Hasta La Ideas

This gas compressor station in southern Denmark by Scandinavian firm C.F. Møller comprises Corten steel-clad boxes atop a pair of artificial hills (+ slideshow).

C.F. Møller was commissioned by Danish energy company Energinet to create the facility as part of a wider government scheme to upgrade the visual appearance of the country’s power grid, and the firm has already completed an electricity station with modular panels folding around its exterior.

Corten steel panels create a textured surface around the upper walls of the structures, and were chosen because they are easy to maintain and fit in well with the natural surroundings.

“The plating is juxtaposed to create a varied and vibrant pattern of light and shadow,” said architect Julian Weyer. “The combination of materials aims to make the buildings appear rugged and elegant at the same time.”

The bases of both buildings are tucked down into the centre of two artificial hills, which are covered with grass.

The new technical plant is the first of its kind in Denmark, suppling gas to pipelines as far away as Germany and Sweden.

The interior of the plant is divided up into a linear sequence of rooms, accommodating storage areas, fire-extinguishing spaces, workshops, and boiler rooms. Additional buildings on-site accommodate an emergency generator in case of power failure.

Photography is by Julian Weyer.

Here’s a description from the architects:

Gas Kompressor Station, Egtved

Natural gas plant consisting of compressor station and service buildings.

A technical site is normally swaddled in greenery to prevent it from becoming an eyesore in the natural environment. The new Energinet.dk compressor station at Egtved is Denmark’s first installation of its kind, and here the opposite is true.

C.F. Møller has designed the plant, consisting of four compressor units and service buildings, as an architectural feature in the open landscape. The form of the buildings was also specially chosen in order to achieve optimum safety conditions at the plant.

The new technical plant, supplying the central intersection of the gas pipelines connection north-south from Germany and east-west to Sweden, has a landscape-like expression emerging from the landscape as a grassy embankment.

The remainder of the building appears almost to hover over the mound and is clad with rust-coloured Corten steel plating. The plating is juxtaposed to create a varied and vibrant pattern of light and shadow. The combination of materials aims to make the buildings appear rugged and elegant at the same time.

The grass and iron-clad plant houses service buildings, including an emergency generator and storage rooms, and beyond the buildings lies the compression plant itself atop an open plane. The buildings are designed to provide visual, aural and safety screening from the compression units.

“We began by asking ourselves a question: Can we push the boundaries for how we see a technical plant? Can we create a gas plant in dialogue with the landscape and yet focus on the energy supply infrastructure, on which we all depend?” says Julian Weyer, architect and partner.

The simple and striking design of the service buildings and substation also provides the opportunity for great flexibility in relation to the functional adaptation of the design in the coming phases.

Background

Natural gas supplies from the North Sea are dwindling. To ensure a regular and safe energy supply in the future, Denmark has to be able to receive gas from continental Europe.

Energinet.dk has therefore constructed 94 kilometres of “gas motorway” from Egtved to Germany. This extension of the fossil gas system may well be a decisive step on the road to a green energy system, which is projected by 2050 to use only renewable energy.

Client: Energinet.dk
Address: Egtved, Denmark
Engineering: Niras A/S
Architect: C. F. Møller Architects
Landscape: C. F. Møller Architects
Size: 4.600 m² new-built and 20.000 m2 compressor station
Year: 2010-2013

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by C.F. Møller appeared first on Dezeen.

This winery by Melbourne studio Folk Architects is embedded into the side of a hill in Australia‘s Yarra Valley winemaking region (+ slideshow).

Folk Architects was approached by owners of a family-run winery to design a new wine-making facility on the site of their existing “cellar door building”, where customers are invited to sample wines.

One half of the building nestles into the hillside, but it is fronted on two sides by concrete walls that protrude like blades from the sloping landscape.

Part of the northern facade is clad in polycarbonate that allows daylight to filter in during the day, but also becomes translucent when illuminated at night.

The ground floor contains a large winemaking space with storage tanks and fermenting facilities, as well as a cool room and a barrel storage area.

Upstairs, an office, meeting room and tasting space open out to a grass roof terrace that meets the hillside.

This roof is also used to collect rainwater. Each year around 500,000 litres of water will be recycled and filtered for use in wine production.

“The landscaped green roof over the subterranean barrel store provides both a raised terrace with views to the surrounding landscape as well as thermal insulation for the stored wine below, reducing the requirement for the mechanical cooling,” added the architects.

Medhurst Winery was shortlisted at the recent 2013 World Architecture Festival in Singapore, in the production energy and recycling category. The overall winner was an art gallery in New Zealand with a wooden entrance canopy.

Other wineries we’ve featured include a restaurant, guest house an wine showroom inspired by the sprawling Portuguese landscape, a winery featuring towering walls of Corten steel and another featuring huge terracotta vaults concealed beneath its vineyard.

See more wineries »
See more Australian architecture and design »

Photography is by Peter Bennetts.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Medhurst Winery, Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia

Medhurst Winery is the first completed project by Folk Architects, a small practice from Melbourne.

The brief was to create a new 250-tonne winemaking facility to complement its existing cellar door. The winery produces a number of varieties and its objective is to produce premium, quality estate-grown wines using small-batch winemaking techniques.

The building is embedded into a north facing slope, and defined by a series of horizontal elements that follow the contours of the site.

Nestled quietly into the existing hill to reduce its visual impact on the landscape, the building accentuates its natural setting by framing views to the surrounding Warramate forest.

The programmatic requirements, orientation, and restrained materials palette were thoroughly evaluated and considered in order to reduce the buildings energy use, ongoing maintenance and provide a sustainable outcome.

The landscaped green roof over the subterranean barrel store provides both a raised terrace with views to the surrounding landscape as well as thermal insulation for the stored wine below, reducing the requirement for the mechanical cooling.

Similarly, the heat reflective, polycarbonate cladding to the northern facade of the wine-making area replaces artificial lighting with filtered natural sunlight.

At night the wall becomes translucent, exposing the profile of the winemaking equipment within. The winery roof captures approximately 500,000 litres of water annually that is harvested and filtered for use in wine production.

The new winery sits adjacent to an existing cellar door, and is very much intended to enable public engagement with the wine making process. A meandering path leads patrons from wine tasting, through a series of landscaped spaces, to views of the production area and vines beyond.

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by Folk Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Modular panels fold around the exterior of this electricity station in rural Denmark by Scandinavian firm C. F. Møller (+ slideshow).

C. F. Møller was commissioned by Danish energy company Energinet to design the gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) station, used to control the flow of electricity on its way from Dutch wind farms to the Danish areas where it will be used.

The project forms part of a wider government scheme to upgrade the visual appearance of the country’s power grid.

The first switchgear station has been built in Vejen from prefabricated wooden components on a steel frame.

“Since it is a design concept and the first in a series of new stations, the exterior cladding is something that can be varied according to the location and context,” architect Julian Weyer told Dezeen.

“The first station now completed is clad in pre-weathered zinc panels, chosen mainly for their low maintenance, good recycling potential and the interesting play of light as reflected on the folded surfaces,” Weyer added.

Each modular unit of the exterior has a sloping roof and sides that triangulate to add stability.

They create a row of gill-like openings ranged along the sides of the structure, admitting daylight and allowing glimpses of the GIS units from the outside.

“With the progressing daylight, the folded surface creates an ever-changing play of shadows, altering its appearance all day long and all year round,” said the architects.

Exposed wooden fibreboard panels line the interior, contributing to the acoustics of the building.

Other projects we’ve featured by C. F. Møller include a proposal for the world’s tallest timber-framed building, an art and craft museum with a frosted glass exterior and illuminated fracture lines and a state prison in the format of a small village.

Other infrastructure projects featured on Dezeen include a combined power plant and ski slope that blows smoke rings, a biomass power station covered in panels planted with indigenous grasses and pylons shaped like giants marching across the landscape.

See more architecture and design by C. F. Møller »
See more stories about infrastructure architecture »

Here’s some information from the architects:

Gas-insulated Switchgear Stations

The Danish Parliament wishes to upgrade the visual appearance of the Danish power grid. Therefore, C. F. Møller has been hired to create a new design concept for switchgear stations for
Energinet.dk. The first 400 kW station is now ready for operation.

As a result of the new design concept, Energinet.dk has decided not to construct a new large open-air switchgear station in Vejen, Jutland, but instead build a gas-insulated switchgear station – also called a GIS station.

The idea of the design concept has been to give the technical enclosure of the station, placed in the open landscape, a distinct architectonic profile, and at the same time maximise the future flexibility.

This GIS (gas-insulated switchgear) station is one of the nerve centres in the Danish power grid, through which increasing volumes of sustainable energy – mostly wind power – will be transported.
The GIS station is an important part of 175 kilometres of new 400 kW high voltage cable running from Kassø in Southern Jutland to Tjele in central Jutland.

The link has been built to upgrade the power grid and to ensure that wind power from Danish wind farms is transported to the areas where it is needed. The GIS station is linked to a total of six aerial cable systems.

The enclosure has been designed as a series of modules, each consisting of a lightweight shell with a slanted roof and a folded exterior surface which adds lateral stability. Arranged in series, the modules create a transparent, gill-like envelope with triangular openings, letting ample daylight into the interior and allowing glimpses of the GIS units at the heart of the building.

All this gives the design an unmistakeable and strong sculptural and facetted identity. With the progressing daylight, the folded surface creates an ever-changing play of shadows, altering its appearance all day long and all year round.

Client: Energinet.dk
Size: 1,650 m² (450 m²workshops and 1,200 m² GIS building)
Address: Vandmøllevej 10, Revsing, 6600 Vejen in Denmark (and various sites across Denmark)
Year of project: 2010-2013
Design architects: C. F. Møller Architects
Executive architect: Kærsgaard & Andersen
Landscape: C. F. Møller Architects

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by C. F. Møller appeared first on Dezeen.

UK studio Designscape Architects has completed two buildings for artist Damien Hirst. One is an art production studio that appears to change colour from blue to green and the other is a glazed brick building designed for using toxic chemicals (+ slideshow).

The two buildings are located near Damien Hirst‘s existing studio in Stroud, Gloucestershire. The Science Studio provides the British artist with a generous workspace, high-security art store and private gallery for showing work to clients, while the Formaldehyde Building provides a controlled environment for working with chemicals, particularly the preservative previously used by the artist to create sculptures from dead animals.

Diffused internal lighting was an important requirement for the Science Studio, so Designscape designed a windowless building that brings in daylight through rooftop glazing.

Without windows, the aluminium-clad exterior walls presented a blank canvas, so the architects added stripes of graphic tape to create flashes of blue and green on the edges of each raised seam.

“The aim was to produce a wall that was intriguingly blue from one direction and green from the other,” they explained. “If you stand halfway down the elevation, you are not quite sure whether the building is blue or green.”

Nine-metre walls give high ceilings to rooms inside the studio, while the gallery is housed in an adjoining 18-metre-high block that is clad with dark grey panels. Interior walls are lined with plywood and plasterboard, providing a strong surface for hanging artwork.

The neighbouring Formaldehyde Building was designed to fit the shape of its site, with one extremely pointy corner.

Glazed white brickwork gives a clean surface to the exterior walls, screening an internal layer of concrete blocks.

Louvred openings in the walls ensure a constant stream of natural ventilation, creating a safe environment for working with poisonous chemicals.

Designscape Architects is a Bath studio led by architects Chris Mackenzie and Spencer Back. Past projects include an extension to an English country house that reverses the building’s orientation.

Other studios designed for prolific artists include a galvanised steel workshop for Antony Gormley and a studio for Vivienne Westwood in London. See more art studios on Dezeen »

Here’s some more detailed information about the construction of each building:

Science Studio

Science Studios is the largest art production studio in the world, incorporating a high security art store and private gallery for showing art to clients.

The studios and art stores have stringent requirements for diffused daylight, as well as privacy and security, so all the daylight is provided from the roof except in the staff amenity areas. This results in very big elevations with very few openings – 70 m long and 9 m high without interruption. The walls are clad in 200 mm thick mineral fibre filled composite metal panels which provide an airtight, fireproof, highly insulated and secure external envelope. Inside these walls there is a high density blockwork wall clad in ply and plasterboard to provide a high-strength hanging wall for artwork, as well as providing a services zone, additional security and additional thermal mass.

The idea of the standing seams, with blue on one side of the seam and green on the other the Client’s brand colours was to make the most of this unusual opportunity with a very big, uninterrupted façade. The aim was to produce a wall which was intriguingly blue from one direction and green from the other. If you stand half way down the elevation, you are not quite sure whether the building is blue or green.

The snap-on overcladding, which protects and extends the life of the mineral fibre panels is made of pre painted hard tempered aluminium. The metal came to site as a coil, and the building was used as a production factory to decoil and form the cladding into trays. Then the colour was applied to the preformed standing seams with a specialist graphic tape (made by 3m).This is a technique very much like a traditional standing seam system, but the seams are preformed and then snap together so no tools are required to close up the seam. This technique is rarely if ever used in the UK, but is more common in the US, but was used in this case because it allowed the application of the coloured tape on the sides of the seams without the risk of damaging the tape during installation.

Once formed and coloured, the panels were carried outside manually and hoisted up (they are extremely light and easily handled by 2 people) and then snapped into place on the façade. Setting out and detailing had to be meticulously planned in order to ensure that there were no unfortunate alignment problems at the openings, and the all the details were first trialled on a sample panel which was essential in order to iron out some issues which would otherwise have ruined the simplicity of the façade.

The gallery is 18m high by 70m long, and is expressed as a separate volume and clad in a dark metallic grey Kingspan micro ribbed panel. These panels were made especially long by Kingspan – they exceeded the normal maximum length by several metres, but because they are made in a linear production line, all that was required was to cut them longer than the normal limit, and then arrange special transport to get them to site. The setting out and installation of these again had to be thought through meticulously, so that the cumulative installation tolerances could be accommodated and the cladding module would coincide neatly at the openings without cutting panels. Corners were designed to take out any final tolerances, with the corner panels being mitred along their full length and then fixed using a @damage and fillA technique making a countersunk hole in the cladding using a ball hammer, installing the fixings, and then repairing the panel with an epoxy filler and overspraying the damaged panels. The resulting finished fixing is invisible, but does require exceptional workmanship to get it right. Finally, the mitred corners were covered by a small 100 x 100 mm angle bonded in place and the coping was made to a matching dimension.

Formaldehyde Building

The building houses a specialist studio facility which uses various chemicals and is therefore fitted out with specialist finishes and services which enable a safe working environment and safe ventilation. The chemicals being used react with and corrode many commonly used building materials, so the choice of glazed brickwork provided a solution that is naturally resistant to the chemicals, but also expresses the use of the building through the choice of external finishes. The client demanded a high quality of finish and detail, and the form of the building – which was dictated by the shape of the site, combined with the other requirements to produce a number of challenges.

The end result is a very high quality and durable building envelope, with all the openings covered in louvre clad doors to produce a fine – grained monolithic, wedge of a singular material.

The building is constructed as a steel frame with an internal leaf of concrete blockwork, bracing the frame and providing the inner leaf of a cavity. The brickwork is therefore a ½ brick thick outer leaf of a cavity wall.

The choice of glazed brickwork and the requirement for a high quality finish led the designers to decide that a standard 10mm brick joint would not be acceptable, and so a 4mm joint was adopted in order to produce the aesthetic quality the client was looking for. This raised a number of challenges:

» Putting wall ties into a 4 mm joint – The solution was to make every brick as a “pistol”, so that the actual brick bed joint was in fact 12 mm, with only the visible face of the brickwork having a 4mm joint for pointing up. This thick bed joint also assisted with the control of thermal movement.

» Avoidance of movement joints in the brickwork – there are only two vertical movement joints in the building façade, and these are disguised by a full height louvred panel. The mortar and the pointing up mix were designed by a specialist engineer and are soft, flexible lime mortar mixes, allowing sufficient movement to avoid thermal expansion cracking.

Coordinating brickwork with 4mm joints sizes around openings. As the perpendicular joints are changed from 10 mm to 4 mm it means that, with a whole number of bricks dictating an opening width, then the bricks at the opening jambs will no longer be exactly a ½ brick – one side of the opening will be 6mm more than a ½ brick, and the other will be 6mm less than a ½ brick.

The solutions to the issues outlined above involved the manufacture of a large number of brick specials. The specials used included the pointed end of the building, copings made into precast units, glazed headers for corners and jambs, (not exact ½ brick sizes) slips for cladding lintels, brick slips for cladding a door, and all the “standard” stretcher bricks were cut as pistols. The Design Team worked closely with Ibstock to develop the details and the range and quantity of brick specials.

The nature of this facework is very unforgiving and required unusually tight manufacturing tolerances (dimensions and colour) and meticulously accurate setting out and gauging, using 4mm tile spacers and specially design stainless steel gauging rods to maintain an accurate face dimension of the brickwork in order to achieve the end result.

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for Damien Hirst by Designscape Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

ELEGANT MINIMALISM PAIRED WITH PERFECT CRAFTMANSHIP