AD Round Up: Green Roof Part I

Sustainability has become a main issue over the past years. Many people believe that in a few years, no construction will be possible without being energy efficient. So today’s Round Up gathers previously featured works that have Green Roofs.

OS House / NOLASTER
The house is located in Spain. A new topography is defined in order to protect a rear south garden from the strong and persistent sea wind. The building is enclosed in a squared prism (22×22 m), measuring three and a half meters in height. The most exposed façade of the house is the . The main program develops in the first floor, over a ground floor that consists of garage, facilities, storage, porch and south garden. None of the pieces over the roof is higher than the horizon line seen from the street (read more…)

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. The green roofs provide spaces for outdoors activities (read more…)

Oliver Kindergarden / Carroquino Finner Arquitectos
The site is situated in a typical Spanish present-day urban expansion surrounded by uniformed eight storey high residential buildings. Our small scale intervention is dominated by a green sloping roof which relates to the topography of the adjacent park. In its contrast to the neighboring buildings it orientates itself by the dynamic of the direct surrounding. A variety of volumes are combined underneath a multiple folded roof wherein spaces offer response to different usage. There are wide open areas (read more…)

Joanopolis House / UNA Arquitetos
Commonly encountered in these condos, lush houses with its constructions occupy almost all of their own sites, leaving no space between one another. Our attempt was to seek the opposite: get more integrated with the descending slope bringing about its attributes, as to keep the house protected from the surrounding constructions, searching for comfort. The process was realized in sections, using the balance of soil volume to fulfill the embankment. The condominium is located along the banks of Piracaia Lake (read more…)

Hanamidori Cultural Center / Atelier Bow-Wow
This is a facility that intensively combines various functions of information dissemination and exchange associated with the Green Culture Zone, newly opened within the Showa Memorial Park. The basic concept was for a “growing architecture”, in response to the developing activities of green culture, and for “parkitecture”: architecture integrating with landscape, in which interior and exterior are connected. Our intention was for a space as comfortable as in the shade of a tree that would provide support for park activities (read more…)

AD Round Up: Restaurants Part I

New week, new Round Up. And today, we bring you our first selection of previously featured restaurants on ArchDaily. Because everyone needs a nice place to have a nice dinner with your wife once in a while.

Nazca Restaurant / Giancarlo Mazzanti
The project is located on the new T zone in Bogota, Colombia. The program is divided in two zone: snacks, bar and VIP on the 2nd floor, dining and kitchen on the first floor. The project looks to enhace the relation with street level, by overlooking pedestrians from a big stair on the entrance, to sit and watch. Through this stair you arrive to the second floor, and after passing through the terrace you enter the bar area. From there, you go down one level onto a more protected and intimate space, on which is the main dining area which opens to an inner (read more…)

Theodore – Cafe Bistro / SO Architecture
The Theodore Café Bistro is a place of culture. It is a café restaurant that exudes a culinair atmosphere, while leaning on an Israeli cultural foundation that was created during the last 60 years, Exhibits in Literature, song, art and architecture on display are shown on the shelves, it allows one to dine while staying in very special atmosphere. The rich and special space of the place is created by an architectural inspection of the concept of the architectural section. The project offers an attempt at the thought of architectural section as a building stone to spatial formation (read more…)

Sheet Lightning Cafeteria / Die Baupiloten
The Baupiloten have constructed a new cafeteria within the framework of a new master plan for the remodeling of the TU Berlin’s main building. The cafeteria connects two courtyards located within the listed 19th century building and provides them with a new function. The cafeteria’s distinctive luminous ceiling is already visible from the university’s foyer and through the windows of the inner courtyards. For the construction of the cafeteria, the building between the two courtyards had to be completely gutted and the circulation reorganized (read more…)

Rosso Restaurant / SO Architecture
The Rosso restaurant is situated in Ramat Yishay, a town in the valley of Yezre-el in the Northern part if Israel. The brief seeks to enlarge the existing restaurant space (also designed by SO Architecture) into a back room with proportion of five to two that should allow the arrangement of intimate functions and parties, as well as being integrated as part of the restaurant. The green hill around the place influenced the design of the place. The planning seeks to explore – How to give to the restaurant space the feeling of its surrounding (read more…)

Donut Stop / Workr
Inspired by mid-twentieth century American roadside architecture such as diners and coffee shops, the new Donut Stop, situated directly adjacent to a major freeway, emphasizes movement through its shape. Its soaring cantilevered roof and horizontal reveals lend the building a dynamic shape. On another level, and in a more sublime sense, the building was conceived as carved from the forces of nature such as wind, water and ice. The building rises up 25 feet to the East, facing the freeway and the East morning light, when a donut store is the busiest (read more…)

AD Round Up: Hotels Part I

Probably the most important thing when you travel is where are you going to stay. Choosing an hotel can be difficult but fun at the same time. So today, we’ll help you in your quest to find the world’s coolest hotel with our Round Up of projects previously featured on ArchDaily.

Hotel Kirkenes / Sami Rintala
The hotel has a single room, a double room and a lobby. The project was constructed in ten days with an economic budget. It is a totally wooden structure standing on a lightweight brick fundament. Whole interior is painted natural white for maximum light condition during winter, exterior brown black to receive sun warmth and to imitate the color of the rocky seashore. The house is anchored to the pier rocks to match with the rough weather conditions prevailing at the site (read more…)

Indigo Patagonia Hotel / Sebastian Irarrazaval
Indigo Patagonia Hotel is situated along the maritime passage of Puerto Natales, entrance to the Torres del Paine National Park. It is has six levels with 29 bedrooms and a Spa on top of the building. The Project is organized around three main ideas. First: to discover the building as a voyager who experience places not at once but through continuous steps. Second: to be sensitive with the site and its provincial character and lack of “noise” .Thirdly: to radically differentiate the intimate space of the sleeping rooms from the monumental space of public areas (read more…)

Arrebol Patagonia Hotel / Harald Opitz
The arrebol hotel is placed on the south-east border of Llanquihue lake, in the city of Puerto Varas. It is located in a 14.000 mt2 of forest area, with native trees, lagoons and four centenary trees. Also, this area, is completely irregular, because of the shrubbery, ravines and little rivers. By the other hand, the entire hotel looks to the city and the lake. The hotel is built on the border of the superior area of the forest. In front of, this you can find a big slope and also the best view of the city, lake and horizon (read more…)

Seeko’o Hotel / Atelier King Kong
The Seeko’o hotel is positioned on Bordeaux’s waterfront at the intersection of the Quai de Bacalan and of the Cours Edouard Vaillant. Upstream, the waterfront façade built in the 18 century is characterised by the homogeneity of the stone buildings and its unique architectural continuity. Looking out over the river, this façade is one of the main gems of the heritage of the city. In this particular, somewhat abandoned part of the waterfront, the heterogeneous architectural identity offers a much more anomalous façade (read more…)

Loisium Hotel / Steven Holl
The project is composed of three parts: the existing vaults, which were made accessible to visitors, the Wine Center, and the Loisium Hotel Wine and Spa Resort. The vault system’s geometry is transformed into an abstract three dimensional spatial language. This language forms the basis of the architecture of the Wine Center and Hotel, wherein each project element is derived from and related to the unique spaces of the vaults, while simultaneously having individual qualities of space, materials, light and experience (read more…)

AD Round Up: Public Facilities Part I

It’s Tuesday, that means Round Up day! Over the past weeks we brought you our selection of Patio Houses and Beach Houses. It’s time to go bigger, with our first selection of Public Facilities previously featured on ArchDaily.

Beijing Airport / Foster + Partners
Located between the existing eastern runway and the future third runway, Terminal 3 and the Ground Transportation Centre (GTC) together enclose a floor area of approximately 1.3 million m2, mostly under one roof. The first building to break the one million square meter barrier, it will accommodate an estimated 50 million passengers per annum by 2020. Although conceived on an unprecedented scale, the building’s design aims to resolve the complexities of modern air travel, combining spatial clarity with high service standards (read more…)

Zenith Strasbourg / Massimiliano Fuksas
The new Zenith building is an important project for the exhibition area in Strasbourg. It will be the new attraction which will give impulses to the future development of the city’s infrastructure. The concept of the design is based on a modular and a well balanced organization of the different elements: good views for all spectators, best acoustics and an optimized cost management already addressed during the concept phase of the design. The building is to be understood as a single, unifying and autonomous sculpture (read more…)

Kastrup Sea Bath / White arkitekter AB
Reaching out into the Øresund from Kastrup Strandpark in Kastrup, Kastrup Sea Bath forms a living and integral part of the new sea front. The project consists of the main building on the water, the new and an ajoining service building with lavatories and a handicap changing room. A wooden pier leads the visitor round to a circular construction, gradually elevating above the sea surface, and ending in a 5m diving platform. The building material is Azobé wood, chosen for it’s durability in sea water (read more…)

Congress Centre Brdo / Bevk Perović arhitekti
Congress Centre Brdo, built on the occasion of Slovenian Presidency of the European Union, is located in the Brdo compound, a medieval castle complex formerly belonging to Yugoslav royal family, 20 kilometers from Ljubljana. Building is conceived as a low glass pavilion which by no means reveals its representative purpose and leaves the primary role to nature. The volume of Congress Centre Brdo follows the outlines of existing old service building of the castle from which the congress centre is distanced by a stone platform (read more…)

Tivoli Concert Hall / 3XN
The venerable hall has been renovated in respect of its historical surroundings; the building has been gently modernized and improved with regards to the modern, second millennium requirements for a concert hall. The scene and the orchestra pit have been expanded, the acoustics and seating comfort considerably improved. And the Tivoli spirit remains intact. Moreover, a new extension has been realized in a light, transparent and modern expression in keeping with the existing Tivoli pavilion architecture (read more…)

AD Round Up: AD Futures Part I

One month ago, we started searching for new works and offices to feature on ArchDaily. Offices that are not yet famous, but will be in the future. So before you get to see them on traditional magazines and websites, we bring you our first Round Up of AD Futures.

ICE – Ideas for Contemporary Environments
ICE stands for Ideas of Contemporary Environments. This practice is in the middle of the most vibrating economies, and has been working on master planning, mixed use developments and corporate buildings in the area. This includes CB3, a very exciting mixed use building in Hanoi, Vietnam set to start construction in late 2009; GSXC Steel Exchange Building in Donguan, China; 3V an interesting mix of villas/business hotel in Shenzhen, China and the recently finished offices for Shenzhen Goldi Trading Co in Foshan, China (read more…)

L.E.F.T
This practice is lead by three partners, Makram el Kadi, Ziad Jamaleddine and Naji Moujaes. They all graduated in Beirut between 1995 and 1997, and then got their masters at Parsons, Harvard and SCI-Arc, respectively. After that, they worked on big practices such as Massimiliano Fuksas and Steven Holl Architects, and then founded L.E.FT in 2001. Also, they got invited to the Young Architects Program at P.S.1 2009, an annual competition that invites emerging architects to design a temporary structure (read more…)

NRJA / No Rules, Just Architecture
Fresh ideas, a young team (average age is 25)… actually building those ideas! That´s NRJA (No Rules Just Architecture) a practive based in Riga, Latvia, founded by Uldis Luksevics in 2005. As a young office they have a very strong statement, that can be seen (or felt?) on their projects. They feel passionate for what they do, while being professional and always trying to go beyond than is allowed or required – hence “No Rules Just Architecture” (read more…)

SPARC
SPARC, a team of architects at MIT, is a Boston based research practice dedicated to exploring the world of architecture, design, urbanism and landscape architecture through investigations of design techniques and material technologies with regard to their affect on global culture. We explore the relationships between the body and space through performative designs. SPARC’s commitment to design innovation has its foundation in the accumulative experience of its founders (read more…)

Estudio Barozzi Veiga
The studio was formed in 2004 by Fabrizio Barozzi (Trento, Italy, 1976) and Alberto Veiga (Santiago, Spain, 1973). The preactice is based in Spain, but with project all over Europe (and a villa in China). Every one of this projects features a different approach in terms of design, showing a constant experimentation and search for innovation inside the practice. Some of these awarded projects are currently ongoing (ROA Headquarters at Ribera del Duero, Aguilas Concert Hall and the Szczecin Philharmonic Hall), so we are close to see built projects from this practice (read more…)

AD Round Up: Beach Houses Part I

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a beautiful house on the to go every weekend and relax? Until you get one, you can catch up with today’s “Round Up” and start dreaming with your favorite Beach House previously featured on ArchDaily. Enjoy it!

Villa by the Ocean / JVA
Overlooking the Atlantic Ocean this house is carved into the terrain, allowing an unobstructed ocean view from the public road at the rear and protecting the building from the winds. The bedrooms are organised towards naturally sheltered outdoor spaces providing close-up views, while the living room is established as a glazed amfi facing the horizon. Walls are made of two-sided site-cast white concrete. White sand from the beach is used within the concrete, the roofs are covered with turf and pebbles from a nearby river (read more…)

Separation Creek House / Jackson Clements Burrows
The treehouse is sited in the bush fringe of Separation Creek, perched on a steep forested hillside above the Great Ocean Road and Bass Strait. It is a site that enjoys a unique combination of bush environment with intimate views of Separation Creek, the beach and the Wye River Peninsula to beyond. The steepness of the site, landscape controls and landslip potential resulted in a limited building envelope to work within. A modest brief called for a three bedroom residence with associated living spaces (read more…)

Mona Vale House / Choi Ropiha
The project is sited on the south side of Mona Vale Headland and has expansive views over Mona Vale Beach to the south. This south facing aspect and the narrow site proportions combine to limit the passive design potential and accordingly establish the key design challenge for the project. The building is of reverse veneer construction. It utilizes low embodied energy and low thermal mass timber cladding to the outside and heavier thermal mass of concrete and blockwork to the inside. Cross ventilation is carefully considered through the whole house (read more…)

House 3 / at103
Our clients asked for an addition and a renewal, for us the challenge was to conserve the original architecture with the new expectations of living in the 21′st century, more space of storage, new technology and new dynamics and programs in contemporary families. The addition consists, in redistributing the bathrooms, more open, much more space, and a new living-terrace-bar-dinning space with a new pool facing the bay, as the original pool was placed in a back terrace. The materials are place with the criteria of not competing with the old house but not to be lost with them (read more…)

Black House / BGP Arquitectura
With a magnificent view as the main feature of this retreat located on the hill of a small village some 150km from mexico city, one-half-house aims to live landscape under a canopy with as few interior elements as possible. A fireplace, a kitchen bar and a marble platform 20m long laid as a free floor plan for public areas and garage on top of a solid block which houses the rest of the program, namely services, three bedrooms and a family room. This covered roof garden becomes the most important part of the house (read more…)

AD Round Up: Patio Houses Part I

For many people, a nice house isn’t complete without a nice . So this Friday, we bring you a “Round Up” with our best selection of patio houses previously published on ArchDaily.

Os House / Nolaster
The architecture project is presented under the following conditions. A couple bought one of the few available plots on the Bay of Biscay coastline. After scouting every seaside village from Plentzia to San Vicente de la Barquera for nearly a year, they found the place they where looking for in a residential estate from the 1970′s near Loredo, a summer resort outside of Santander. The plot slopes downwards and is cut by a 30 meter-high cliff against which the waves break. The Northern sea wind is very rough, making it hard for trees to grow by the coastline (read more…)

Ocho al Cubo House / Sebastian Irarrazaval
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. For that reasons the configuration of house focuses on shadows as the main element that qualifies space, making space to change during the day and indeterminacy of physic and programmatic boundaries, making circulation as free as fluid is the relation between different spaces (read more…)

Villa Meindersma / Cie
The Meindersma villa is an introvert house. All the rooms are organized around a patio. The exterior facade has no windows, whereas the patio facade consists of only windows and doors. At the same time, there are frameless strip windows along the floor and the ridge of the roof, and sunlight moves like a corona of skimming light along the curves in the interior. The house and patio have been elevated in relation to the surrounding ground, while, adjoining the garden room in the basement, ground level sinks to form a terrace at breast wall height (read more…)

House N / Sou Fujimoto
A home for two plus a dog. The house itself is comprised of three shells of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden. Second shell encloses a limited space inside the covered outdoor space. Third shell creates a smaller interior space. Residents build their life inside this gradation of domain. Life in this house resembles to living among the clouds. A distinct boundary is nowhere to be found, except for a gradual change in the domain (read more…)

House 2 / Eduardo Berlin Razmilic
Through an unconventional implantation, House 2 articulates the house’s every-day program in a single level. Opposing the site’s natural slope, the house and garden develop 3,5 meters above street level, via an elemental ground operation that transforms the preexistent rise in two main horizontal plans, above and below. Both realms are gradually articulated by architectural operations. More than a parking lot, the 500 square meter court, porous and transparent, amounts to an access plaza, carefully designed and partially sheltered by the second’s level large volume (read more…)

AD Round Up: Educational Architecture Part I

We continue our effort to bring you our best previously published works, this time, our Round Up features Educational Architecture. Enjoy it!

Metzo School
Designed by Erick van Egeraat, the new Metzo College, located in Doetinchem, a City in the East of the Netherlands, houses a school for vocational education as well as public sport facilities. The new building replaces three existing school buildings. On a total gross floor area of 16.000 m2 the school accommodates 1.300 students between ages 12 to 16. The school offers a range of technical and theoretical courses, including health and welfare education.  The main design objective was to preserve the existing open surroundings as much as possible (read more…)

Aalen University Extension
There was an existing urban masterplan with a linear arrangement of the buildings and a central pedestrian zone. Trees planted along the streets integrate the buildings in the nature. A square surrounded by the library and the different faculties provide an open-air space for recreation after exhausting lectures. The now realised buildings are the first steps of a small hopeful growing village, a campus of research and education. The project is from MGF Architekten GmbH (read more…)

Siamese Towers
By Alejandro Aravena. We were asked to build a glass tower to host everything that had to do with computers in the university. We saw three problems in this: the computers, the glass and the tower. The university asked us to question the type of architecture required for teaching now that everything depends on digital technology. Should architecture change now that we have computers? Does the notion of room (be it for work or for attend a class) still make sense? Our answer was, of course, Yes and No (read more…)

Building renovation and auditorium addition, School of Fine Arts, Universidad de Chile
After the 1969 fire of the Art School which has been located at the forest park since 1910, the art faculty was forced to sub-rent part of its facilities as classrooms. It was at the early 70′s, just when the masterpieces Juan Gomez Millas were starting to be built, that president Salvador Allende asked the architect Ricardo Alegría to build a new Department of plastic arts. Soon after the military cue, the construction stopped, only remaining the steel structures that for 30 year held nothing but air (read more…)

Oslo School of Architecture
The new Oslo School of Architecture, by JVA, is based in an existing building from 1938, located by the Akerselva River in the eastern part of Oslo. The school is part of a larger effort to revitalise this former industrial area for education-related use. The long-term aim is a campus for arts education along the riverbank. The project won 1st prize in an open architectural competition in 1998. The exterior of the existing building has a conservation status. The architects have kept the block open towards the river, and combined the new programme with the logic of the existing building together with the surroundings in one spatial sequence (read more…)

AD Round Up: Institutional Architecture Part I

Following with our “Round Up”, the category this Friday is Institutional Architecture. Enjoy this selection of our previously published works.

Frexport Headquarters
Designed by CC Arquitectos. Leaving back the marketing of the building, translated to the contact with nature (the company’s main products), the corporate offices were considered to be open, built taking down the dividing walls to become part of the contiguous gardens. Three stories were formed by lightweight concrete parallelepipeds that more than to contain, were conceived to absorb. And with different programs within them, were brought together by the landscaping project that surrounds them (read more…)

Dolce & Gabbana Headquarters
The new D&G headquarters in Milan, by Studio Piuarch, contains the showrooms for the collections, offices, a restaurant and a series of image spaces, ina total area of 5.000 square meters. Two buildings dating back to the 1920s and the 1960s, facing three streets, are combined in a complex with five floors above ground and two basement levels. The project is based on an architectural principle of great rigor, with the use of natural materials like white Namibia stone, glass and unfinished steel sheet (read more…)

Ecopellets Offices
The building, by Iván Bravo, is located in the peripheral zone of Lo Boza, Chile. Once destined to be a waste dump, it is now an industrial zone of the city lacking in urban references. Two different programmatic situations had to be resolved; Administrative offices and personnel services. Cost restraints called for both programs to be housed in a single facility but under strict control measures. The strategy used was to separate both areas with a corridor spanning the whole length of the building (read more…)

DVF Studio Headquarters
Designed by WORK AC, the headquarters building for Diane von Furstenberg (DVF) Studio, a fashion design company, is a new, six-story structure built behind two landmarked facades in New York City’s Meatpacking District. The building houses the company’s flagship store, a 5,000 SF flexible showroom/event space, design and administrative offices for a 120-person staff, an executive suite, and a private penthouse apartment. In order to maximize natural light, a series of heliostat mirrors were installed within the diamond. (read more…)

Hunter Douglas Plant
The project for Hunter Douglas Chile is a combination of new work, recycling existing spaces along with creating a reorganization and future development plan of an industrial plant that fabricates metal facades, persian blinds and curtains. The plant has had an inorganic growth, due to an original unrealized plan to relocate, opting instead to buy a series of storehouses from a neighboring company. The project was to establish a general master plan for the complex that considers future development (read more…)

AD Round Up: Museums Part I

It’s Tuesday, time for another “Round Up” of previously published works. This week, we bring you our first selection of Museums.

Grand Rapids Art Museum: LEED Gold Certified
The new Grand Rapids Art Museum, by wHY Architecture, occupies one city block right in the heart of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The new museum has 125,000 SF of floor area with more than 50,000 SF of gallery and art exhibition spaces. The new building is located adjacent to the park with sculpture “Ecliptic” by Maya Lin, forming an urban oasis surrounded by tall buildings. The design stresses both the symbolic need of a museum to be a civic icon within the city, plus fulfilling humanistic needs for people to have their own experience with art (read more…)

Petter Dass Museum
Petter Dass is one of Norways most important and beloved National poets. The project involved designing a new 1350m2 museum building, a landscape plan for the surrounding site, parking facilities and a service building. The project was financed by Alstahaug kommune, Nordland fylkeskommune, Kultur- og kirkedepartementet and commercial contributions. Snøhetta have continuously been involved in the process since 2001 and until the opening of the museum on October the 20th 2007 (read more…)

Jewish Contemporary Museum San Francisco
This two rotated cubes are part of the adaptation of the 1907 Jessie Street Power Substation, adjacent to the Yerba Buena Park in San Francisco, into the new Jewish Contemporary Museum by Daniel Libeskind Studio and local architects WRNS Studio. The project houses 63,000 sq feet for exhibitions and programs in visual, performing and media arts, and includes 3,500 square feet of space for education. The skin of the cubes is made of over 4 million luminous blue steel panels (read more…)

Fundação Iberê Camargo
The new building for the Ibere Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil designed by Portugal´s Alvaro Siza, is a big rectangular white concrete structure. It has a big central space enclose by circulations and exhibition spaces. Some of this circulations separate from the main body as arms going out through the facade. This form is really informed by brazilian modernists, resulting on sculptural rock in front of the river with an amazing light use, a tradition on Siza´s works (read more…)

Ilopolis Bread Museum
The Colognese Mill had been built by the Italian immigrants; and within the same cultural conditions, Brasil Arquitetura have conducted the making of the Bread Museum complex, incorporating the museum, the Baking Workshop, and the restored old Mill. The restoration of the mill, realized in conjunction with the Italo Latino American Institute (IILA), was carried out according to strict rules of scientific restoration, recovering the original elements and functions and reintegrating the abandoned back into the day-to-day of Ilópolis (read more…)

AD Round Up: Interiors Part I

Following with our round ups of works by categories, this week we bring you a selection of Interiors previously featured in ArchDaily.

Contrapunto Bookshop
Contrapunto, designed by Lipthay + Cohn + Contenla, is a Chilean book shop that specializes in architecture, design, art, photography and illustrated books They invited us to develop a new concept for their most recent store. The atmosphere, architecture and design should act as a support for the book world, and deliver a pleasant environment were the content and the aesthetics of the books were the main characters. The project should solve the coexistence of three main book subjects: illustrated books, novels and medical books (read more…)

Two residences in New York
While visiting Gage Clemenceau Architects we learned about their design process and research on building new forms through diverse design strategies that range from the use of automotive design software to a heavy reliance on robotic digital fabrication tools. This time we bring you two residences in New York by Gage Clemenceau – Mark Foster Gage & Marc Clemenceau Bailly. In the past decade architectural design has become increasingly reliant on the limited form-making tools offered in standardized architectural software package (read more…)

Nisha Bar-Lounge
The project comes up from the intention of creating an entertainment space for adults of 30 years old and over. The place houses a lounge and a restaurant-bar area connected by a lobby. The lobby, predominantly in dark tones since it is covered with black metal plates and “terrazo” floor, is illuminated by psychedelic images displayed by eight plasma screens. The restaurant-bar is surrounded by crystal walls that changes colors in combination with the music and the videos (read more…)

AxD Gallery + Studio
This isn’t just a gallery, but an architectural studio. This refurbishment of an old building exposes the original brick work, which mixed with wood results on a very warm interior space, contrasting with the white walls of the gallery. It’s a renovation of an urban storefront and warehouse to accommodate dual program of a contemporary art gallery and architectural studio. Not only did this permit separate front and service entrances, but allowed a natural coexistence of the gallery and studio without doors (read more…)

Barber Shop
By Gage Clemenceau, the hair strand project started its way by considering the idea of what a hair strand is and what kind of insights it can provide for designing the interior space of the barber shop. Hair has a particular geometry and dynamics derived from natural law. The strand geometry is curved, in accordance with natural or designed hair growth of different people. The hair adheres to the gravity of earth but also has almost a dynamics of its own. These concepts were adapted for the interior space design to create setting and atmosphere appropriate to the barber shop functions (read more…)

AD Round Up: Office Buildings Part I

Last week, we started our round ups of previous works we’ve published in different categories, starting with Libraries and Sports Architecture. This week, we’ll start with our selection on Office Buildings, previously  featured on AD:

Willis Headquarters at Lime Street
As usual, the firm lead by Sir Norman Foster developed a urban piece that integrates with the city at street level and features environmental strategies to reduce its energy consumption and carbon footprint. This two buildings are developed as a series of overlapping curved shells while its section is arranged in three steps. The roof terraces overlooking the plaza on the lower two steps are directly accessible from the office spaces. Both buildings have a central core to provide open floor plates and maximum flexibility in use (read more…)

Ernst & Young Headquarters
Designed by Foster + Partners this office building in Amsterdam, at the Vivaldi-park area of the new Zuidas district, south of the city, is a 24-storey building divided into two twelve metre-wide column free towers with open, flexible floor plates. The blocks are staggered in plan to admit as much natural light as possible, helping this tower to be ten per cent more efficient than the target Dutch environmental standards. Plus, it has a very nice looking lobby (read more…)

Kraanspoor
Kraanspoor (translated as craneway) is a light-weight transparent office building of three floors built on top of a concrete craneway on the grounds of the former NDSM (Nederlandsche Dok en Scheepsbouw Maatschappij) shipyard, a relic of Amsterdam’s shipping industry. This industrial monument, built in 1952, has a length of 270 meters, a height of 13,5 meters and a width of 8,7 meters. A street length and width. The new construction, by OTH on top is the same 270 meters long, with a width of 13,8 meters, accentuates the length of Kraanspoor and the phenomenal expansive view of the river IJ (read more…)

Menzis Office Building
The new construction for the Menzis health insurarce company is situated on the edge of the Europapark urban expansion of the city of Groningen. At city scale level, the construction expresses its iconographic character toward the urban circular and the A7 motorway, the Europaweg. At ground floor level, the street alignment is determinated by the Europapark, where the building, as it rises, gradually leans over into the street space. The 12-storey building is divided into three identical prismatic segments, rotatred 90º in relation to each other. ent is characterized by functional yet aesthetic compactness (read more…)

Rubi Offices
The project has been planned understanding the closer environment and the relation between the city and the landscape. The project is situated on a place where the urban conditions are loosing the density and the compactness in front of one river of the city. The location of the project invites to focus the views to the landscape, and propose to choose those green views from every part of the offices. The constructive solution consists to use a precast concrete for all the building. For the structural part the project we have used conventional precast solutions (read more…)

AD Round Up: Sports Architecture Part I

Following first review on Libraries, we now we bring our selection on Sports Buildings previously featured on AD:

Sports Hall Bale
Bale (Valle in Italian) is a small place in Istria with a population of 1000 people. The new sports hall, by 3HLD,  is adjacent to the old school, and due to the size of the village itself where this building is the second largest after the church, it will also be used as a public facility for various social gatherings. The size of the building has been defined by the basket ball playground and modified by additional facilities on the gallery: a fitness centre and a sauna, while the locker rooms are planned as an extension to the school (read more…)

The Ring Stadium
This project, by OFIS, is a result of the winning competition back in 1998. The plot that was used as a multi-functional sport field is located in the centre of the city. In the sixties a small tribune was build along one site of the field that was covered with huge concrete arched roof. The brief was to convert the field into a football stadium and extend the existing building with covered tribunes (12.500 spectators, VIP and press facilities) and additional public programme such as 4 big gymnasiums, fitness-club with swimming pools, shops and restaurants (read more…)

Insular Athletics Stadium
Designed by AMP, in the district of Tincer, on the outskirts of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and close to the boundaries between the city, the mountains and the motorway, is the new Tenerife Athletics Centre, a monumental scale project that reflects the volcanic origin in the formalisation of a crater with slopes that are fixed thanks to the Cyclopean volcanic rocks that cover it, creating an image that evokes a pyroclastic cone. This single forceful proposal resolve a programme that integrates a range of different uses, under a unifying petrified mantle (read more…)

Inside Herzog & de Meuron Bird’s Nest
We´ve seen tons of pictures of both the exterior and the inner court of Herzog & de Meuron’s bird nest in Beijing during the past Olympics in Beijing. But what we haven’t seen is the intermediate space inside the nest fibers, a space which looked amazing on the early renderings. But thanks to Edgar Gonzalez, we can see the colorful inners of the Bird’s Nest through Manuel Ocaña‘s Flickr (pictures here…)

Slowtecture
This complex, by Shuhei Endo, was required to look through the space of nine tennis courts including a center court of 1,500 seats. Generally, when a building with many seats is constructed, several legal restrictions are imposed. Many difficulties have been occurs on the process of creating the entire space without any barrier. In the middle of the dome, the centre court has been sunken 6m below ground level to clear this restriction. A standard space frame system covers the required space to obtain this vast space (read more…)

AD Round Up: Libraries Part I

In less than a year of existence, we have featured more than 500 projects! So in case you´ve missed some we will be featuring interesting projects, sorted  by building type. Here´s our first selection of you can´t miss.

España Library
This library by Giancarlo Mazzanti, finished its construction in 2007 and is located in Santo Domingo Colombia. The Project is located on one of the hillsides that have been affected by the violence since the 80´s because of the drug traffic network that operates in the city of Medellin. It is part of the government’s social master plan program to give equal economic and social opportunities to the population (read more…)

Central Library, Universidad Católica del Norte
Built by Marsino Arquitectos, this architectural container materializes the gathering in spaces to develop the social role of contemporary libraries, distant from the old archive-like approach for libraries. Its facade consolidates the institutional image of the University, that has been developed as a series of temporary constructions (read more…)

Chongqing Library
Perkins Eastman’s design for the new Chongqing Library, a stunning 540,000 sf urban complex, evolved from a central idea of expressing the freedom and importance of knowledge. Conceived as a cultural and civic icon, the library goes beyond the notion that a library is simply a repository for books-incorporating a concert hall, gallery space, conference facilities, restaurant, and a hotel for visiting scholars (read more…)

Ilhavo City Library
Constructed by ARX PORTUGAL, the building is located on the periphery of the town of Ilhavo in Portugal, an area with little urban expansion, still fairly inarticulated and problematic. We chose not only to design an object, the library, but to intervene in the clarification and consolidation of urban fragments and volumes with no apparent overall coherence (read more…)

Turku City Library
By JKMM Architects, the new city library in Turku, Finland is located at the historical centre of the city. The building is the latest addition to a block with the old library and several other historically valuable buildings. The historical and cultural value of the site presented a great challenge for the planning of the new building. The objective of the project was to create a new construct, which would harmonize with the historically invaluable setting while also manifesting an architecture of its own age (read more…)