Paul Cremoux Studio designed a building that uses plants to moderate its own internal temperature, whilst giving residents an indoor garden.

“Making sustainable eco-effective design in Mexico is pretty hard. Many clients do not yet realise the importance of changing the design strategy,” says architect Paul Cremoux.

He explains: “We would like to think about vegetation not only as a practical temperature-humidity comfort control device, or as a beautiful energetic view, but also as an element that acts like a light curtain.”

The green wall flanks a courtyard terrace, which occupies the middle floor and is open to the sky on one side. Meanwhile, most the rooms of the house are positioned on the levels above and below.

A driveway for two cars is located beneath the terrace and leads through to the dining and kitchen areas. A living room and three bedrooms occupy the second floor and can be accessed via a staircase tucked away in the corner.

The dark slate panels that clad the exterior also line some of the walls around the courtyard, contrasting with the light wood finishes applied elsewhere.

Other houses we’ve featured with indoor green walls include a residence in the Netherlands inside a timber-clad box and a house in Brazil clad with perforated golden metal. See more green walls on Dezeen.

Photography is by Héctor Armanado Herrera and PCW.

Here’s a project description from Paul Cremoux studio:

Casa CorManca

On a 12 metres by 13 metres (39ft by 42ft) plot of land, a monolithic volume is transformed in order to attain luminous indoor spaces. Slate stone at the exterior facades is contrasted with the soft beech-like wood finish, achieving great definition and space discovery.

Built in a small plot of land 176 m2, (1894 sqft), the construction rises looking south to the vertical vegetation garden wall. It is a three-storey-high assembly where the main terrace is to be found at the second level, follow by a small lecture studio.

This area is intent to transform radically the notion of “open patio garden” since there is not really space to ensure a ground courtyard, the main terrace plays a social definitive roll.

Recyclable content materials, VOC paint, cross ventilations highly used and passive energy-temperature control strategies are bound into the core design. Three heat exhaustion chimney work as main devices to control hot temperature at bedrooms areas.

Vertical garden is a mayor air quality and humidity creator, where before there was any plant, now we have planted over 4000.

Design Architect: Paul Cremoux W.
Project Team: Anna Giribets Martin
Structural Engineering: Arch. Ricardo Camacho
Equipment Engineering, Sustainability Consultant and vertical garden: Ing. José Antonio Lino Mina, DIA
General Contractor: Fermín Espinosa, Alfredo Galván, Factor Eficiencia

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Paul Cremoux Studio appeared first on Dezeen.

Windows of various shapes and sizes give this weekend retreat on the south coast of Japan the appearance of a children’s shape-sorter toy.

Designed by Tokyo studio Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects, Nowhere but Sajima forms part of the Nowhere Resort, a series of rentable holiday homes on the Miura peninsula of Kanagawa Prefecture.

The house is located on the harbour of a small fishing village. It has a triangular plan, with rooms on three storeys.

Each of the windows lines up with a different room and the ceiling of every room follows the profile of its window.

The architects describe the rooms as “thin tube-like spaces” with views directed towards the ocean. “We have created a place reminiscent of looking out to sea from the deck of a ship,” they explain.

Sliding doors and screens allow different rooms to open out to one another, plus a circular cutaway provides views between the first-floor study and the storey above.

See more holiday homes on Dezeen, including a set of apartments above a yacht house on the Crimean coastline and a weekend fishing retreat in Germany.

Here are more details from Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects:

Nowhere but Sajima

Cutting resort environment out of urban environment

Nowhere resort is the resort program that is renting out weekly vacation house. Suggesting new urban lifestyle by making shorter the distance to weekend house from standard 3 hours up to 1 hour. The environment must get close to urban when shorten the distance, the issue comes to how to cut off resort environment out of there. Therefore Nowhere but Sajima comes to build long and thin tube-like spaces that bundle them into one home unit. The tube-like spaces are facing toward the ocean and at the same time intercept the sight from the next condominium. The building is controlling both privacy and scenery.

A home for guests

Nowhere but Sajima provides a temporary ‘home’ for its guests. The weekly rental service provided by Nowhere Resort is a relatively new method of operating resort properties in Japan, and allows different tenants the opportunity to inhabit a ‘home’ on a weekly basis. While the weekly term is short compared to a standard monthly rental and long compared to a hotel stay, this in-between length accommodates a new diversity of uses of a ‘home’. Serving as a space for exhibitions, as a classroom or for wedding parties, the unit easily adapts to the imagination and invention of the tenant and in doing so also re-defines the range of activities that can take place in the ‘home’. As well as accommodating the functions of work and business, the ‘home’ again becomes the space of many life events beside the basic function of ‘inhabitance’. In acquiring a new program for use, the ‘home’ regains the richness of activity that can take place all around of life.

The building, a triangular block composed of tube-like volumes heading to the ocean, stands on a point of reclaimed land in a small fishing village. While the site meets the seawall and directly faces the sea, it is also faces other buildings across the water. To provide adequate privacy without the use of curtains, narrow tube-shaped spaces were bundled together and angled to provide openings toward the sea. The orientation of these tubes naturally blocks the line of sight from the adjacent apartments and while gazing down the length of the tube from inside only the ocean can be seen. While providing an escape from the tide of urbanism characterising what we normally call a ‘resort’, the design still maintains the key aspects of the resort experience. We have created a place reminiscent of looking out to sea from the deck of a ship.

Location: Yokosuka Kanagawa, JAPAN
Principal Use: HouseStructure: RC 3 stories

Site Area: 132.09 sq.m
Building Area: 63.88 sq.m
Total Floor Area: 176.65 sq.m
Max Height: 9,459 mm

Architect: Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects
Client: Nowhere resort
Structural Engineer: Akira Suzuki/ASA
Services: EOS+
Electric Services: comodo
General Contractor: Heisei Construction

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Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

This renovated family home in Japan by designer Yasunari Tsukada features large internal windows and a mezzanine loft, creating apertures and vantage points for looking into different rooms (+ slideshow).

Adapting part of a three-storey house, Yasunari Tsukada planned the interior as a grid of partitioned rooms that maintain the same clarity as an open-plan residence.

“The client requested a home where he could feel the presence of his family throughout the building, while at the same time having the calm and relaxing sensation of being in a private room,” explains the designer.

The mezzanine floor runs across the centre of the space, accessed by a metal staircase near the entrance. There are no walls around it, only balustrades, so residents can look down onto any of the surrounding rooms.

Large windows and doorways also open rooms out to one another. There are a few sliding doors, so some of the spaces can be made more private when necessary.

“Each space also contains two or more windows or openings, giving rise to a multilayered space with no sense of hierarchy within it,” says Tsukada.

An existing glass-block wall that previously encased a stairwell gives a curved outline to a new living room, plus a single concrete wall is the backdrop for a television.

The ceiling of the residence follow the angle of the roof. Bare lightbulbs hang down from it on long cables, while others are mounted sideways onto the walls.

Japanese designer Yasunari Tsukada more recently completed a beauty salon in Osaka with a timber lattice stretching across one wall.

Other new Japanese residences include an apartment with a sunken circular living room and an opaque house balanced above a pet shop. See more architecture in Japan.

Photography is by Stirling Elmendorf.

Here’s some more information from Yasunari Tsukada:

House in Takamatsu

Our client was initially inclined to build a new house. After much consideration, however, he decided to partly renovate his three-storey family house, and use it as a residence for a two-generation family.

The client requested a home where he could feel the presence of his family throughout the building, while at the same time having the calm and relaxing sensation of being in a private room. By enveloping each room with a sloping ceiling to make use of the existing building, we wondered if we could create an ambiguously defined space that would feel as if it had been partitioned, while still maintaining a sense of coherence and unity.

The components that make up each individual room are gate-like walls, which consist mainly of openings. The roof gradient and heights of the sash windows were determined in accordance with the original height of the living room, which was 2400mm. The heights of the walls also took their cue from this figure, and were set at 2400mm. Although it seems as if this height has been deployed with excessive frequency within the space, doing away with ceilings for the individual rooms while covering them with a single, sloping ceiling and installing windows at a number of positions along the walls allowed us to create a sort of landscape that presented a very different face to the familiar surroundings. Each space also contains two or more windows or openings, giving rise to a multilayered space with no sense of hierarchy within it.

The renovation process involves thinking about how we can devise new spaces while respecting a given set of conditions imposed by the existing building, as well as the client’s requirements. The glass blocks from the large staircase and stairwell were transformed into a part of the living room and the reading space, while the innocuous reinforced concrete wall that originally supported the staircase was given a new lease of life as the wall that one notices most of all on a daily basis. For our client, this space helped to give things and objects new meanings, and became invested with new stories and narratives – a process that prompted him to rethink the possibilities of design through renovation.

Project Name: House in Takamatsu
Project Type: residence renovation
Location: Takamatsu-city, Kagawa, Japan
Completion: 2012 May
Design: Yasunari Tsukada design
Contractor: Shikoku Housing

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by Yasunari Tsukada appeared first on Dezeen.

The latest building to feature an indoor slide is this South Korean house by Seoul studio Moon Hoon, where a wooden slide is slotted into a combined staircase and bookshelf (+ slideshow).

Named Panorama House, the three-storey residence is home to a family of six in North Chungcheong Province. The clients had asked Moon Hoon to include various spaces where their four children could play, so the architects designed a house where different floors belong to different residents.

The ground floor is dedicated to the children and includes the wooden staircase and slide. Open treads create bleacher-style seating areas for a home cinema, but they also double-up as bookshelves for a small study area tucked underneath.

“The key was coming up with a multi-functional space,” say the architects. “The multi-use stair and slide space brings much active energy to the house. Not only children, but also grown-ups love the slide staircase.”

Two twin bedrooms are located behind the study, plus the youngest children can also use the large second-floor attic as a playroom.

Family rooms are all located on the middle floor and lead out to two separate terraces. Underfloor heating was added to each of the spaces to encourage residents to sit on the floor, rather than on furniture.

A bedroom suite is separated at one end of this floor and features an en suite bathroom and dressing room.

The facade of Panorama House is divided into a basalt-clad base and a white-rendered upper. To accentuate the subtle zigzag of the plan, the architects added angled sections to create the illusion of three cubes in perpective.

Indoor slides have featured in a few residences in recent years. Architect David Hotson added a tubular steel slide to a penthouse apartment in New York, while slides have also featured in a house in Indonesia and a house in Japan. See more slides on Dezeen.

Photography is by Huh Juneul, apart from where otherwise indicated.

Here’s a project description from Moon Hoon:

Panorama House

The Client

They have four kids, and that is a big family by contempory standards. They are both teachers in their late thirties. The first and the most important thing they wanted in their new home was a place where their kids could play, read and study. They wanted lower floors for the kids and upper for themselves. They already tried it out with another architect, but it did not satisfy them, that’s when they said that they found about me, who appeared to be more playful and more creative.

The Site

Irregular and sloped site boasted a great view. It is situated in a nice newly built surburb. The view reminded me of a scene from a movie, LA surburbs at night. Instantly, a name for the house came up – Panorama House – which they nodded with some ambience.

The Design

The basic request of upper and lower spatial organization and the shape of the site prompted a long and thin house with a fluctuating facade, which would allow for a more differentiated view. The key was coming up with a multi-functional space which is a large staircase, bookshelves, casual reading space, home cinema, slide and many more.

The client was very pleased with the design, and the initial design was accepted and finalised almost instantly, only with minor adjustments. The kitchen and dining space is another important space where family gathers to bond. The TV was pushed away to a smaller living room. The attic has the best view is possible and it is used as a play room for younger kids.

The multi-use stair and slide space brings much active energy to the house. Not only children, but also grown-ups love the slide staircase. It is an action-filled, playful house for all ages.

The fluctuating facade is accentuated by mirrored bottom and top angles. It can bring about some illusion when looked at with some concentration. The various sized windows provide different outlooks. Korean houses are floor heated, which is quite unique and brings users to the floors more than to furniture such as sofa and chairs. So many windows are placed quite low, considering the long living habit. There is no high-legged dining table for the family, only a portable foldable short-legged table. The space kept empty until any specific function arises.

Architect: Moon Hoon
Design Team: Lee Ju Hee, Kim Dong Won, Park Sang Eun
Client: Moon Sung Gwang
Total Site Area: 570.50 sqm
Total Floor Area: 209.14 sqm
Construction: reinforced concrete and wood frame

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by Moon Hoon appeared first on Dezeen.