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

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behind tiled facade in Porto appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch firm Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architecten covered the facade of this school in Rotterdam with black and white tiles arranged in patterns that reference typical Dutch interior decoration (+ slideshow).

The new A.J. Schreuderschool was designed by Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architecten for children with learning disabilities, and the tiled decoration was added to give the exterior spaces a more domestic and familiar appearance.

“The pattern is based on classical patterns used in many traditional Dutch houses for various purposes, usually entrances, and kitchens,” architect Mechthild Stuhlmacher told Dezeen.

“We used the tiles on the exterior as an ornament but also to make the outdoor spaces more room-like, as if we are referring to an interior,” she added.

The architects also invited pupils to create unique colourful tiles that are incorporated into the facade near the entrance.

“We proposed the involvement of the pupils, because we were impressed by the artistic production and the creativity of the mentally handicapped children who happen to be taught by a very engaged, creative art teacher,” said Stuhlmacher. “The black and white pattern has been designed as a rather powerful framework to integrate the pupil’s work in a larger whole.”

The school is situated in the postwar neighbourhood of Lombardijen and was laid out to establish a stronger relationship with its surroundings than the majority of its 1960s-built neighbours.

Two connected buildings housing the classrooms and a large sports hall are positioned on opposite corners of the plot, creating a pair of outdoor spaces that are partly enclosed by the two blocks.

The courtyard facing the street at the front of the school acts as a playground and public square leading to the main entrance.

At the back of the school is a larger space used as a garden for play and teaching activities centred on nature and sustainability.

“The two outdoor spaces have a very different character – one is very open to the neighbourhood while the enclosed garden on the other side is much more private,” explained Stuhlmacher. “For pupils with a mental handicap both qualities are essential, and the school can divide groups according to the abilities of the children.”

Inside the main school building, the reception area connects to a corridor that leads past labs dedicated to skills including art, music and computing, towards classrooms that face the street or the garden.

On the other side of the reception is the entrance to the sports hall, which features windows at floor level and a roof supported by chunky timber beams.

Circulation spaces at the centre of the school feature large skylights that introduce natural light to both levels of the building.

Materials throughout have been chosen for their muted tones and to help reduce noise levels in line with the needs of many pupils for a neutral and tranquil environment.

Photography is by Luuk Kramer.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

A.J. Schreuderschool

On the site of a former technical school in Rotterdam Lombardijen a new school for children with learning disabilities has been built. Lombardijen is a typical post-war neighbourhood consisting of a repetitive mix of low-rise and high-rise blocks of flats.

The neighbourhood is urgently in need of technical, spatial and social transformation. This especially applies to the public space; as in many neighbourhoods of the 1960s the area between the building blocks is rather large and unarticulated, poorly maintained and hardly used. The problem is partly caused by the existing architecture that fails to establish a mutual relationship between indoor and outdoor space. The project for the new school attempts to rethink this relationship while engaging with the existing context.

The project consists of two loosely connected volumes, a two storey compact building block, which is the actual school building, and a double sports hall. Both volumes are placed in the far corners of the generously dimensioned plot. The buildings are complemented by two semi-enclosed outdoor spaces. Facing the Spinozaweg there is an open, paved and rather urban square that will be used as playground.

On the other side there will be a large, intensively planted, enclosed garden. This garden offers space for recreation and play and serves as an outdoor ‘classroom’ for the subject ‘green’ that will be part of the curriculum in the new school. The design of the façades, entrances and the plinth supports the desired close relationship between inside and outside.

The curriculum focuses on three main subjects: living, working and leisure. These subjects are taught in specific classrooms, such as the living room, the kitchen and the art studio. These classrooms are situated on the ground floor facing the street and establish, quite literally, the connection between the school and the outside world.

The rest of the school, with all regular classrooms facing the garden, has a more private character. Specific attention has been paid to the design of the spacious circulation area in the centre of the building. Generous roof lights and voids allow for daylight to reach the ground floor, while respecting the need of many of the pupils for a calm environment avoiding stimuli such as noise, too vivid colours and forms.

Within the budgetary limits of public school buildings we designed a sustainable structure with flexible and timeless plans and a low energy installation; in the future the school can easily be adjusted to the needs of other types of education. The sports hall combines a regular steel structure with an expressive timber roof and appears as a completely timber-lined, roof-lit space. The plinth around the building has been clad with ceramic tiles in different black and white patterns made by the remarkably artistic pupils.

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based on traditional Dutch patterns appeared first on Dezeen.

Decorative tiles salvaged from different apartments are rearranged in stripes across the floor of this Barcelona residence by Spanish studio Bach Arquitectes (+ slideshow).

Architects Anna and Eugeni Bach were asked to renovate a pair of existing apartments on the upper two floors of a housing block in Barcelona’s Eixample district to create a two-storey home for a young family, which is named Urgell Apartment.

While the upper flat had been built in the 1960s, the one below it was considerably older and still contained some of the original encaustic floor tiles, which were made by pouring differently pigmented ceramics into a mould divided by walls before pressing the tiles to create a pattern that goes right through.

“In Barcelona it is quite typical to find these kind of tiles in old flats from the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth,” Eugeni Bach told Dezeen. “The problem was that there were not enough tiles for the whole flat because in some rooms they had been replaced for newer ones.”

Luckily, the architects managed to find more of the tiles when another flat in the block was being refurbished. “We asked them what they were doing with the old tiles and they wanted to get rid of them, so we took them to our site,” said Bach.

With seven different kinds of tiles, the architects created a variety of stripes across the entire lower floor, including a large living and dining room, a children’s bedroom and a small bathroom.

A new pine staircase ascends to a master bedroom, bathroom and study on the level above.

This staircase is contained with a boxy structure that encompasses kitchen units and storage closets on the lower level, as well as laundry facilities and a desk on the upper floor.

“The second most important material in the flat is the pine wood for the cupboards, the stairs and the flooring on the upper level,” added Bach. 

Two voids are punched through the stairwell to improve views between floors. The first is a window that looks through to the kitchen, while the second provides a view onto the stairs from the study.

A decked terrace runs along the side of the upper floor and features a folding metal staircase that leads up to a larger terrace on the top of the roof.

It’s become quite fashionable to retain or reuse this type of traditional floor tile in Barcelona – see our slideshow of similar projects here.

Here’s some extra information from Bach Arquitectes:

Apartment Refurbishment in Urgell, Barcelona

The top two floors of a block in Barcelona’s Eixample should be reformed into a single apartment that could take advantage of the existing terraces.

The lower floor consisted of an apartment of about 65 m2, heading the street and getting some light to the kitchen and bathroom via an inner patio. The upper apartment, of about 40 m2, had been built later, probably during the 60s. It consisted of a simple volume built on the terrace, separated from the street and from one of the neighbouring buildings, leaving an L-shaped narrow open space.

The organisation of the apartment orbits around the staircase. This element becomes something more than just a communication device between the two floors by absorbing the kitchen and a storage space on the lower level, and the study and laundry space on the top floor. The staircase is as well the space for visual relationship between the two floors, via an inner window and a big opening on the upper studio which allows to get visual contact from the upper floor until the kitchen downstairs. This easy visual contact helps you understand the flat as a whole, and not just as the superposition of two different floors.

Given the surface of each floor, we understood that we had to organise the lower one as the main floor, which accommodates the entry, living room, dining room, kitchen, a room for children and a bathroom; while the upper floor is a more intimate place for the parents, with their bedroom, bathroom and a study room.

On the outer spaces, a folding ladder allows the lower terrace to gain room, leaving the top terrace as a space for occasional events. A shade on the top terrace offers shadow to all these spaces and, most important, closes the space giving a feeling of being somewhere between inside and outside.

The existing hydraulic floor tiles had been removed in earlier refurbishments and there were only enough pieces for half of the lower floor surface, but we were lucky enough, and we looked for such luck, that at the same time that we started the works, there was an other refurbishment in the same block where they were going to throw all their floor tiles away.

We picked those tiles and together with the existing ones in our apartment we checked the possibilities for different patterns on the lower floor. The final solution was to place the different tiles in stripes, despite the walls and partitions, so that we gained a feeling of continuity that helps you understand the floor plan as a continuous space.

On the lower floor, all the woodwork, both doors and windows, were preserved, maintaining the “spirit” of the Barcelona Eixample that this flat once had. Upstairs, where there were no elements worth preserving, both floor and windows were replaced by new items.

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Barcelona apartment by Bach Arquitectes appeared first on Dezeen.

Spanish architects Nook have renovated a small apartment in Barcelona‘s gothic quarter, leaving decorative floor tiles in place to reveal the original layout of the flat (+ slideshow).

Called Roc³, the conversion is the third that Nook Architects have carried out in the same building, following Casa Roc and Twin House.

“We have followed the same conceptual thread in all three projects, highlighting the original envelope,” the architects told Dezeen. “We have retained all original floors as much as possible, and they have been left exactly in the original place, so you can read the old distribution of the apartment.”

It has become fashionable to retain old tiles in Barcelona apartment conversions; see more projects that use this technique in our slideshow.

Nook removed some of the original internal partitions to optimise space, creating a combined living room and kitchen on the street side of the apartment, and a bedroom and bathroom on the courtyard side.

“We thought it correct to once again incorporate the washbasin in the bedroom to make a better use of natural light and to enlarge the sensation of open space,” the architects said.

The bathroom of the one-bedroom apartment has a second door into the entrance hall, meaning that guests sleeping over in the lounge can access it without disturbing the owner.

Nook used a more industrial palette of materials than in the previous two conversions, in order to save money and create longer-lasting fixtures.

A row of suspended steel storage boxes backed with chicken wire separates the bedroom from the bathroom. The waist-high partition is made of white-painted clay bricks.

Much of the furniture was sourced from a local second-hand store while the dining table is topped with an old door. Walls are left unpainted in places, revealing layers of faded plaster and old tile adhesive.

“In all three projects, we have used modular furniture for the kitchen and the bath, concrete floors, ceramic tiles and translucent polycarbonate for interior doors,” the architects said. “The other furniture, door frames and accessories have been made in steel, not like in the other two first projects which were made of wood. The idea is to use neutral materials which can last and get older in a good way.”

Photography is by Nieve.

Here’s some text from the architects:

ROC³ | apartment in Barcelona, third intervention | nookarchitects

With ROC³ we reached the end of a cycle, the renovation of three, very similar, but different apartments on a single building in Barcelona’s gothic quarter.

We were recently advised that in times of economic crisis, as architects, we had to look for a formula to obtain products with scalability to optimise our resources. We understood that a product with scalability was the repetition of valid solutions from one project to the other, a difficult approach within the refurbishment industry. In the midst of that search for a common denominator the opportunity to rehabilitate ROC³ arrived- another diamond in the rough on the very same building where we had done two previous interventions: CASA ROC and TWIN HOUSE.

We approached the project thinking that we could apply the same parameters as in TWIN HOUSE due to the fact that it was a very similar apartment in terms of dimensions, orientation and pre-set requirements.

This meant placing the daytime space towards the Street, the bedroom towards the interior courtyard, and placing the kitchen and bathroom against the median Wall in the form of a humid strip. What seemed obvious, however, was not possible due to the fact that the sanitary drainpipe changed its position on this apartment from the one in TWIN HOUSE, so we had to look for a new solution for placing the bathroom.

We thought it correct to once again incorporate the washbasin in the bedroom to make a better use of natural light and to enlarge the sensation of open space. This time we separated it from the rest of the room with a low Wall and suspended iron cubes that allow storage from both sides. These same cubes were also used to create night tables and extra storage space for recipe books and utensils in the kitchen.

The shower and water closet have independent entries, but can be closed using a single sliding door, a solution first use don CASA ROC. The water closet can also be accessed from the main entry through a second door, which gives the option of guests using this space without having to enter the bedroom. This way, boundaries were set between one space and the other without creating a visual barrier.

The building’s structure and closings are very irregular, so we introduced lineal elements that counterpoint these irregularities and set order within the space. Amongst these elements are a close hanger that integrates lighting (borrowed from TWIN HOUSE) and connects itself with the support of the suspended cubes and the sliding door’s guide. Wood was used to set limits on the pavement which regulates the traces of the previously existing partition walls. This was also synthetised on the living room lamp.

ROC³ was about applying new ideas to new challenges, but maintaining the spirit behind CASA ROC and TWIN HOUSE in which we searched for the original spirit of the building and subtly intervened to achieve today’s levels of comfort while harmonising with the building’s history.

Architects: Nook Architects
Location: Barcelona, España
Year:  2013
Furniture: Casa Jornet, Sillas-Muebles

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but leaves original tiled floors intact appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch Design Week 2013: Dutch firm Bierman Henket architecten has added an extension shaped like a rugby ball on top of a neo-classical museum in the city of Zwolle (+ slideshow).

Bierman Henket architecten created the extension for The Museum De Fundatie, which is housed in a former courthouse designed in 1838 that now contains a collection of international art, sculpture and curiosities.

Located on the edge of a market square that links the medieval city centre to an area of nineteenth-century parkland, a shortage of space around the museum and the technical complexity of extending underground led the architects to propose placing the extension on top of the existing building.

The architects explained that their design “couples the classical, static building with the fluid dynamics of a contemporary extension in a vertical direction.”

Eight steel columns pierce the original building and support the two-storey extension, making it structurally independent.

The extension’s exterior is covered in 55,000 three-dimensional tiles produced by Royal Tichelaar Makkum with a blue and white glaze that helps the structure match the colour of the sky.

The curving, open spaces inside the extension contrast with the typical arrangement of adjoining exhibition halls found in the old building.

A large window on the northern side fills the interior with daylight and provides visitors with a panoramic view of the city.

The project won the Spatial Exterior category at the Dutch Design Awards last week, with the selection committee commenting that: “the project generates a huge impact in the city” and “has an incredible presence”. The top prize at the awards went to fashion designer Iris van Herpen’s collection featuring 3D-printed garments.

The architects sent us this project description:

Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle
Extension: 2010-2013

Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle, situated on the border between the mediaeval city centre and the open 19th century parkland with its canals, has been extended with a spectacular volume on the roof of the former Palace of Justice.

The courthouse on Blijmarkt was designed by the architect Eduard Louis de Coninck in 1938 in the neo-classical style. De Coninck intended this style of architecture to symbolise the unity in the legislation of the new kingdom. The building has a double symmetry with a monumental entrance and a central entrance hall extending over two floors.

On the city side the free-standing building is slightly recessed in relation to the unbroken, mediaeval façade of Blijmarkt. Together with the classical façade structure of a tympanum on Corinthian columns, this gives the building a solitary character.

The building is also free-standing on the canal side, in the green zone of Potgietersingel. The canals were laid out as a public park in the English landscape style in the second half of the 19th century, following the demolition of the city walls.

Due to its location the building became a link between two distinct worlds: one an inward-orientated, mediaeval, fortified city with a compact and static character and the other a 19th century park with an outward-orientated, dynamic character.

In 1977 the building ceased to function as a Palace of Justice and it was converted into offices for the Rijksplanologische Dienst, the government planning department. A mezzanine was constructed in the two high court rooms. Since 2005, following internal renovation by architect Gunnar Daan, the building has been the home of Museum De Fundatie.

The museum has an extraordinary collection including works by Rembrandt, Saenredam, Turner, Monet, Rodin, Van Gogh, Mondrian and Van der Leck. In addition, the museum organises modest, but much discussed exhibitions. Under Ralph Keuning’s directorship these temporary exhibitions became so successful that extension of the museum became unavoidable. Despite the inherent problems of extending the palace in the historical city centre, the museum resisted the temptation to abandon this national monument and opted to extend it.

Bierman Henket architecten designed the extension of the former courthouse in 2010. Architect Hubert-Jan Henket succeeded in persuading the client not to add an extension next to the existing building: this would have destroyed its solitary and symmetrical character. An underground extension proved spatially too complicated. Instead Henket designed an extension with an autonomous volume on top of the monumental building.

In the same way that the Palace of Justice links two worlds in a horizontal direction, Henket couples the classical, static building with the fluid dynamics of a contemporary extension in a vertical direction.

The superstructure, just like the substructure, is symmetrical in two directions, but the shape rather resembles a rugby ball. Together, the two totally-different volumes form a new urban entity. There are also two contrasting interpretations in the interior: the classical succession of rectangular museum halls below versus the fluid, open spaces in the elliptical volume above.

Right from the outset, both the Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed, the department responsible for the preservation of monuments and historical buildings, and local conservation societies were enthusiastic about the radical concept for the expansion. Under the motto preservation through development the customary debates and public inquiry procedures were considerably shortened. Planning permission was granted in record time.

Straight through the existing building, eight steel columns stand on eight individual foundations. The columns support the new extension – with two exhibition floors that total 1,000 m2. So, structurally and architecturally, the extension is independent of the old building.

The extension – also called the Art Cloud – is clad with 55,000 three-dimensional ceramic elements produced by Koninklijke Tichelaar in Makkum. Together, the mixed blue-and-white glazed tiles measuring 20×20 cm and 10×10 cm, form a subtle surface which, depending on the weather, merges into the heavens. On the northern side daylight floods into the two, new exhibition floors through a large, glazed pane in the tiled superstructure. Inside, visitors have a panoramic view of the city.

With the extension, the original central entrance hall has been carried through as an atrium where the two museological worlds converge. A glass lift in the atrium conveys visitors to the various floors. The stairways are located on the outer part of the floors. In the old building they are stately and straight, in the new development they are flowingly curved.

A glass passageway runs between the existing building and the extension − where new and old meet. On the one side visitors look into the atrium and on the other they have a view of the city and the underside of the tiled extension. With its aim of presenting contemporary and old art in one building – Museum De Fundatie now has a new, truly-unique identity.

Design: 2010
Completion: 2013
Client: Museum De Fundatie / Gemeente Zwolle
Architect: Bierman Henket architecten
Consultants: ABT adviesbureau voor bouwtechniek bv (structural engineer); Huisman & van Muijen (services engineer); Climatic Design Consult (building physics); Bremen Bouwadviseurs (cost consultant)
Contractor: BAM oost.

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Bierman Henket architecten appeared first on Dezeen.