Hasta La Ideas

Behind the traditional ceramic-tiled facade of this nineteenth-century building, Portuguese studio OODA has completed a modern renovation to create 14 studio flats (+ slideshow).

The building in Porto dates from 1895 and was originally designed as a home, but was turned into an office and service building in the late 20th century. It lost many of its original features in the process, including wood flooring – now concrete – and a skylight above the stairwell.

It has now been converted back into a residential building by OODA with 14 studio flats and three one- or two-bedroom apartments. The apartments range from 28 square metres to 105 square metres, and are aimed at young people and students.

An automatic pivoting door provides access for cars from the street to the DM2 Building, and OODA clad it in stone to camouflage it among the building’s exterior when the door is closed.

“The client’s objective – which drove the intervention – was to cater for the younger market as the building is near universities, hospitals, the art district and the nightlife area,” architect Diogo Brito told Dezeen.

The apartments all feature contemporary details such as folded metal staircases and built-in storage, and mezzanine levels for sleep or work areas to maximise the small footprint of some of the apartments.

Black floor-to-ceiling cabinets help to differentiate the kitchen as a separate area in the open-plan apartments, and also helps to visually recede them in the room.

The communal corridors are covered in oriented strand board (OSB), which the architects chose partly for its affordability, and to add warmth to the building’s interior.

“We used it because it is a cheap material, and we thought it would be an interesting and warmer contrast to materials such as glass, concrete and light,” said Brito.

At the back, a patio designed for parking has been landscaped using grass and paving with the same triangular pattern found in the ceramic Azulejo tiles at the front.

“In Portugal it is quite common and traditional to use tiles in facades,” said Brito. “Our idea was to make this part of the conceptual process, using its configuration to generate other new features of the building.”

Beneath the patio, a separate, sunken apartment has been built for the client’s son, with a small, private courtyard at its front. A rectangular concrete structure protrudes through the front window, and is designed to serve a range of purposes.

“The client’s first idea was to place a mini-bar there, which then shifted to storage, and then to a place for TV and music devices,” said Brito.

The renovation is part of a wider regeneration taking place in Porto at the moment, which saw construction projects drop significantly following the global financial crisis.

“The recovery of abandoned buildings has become the new major task for the market,” said Brito. “It’s a process that is now in full throttle, but there is still a lot to be done. This building is one of many that our office is doing.”

OODA was co-founded by Brito, who previously worked as an architect at Zaha Hadid, and Rodrigo Vilas-Boas, who has worked with both OMA in Rotterdam and Álvaro Leite Siza in Porto.

Photography is by João Morgado.

Here is some more text from OODA:

DM2 Housing, Porto, Portugal

One of the most demanding tasks in Porto nowadays is the intervention on the major amount of old and historical buildings of Porto’s downtown. This project is a renovation of a 20th century building to convert to a 17 housing unit for students and young people in general.

The DM2 Building, located in downtown Porto (priority intervention zone), in the area of protection of the National Museum Soares dos Reis, is dating the nineteenth century and their original composition the property was intended for a single dwelling taking ornamental and construction of the whole characteristics of the buildings at the time, both in functional layout as an ornamental and aesthetic.

However, a later change occurred in the late twentieth century, the building has undergone a profound change taking place inside caused by the modification of use required.

The property became divided by several independent floors with features framed in services and trade and lower floors have been completely redesigned and trace assets were hidden in part and/or removed from the particular frames original, wood structure of the floors (now concrete) and traditional skylight at top of stairs. Indeed, the draft D.Manuel intended to rebuild the property, returning the initial function of integral housing, recovering traces of hidden identity, reinterpreting traditional elements and giving the building a new sense of contemporary housing program with a set of typologies ace current market needs.

So Manuel II building as a whole distributes 17 apartments T0 and T1 types, ranging in size between 28sqm and 105sqm, spread over 5 floors and are accompanied by a landscaped patio intended for parking.

The rehabilitation now completed, restores the original residential function, underlines the unique formal and constructive characteristics and adapt to a contemporary urban reality of the city of Oporto.

Size: 1,100 SQM
Team: Diogo Brito, Rodrigo Vilas-Boas, Francisco Lencastre, Francisca Santos, Lourenco Menezes Rodrigues

The post OODA completes modern apartment renovation
behind tiled facade in Porto appeared first on Dezeen.

Bold orange windows punctuate the wooden facades of this angular apartment block that French studio Vous Êtes Ici Architectes has slotted between the existing buildings of a south Paris neighbourhood (+ movie).

The six-storey building was designed by Vous Êtes Ici Architectes to provide 11 social housing units beside a school in the 5th Arrondissement of the French capital, on a site previously occupied by a low-rise warehouse.

Rather than building across the entire site, the architects developed an irregularly shaped block that follows the rhythms of the surrounding architecture and frames a pair of gardens at the north and south-east edges.

These gardens also line up with the main road and pedestrian pathway that frame two edges of the site, helping to the reduce the visual impact of the structure.

“The building is set back from the street, allowing the sunlight to reach the school courtyard set across the street,” explained studio founders Alexandre Becker, Paul Pflughaupt and Julien Paulré. “This setup allows respiration and gives space back to the pedestrian passage.”

While some of the building’s walls are clad with timber planks, others are covered with pre-weathered zinc. At ground level, there are also walls of dark brickwork, which demarcate entrances.

Windows with orange frames add colour to the elevations. This feature is echoed in the building’s stairwells and corridors, where walls, floors and railings are uniformly painted in the same hue.

No more than three apartments are located on each floor and the angular shapes of the building give each home a non-standard shape.

“The created volumes allow different typologies for the apartments as well as creating views for all,” said the architects.

South-facing loggias allow apartments to benefit from sunlight during the peak of the day.

Graphic logos adorn doors to direct residents to bicycle storage and bin stores, while a grassy terrace is located on the roof.

Photography is by 11H45.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Logements Sociaux Paris 75005

Located in the Mouffetard area, Latin Quarter of Paris, our project aims to de-densify the heart of the city block in which it is located.

The building is set back from the street allowing the sunlight to reach the school courtyard set across the street. This setup allows respiration and gives space back to the pedestrian passage. The roof line is continuous and guaranties the continuity of the facades over the street. The set up on the plot is effective, the street is no longer only functional it has become sumptuous.

The construction is a unique volume that has been hollowed out. The recesses generate a course. They punctuate and follow our movements. The created volumes allow different typologies for the apartments as well as creating views for all. The project is more an architectural device than a sculpture.

The primary concrete structure supports wooden based facades. The envelope is of pre-aged zinc and wooden openwork cladding. The hall, stairs and landings are set up in a unique volume that has no partitions; the different levels are visually linked. Perambulation is naturally illuminated in the common spaces. Apartments have from two to three orientations. Hollow construction elements were refused. The apartments are luxurious.

A compact building, a well-insulated wooden structure, solar panels, double glazing windows, a planted roof terrace and loggias with a southern exposure allow us to respect the requirements of Paris’s Climate Plan and to reduce the ecological impact of the building. It is architecture of an efficient nature.

Developer: ELOGIE
Architects: Vous Êtes Ici Architectes (A. Becker, J. Paulré, P. Pflughaupt)
General contractor: Fayolle & Fils
Technical engineering: FACEA
Economist: BMA
Environment engineering: ICADE

The post Social housing by Vous Êtes Ici Architectes
slots between buildings in Paris appeared first on Dezeen.

A seven-storey block of flats by Guérin & Pedroza Architects is the latest addition to a project transforming the site of a nineteenth century fort outside Paris into a new residential district (+ slideshow).

The Issy-les-Moulineaux fort was one of 16 built around the French capital between 1841 and 1845 that played a part in protecting the city from Prussian invasion. It became wasteland after it was decommissioned and was bought from the Ministry of Defence by the local government in 2010.

Public facilities were built, including fitness trails, a swimming pool and a bowling pitch for future occupants, and further plots sold on to a series of developers.

Parisian firm Guérin & Pedroza‘s contribution, situated in the northern part of the fort with views over eastern Paris, is one of four blocks built by developer Bouygues Immoblier as part of the project.

The shape of the block respects the original outline specified by over-arching masterplanners Architecture Studio.

It contains 74 flats, ranging from studios to five bedroom homes, arranged along central corridors. Rather than create uniform volumes, the architects made each flat unique by hollowing out or filling in the facades to create balconies, loggias and terraces.

Each intervention is clad in a gold material to make it stand out further.

Hot water and heating is provided using geothermal energy provided by a 700-metre-deep well and heat pumps, and waste collection is also handled underground with a pneumatic removal system.

Photography is by Paul Kozlowski.

More from the architect:

Project description 

A contemporary history

During the period of the Prussian invasions, the politician Adolphe Thiers erected defensive walls around Paris named after him. Between 1841 and 1845, 16 forts were built around the city. One after the other, they lost their military status. Among these military wastelands, the Issy-les-Moulineaux fort, known today as the “Digital fort”, an eco-district project carried out notably by Bouygues Immobilier. This grouping gathers 18 blocks of residential flats, a day nursery and two school complexes.

Concerning leisure, the curtains have been recycled into two-kilometre-long fitness trails; a swimming pool and a bowling pitch have also been created. If the programme has somehow been thought as a garden of Eden, the developers have meant to give digital touch with a systematic optical fibre cabling of the buildings and home automation.

An ellipse to fill in

Within this multi-authors programme, the building lies within a wider urban project with various authors. The general plan of the fort and of thus the shape of the blocks was designed by the French team of Architecture Studio which won the 2000 competition. Guerin & Pedroza chose to respect that shape while giving it a strong identity. The seven-storey building has 74 flats —from studio to five-bedroom— arranged along central corridors. The bigger ones are duplexes.

The situation of the villa in the northern part of the fort, along a north/south axis, offers a special view on the east of Paris and opens widely to the south on orchard. Each flat is made specific by hollowing out or filling in the façades. Thus, the orientations either follow the original geometry of the building or that of new the openings.

A precious and useful touch

A series of polymorphous inclusions make the regularity of the general plan more dynamic. A bright golden cladding adds value to those spaces carved into the white volume. It stages the balconies, loggias and terraces where the inhabitants will enjoy the outer living areas. At sunrise and sunset, lights and reflections will be enhanced for the pleasure of the users.

About environment

Four hectares out of twelve are dedicated to green spaces and most notably an orchard that counts 350 trees spread around the villas. Concerning sustainable development, two 700-metre-deep geothermal wells have been set and cover 78% of the production of hot water and heating needed for the whole fort. A pneumatic waste collection system gathers all the rubbish into two spots at the entrance of the fort, thus avoiding trucks within the site. Besides, all the flats located on the ground floor enjoy a private garden.

Technical details

Programme: 74 low-energy flats (studio to 5-bedroom)
Location: Issy-les-Moulineaux (Hauts-de-Seine, France)
Client: Bouygues Immobilier
Architects: Guérin & Pedroza Architects
Collaborators: F.Mouly and S. Videment
Builder: Bouygues Bâtiment
Total surface area: 4016m2
Material used: Concrete structure, aluminium clapboard cladding, thermo-lacquered aluminium railing, thin coating over external wall insulation, and white PVC exterior window and door frames.
Cost: 7,23 millions euros off tax

The post Franco-Prussian war site hosts block
of flats by Guérin & Pedroza Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Design strategy collective Urban-Think Tank has designed and built a prototypical house as part of an initiative to improve housing conditions for slum dwellers in some of the 2700 informal settlements across South Africa (+ movie).

Urban-Think Tank, which was involved in the Golden Lion-winning research into the Torre David vertical slum in Caracas, has this time teamed up with ETH Zürich university to search for ways that architects can help improve the environment and security of these slums that house approximately 15 percent of the country’s entire population.

Working under the title Empower Shack, the team organised a design-and-build workshop in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town that is one of the largest in South Africa, and developed a design for a low-cost two-storey shack for local resident Phumezo Tsibanto and his family.

They then worked together to replace Tsibanto’s existing single-storey dwelling with the new two-storey structure, giving the family a new home with a watertight exterior and its own electricity.

The designers are now exploring different configurations of the prototype that will allow it to adapt to the needs of different residents, extending up to three storeys when necessary.

This in turn becomes part of a wider strategy for rationalising the layout of the entire community, known as blocking out. This involves creating access routes for emergency vehicles and providing basic services such as sanitation and water.

“Our work on the Empower Shack project is not the result of the usual architectural pursuit for a new housing typology,” said Urban-Think Tank co-founder Alfredo Brillembourg. “While we are absolutely trying to innovate upon the design and technology of low-cost housing, we’re more concerned with the general ‘system’ that surrounds housing in the context of informal South African settlements.”

He continued: “This includes the infrastructure that makes housing decent, such as power and sanitation, along with the urban configuration of homes. The Empower Shack project seeks to address these larger challenges, and in doing so, hopefully changes not just the built landscape of places like Khayelitsha, but also the social, political and economic structures that shape residents’ lives.”

Brillembourg and partner Hubert Klumpner are now showing their findings from the two-year research in an exhibition at the Eva Presenhuber Gallery in Zurich.

Here’s a project description from Urban-Think Tank:

Empower Shack

Can art and architecture lend a voice to segments of the population that go unheard? Empower Shack is a new exhibition presenting an ETH Zürich and Urban-Think Tank project on South Africa, supported by Swisspearl (Schweiz) AG. A collaboration between the Brillembourg & Klumpner Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, South African NGO Ikhayalami (‘My Home’), Transsolar, Brillembourg Ochoa Foundation, Meyer Burger, the BLOCK ETH ITA Research Group, and videocompany, the Empower Shack team was established as a response to conventional approaches in dealing with urban informality, which are unsustainable and painstakingly slow in meeting the immediate needs of the vast majority of South Africa’s urban poor.

With its roots in a research, design and build workshop aimed at developing an innovative, replicable, affordable and sustainable shack prototype for Cape Town’s Khayelitsha (the third largest township in South Africa), the exhibition uses film, photography, drawings, painting and large-scale architectural installations to explore the complexity of living conditions in informal settlements, and the social role of architects in helping to address the economic, ecological and security challenges faced by residents.

With a population of over 50 million and the continent’s largest economy, South Africa is often seen as a source of relative stability and prosperity in the region. Yet economic inequality remains high. Around 1.5 million households (approximately 7.5 million people) live in 2,700 informal settlements scattered across the country, which faces an overall shortage of 2.5 million houses.

While the government’s record on housing delivery is laudable, the scale of need means informal settlements will remain for the foreseeable future. In response, authorities have slowly begun shifting the focus to incremental upgrading, including committing in 2010 to improve the quality of life of 400,000 households in well located informal settlements by 2014 through improved access to basic services and land tenure.

Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, along with their research and design teams and collaborating partners are engaged in an ongoing project to develop and implement design innovations for rapid and incremental informal settlement upgrading.

The examples featured in the Empower Shack exhibition are intended to provide immediate strategies to alleviate a national crisis, while remaining embedded within community-driven processes around resource allocation.

With Empower Shack, Brillembourg and Klumpner reinforce their broader vision for practical, sustainable interventions in informal settlements around the world. They argue the future of urban development lies in collaboration among architects, artists, private enterprise, and the global population of slum-dwellers.

Brillembourg, Klumpner and their team frequently exhibit internationally in venues such as Kassel (2004), MoMA (2010) and the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture, where they were awarded the Golden Lion in 2012. Through artistic and didactic presentations, they issue a call to arms to their fellow architects to see in the informal settlements of the world a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future.

The post Urban-Think Tank develops housing
prototype for South African slums appeared first on Dezeen.

French office Périphériques has redeveloped a site in west Paris by adding apartment blocks with contrasting facades and angular balconies, as well as a nursery with stripy pink and green walls (+ slideshow).

Périphériques designed three buildings for the irregularly shaped plot between Fremicourt Street and Boulevard de Grenelle, accommodating 35 apartments for rent, 54 social housing units and a kindergarten for up to 30 children.

The nine-storey apartment block is positioned on the northern side of the site, facing out onto Boulevard de Grenelle, and its facade is clad with terracotta panels that have been enamelled to create an iridescent effect.

The south-facing rear of the building overlooks a large communal garden, so the architects added a series of protruding balconies that extend the living rooms of each residence. Contrastingly, this elevation is clad with timber slats.

The social housing block is positioned opposite, facing south onto Frémicourt Street. The facade of this building is glazed, while its rear wall is clad with anodised aluminium.

“The program’s particularity is that the same operation unites social housing as well as private housing units,” said the architects. “Thus, we have treated the facades in a common way but with some classification.”

The three-storey kindergarten is sandwiched between the two housing blocks but can be accessed via a passageway that runs along the edge of the plot.

This structure has a multicoloured facade comprising terracotta blocks enamelled in various shades of pink, green, yellow, red and white. Some of these block also function as louvres for the windows.

The main spaces of the nursery are located on the two lowest levels of the building, while staff rooms occupy the uppermost floor.

Photography is by Sergio Grazia.

Here’s more information from Périphériques:

Grenelle Frémicourt

Grenelle, 35 Private Housing, and Fremicourt, Immeuble de 54 Logements

The plot allotted to the project is situated between Fremicourt Street and Boulevard de Grenelle. It is exceptional by its orientation and its centre which is in continuity with the neighbouring gardens. In order to achieve a Low Energy Consumption Building in Paris, it is fundamental to recon on important technical plans of action.

The position of the building’s body on the boulevard (nine levels high) and on the street (ten levels high) is planned in a way to allow housing units with a double exposition. Their south end is extended by loggia spaces with pleasant views. Beyond the general implantation question, the proposed working drawing of the building is adapted to the context’s constrains.

The facades are creased in order to exploit at best its exposition and to mark the opening to the surrounding free spaces. The program’s particularity is that the same operation unites social housing as well as private housing units. Thus, we have imagined to treat the facades in a common way but with some classification.

The four facades, isolated on the interior, have been enveloped in an openwork horizontal sheathing elements – using glass for the Fremicourt side, anodised aluminium and wood for the garden side, and finally enamelled terracotta for the Boulevard de Grenelle side.

Nursery, 30 Cribs

The nursery capacity is 30 cribs. It develops as a 3-level superstructure with the first two floors accessible to the public. The ground floor houses the reception and premises for cradles, first floor houses premises for tall children then the second floor houses staff quarters.

The building is located in the inner courtyard of the passage along the west side of the operation. The volume respects the template imposed on street along the way. Inside the inner courtyard, the front of the nursery has inflection points in order to meet the size constraints imposed by the major sights in the lower levels of the building of social housing vis-à-vis.

The facades and garden will pass mechanical protection made with terracotta elements enamelled colour. This mineral cladding partially returns the roof. In front of windows, sunshades also in terracotta elements provide sun protection.

The outdoor areas are planted and bordered by a fence lined with a hedge shrub. A playground occasionally covered with a canopy containing the same elements as facade is provided along the building.

The post Périphériques upgrades Paris plot with contrasting
apartment blocks and a colourful kindergarten appeared first on Dezeen.