Hasta La Ideas

A gigantic golden chasm welcomes visitors to this shopping centre in Malmö by Swedish architects Wingårdhs (+ slideshow).

Located to the south of the city in Hyllie, the Emporia shopping centre is Wingårdhs‘ first realised building from a competition-winning masterplan of proposed housing and office blocks. Once all the buildings have been completed, the “amber entrance” will be the only section of the shopping centre visible from the surrounding new streets.

“The main idea of our winning competition entry was to hide inward-looking retail behind a wreath of residential and commercial buildings,” said the architects.

The curving golden glass stretches across a gridshell structure, which curves up and back to allow daylight to penetrate the entrance courtyard. From here, shoppers are led towards three storeys of retail arranged around a figure-of-eight plan.

The roof of the structure accommodates a large park with a faceted landscape made up of lawns, terraces and pavilions.

“In the future the roof will be developed with outdoor dining and a spa facility,” added the architects. “Like amusement parks, shopping centres need to offer new attractions at regular intervals.”

Atriums in bold shades of blue, green and red help shoppers to navigate the building, while the adjoining car park can be identified by an assortment of coloured panels.

Wingårdhs is led by architect Gert Wingårdh. Past projects by the studio include a thatched visitor centre at Sweden’s Lake Tåkern and a high-rise hotel in Stockholm. See more architecture by Wingårdhs »

Other shopping centres on Dezeen include a former bullring in Barcelona and a rippled concrete building in Hong Kong. See more shopping centres »

Photography is by Tord-Rikard Söderström, apart from where otherwise indicated.

Here’s a project description from Wingårdhs:

Emporia

Emporia is first and foremost an urban planning project in which offices, housing, and retail come together in a mixed-use development along Boulevarden and Stationsgatan in Hyllie, on the south side of Malmö. The main idea of our winning competition entry was to hide inward-looking retail behind a wreath of residential and commercial buildings. The whole shopping complex would thereby eventually become integrated into the fabric of the city.

It is a huge development, of which only the corner building with the Amber Entrance has yet been completed. This entrance will be the only part of the Emporia shopping centre that remains visible when the development is completely built out. The idea of lining the streets with mixed-use buildings demanded a strong form that could attract visitors from Station Square to come in and shop. A sequence of vaults from a previous competition proposal, along with a memory from the Pantheon, reemerged in a bronze-ochre tone. Double-bent glass encloses the diagonal slit that cuts through the building. Here the weather of the Öresund Strait, its fast-moving clouds chasing glimpses of sun, becomes present and tangible.

The diagonal entrance from Hyllie Station Square leads deep into the block. Inside, retail is organised around a three-storey figure eight. Shops are grouped together around boldly coloured atriums, each with a different theme. On the north side of the complex, a ramp leads into a rainbow-coloured parking garage (for 2500 cars) with direct access to the figure eight. To the east is a surface parking lot (for 500) right outside the supermarket.

The rooftop park is designed as a bit of cultivated nature. Its vegetation (sedum, prairie grass, and trees) and its sun-facing, wind-sheltered patios are accessible from both inside and outside the building. The hills that provide protection from the wind are actually hiding mechanical rooms. In the future the roof will be developed with outdoor dining and a spa facility—like amusement parks, shopping centres need to offer new attractions at regular intervals.

Emporia can expand upward and to the west, but not in any of the other directions. The freestanding residential buildings facing Boulevarden have yet to be built, as do those that will stand atop the podium along Stationsgatan on the south side.

Emporia’s interior challenges established shopping centre conventions. Its bold colours and bent sight lines break with the norm, as do the project’s size and ambition—which have made it possible to do custom designs for everything from ceilings, floors, and storefronts to signage, ropes of hanging plants, furniture, and cast glass door handles.

Our motto has been “no intermediate scale” — because that is the realm of the products on display. Large-scale patterns and intricate details characterise the interior. The terrazzo floor is typical of this approach, with its oversized triangular joint pattern, its gradual shift from white to graphite in seven steps, and its flashing inclusions of coloured mirror glass. The design has been wrought with extraordinary attention to detail, down to the leather-wrapped handrails and the colour of the stitching on the built-in seating.

Emporia also includes a quantity of art seldom seen in a commercial environment. A lighting installation (ninety-nine bollards) by Petteri Nisunen and Tommi Grönlund lifts the Amber Entrance, bronze sculptures by Joep van Lieshout and a glass art piece (4 x 81 m) by Silja Rantanen adorn the Sea Entrance, and a line painting on film at an extremely outsized format (20 x 114 m) by Per Mårtensson clads the façade of the parking garage. On the interior is a series of photos by Signe Maria Andersen.

Architect: Wingårdhs through, Gert Wingårdh, Johan Eklind and Joakim Lyth
Interior architect: Wingårdhs through, Helena Toresson
Graphic design: Wingårdhs through, Jennie Stolpe
Landscape design: Thyréns AB (Anders Dahl, Pamela Sjöstrand)
Landscape design (roof park): Wingårdhs, Landskapsgruppen Öresund AB
Client: Steen & Ström Sverige AB

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by Wingårdhs appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects has won a competition to design the replacement city hall for a Swedish city that’s set to be relocated after mining caused huge underground cracks in the area.

The move has been planned for nearly a decade, after the state mining company warned city officials in 2004 that excavating more iron ore would destabilise the ground beneath the city of Kiruna, northern Sweden.

Around 2500 flats and a total of 200,000 square metres of shops, offices, schools and healthcare buildings will be rebuilt over the next 20 years on a new site two miles east, and the city hall is the first public building to be affected.

Henning Larsen Architects’ competition-winning proposal features a circular building with a crystal-shaped inner structure that is intended to resemble iron ore deposits.

Parts of the 1950s hall will be recycled where possible, including an original bell tower that will be reinstalled in the public square surrounding the new building.

The circular plan is designed to bring as much light as possible into the interior spaces, which will be arranged with offices around the perimeter and public facilities in the centre.

“Kiruna’s new city hall is a democratic building, open to everybody,” said studio director Peer T. Jeppesen. “Inside the building, the democratic process is supported by the interplay between offices at the periphery and public functions at the heart of the building.”

Completion is scheduled for 2016.

Henning Larsen Architects recently won the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture for the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre in Reykjavik, Iceland and are currently working on the new Copenhagen headquarters for Microsoft. See more architecture by Henning Larsen Architects »

Here’s some more information from Henning Larsen Architects:

New city hall in Kiruna designed by Danish architects

Henning Larsen Architects in collaboration with Tema Landscape Architects Sweden, WSP Engineers Sweden and UiWE Cultural Designers have won the competition for a new city hall in Kiruna in Northern Sweden. The city hall will mark the beginning of the development of an entirely new city centre in Kiruna.

The city hall consists of two building volumes. The inner building is shaped like a crystal inspired by the great deposits of iron ore in the area’s underground. The outer building floats like a ring around the crystal, protecting it against the rough weather conditions of the region.

“It has been important for us to get the best out of the rough weather and wind conditions and allow as much daylight into the building as possible”, says Peer T. Jeppesen, Director and Partner at Henning Larsen Architects. “Kiruna’s new city hall is a democratic building, open to everybody. Inside the building, the democratic process is supported by the interplay between offices at the periphery and public functions at the heart of the building.”

The round shape of the new city hall creates a better microclimate both inside and outside. The shape allows 17% more daylight to pour into the volume. The city hall has already been named The Crystal. It is inspired by the city’s special character, culture and history. Kiruna’s existing city hall is a unique piece of architecture from 1958, which was designed by Artur von Schmalensee. The new city hall refers to the old one in several ways. The bell tower from the listed city hall will be re-used in the square, just as materials and building parts will be re-used to the extent possible.

“The Crystal is a city hall that we can be proud of, and we are delighted to present this particular proposal as winner today. In the assessment, we have sought help from several experts and various reports. We have also had many comments from the public, and naturally, we have considered these in the jury work, too”, says Lisbeth Nilsson, Chairman of the Jury.

Kiruna Municipality is moving the existing city hall and surrounding buildings, because of the effect of the excavations on the city’s underground. A total of 2,500 flats and 200,000 m2 of commercial, office, school and healthcare buildings will have to be moved by 2035. The city hall is the first large building to be affected by the excavations. Thus, the new city hall becomes the starting signal for the new city centre in Kiruna. According to plans, it is to be inaugurated in 2016.

The post Henning Larsen Architects to design
town hall for a relocated city appeared first on Dezeen.

La fascination pour les jouets sous forme de kit de l’artiste suédois Michael Johansson ont influencés nombreux de ses projets. Il détourne des objets du quotidien qu’il démonte et donne à voir sous forme de kit à assembler. Une manière non conventionnelle et ludique de revisiter le quotidien à découvrir en images.

In Part One, we wrote about The Conference’s theme of taking grassroots action in media—people doing it for themselves. Another persistent subject, which kept rearing its futuristic head, was the concept of expressive technology. In contrast…

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A row of raw concrete gables give a zig-zagging profile to this summer house by Swedish studio Tham & Videgård Arkitekter on an island in the Stockholm archipelago (+ slideshow).

Oriented towards the bay, the wide and shallow house was designed by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter to stretch across its site like a line of boathouses, creating five pitched rooftops with varying proportions.

One of the middle gables comprises a glass canopy, sheltering a terrace that splits the building into two separate volumes. This space functions as the houses’s entrance and offers an aperture from the edge of the forest towards the seafront.

Rather than following the timber-clad aesthetic shared by many of the archipelago’s houses, architects Bolle Tham and Martin Videgård chose a plain concrete construction with seamless eaves and minimal detailing.

“The client’s desire for a maintenance-free house inspired us to search for a way to design the house as an integral part of nature, where the material’s weight and colour scale connects to the archipelago granite bedrock, rather than a light wooden cottage,” they explained.

The concrete was cast against plywood boards, giving a subtle grain texture to the surface. This is complemented by ash window frames and wooden furniture.

The largest of the two volumes accommodates a living and dining room that spans three of the gables.

Wooden doors slide open to reveal additional rooms behind, including three bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Ceilings inside some of the rooms are shaped into gables, extended from the main roofline, and many feature opening skylights.

The smaller second volumes contains a guest bedroom and bathroom, with an outdoor swimming pool just beyond. There’s also a concrete sauna located closer to the coastline.

Tham & Videgård Arkitekter is based in Stockholm. Other residences completed by the studio include an apartment with a colour scheme based on changing seasons and a hotel suite inside a mirror-clad treehouse.

See more architecture by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter »
See more houses in Sweden »

Photography is by Åke E:son Lindman.

Here’s a project description from Tham & Videgård Arkitekter:

Summerhouse Lagnö

The setting is the Stockholm archipelago, natural ground sloping gently down to the sea in the south, mostly open with a few trees and bushes. Unlike other projects we worked on located on more isolated islands in the archipelago without car access from the mainland, this site was relatively easy to reach also with heavy transports. This, together with the client’s desire for a maintenance-free house inspired us to search for a way to design the house as an integral part of nature, where the material’s weight and colour scale connects to the archipelago granite bedrock, rather than a light wooden cottage. The two building volumes are placed side by side and form a line that clarifies their position in the landscape, just at the border where the forest opens up out onto the bay. When approached from the north, the entrance presents itself as an opening between the buildings giving direction towards the light and water. It is a first outdoor space protected from rain by a pitched canopy of glass.

The exterior character of the house is derived from a number of transverse gable roofs, which connect to each other, and like boathouses in a line form a pleated long facade. This provides a sequence of varied room heights for the interior and create places in the otherwise completely open living room that stretches through the entire length of the main building. With a relatively shallow room depth and a continuous sliding glass partition out to the terrace, the space can be described as a niche in relation to the archipelago landscape outside. The small rooms are located along the north façade with access through a wall of sliding doors. They are lit by openable skylights and form smaller pitched ceiling spaces within the main roof volume.

Terrace, interior floors and facades are made of exposed natural coloured in situ cast concrete with plywood formwork. The interior is painted white with woodworks in ash. A sauna, a detached block of in situ cast concrete with a wooden interior, offers a secluded place near the beach and pier.

Architects: Tham & Videgård Arkitekter
Team: Bolle Tham and Martin Videgård, (chief architects), Anna Jacobson (project architect)
Interior: Tham & Videgård Arkitekter
Landscape design: Tham & Videgård Arkitekter
Structural engineer: Sweco, Mathias Karlsson
Built area: 140 sqm
Project: 2010
Completion: 2012

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Tham & Videgård Arkitekter appeared first on Dezeen.