Sebastian Jordana

Za’abeel Park Observation Tower / XTEN Architecture

Our friends from XTEN Architecture shared with us their entry to the ThyssenKrupp elevator competition in . The observation tower is located in a cultural park just off axis from the main skyscraper boulevard in , Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Road.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

AD Round Up: Sports Architecture Part II

An impressive stadium may be well known around the world. The latest example is the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. So to finish this week’s Round Up, we bring you our second part of previously featured Sports Architecture.

Sports and Leisure Centre / ACXT
The project has been developed within a plan to transform and regenerate the coal-mining area of Asturias, following a deep crisis in a sector that until now had been its main source of wealth: its coal mines. We understood that within this context, the building should have a symbolic, turn-of-the-century appeal, marking a turning point in the life of the coalfields of Asturias (read more…)

La Peña Multi-Sport / Coll-Barreu Arquitectos
The sports complex is an uneven volume that complies with multiple conditions that coexist in the lot. A semitransparent fencing of black concrete and glass tries to respond to the different situations generated between the transforming residential city and natural hillside profoundly affected by industrialization. The building generates small exterior spaces and empty interior ones (read more…)

Sports & Culture Centre / + b&k brandlhuber & co
The building´s structure is composed of steel and timber covered with opalescent polycarbonate panels with a low U-value. This translucent cover offers excellent daylight conditions and at night the structure appears as a glowing crystal. The building will be used for a variety of daily sport and cultural activities such as concerts and theatre performances. The dynamic landscape inside allows for various activities (read more…)

Higueritas Sport Center / GBGV Arquitectos
Located on a dense metropolitan area between the Santa Cruz and La Laguna districts, this building incorporates sports facilities to fill the lack of equipment. The required program is quite complex, in order to organize services to practice several sports, mostly the usual sports for covered courts such as basketball, volleyball, handball, tennis and a space for gymnasium and fitness (read more…)

Council Sport Complex / Vora Arquitectura
The Council Sport Complex is a building situated in a zone with a number of important developments in recent years with others pending. The complex is important for the revitalisation of the neighbourhood, which is historically a run-down area and also has to contribute to the integration of all social strata to the area through wellbeing and its use of sporting activities (read more…)

Sapphire Gallery / XTEN Architecture

Our friends from XTEN Architecture just sent us one of their latest projects. The Saphire Gallery is a residential gallery addition to a private residente in , California. It is designed to display a private collection of contemporary art while also providing for a home office with views to the sorrounding hills.

More images and architect’s description, after the break.

AD Round Up: Museums Part II

Since we started with AD, many interestings museums have been published. That’s why one of our first Round Ups featured our first museums previously featured on AD. Today, we bring you Part II.

Neue National Gallery in Berlin / Mies van der Rohe
his building is from 1968, and it´s a jump from the traditional museum idea of a closed building with rooms, into an open-plan flexible space. The building is 64.8m long, with only 2 steel columns on each side, which free the corners giving the building a lightweight look. A very “Mies” building, with a clear and radical idea put on a very minimal, yet detailed structure (read more…)

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art / Steven Holl Architects
The expansion of The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art fuses architecture with landscape to create an experiential architecture that unfolds for visitors as it is perceived through each individual’s movement through space and time. The new addition, named the Bloch Building, engages the existing sculpture garden, transforming the entire Museum site into the precinct of the visitor’s experience (read more…)

Extension and renovation of the Ljubljana City Museum / OFIS arhitekti
The project involves the renovation and extending of the Auersperg Palace, which is located in the heart of the protected historical city centre. The palace and the plot have a very rich history dating from the prehistoric period to Roman and medieval times. Each era added something to the building. During the course of history the purpose of the palace changed several times (read more…)

Kunsthaus Art House Extension / ssm Architekten
The project proposal aims at a holistic view of the Kunsthaus entity, but equally taking its near as well as its extended urban architectural surrounding into consideration. The proposal looks in particular at the fact that the existing Kunsthaus plays an important role on a prime location between the southern train station and the pedestrian path leading from the train station towards the central area (read more…)

Museum Liaunig / Querkraft
The museum liaunig projects out on two sides over steep-sided ground, high up in the landscape. A cut through the hill marks a precise intervention in nature. Planted into the site the new museum emerges more like a work of landart. Only a small part of the outstretched museum building is visible. Cut through the hill, the main body of the museum slices through a densely-wooded, steep-sided embankment (read more…)

AD Round Up: Dorte Mandrup

Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter is a Denmark-based architecture firm with a tremendous variety in their projects. From a day care centre, to a summerhouse, a water tower, and a sports centre, we bring you previously featured projects by .

Day Care Centre
The Day-Care Centre is located in a residential neighborhood which was parceled out in 1857-72. The territory is a green oasis in the densely built quarter of Copenhagen. The residential neighborhood of Italian inspiration is of high architectural quality. The neighborhood was built for rich inhabitants of the city of Copenhagen including a number of acknowledged artists of the time. The site is narrow and rather long (read more…)

Read-Nest
Measuring only 10 m2, Read-Nest is a small pre-manufactured structure that is designed to sit in the landscape like an architectural folly. Being flexible in both situation and use, the owner can place Read-Nest where he or she feels would best suit their needs, whether for study, relaxation or both. The exterior is clad in vertically striated natural oiled wood (thuja) slats that are designed to interact (read more…)

Summerhouse in Jørlunde
Sitting in the midst of an expanding landscape, the summerhouse is an open-plan dwelling allowing the inhabitants and its visitors to experience a continual interior/exterior natural environment. Raised above the ground by concrete pillars, the house extends over the sloping terrain with interior spaces and terraces filtered from the outer landscape by movable fabric screens stretching along the perimeter (read more…)

Jaegersborg Water tower
Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter ApS won in 2004 the competition to convert Jægersborg Water Tower in Copenhagen, Denmark, into a mixed-use building. On the upper floors, student housing units mark the perimeter of the existing structure. Each unit is expressed by a protruding crystal-like add-on that brings daylight into the apartment, and offers unobstructed views to the surrounding landscape (read more…)

Sports & Culture Centre
The schemes most pronounced feature is a large translucent membrane that stretches between the sports and culture centre arena, and the four characteristic end walls of the neighbouring public housing scheme. The building´s structure is composed of steel and timber covered with opalescent polycarbonate panels with a low U-value. This translucent cover offers excellent daylight conditions (read more…)

AD Round Up: Pool Houses Part I

I guess there’s nothing better to sit back and relax after a long week than a . Fun and refreshing, houses are just great. So now, we bring you our Round Up of previously featured houses on ArchDaily.

House at Jardin del Sol / Corona y P. Amaral Arquitectos
The basic idea of the project consists in the location of a monolithic concrete and glass volume over a timber platform located at the edge of a cliff in order to enjoy the amazing view of the 300m cliff, a 1000m long black sand beach, mount Teide and all the north coast of Tenerife island. Bedroom and service areas are located in a one storie rectangular volume which enters into a double high volume containing the living-room (read more…)

Ocho al Cubo House / Sebastian Irarrazaval
Sebastian Irarrazaval sent us this concrete house, located on a complex in the chilean country side next to the beach, featuring houses from the best chilean architects called 8 al Cubo.The house is to be inhabited during weekends; special occasions when persons, on the one hand, inhabit space during long periods of time and on the other hand, inhabit space in an informal and more distracted way (read more…)

Osler House / Marcio Kogan
In front of the entrance of the Osler House, located in Brasilia, there is a panel of tiles by the artist Athos Bulcão, designed especially for this wall. Dozens of buildings in Brasilia have panels by Athos, among them are: Planalto Palace, Itamaraty and the National Theater, all by Niemeyer. The artist’s modular tiles are an outstanding feature incorporated into the modern architecture of the modern city (read more…)

Rota House / Manuel Ocaña Arquitectos
This project contemplates the refurbishment of an old house, on which the client wanted a swimming pool. The result is amazing, with a vertical space bringing daylight to the inner spaces, ending on a pool on the first level. A well-known ‘Dame of the Theater’, single, 65 years of age, whose dream was to have a swimming pool at home, commissions us the refurbishment of a dark dwelling (read more…)

Couran Point house / Arkhefield
The core drivers behind the build were maximising space and privacy, sheltering from the predominant south-easterly wind/weather front and creating a simple, low maintenance, sustainable living volume which could be enjoyed all year round. The isolation of the site and the harsh climatic conditions on the island are evident in the simplicity of the structure, the choice of basic, low maintenance materials (read more…)

AD Round Up: Latin American Houses Part I

Last week we featured a Round Up of houses from the United States. So for you to start comparing different architecture at different places, we bring you our first Round Up of previously featured houses from .

Chile – Wall house / FAR frohn&rojas
Wall house innovates on house design, through a sustainable soft skin. This house was awarded the 2007 AR Emerging Awards and selected as one of the 2008 Record Houses by Architectural Record. With a limited budget, our office was asked to design a residence for a retired couple in one of the suburban areas that stretch out from the center of Santiago de Chile along the Pan-American Highway (read more…)

Brazil – Vila Romana Residence / MMBB Arquitetos
The design of the Espirito Santo Residence is derived from the twin imperatives of topography and usage. It is situated on a corner plot with views of the town’s principal valley, with a drop of 10 meters from one side of the plot to the other. The first question to be tackled was that of creating an artificial terrain that would allow for easy transit around the external areas and their use for day-to-day activities (read more…)

Mexico – Aquino House / Augusto Fernández Mas (K+A Diseño)
This single-family residence is located on a steeped lot in front of federal government lands and aside a river; it entailed a series of building and environmental restrictions. The sloped terrain made retaining walls necessary, as well as a drainage system to channel large amounts of rainwater. The house is configured by orthogonal shapes and materials such as wood, stone and metal without artificial claddings (read more…)

Ecuador – Pentimento House / Jose María Sáez & David Barragán
A garden and a client without fear. An architecture to be naked to connect with their surroundings. Built with a single piece of prefabricated concrete, which can be placed in four different ways (assembly) which solves structure, wall, furniture, ladders, even a garden facade that is the origin of the project. Outside is a neutral grid that is camouflaged like a fence or hedge. Inside, each wall is different (read more…)

Colombia – Ecological Shelters at Finca El Retorno / G Ateliers
The project is located in Guatapé- Antioquia, a place with natural potential for ecological tourism development just two hours from Medellín. The design acknowledges the natural beauty of the site to create 8 ecological shelters that care to minimize the impact on the site and achieve a delicate fusion of architecture and place. These shelters emerge from the topography and enhance the surrounding nature without competing with it (read more…)

Push Botton House 1 / Adam Kalkin

Adam Kalkin’s Push Button House 1 demonstrates how industrial products can repurposed as architectural elements, or as entire homes. The Push Button House was originally displayed at Art Basel Miami in 2005, and uses a standard shipping container as the structure of a home.

Kalkin’s concept uses hydraulic power to lift and lower the sides of the shipping container, vastly expanding the usable living space. His design incorporates bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchenette, and living area. Though not actually viable for use as a home, Kalkin’s Push Button House is one of many shipping container concepts that utilize an object that might otherwise lie dormant.

Seen at SwipeLife. More images after the break.

AD Round Up: ORDOS 100 Part I

ORDOS 100 is a development in Inner Mongolia that you might have heard of. It consist of one hundred 1000sqm villas designed by 100 hip architects in 100 days, selected by Herzog & de Meuron over a master plan developed and curated by Ai Wei Wei (FAKE Design). So now we bring you our first Round Up of the first ORDOS project’s featured on ArchDaily.

#1: Alejandro Aravena Architects
We are going to feature the projected villas each week, and hopefully we manage to document all #100. We have contacted several offices already, but if you are part of ORDOS 100 and we haven´t got in touch with you, please use the contact form. We start with the villa by Alejandro Aravena (Chile). No project description, but you can understand some of the concept design from the sketches (read more…)

ORDOS 100 #2: Luca Selva Architects
The design-operation was to transform specific landscape beneath the plot in architecture, little lakes and ponds will be transformed into courtyards, dunes into spaces, topography into stores. This design-strategy points out a specific building closely related to the site. A specific villa with a specific shape, specific spaces and a specific shell in bricks. The villa is landscape transformed into architecture (read more…)

ORDOS 100 #3: nArchitects
Conceived as an Inner House within an Outer House, our villa combines two distinct spatial and thermal conditions. The Inner House is designed as a compact, essential house, containing 60% of the project’s total volume and 75% of its area. Outer House provides a protective enclosure, and a unique series of interconnected, voluminous, sky-lit spaces. This layered strategy responds (read more…)

ORDOS 100 #4: Rafi Segal
The building responds to the intersection of these economies by articulating a variable relation between private and public or “privacy and publicity.” The building alternates between a state of radical interiority providing an introvert retreat that gives away no image; and a state of total exhibitionism that publicly exposes its interiors. A series of pathways and spaces are carved out (read more…)

ORDOS 100 #5: HHF
The physical context for the Ordos 100 project is limited to climatical conditions and some few regulations by the master plan done by FAKE Design. Within Ordos 100, this project is simply the HHF house. It’s making an issue out of the fact that 99 other architects are simultaneously and independently planning 99 houses with an identical program within the same master plan (read more…)

Harvest Green Project-02 / Romses Architects

Romses Architects has designed “Harvest Green Project-02′ as a part of ‘The 2030 Challenge’. Harvest Green Project is rooted in a concept that challenges the status quo of how energy and food is produced, delivered and sustained in our city, neighbourhoods, and individual single-family homes.

Taking cues from the citys eco-density charter, and in particular, it’s new laneway housing initiatives, the Harvest Green Project proposes to overlay a new ‘green energy and food web’ across the numerous residential neighborhoods and laneways within the city as these communities address future increased densification. The city’s laneways will be transformed into green energy and food conduits, or ‘green streets’, where energy and food is ‘harvested’ via proposed micro laneway live-work homes.

Seen at designboom. More images after the break.

Exhibition: Pancho Guedes – Vitruvius Mozambicanus

Amancio Guedes, best known as Pancho Guedes is an architect, a sculptor, and a painter. He was born in in 1925 and spent most of his creative life in Mozambique, where he made more than 500 designs for buildings.

Guedes was part of the legendary Team 10, often referred to as “Team X”, a group of architects and other invited participants who assembled starting in July 1953 at the 9th Congress of CIAM and created a schism within CIAM by challenging its doctrinare approach to urbanism.

The Guedes exhibition will take place at the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisboa, Portugal, between May 18 and August 16. It will show many of his original designs, paints, and sculptures.

Gambia University / Snøhetta

Snøhetta create a unified vision for ’s higher level educational institutions with the new University of . The new university will relocate and unite three of ’s existing formal institutions and one university in a single campus for 15,000 students. In addition to designing with the educational experience in mind, Snøhetta also want the project to set new environmental standards.

Part of this plan involves a solar park for generating energy, a waste management centre and locally done water harvesting. Because the masterplan for the university was previously undeveloped, there was no infrastructure, allowing the architects to re-invent the established western conventions. Snøhetta worked to develop a campus based on Gambian traditions in architecture and culture.

Seen at designboom. More images after the break.

Tina Manis Associates selected to design Art Fund Pavillion

The Lightbox and Tent has selected Brooklyn‐based Tina Manis Associates from among a group of five finalists to design The Art Fund Pavilion.

The Pavilion will initially appear as part of Tent London’s exhibit at the London Design Festival 2009 before taking up residence at The Lightbox as an annual summer pavilion and gallery space. The structure is to be engineered and constructed by Facit and funded by the Lightbox Museum’s £100,000 Art Fund Prize 2008.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

AD Round Up: Shanghai Pavillions Part I

The Shanghai 2010 World Expo will without a doubt be a huge event. Countries from all around the world will show what they have to offer in gigantic pavillions built specially for the occasion. So we bring your our first Round Up of previously featured Shanghai Pavillions on ArchDaily.

Denmark / BIG
The pavilion is a big loop on which visitors ride around on one of the 1,500 bikes available at the entrance, a chance to experience the Danish urban way. At the center there’s a big with water from Copenhagen’s harbor, on which visitors can even swim. At the center of the you will find The Little Mermaid, a statue that has become a symbol for Denmark. And this time, it will be moved temporarily to China (read more…)

Macau Pavillion / Carlos Marreiros
The Macau Pavilion will take the shape of a jade rabbit lantern. Designed by Chinese firm Carlos Marreiros Architects the pavilion will be wrapped with a double-layer glass membrane and feature fluorescent screens on its outer walls. Balloons will serve as the head and tail of the ‘rabbit’, which can be moved up and down to attract visitors. The building will be constructed with recyclable materials (read more…)

UAE Pavillion / Foster + Partners
Foster + partners decided to base on a sand dune for their UAE Pavillion design. The pavillion is a reference to the symbolic feature of the desert landscape shared by all seven emirates. The peak rises to 20 meters in height and it is entered via a glazed lip at the pavillions base. Light penetrates the building’s business center and VIP area through glazed vertical strips which illuminate the pavillion from within by night (read more…)

Austrian Pavillion / SPAN and Zeytinoglu Architects
The main driving force behind the design of the Austrian Pavilion for the Shanghai 2010 Expo can be described as acoustic forces, or more accurately as music. Music as a concept that reflects continuity in terms of architectural articulation that seamlessly connects the various spaces within the program. The embodiment of the sonic conditions within the space manifest the architecture of the pavilion (read more…)

Korean Pavillion / Mass Studies
The Korean Pavillion is situated in Zone A, directly neighboring the Japan Pavillion and the Saudi Arabia Pavillion, and in close proximity to the China Pavilion. The site is around 6000m2, and it is one of the largest lots within the expo compound. Located on the perimeter of the zone, the site takes advantage of the views out towards the Huangpu River and the Shanghai skyline in the distance (read more…)

Warner Parking and Retail / Eric Owen Moss Architects

Eric Owen Moss Architects designed a parking structure and retail space in Culver City, California. Located in the “Conjunctive Points” development, the new structure will serve local residents and business with a new parking garage and 50,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space.

The area is a growing hub that is in need of additional parking space (a necessity in the city of ). The project will provide an additional 800 spaces below its three story retail space. The structure will feature an open courtyard that is covered with an installation that features 196 glass tubes suspended above at various lengths.

Seen at designboom. More images after the break.

Silo Competition Proposal / Allard Architecture

Our friends from Allard Architecture sent us their proposal for the Silo Competition in , Netherlands.

The Biotope converts the remains of an old water purification plant in an ecological mixed use development. Conceived as an ecological education centre, the Biotope will be the home for eco-related institutes like IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), for several schools of Amsterdam, for residential spaces and for sport facilities.

More info and images after the break.

Tondonia Winery Pavilion / Zaha Hadid

Rafael López de Heredia Tondonia Winery is one of the oldest and more famous in the Spanish region of La Rioja. To celebrate their 125th anniversary they decided to rehabilitate a very old store that the founder took to Brussel’s World Fair in 1910 and had been disassembled ever since.

In 2002 current owners (direct descendants of the founder), discovered how beautiful the old store was and decided to built an exterior volume to house the old store. This would become the future wine store and a place where visitors could taste the great wines they produce. This is only part of all the project that will include three more tasting rooms and a cleaning room. More images and architect’s description after the break.

Dubai Tall Emblem Structure / Francois Blanciak Architect

Here’s Francois Blanciak Architects proposal for the TyssenKrupp Elevator Award to develop an iconic tall emblem structure for Zaabeel Park in .

This is one of the 926 proposals submitted for the competition.

Seen at designboom. More images and architect’s description after the break.

House re-Growth Competition Winners Announced

The prize winners of the re-Growth House competition were recently announced. The competition, organised on behalf of the people of Victoria that lost their homes in the Black Saturday bushfires, sought inspirational design ideas that can offer a way, for residents who have lost their homes to the bushfires, to re-build.

The first stage of the competition attracted 36 entries that were assessed anonymously, with seven shortlisted.
The panel included , Marcus Trimble, Dan Honey, Peter Johns and Stoney and Jacqueline Black a family that lost their home in the fires and are now living in the Pod.

Images and architect’s description of the four winning proposals, after the break.

AD Round Up: Houses in USA Part I

Architecture can tell us a lot about the places in which the projects are located. So to start comparing different architecture in different countries, we bring you previously featured houses in . Next week, houses in Latin America.

Openhouse / XTEN Architecture
The Openhouse is embedded into a narrow and sharply sloping property in the Hollywood Hills, a challenging site that led to the creation of a house that is both integrated into the landscape and open to the city below. Retaining walls are configured to extend the first floor living level into the hillside and to create a garden terrace for the second level. Steel beams set into the retaining walls perpendicular to the hillside are (read more…)

Monte Silo / Gigaplex Architects
Our charge was to design a house for a newly single man with two grown daughters from whom he expects multiple grandchildren. Earl, the client, is foremost a sound engineer, but also a screenwriter (of course), director and producer in the film business, with many big Hollywood pictures to his credit, and hence he has to be on the road for lengthy periods of time. He requested a home both cozy in scale (read more…)

Hill House / Johnston Marklee & Associates
Completed in October 2004, the Hill House was designed under challenging conditions generated by modern problems of building on a hillside. Located in Pacific Palisades, , while the site for the house offers panoramic views from Rustic and Sullivan Canyons to Santa Monica Bay, the irregularly shaped lot is situated on an uneven, downhill slope. With the canonical Eames House nearby, the 3300 square foot (read more…)

Mount Baker Residense / Pb Elemental Architecture
Located in the Mount Baker neighborhood of Seattle, this dramatic home is perched on a hill, high above the street. The design captures the territorial views of the surrounding rooftops with floor to ceiling glass and roof top deck. The 3,600 sqft home includes four bedrooms, two and a half baths, and a large open living floor with ten foot-tall ceilings and a two car garage with a 400 sqft roof deck above (read more…)

EB1 Home / Replinger Hossner Architects
This contemporary modern house by Replinger Hossner Architects is up for sale in Seattle, WA. Amazing views and good interior spaces. I just got this on my mail and I thought any of our readers could be interested. More pictures here (read more…)

Art Pavillion / Cre8 Architecture

Our friend Pierre Forissier, from Cre8 Architecture, shared with us their entry for the Art Fund Competition London 2009.

“Panelion” was selected as an exception entry and will be exhibited at The Lightbox London.

More images and architect’s description, after the break.