Hasta La Ideas

Glass panels slide into the walls to create an outdoor living room at this lakeside house outside São Paulo by Brazilian architects Studio Arthur Casas (+ slideshow).

Named Casa Itu, the building is the main residence for a young family with two children. It is two storeys in height, but most of the rooms occupy the ground floor to create a long L-shaped plan.

Studio Arthur Casas used an earthy materials palette of sandy-coloured render and Brazilian teak wood to create a relationship between the house and the surrounding landscape.

“We always try to use local materials,” architect Alexandra Kayat told Dezeen. “We used local earth in the mixture of the colour for the facade. We tried to find a colour that would be as close as possible to tones found in the landscape, so the house would fit better in the landscape, as its quite large and horizontal.”

The living room sits at the outer corner of the plan, allowing two sides to open out to the garden. A wooden pergola cantilevers out beside it and has now (since the photographs) been fitted with a retractable canopy, while a supporting column is concealed behind the trunk of an indoor tree.

A timber deck stretches out along the edge of the rear elevation, where the architects have installed a swimming pool. From here, a staircase ascends to give access to another terrace on the roof.

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Studio Arthur Casas appeared first on Dezeen.

Swedish architects Claesson Koivisto Rune will present a kit-of-parts for a prefabricated Scandinavian house in Milan this April (+ slideshow).

“The prefab/kit house market generally prefers fake historical over contemporary,” says Claesson Koivisto Rune, “and it is more than common that an architect has not been involved at all.” The team was keen to avoid this conservative approach and wanted to come up with a modern design that reflected current Swedish architecture.

With Tind House, they developed distinctive contemporary details for the roof shape, windows and doors of the flexible system, which can be constructed as a single-storey residence for a couple or a family home with two or three floors.

Each house features a roof with a gentle incline to match the housing vernacular in Sweden. The peak of the roof is flat, which the designers compare to the profiles of the Scandinavian Mountains.

Windows or skylights are generously sized to offer the best possible views and their frames are bevelled on the outside to create a rhythm with the rest of the facade, but each one sits flush with the interior walls.

“The greatest challenge was to meet the demands for a client-flexible house with maintained architectural integrity,” architect Mårten Claesson told Dezeen. “We had to establish a couple of strong feature principles – the roof shape, the full cut-out of windows and doors, and their side alignment between different floor and roof levels – that would define a house that could vary in size, colour and number of floors.”

Tind House is designed to sit on a level plan, but can easily be adapted to negotiate a sloping site. The layout can also be altered to suit different occupants and locations.

Ordinarily, the entrance and staircase are positioned at the front of the building and lead through to living and dining rooms at the back. Utility rooms, bathrooms and bedrooms are placed at the sides, plus extra bedrooms and bathrooms occupy the upstairs floors on the two- and three-storey buildings.

The house is manufactured by Swedish house builder Fiskarhedenvillan and will be presented at the Globo Art Space in Milan.

Claesson Koivisto Rune comprises a team of designers and architects, whose projects includes lighting and furniture, as well as architecture. They recently presented a collection of colourful pendant lamps and a set of solid brass coat hooks as part of Stockholm Design Week. See more design by Claesson Koivisto Rune, including a house on the Baltic island of Öland.

Other prefabricated houses we’ve featured include one in Portugal that costs the same as a family car and another home that’s lifted into place by a helicopter. See more prefabricated buildings on Dezeen.

Images are by Peter Guthrie.

Here’s a project decription from Claesson Koivisto Rune:

Claesson Koivisto Rune at Globo Art Space – Tind house

Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects is showing for the first time to an international audience their new house called Tind. Tind is a prefab house and represents a brand new typology for this particular field.

Globo being a manufacturer of sanitary porcelain, it is perhaps peculiar to show architecture during the Salone del Mobile. But Globo Art Space is not a commercial scene but a new gallery space offered by Globo to promote art, architecture and related culture in general.

Claesson Koivisto Rune is also a product and furniture design practice, but is during this event proud to present their architecture, by showing their most recent project. It will also be an example of the Scandinavian approach to living, not in the usual historic, modernistic context, but right now, right here.

The Tind* house is a new prefab house by Swedish Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects. Manufactured by Fiskarhedenvillan and provided to clients as a complete building kit.

The prefab/kit house market is traditionally conservative and generally prefers fake historical over contemporary. And it is more than common that an architect has not been involved at all. If this is from neglect on the manufacturers’ side or arrogance from the architects’ is difficult to know. What we do know, is that it is time for change.

We have built a house built on a concept built on a set of features. The prefab house needs to be flexible in size and configuration to accomodate individual families’ needs and individual locations. So in order to maintain the houses’ architectural integrity it is some strong features rather than exact dimensions that are important.

The first feature is the roof:

The traditional Swedish one-family house has a single-pitch roof. With its pitch angle not as steep as in Germany and not as gentle as in Italy, but in between. The Tind house’s roof starts with this typical Swedish pitch. But then the peak is cut off. So that the roof becomes somewhat of a hybrid between single-pitch and flat.

The second feature is the window niches:

First, windows are few, but big, and allocated to the most important walls, rather than many, small and on every wall. Second, every opening, window or door, is flush with the interior. Furthermore the thicknesses of the joists are disguised by bevelling the niche. This allows the house to become a rhythmic composition of wall and void, wall and void. Rather than the usual volume with punched holes.

The third feature is alignment:

The division between roof and walls is clear and sharp; like a waistline. Sharp is also the one-side alignment between windows on overlying floors. Every line and every cut aligns with another; with the next.

The interior layout is generous in spatial flow and efficient in actual flow. The entrance and staircase is at the core. Directly onward lies the communal living, dining and kitchen area. A second, side entranceway goes through a combined storage and wash room. For brushing off your shoes or dog from a muddy walk in the forest before entering the living areas. Bedrooms and bathrooms are either upstairs, downstairs or to the side end of the house. The general ambience is that of outdoor and indoor being connected.

* Tind is Norwegian for Mountain Peak. One difference between the Scandian mountain range and most other mountain ranges, such as the Alps, is the lack of sharp pointed peaks. This because the last big ice age shaved them off when retracting. In Scandinavia we find our mountains particularly beautiful because of this feature.

Above: Tind house one – ground floor plan

Above: Tind house one – facades

Above: Tind house two – ground floor plan

Above: Tind house two – first floor plan

Above: Tind house two – facades

Above: Tind house three – ground floor plan

Above: Tind house three – first floor plan

Above: Tind house three – second floor plan

Above: Tind house three – facades

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Claesson Koivisto Rune appeared first on Dezeen.

Australian firm Charles Wright Architects used a mixture of precast and in-situ concrete to construct a house that can withstand the most powerful cyclones in northern Queensland (+ slideshow).

The two-storey residence hangs over the edge of a lake in a beachfront rainforest area that is prone to tropical cyclones at the top end of the meteorological scales. The chunky cantilevered volumes are not only strong enough to withstand these cyclones but also prevent water from getting in during any accompanying floods.

Charles Wright Architects designed the building to be self-sufficient, so it functions entirely off-grid. Solar panels on the roof generate electricity, while a 250,000-litre water system lets residents take advantage of rainwater harvesting and grey-water recycling technologies.

“The aim was not to simply produce an engineered outcome,” explain the architects, “but to produce a building which made the most of the site’s natural amenity and reintroduced the surrounding native wetland environment.”

Named Stamp House, the building has an embellished exterior featuring a grid of circular indents that dot across the walls and roof.

The entrance to the building is located on the uppermost floor and is accessed by crossing a long bridge over the water. Inside, a large central living room accommodates various seating areas, a kitchen, a dining room and a gym. Bedrooms are situated in the wings.

Other houses designed to withstand intense weather conditions include a concrete bungalow on a Japanese island prone to typhoons and a conceptual tornado-proof house.

See more houses in Australia, including a blackened-timber residence outside Melbourne.

Here’s some more information from Charles Wright Architects:

Stamp House

CWA were approached by the project client to deliver a carbon neutral (in operation) solution for an environmentally sensitive site off-grid on the edge of the FNQ beachfront rainforest. The aim was not to simply produce an engineered outcome but to produce a building which made the most of the site’s natural amenity and reintroduced the surrounding native wetland environment. The building is literally reflected by way of its siting over an engineered water ecosystem which was the result of lengthy liaison and collaboration with National Parks, Environmental Agencies, State and Local Government.

The design is formed in an innovative combination of in-situ and precast concrete. The concrete has been engineered and insulated incorporating a total solar panelled roof to provide for a constant cooler and more comfortable ambient temperature year-round. The design utilises massive cantilevers to mitigate impact from potential flooding and king tide inundation associated with cyclonic activity. The project has been designed to be solid and to withstand intense cyclones.

ESD initiatives include: total 250,000 ltr water harvesting, recycling and reticulation, renewable solar energy generation with solar backup non-reliant on fossil fuel backup generation, On-site Advanced Tertiary Sewerage treatment plant, grey water recycling and irrigation, Shaded and Insulated Thermal mass engineering, ‘green’ cooling and energy conservation controlled via building automation system (CBUS).

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Charles Wright Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

More from architect Hironaka Ogawa: the two trees felled to make way for this house extension in Kagawa, Japan, were reinstalled inside the living room (+ slideshow).

The two-storey extension branches out into the garden of the 35-year-old family house to provide a residence for the client’s daughter and her husband.

The two trees stood in the way of construction and had to be removed beforehand, but Hironaka Ogawa was concerned about the connection they had to the family’s history. “These trees looked over the family for 35 years,” he explains.

The architect decided to keep the trees intact, dry them out and insert them into a double-height living and dining room. The floor was sunken just below ground level to ensure enough height to fit them in.

“Utilising these trees and creating a new place for the client became the main theme for the design,” says Ogawa, and explains that the family asked a Shinto priest to perform an exorcism on the trees as they were cut down.

Entitled Garden Tree House, the residence also contains a mezzanine loft that squeezes in alongside the trees. Bathrooms are tucked away below it.

Walls and ceilings are painted white, allowing the yellow and brown shades of the trees to stand out.

Trees were also the centrepiece of a wedding chapel that Hironaka Ogawa designed, which we featured on Dezeen this week. See more architecture from Japan on Dezeen.

Photography is by Daici Ano.

Here’s a full project description from Hironaka Ogawa:

Garden Tree House

This is an extension project on a thirty-five year-old house for a daughter and her husband. A Zelkova tree and a Camphor tree stood on the site since the time the main house was build thirty-five years ago.

Removing these trees was one of the design requirements because the new additional building could not be built if these trees remained. When I received the offer for the project, I thought of various designs before I visited the site for the first time. However, all my thoughts were blown away as soon as I saw the site in person. The two trees stood there quite strongly.

I listen to the stories in detail; the daughter has memories of climbing these trees when she was little. These trees looked over the family for thirty-five years. They coloured the garden and grew up with the family. Therefore, utilising these trees and creating a new place for the client became the main theme for the design.

In detail, I cut the two trees with their branches intact. Then I reduced the water content by smoking and drying them for two weeks. Thereafter, I placed the trees where they used to stand and used them as main structural columns in the center of the living room, dining room, and kitchen.

In order to mimic the way the trees used to stand, I sunk the building an additional 70 centimetres down in the ground. I kept the height of the addition lower than the main house while still maintaining 4 metre ceiling height.

By the way, the smoking and drying process was done at a kiln within Kagawa prefecture. These two trees returned to the site without ever leaving the prefecture.

The client asked a Shinto priest at the nearby shrine to remove evil when the trees were cut. Nobody would go that far without a love and attachment to these trees.

When this house is demolished and another new building constructed by a descendant of the client hundreds of years from now, surely these two trees will be reused in some kind of form.

Above: site plan – click for larger image

Above: floor plan – click for larger image

Above: cross section – click for larger image

Above: long section – click for larger image

Above: exploded isometric – click for larger image

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by Hironaka Ogawa appeared first on Dezeen.

Residents taking a bath or using the toilet are on show to swimmers in the pool at this brick and concrete house in Chiang Mai, Thailand (+ slideshow).

The house was designed by local studio SO, also known as Situation-based Operation. Named Wonderwall, it comprises a series of both indoor and outdoor rooms that fold around a row of chunky brick walls.

The residence is organised over a series of split levels to negotiate the slopes of the hill. Staircases are dotted around the rooms to prescribe different routes between floors.

“The house is basically a living space,” explains architect Narong Othavorn. “[It has] a huge open plan and open space between indoor and outdoor, with the big wall cutting through the existing landform to create the sequential scenes, exposing it to different space and functions.”

The swimming pool is positioned on the uppermost storey, sandwiched between the main bedroom and bathroom. Walls are glazed on the facades of both rooms so that they face each other across the water.

“I just wanted the owner to be able to shower right after swimming,” Othavorn told Dezeen.

Louvred fencing surrounds this cluster of rooms to let in light, but also maintains privacy from the rest of the house.

“The bedroom can be seen once entering the plot, but can only be accessed at the end of the sequential scene by passing through a gallery-like living room and the swimming pool,” added Othavorn.

The “gallery-like” living and dining room is also located on the top floor, while a sheltered outdoor kitchen and living room sits on the level below.

A square terrace covers one of the rooftops and is designed to double-up as an outdoor cinema.

The architect’s materials palette included red clay bricks, exposed concrete and timber decking. Glass walls are made up of concertinaed panels that hinge open when necessary.

Other residences we’ve featured from Thailand include a Bangkok apartment with an outdoor shower room and a renovation of two traditional shophouses.

See more architecture from Thailand ».

Photography is by Piyawut Srisakul.

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by SO appeared first on Dezeen.