Set in a valley located 45 minutes west of Santiago de Chile, an elementary timber shed by Josep Ferrando and Diego Baloian seeks to unhinge the division between vertical and horizontal architectural elements. The scheme is the result of a private commission to build a wooden shed on a family-owned plot in the town of Curacaví, halfway between the Chilean capital and the coastal town of Valparaíso.
Zaha Hadid Architects unveiled a new experimental structure as part of Milan’s White In The City Exhibition during the city’s annual Salone del Mobile. Held at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in the heart of Milan’s design district, the exhibition explored the contemporary use of white color in design and architecture across various locations in the city. Named the Thallus – after the Greek word for flora that is not differentiated into stem and leaves, the sculpture is the latest in ZHA’s investigations using 3D printing technology. Thallus continues Zaha Hadid Architects’ Computational Design (ZHA CoDe) group’s research into generating geometries through robotic-assisted design.
An environmentally-concious material response by Lukkaroinen Architects, the structural design for the Pudasjärvi Wood Campus in northern Finland highlights the potential of large-scale structural timber.
Commissioned for a large-scale event in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, Edoardo Tresoldi in collaboration with Design Lab Experience have constructed a vast indoor "piazza" of architectural fragments. Accommodating a 7000sqm event space, each "Classical" element is built entirely from wire mesh and comprises domes, arches, colonnades, columns, and imitations of sacred spaces (namely Italian basilicas). Together they create a translucent and ephemeral sequence of indoor rooms – all layered by a strikingly contemporary aesthetic.
Through a revisiting of Zaha Hadid's MAXXI Museum of Art in Rome and Heyder Aliyev Center in Baku, as well as the practice’s exploration of materiality and composition, Boffi_Code Kitchen is a custom kitchen island created by Zaha Hadid Design and Boffi, an Italian furniture company founded in 1934.
The object of this architectural restoration is the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Vistabella, the work of Catalan architect Josep Maria Jujol (16 September 1879 – 1 May 1949). The original design dates from 1917 with the construction completed in 1923. The building is a magnificent and personal work of Catalan architecture.
The simplicity of the materials used—basically brick, mortar, and stone—contrasts with the spectacular formal richness of the structural solutions: columns, arches, and vaults that generate a complex, rich, and surreal interior space typical of the mysticism of Jujol.
The geometric design from Lab for Planning and Architecture for the Municipality of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain is a morphological response that conditions Julio Navarro's and Roque Díaz's swimming pools allowing adequate movement of people with reduced mobility.
In 1855 the German machinery manufacturer Carl Schlickeysen issued the patent he had recently created, the "Universal Patent Brickmaking machine", the first machine created to manufacture bricks by extrusión as an industrial process.
Ten years ago when Colombian Fernando Llanos tried to build his own house in Cundinamarca, he realized that moving the materials from Bogota was going to be very difficult. After mulling it over, he decided to build his house out of plastic, and after a series of trials and errors, he ended up meeting architect Óscar Méndez, who developed his thesis on the same subject, and together they founded the company Conceptos Plásticos (Plastic Concepts) in 2011.
Project.DWG and LOOS.FM have unveiled their PET pavilion, a temporary structure in a community park in The Netherlands that focuses on issues of sustainable building, recycling, and waste by rethinking the ways that buildings are developed, built, and used. Specifically, the pavilion is a study of the use of plastic waste as a building material.
Bricks are as old as the hills. An enduring element of architectural construction, brick has been a material of choice as far back as 7000BC. Through the centuries, bricks have built ancient empires in Turkey, Egypt, Rome and Greece. Exposed stock brick came to define the Georgian era, with thousands of red brick terraces still lining the streets of cities such as London, Edinburgh and Dublin.
This article is part of our series "Material Focus", where we ask architects to share with us their creative process through the choice of materials that define important parts of the construction of their buildings.
Responding in part to recent debates on how big data will affect our built environments, Synthesis Design + Architecture have teamed up with IBM Watson Analytics to design an interior feature wall for the Watson Experience Center in San Francisco. The project, named Data Moiré after the dizzying patterns created by overlapping sets of lines, uses data from the influence of mobile phones on monthly consumer spending to create a precise screen material that defines the wall.
In 2016, Arauco launched a call to rethink the space of the kitchen with the objective of finding simple and attractive solutions for the houses of the Worker's Housing Plan (PVT), located in Constitución, Maule Region, Chile.
The competition developed within the framework of the II Encuentro Espacios Vesto, and it forced participants to consider a simple, low-cost assembly that could be self-constructed and expanded according to the needs of the users. In addition, each project had to consider self-supporting furniture that didn't require support holes on the walls to preserve the acoustic insulation of the dwellings.
With the aim of raising awareness and expanding knowledge about the advantages of wood in the built environment, reThink Wood has created an online library that collects a series of articles, reports, studies and videos that can be freely accessed right now.
What's behind our current obsession with all things Superheroes, from the Marvel and DC comics spinoffs for TV and Film, to the more eccentric offerings on Netflix from the Wachowski’s Sens8 to the cosmic supernature of The OA? Critics see the classic superhero expressing the desire to re-establish order in the face of chaos (Batman/Joker) but some of our more recent superheroes are about the power of change, of remaking the world through a kind of ‘superempathy’. The power of the superhero depicted as an eccentric group of people reskilling with new forces and energies – think the aerobics-physics of The OA which invents and designs a new collective body and superpower and the transcultural/transtemporal superempathy of Sens8.
Italian firm Giovanni Vaccarini Architetti has designed the new Headquarters of the Swiss Société Privée de Gérance (SPG), built on Route de Chêne, at the gates of the historical center of Geneva. The work involved the conversion and extension of the existing building, starting with a glass façade that meets the need for solar shading in the interiors while achieving maximum visual permeability.
In celebration of the inaugural Melbourne Design Week, which took place in March 2017, Chilean design studio Great Things to People (gt2P) presented their Catenary Pottery Printer, aimed at exploring the boundaries between digital and analog machines. Throughout the design festival, local designers and students used the pottery printer to create their own custom works, with visitors welcomed to watch the craft in action.