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Après la série Floating, le photographe hongrois Bence Bakonyi a fait une série sur une des villes qu’il aime et dans laquelle il vit : Shanghai. Il passe de lieux délabrés à des lieux vides en représentant l’architecture des milieux modestes avec une lumière blanche qu’on retrouve dans toute la série, même à la tombée de la nuit.
Les photographes russes et téméraires Vitaly Raskalov et Vadim Makhorov ont un jour décidé de visiter en toute simplicité un des plus hauts bâtiments du monde : la tour Shanghai, encore en construction. Des images et une vidéo qui vous donneront le vertige, dont le tout est à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.
Glass floors allow residents to look down from a dining table into a toilet inside this windowless concrete house in Shanghai by Chinese firm Atelier FCJZ (+ slideshow).
Yung Ho Chang of Atelier FCJZ originally designed the Vertical Glass House as an urban housing prototype for a competition in 1991. Twenty-two years later, the studio was able to realise the project as part of the West Bund Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art.
The building now functions as a guesthouse for visiting artists and architects. Closely based on the original design, the four-storey house has a glass roof and glass floors between each level, meaning that residents can look all the way up from the basement to the sky.
According to project architect Lu Bai, the house is a 90-degree rotation of the typical glass houses completed during the Modernist period, placing more of an emphasis on spirituality and materials.
“With enclosed walls and transparent floors as well as roof, the house opens to the sky and the earth, positions the inhabitant right in the middle, and creates a place for meditation,” he explained.
A single steel column extends up through the exact centre of the building. Together with a series of criss-crossing joists, it dissects the floors into quarters that each accommodate different activities.
On each floor, one of these quarters is taken up by a steel staircase that spirals down to the basement from a double-height second floor.
The house’s austere concrete walls were cast against wooden formwork, which was left rough on the outside and sanded on the inside to give a contrast in texture between the facade and the interior walls.
Each glass floor slots into a pair of narrow horizontal openings in the walls and the architects have added lighting along these junctions to create stripes of light on the building’s facades after dark.
The overall footprint of the house is just 40 square metres.
Here’s a project description from Atelier FCJZ:
Vertical Glass House
Vertical Glass House was designed by Yung Ho Chang as an entry to the annual Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition organised by the Japan Architect magazine in 1991. Chang received an Honorable Mention award for the project. Twenty-two years later in 2013, the West Bund Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art in Shanghai decided to build it as one of its permanent pavilions.
Basement plan
Vertical Glass House is a urban housing prototype and discusses the notion of transparency in verticality while serving as a critic of Modernist transparency in horizontality or a glass house that always opens to landscape and provides no privacy. While turning the classic glass house 90 degrees, Vertical Glass House is on one hand spiritual: with enclosed walls and transparent floors as well as roof, the house opens to the sky and the earth, positions the inhabitant right in the middle, and creates a place for meditation. On the other hand, Vertical Glass House is material: vertical transparency visually connects all the utilities, ductworks, furniture pieces on different levels, as well as the staircase, into a system of domesticity and provides another reading of the modern theory of “architecture as living machine”.
Ground floor plan
The structure erected in Shanghai in 2013 was closely based on the 22-years old design scheme by Chang and developed by the Atelier FCJZ. With a footprint of less than 40 square meters, the four-storey residence is enclosed with solid concrete walls leaving little visual connection to its immediate surrounding. The walls were cast in rough wooden formwork on the exterior and smooth boards on the interior to give a contrast in texture in surface from the inside out. Within the concrete enclosure, a singular steel post is at the centre with steel beams divide the space in quarters and frame each domestic activity along with the concrete walls.
First floor plan
All the floor slabs for the Vertical Glass House, which consists of 7cm thick composite tempered glass slabs, cantilevers beyond the concrete shell through the horizontal slivers on the facade. The perimeter of each glass slab is lit from within the house; therefore, light transmits through the glass at night to give a sense of mystic for the pedestrians passing by. All the furniture were designed specifically for the rooms inside the Vertical Glass House to be true to the original design concept and keep a cohere appearance with its structures and stairs. Air conditioning was added to the house.
Cross section
The Vertical Glass House will be operated by the West Bund Biennale as a one-room guest house for visiting artists and architects while serving as an architectural exhibition.
Original drawings
Office: Atelier FCJZ Principal Architect: Yung Ho Chang Project Architect: Lu Bai Project Team: Li Xiang Ting, Cai Feng
Original drawings
Location: Xuhui District Longteng Road, Shanghai, China Client: West Bund Building Area: 170 m2 Structural Type: Housing/Exhibition
The walls of this six-sided community centre in a suburb of Shanghai by Scenic Architecture Office project outwards from a central courtyard and are connected by an angular roof (+ slideshow).
Local firm Scenic Architecture Office designed Community Pavilion as a multipurpose centre for residents of Malu in the Jiading district of Shanghai.
“We played down the differences between the attributes of the six indoor and outdoor spaces and tried not to dictate where is the interior, where is the outdoors, or how each space should function,” said the architects.
Two sides of the building are enclosed to create a recreation room and a teahouse, while a third acts as a covered stage. The other sides are open to provide views of two bridges and the adjacent river.
At the centre of the building is an open courtyard with a tree planted in the middle. Six brick-clad walls radiate from the courtyard, creating openings that act as entrances and shaded outdoor areas.
Latticed wooden shades on either side of the indoor spaces can be opened to connect the rooms to the courtyard and the outside.
The arrayed walls all extend upwards from the building’s core, reaching different heights and creating a dynamic, angular roofline that funnels rainwater down into the courtyard.
Aluminium cladding covers the outer edges of the roof, while the top surface is tiled to reference the traditional local vernacular.
Timber slats cover the underside of the roof where it projects over part of the courtyard, creating a sheltered walkway.
Located on a spur of land at the junction of two rivers, a low concrete bridge to the northwest and a stone bridge to the east of the site connect the community centre to the surrounding neighbourhood and farmland.
Alors qu’il travaille actuellement sur le chantier de construction de la Shanghai Tower, Wei Gensheng profite de la vue qu’offre ce projet pour nous faire découvrir la ville depuis plus de 610 mètres de haut. Des clichés incroyables pris depuis, ce qui sera en 2014 à son achèvement, le 2ème bâtiment le plus haut du monde.
News: architecture firm Foster + Partners and designer Thomas Heatherwick have unveiled images of a finance centre they are collaborating on, which is currently under construction in Shanghai.
The 420,000 square-metre Bund Finance Centre will feature two 180 metre-high office towers, alongside a mix of shops and restaurants, a boutique hotel, and an art and culture centre.
Located at the end of Shanghai’s popular waterside street The Bund, the complex is intended by Foster + Partners and Heatherwick Studio to connect the Chinese city’s old town with its financial district.
“Sitting at the gateway to Shanghai’s old town, on the river bank where boats would arrive from the rest of the world, this is an extraordinary site which stood unoccupied for many years,” said Thomas Heatherwick.
“In filling this last empty site on Shanghai’s famous Bund, the concept is inspired by China’s ambition not to duplicate what exists in the rest of the world but to look instead for new ways to connect with China’s phenomenal architectural and landscape heritage,” he added.
The art and culture centre will be located at the centre of the masterplan and will feature exhibition galleries and a performance venue based on traditional Chinese theatres. According to the designers, this structure will be “encircled by a moving veil” that can be adapted to suit changing activities inside.
Foster + Partners’ head of design David Nelson commented: “The project has given us an exciting opportunity to create a glamorous new destination, as well as a new series of spaces that create a major addition to the public realm, right in the heart of historic Shanghai.”
The glazed facades of the buildings will be complemented with bronze details, while the edges will be finished with strips of granite that taper as they rise.
AIM Architecture a imaginé pour les nouveaux bureaux du building de Soho à Shanghai cet intérieur tout en verre et en miroirs. Donnant au lieu un maximum de lumière et une impression de double réalité, cet aménagement est situé dans le centre de la ville chinoise. Plus d’images dans la suite.
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