Project: Beach House at Ponta do Pulso
Author: Arch. Affonso Risi
Collaborator: arch. Willian T.S.Miyagui
Location: Ponta do Pulso, São Paulo, Brazil
Project: 2005
Construction: 2007
Builder: eng. Lineu Botta de Assis
Photographs: Paulo Risi

The main building, a two floor pentagon plan pavilion (258,80 m²/2 784 ft²), is almost entirely surrounded by the sea.

The plan allows to dispose 4 bed-rooms upstairs opened as verandas to the sea landscape. The fifth vertex is an open space two stories high. The entire ground floor is also designed as a veranda with sliding glass doors.

Servant spaces (kitchen, fireplace, bathrooms, closets, stairs) are in the center of each face of the polygon and also contain the reinforced concrete structural elements and pipes, allowing the five cantilevered vertex of the house. The entire design is controlled by the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Series.

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Project: The Margoliouth House
Author: D Lab
Interior Design: A D Lab Pte Ltd
Photography: Aaron Pocock

In keeping with the architect’s belief in a sustainable design approach with minimal waste, and in finding the best design solution with an economy of means, this reconstruction project on Margoliouth Road retains the majority of the existing 2 storey bungalow on the site.  This existing house followed a Western model which was positioned like an object on a landscape, surrounded by lawn.  In the new design, architectural firm DLab questioned the relevance of this model in the tropical Singapore context where the usefulness of the lawn is very limited.  The architects searched for an alternative strategy for dealing with external and internal spaces that would make the garden a more livable area and allow it to positively affect the living spaces in terms of its cooling and regenerative properties.

DLab conceived the design as a cluster of volumes, some of them positive solid forms and some negative hollow volumes.  These positive and negative volumes of varying proportions are composed in a non-hierarchical spatial organization where the positive volumes contain the various domestic functions and the negative volumes are courtyards or outdoor rooms. The volumes are in various locations separated from each other with interstitial zones that act as sheltered corridors straddling the internal and external rooms.  These circulation spaces heighten the perception of the various volumes that are experienced simultaneously from the corridor, blurring the differentiation between inside and out.

The existing house structure is retained and forms the largest solid volume which contains the family-oriented accommodations such as the Dining, Kitchen, Family rooms and children’s bedrooms. It occupies the western half of the site and anchors the dwelling as a whole. Three more pavilions were added to the eastern half of the site. The first houses the grandparent’s suite and master suite. This monolithic 2 storey pavilion is situated at the furthest eastern corner of the site to act as a counter weight to the existing house. The second is a double volume glass pavilion for the living room and is placed in between the first two pavilions.  This space uses insulation glazing on three of its façades, allowing daylight to flood the room so that it is perceived more like a sheltered outdoor venue.   The designers developed a system for the glazing that is composed of an outer layer of ceramic fritted glass and an inner layer of roller blind. In between these two planes, an inner pocket of hot air forms, which is released through ventilation slots at roof level.   With the added advantage of cross ventilation, the effect is a surprisingly cooling space which benefits from the daylight and exposure to the garden without the detrimental effects of the heat.  The third addition to the house is a partially enclosed garden courtyard placed at the centre of the house, making it the focal point of all the living spaces. The courtyard is treated architecturally like all the other rooms, with three sides of the space enclosed in glass and a staircase to the master suite cantilevering off its side wall.

Via: Contemporist

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After years of accommodation in temporary premises, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has revealed its design for new permanent headquarters by schmidt hammer lassen architects (SHL). The Danish office was selected in a prestigious architectural design competition with a twenty strong international shortlist including David Chipperfield, Mecanoo Architecten, OMA/Search, Ingenhoven, Wiel Arets, and Kengo Kuma & Associates.

“To the victims, to their families and to the world, the ICC building must communicate respect, trust and hope. This building cannot be anonymous; it must have the courage to express the values and the credibility of the ICC,” said Bjarne Hammer, Co-Founding Partner and Creative Director of schmidt hammer lassen architects. He continued: “The building is designed as an abstract and informal sculpture in the landscape. This way, it becomes a backdrop for the ICC to communicate trust, hope, and most importantly, faith in justice and fairness.”

Located close to the North Sea, the new Court is placed between nature and city, set in the rolling dune landscape at the edge of The Hague. The main concept is the sculptural arrangement of buildings in the landscape and the design of a landmark that conveys the eminence and authority of the ICC while at the same time relating to a human scale. Schmidt hammer lassen´s winning design complies with a complex brief and captures the spirit of the ICC. The overall building form can be seen as an undulating composition of volumes on the horizon, reminiscent of the dune landscape. “It was evident that connecting the dune landscape with the edge of the city had a striking potential. By designing a compact building with a small footprint, we propose to return the landscape to the city,” said Bjarne Hammer.

According to the Architectural Jury, the design provides the ICC with a sculptural composition of square towers. The Jury quoted this approach as “a very impressive and interesting architectural gesture and a great contribution to the city with an attractive integration into the landscape. This applies also for the idea of ‘moving down’ to the Court through the spacious staircase. The big and sharp incision in the landscape and the lower ground floor are very interesting elements. The inner atmosphere is confirmed as user-friendly, especially the spacious ground floor with beautiful daylight from above. This ground floor can be seen as an inner private park area which facilitates the interaction between all the ICC employees in a very pleasant and positive way.”

By making a sharp incision into the ground the building complex forms a contrast to the surrounding dune landscape. The architectural idea is to continue the gardens in the ground floor (parterre) level of the building as a cladding of the Court Tower.

“Gardens have always existed as part of all cultures and all religions. With flowers and plants from each of the 110 ICC member countries, the parterre gardens rise up as a green landmark and a symbol of unity, regardless of nationality and culture,” explained Bjarne Hammer.

Environmental sustainability is a key criterion in terms of the building’s footprint and the selection of building materials. The facades of the office buildings are clad in a composite material selected for its suitability to the windy and salty local climate, ease of maintenance and security performance. The material is normally used in the bodywork of professional race cars and in the cladding of windmills due to its durability. The design has at this stage been assessed as BREEAM Excellent.

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New York, March 8, 2010 – eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of the 2010 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organization. The award seeks to discover young talents whose ideas will change the way we understand architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

The Jury of the 2010 edition was formed by leaders of the architecture and design fields including: Mario Cipresso, Kyu Ho Chun, Kenta Fukunishi, Elie Gamburg, Mitchell Joachim, JaeYoung Lee, Adelaïde Marchi, Nicola Marchi and Eric Vergne. The Jury selected 3 winners and 27 special mentions among 430 entries from 42 countries. Images and short description of the three winning projects after the break.

Images Courtesy eVolo Magazine

Globalization, sustainability, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution, were some of the multi-layered elements taken into consideration.

The first place was awarded to a project for a vertical prison designed by architecture students Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, and Beh Ssi Cze, from Malaysia. Their project examines the possibility of creating a prison-city in the sky, where the inmates would live in a “free” and productive community with agricultural fields and factories that would support the host city below.

The recipients of the second place are Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti, and Leonardus Chrisnantyo, from Indonesia, whose project ‘Ciliwung Recovery Program’ aims to purify and repair the Ciliwung River habitat. The building is designed as an ingenious habitable machine that would collect garbage, purify water, and provide housing to thousands of people that live in the slums along the river.

The third place was awarded to Ryohei Koike and Jarod Poenisch, from the United States, for their project ‘Nested Skyscraper’ that explores robotic construction techniques for a novel structure of carbon sleeves and fiber-laced concrete. The building is a system of multiple layers of composite louvers which thicken and rotate according to solar exposure, ventilation, and materials performance.

Among the special mentions there are skyscrapers used as bridges that link different territories, cities in the sky powered by renewable energies, instant deployable buildings for disaster zones, skyscrapers that purify and desalinate sea water, or high-rises that commemorate historic dates. Other proposals create new pedestrian layers for existing cities. Some use the latest building technologies and parametric design to configure environmentally conscious self-sufficient buildings, while others create city-like buildings where different programs are mixed in one structure.

eVolo Magazine would like to acknowledge all the competitors for their effort, vision, and passion for architectural innovation.

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Project: House in Samosaguas
Author: A-cero
Joaquin Torres
Collaborator: Rafael Llamazares
Location: Madrid, Spain
Project Year: 2005-2007

The plot, where this housing is situated, is the result of dividing an original state. It adopts the form of an irregular polygon of four sides, presents a light slope and has a surface of 13.357 sqm. The plot borders to the North on common spaces of the housing development; on the South with the access route and to the east with the nearby plot. The housing development has a lot of wide gardens between the houses which are arranged around a central pond.

Following the client needs, the housing develops in three plants, dividing its space in differentiated areas: a buried floor where is the facilities rooms, holiday room, movies room and a gymnasium with dressing room; the first floor, where the access is located, developed in different levels separating different functions: garage, kitchen with several rooms like a larder, a cellar, a cleaning utensils room, office, service area with laundry, drying area and a safety room; furthermore, there is an area for the principal bedroom with its dressing-rooms, baths, gymnasium and swimming pool. In the last floor they are located a lounge and the children bedrooms, all of them with its bathrooms.

Next to the principal housing is located the service house, provided of a lounge and four bedrooms with their bathrooms. This second piece is integrated to the whole volume with the surrounding curved walls, which mark the exterior unit of the project and delimit the open spaces inside.

According to the client desires, the housing presents a closed face towards the exterior, solved with a series of concentric curved walls of natural stone that produce open spaces more intimate and private in its interior area. A scenery created by natural stone elements and water. The spaces are organized in battery along a series of longitudinal stripes that define the different types of use.

In the transverse sense, the housing is organized in a gradation made of closed and open volumes, and from social and services spaces to private and intimate areas. Two principal stripes are separated by an open space marked by a water sheet. The transit between both parts is done across a sculptural footbridge of massive granite blocks, which marks in a physical and symbolic way the housing limits.

The exterior walls are made of travertino Roman marble, solved in a system of ventilated front that it allows to put in value the aesthetic qualities of the natural stone, making use at the same time of technical qualities of this constructive system as its climatic efficiency and easy maintenance.

In most of the interior spaces the floors are finished in black granite, while in some points in the first floor the travertino marble is used too in order to give unit to the housing set.

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Project: Les Aventuriers
Author: Shun Hirayama Architecture
Location: Kanagawa, Japan
Total Floor Area: 166.77 m2
1st Floor Area: 81.57 m2
2nd Floor Area: 85.20 m2
Structure: Wood
Design Period: 2007.3 – 2008.5
Construction Period: 2008.6 – 2009.5
Photography: DAICI ANO
Katsuhisa Kida

The site is located in Kanagawa Prefecture on a mountainside that overviews a sea and a city. The client couple, who are friends of mine, and I visited there, when the project was initiated. Walking around in the pre-project site, where too many tall trees stand on, views changed variously, because of the slanted land’s height differences. The experience was comparable to a pleasure of wandering in a forest. Taking a walk on a hillside or feel like so even inside the house had become a concept and we went on to continue the project, taking the slope positively.

Firstly, we started to define what kind of places should be there on the hill and then images of four living places were formed: a kitchen and a dining space near a road that becomes an approach, a living space at a good view point, bedrooms at positions to look out the hill, a bathroom at an airy location, and so on. After that, we put these places to individual volumes, converted them to wooden masses and shaped them, conforming to each site shape and condition, as if carving sculpture. The lateral of the road and the north surface are positioned parallel to the site boundaries, and the east surface, where the kitchen is, is slanted toward the south in order to let light in. The face of the living space is slightly inclined toward the north, so as to avoid seeing the neighborhood’s building. As a result, gradually overlapping each other, the four masses were formed into one shape.

After the outline of the building emerged, we proceeded to create the interior spaces. First of all, we produced a path that possesses comfortable straight eyesight, analogous to walking between trees. The path connects the inside and the outside, and again backs to the inside without a dead-end. A bridge becomes a part of the journey. On the finishes of the floors, various kinds of wooden floor that were chosen to match the assorted atmosphere are laid like carpets. In the center of a concrete floor that meets the ground, thin trees are arranged so as to look like a path between rice paddies.

We forwarded the design, piling up stories little by little, as if animals create their nest steadily. The traces of the thoughts and processes appear remarkably. In the interior of the building that was shaped to fit the landform, walls set in diverse angles, various ceiling heights and ten different floor levels exist and in the each space dissimilar shades live. The wind that enters inside the one-room interior space feels like they came between trees, and it feels like sitting on a natural stump, when sitting on a slight level difference.

Via: Contemporist

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Project: Edificio de Oficinas Vanguardia
Author: Gonzalo Mardones Viviani
Collaborators: Luis Morales Gatto, Gonzalo Rudolphy Brito, Gonzalo Mardones Falcone, Andrés Núñez Fuenzalida, María Jesús Mardones Falcone, Manuel Fuentes Ramos, Alberto Reeves Droguett, Claudio Quezada Fuentes, Cristián Martínez Escárate, Javier Mora Calderón, Emilio Ursic Marechau, Julio Miranda González
Location: Santiago, Chile
Plot Area: 4,631 m2
Built Area: 7,100 m2
Project Date: 2007
Finish Date: 2008
Lighting: Paulina Sir
Builders: Salfa Novatec
Engineer: Cristián Delporte
Photography: Guy Wenborne (GW), Andrés Nuñez (AN)

The main idea of this white steel box is found in the internal hall. This interior is the heart of the building. The cubic volume opens towards the corner by means of a great six storey high crack.

This void onto which all the levels balcony is open towards the west (the entrance), protected by a kind of great vertical grapevine which controls the afternoon sun. The interior space also received vertical light through a series of skylights.

So, the total space was activated by the light but also by the circulations. Each level was different with none regulate form, that produce an irregular total space that crosses in all directions adapting to the different way of the slabs.

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Project: Element House
Architect: Sami Rintala
Landscape Architects: Eedo Space Architectural Design, Seúl, Republic of Korea
Location: Anyang Park, Anyang, Seúl, Republic of Korea
Construction Date: October-December 2005
Finish Date: January 2006
Constructed Area: 72sqm
Client: Anyang City / Public Art Project
Collaborators: John Roger Holte, Artist, Norway; Finnforest, Wood
Photography: Park Wan Soon, Emil Goh

This architectural structure, situated in a river valley marking an edge of a forest park and the Seoul metropolitan area, is made to offer a shelter and an experience for all senses to the people on their way to nature or returning back to city; it is an invitation space for the users of the Anyang Resort.

The larger main space is a cubical space made of steel. It leads to four smaller wooden rooms situated in four different levels, from a cellar to an attic. Each small space includes a suggestion for use and the symbolic presence of one of the basic elements (fire, water, air, earth). The chosen main materials, rusty steel and wood, imitate the colors of the surrounding nature.

In one of the rooms is an art work made of colored concrete by Norwegian artist John Roger Holte. The project wishes to create an inner world where memories and even dreams may have their moment and place. It is bringing together an archetype of a house, movement in space and the expression of four basic elements into a three-dimensional collage.The Element House is made for passers-by who wish to halt, rest and make their own understanding and use of a simple space made of matter and light. This architectural structure, situated in a river valley marking an edge of a forest park and the Seoul metropolitan area, is made to offer a shelter and an experience for all senses to the people on their way to nature or returning back to city; it is an invitation space for the users of the Anyang Resort.

The larger main space is a cubical space made of steel. It leads to four smaller wooden rooms situated in four different levels, from a cellar to an attic. Each small space includes a suggestion for use and the symbolic presence of one of the basic elements (fire, water, air, earth). The chosen main materials, rusty steel and wood, imitate the colors of the surrounding nature. In one of the rooms is an art work made of colored concrete by Norwegian artist John Roger Holte.The project wishes to create an inner world where memories and even dreams may have their moment and place. It is bringing together an archetype of a house, movement in space and the expression of four basic elements into a three-dimensional collage.

The Element House is made for passers-by who wish to halt, rest and make their own understanding and use of a simple space made of matter and light.

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Project: Rolex Learning Center
Author: SANAA
Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa
Team: Yumiko Yamada, Rikiya Yamamoto, Osamu Kato, Naoto Noguchi, Mizuko Kaji, Takayuki Hasegawa, Louis-Antoine Grego
Location: Lausanne, Switzerland
Client: EPFL Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Local Architect: Architram sa Renens, Switzerland
Site Dimensions: 88,000sqm (166.5m x 121.5m)
Footprint: 20,200sqm
Floor Area: 37,000sqm
Number of Floors: 1 basement + 1 main
Fotography: Sasha Cisar

Built on the campus of EPFL ecole polytechnique fédérale de lausanne, the rolex learning center will function as a laboratory for learning, a library with 500,000 volumes and an international cultural hub, open to both students and the public.spread over one single fluid space of 20,000 sq metres, it provides a seamless network of services, libraries, information gathering, social spaces, spaces to study, restaurants, cafes and beautiful outdoor spaces. It is a highly innovative building, with gentle slopes and terraces, undulating around a series of internal ?patios’, with almost invisible supports for its complex curving roof, which required completely new methods of construction.

Located centrally on the EPFL campus, and its new hub, the building is essentially one continuous structure spread over a site of 88,000m2: the building is rectangular in plan, but appears to be more organic in shape because of the way that its roof and floor undulate gently, always in parallel. with few visible supports, the building touches the ground lightly, leaving an expanse of open space beneath which draws people from all sides towards a central entrance.

Inside, the hills, valleys and plateaus formed by the undulation often make the edges of the building invisible, though there are no visual barriers between one area and the next. instead of steps and staircases, there are gentle slopes and terraces. clearly, but without dividing walls, one area of activity gives way to another. visitors stroll up the gentle curves, or perhaps move around the space on one of the specially designed ‘horizontal lifts’, elegant glass boxes, whose engineering is adapted from everyday lift design.

As well as providing social areas and an impressive auditorium, the building lends itself to the establishment of quiet zones and silent zones, acoustically separated areas created through changes in height. the slopes, valleys and plateaus within the building, as well as the shapes made by the patios, all contribute to these barrier-free delineations of space. in addition, clusters of glazed or walled ?bubbles’ make small enclosures for small groups to meet or work together in.

The topography lends an extraordinary fluidity to the building’s flexible open plan – a flow that is emphasised by fourteen voids in the structure, of varying dimensions. these are glazed and create a series of softly rounded external ?patios’, as the architects describe them. the patios are social spaces and provide a visual link between the inside and the outside. they are very much part of the building.

From the higher areas, visitors may enjoy views not only of the campus but, spectacularly, of lake geneva and the alps.

With all its unity and variety, the rolex learning center is, as described by kazuyo sejima on the announcement that SANAA had won the architectural competition, an ‘intimate public space’.

The rolex learning center embodies the aims and philosophy of the EPFL, setting the scene for different kinds of collaborative, cross-disciplinary research, regarded as essential to advances in science and technology. It offers flexibility to use the building in many different ways, now and in the future, to absorb new technology and working methods, as they come on stream, many of them developed within EPFL itself. the building emphasises sociability, getting together for coffee, for lunch, for study, for seminars, to stimulate informal encounters between people of all the key disciplines. it is designed to be a landmark, a place people will want to visit, allowing EPFL to reach out to the surrounding community and internationally. The engineering and construction of the rolex learning center is highly experimental and innovative.

For the 3-dimensional curved concrete shells, SANAA worked with structural engineer, SAPS, to find the shapes with the least bending stresses by making computer simulations. after repeating this process numerous times, engineers bollinger und grohmann and walther mory maier made detailed calculations to arrive at the final shape.

For the construction, SANAA worked closely with the total service contractor, losinger construction, on the final calculations and physical implementation of such large and gentle slopes. the concrete execution had to be precise because of the complex facade system that needed to absorb both the concrete shell deflection movement and the construction tolerances. one example of precise execution was the use of laser-cut 2.5m x 2.5m wooden formwork, which was positioned using GPS technology on site. for the ventilation and heating, the undulating one-room volume was also studied via computer simulation to determine the periods when natural ventilation was possible and when floor heating would be necessary. this helped to achieve a low energy consumption target.

Essentially, the building is made up of two ’shells’. inside the two shells are 11 under-stressed arches. the smaller shell sits on four arches, 30-40 metres long, while the larger shell rests on seven arches, 55-90 metres long. the arches are held by 70 underground pre-stressed cables.

The main structural materials are steel and wood, with concrete poured into formwork so precise that the underside of the building looks polished. the floor is a concrete structure, the roof steel and wood; the floor and roof run parallel to each other. to follow the geometry of the shells required 1400 different moulds for concrete. the concrete pouring involved delivering concrete continuously over a period of two days, to achieve the complex task of creating one continuous flowing roofspace.

As the building is made up of a single structure, all the elements, including the roof, have to be flexible, to accommodate minute changes in dimension caused by natural and structural movements.

The internal ceilings are jointed to accommodate these shifts. the curved glass facades, including those that wrap around the patios, with a total area of 4800 m2, also have to take the movement of the concrete: each piece of glass is cut separately, and each piece moves independently on jointed frames.

The rolex learning center is a highly energy-efficient building which, for its low energy consumption, has received the coveted minergie label – the standard used in switzerland for measuring environmental excellence in buildings.

The building is largely daylit with carefully controlled natural ventilation systems, except for the restaurant and multimedia library, which have cold ceilings. it achieves a 38.5 kWh/m2 (139 MJ/m2) energy consumption thanks to high quality double-glazed windows, 20cm of insulation in the roof and up to 35 cm in the ground, exterior blinds, natural lighting and ventilation, and because it takes advantage of the 25-year-old installation of thermal pumps that use lake water for cooling the whole campus. this degree of energy efficiency was achieved by the pioneering engineering firm sorane SA, based near to the campus and comprised of engineers from lausanne and zurich. using digital modelling for airflow, lighting, and thermal measurements, the firm increased the energy efficiency of the new building to a technical maximum while at the same time ensuring the safety of its users in case of a fire. obtaining the minergie label is an even more outstanding achievement given the energy challenges of an open plan building.

ALL IMAGES:
Sasha Cisar

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Project: Casa G
Author: Gudmundur Jonsson
Location: The Countryside, Iceland

The concept of Casa G is based on reading and feedback to the landscape it exists on. The characteristic landscape situation and view differences distinctively in each direction. Towards south the view to the sea and islands, towards north the characteristic triangular mountain, towards east the glacier and towards west the river and canyon.

Those elements are the creator of the project, the transitions between the landscape views giving the entrance from the north and the curved plan giving a vitalized focus towards the seaside in south. When turning back the north view towards the mountain is as well enhanced with the widening view due to the fan-shape of the tilting wooden wall, being a mediator between the northern and southern landscape characteristic.

The tilting is an answer and an interpretation of the glacier towards east, they are communicating and the only and huge window in that wall is creating “a painting” of the glacier experienced from the interior. The guest-wing of the building stretches to the canyon and the river towards west. Thus the building concept is a composition and dialogue of views and experiences of the various nature at site.

Via: Contemporist

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