Residential: The Latest Architecture and News

Construction for Change, a non-profit in the United States, focuses on building the necessary infrastructure to sustain impoverished communities’ needs. Kit and Samantha Kollmeyer were asked by the CFC to design housing for the One Acre Fund in Bungoma, Kenya to provide a new facility for the growing organization. The One Acre Fund hopes to expand the number of families they provide aid to, from 12,000 families to 33,000 families in the next two years, so this husband and wife team was brought in to design a new headquarters consisting of office and classroom space, and two-bedroom housing units for in-country volunteers.

More about the Kollmeyer’s project after the break.

Visiondivision‘s latest project, a residential extension for two children in Stockholm, utilizes a landscape surface that is enhanced by elements around and inside the house. The young children will be spending most of their day enjoying the outdoors, so Visiondivision “wanted to give the two new citizens a safe base where they can explore their new surroundings and be able to appreciate it to the fullest.” By deliberately choosing inexpensive building components, such as windows and façade materials, the architects saved a bigger part of the budget to create as many playful elements as they could.

More about the Hill House after the break.

Oncuoglu Architecture designed the B199, a 74.500 m² mix-use development for Istanbul, Turkey. Inspired by the urban landscape of Istanbul, the project occupies the intersection of the Gultepe and Buyukdere, two districts with different urban patterns. The project is designed to act as a “bridge integrating the spatial discontinuity between two sides of the site.”

More about the B199 after the break.

ICE – Ideas for Contemporary Environments, became our first AD Futures ever. They have just shared with us DK2, a luxury service apartments project in Hanoi, Vietnam for which they won 3rd prize in an invited competition.

The project is located next to the West Lake in Hanoi. The competition was requesting to create a residential iconic tower of 65 floors. As the project would be naturally dominant in a city of rather low scale, it focussed less on the design of the form of the building, but rather on the quality of the units within to create a user based experience.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

A few weeks ago Superpool surprised me with one of the best library designs I have seen in a while: the Open Library in Istanbul. A small area, a rich public space.

But the office has also been working on two large scale residential projects in Turkey: Konya Residence and Dagos Tower (will be featured on a future article). Both projects propose innovative strategies in terms of dense housing. I´m eager to see how this projects develop and materialize in the future.

About the Konya Residence:

Designed for an 80 year old woman, EASTERN Design Office’s Slit House, a reinforced concrete residential project, “presents her both a life space with a soft light and an interesting experience of scale unlikely in a house.” Situated in an old Japanese city on a site 50 meters by 7.5 meters, the home has long slits that run along a 22 centimeter thick wall, making the interior space open, while providing enough privacy.

More about the home and more images after the break.

A year and a half ago, OMA unveiled the first images for a residential project in Singapore, on schematic design phase. Basically it was a set of stacked low-rise blocks.

Today OMA sent us an update on this project, The Interlace, and more details appear.

The project is located on a green belt outside the capital city, and consists on 31 stacked apartment blocks, each six-stories tall and identical in length, resulting in 170,000sqm of gross floor area for 1,040 apartments.

What is interesting about the project is how these stacked volumes achieve a high density, while still maintaining privacy and long-range views as you can see on the renderings.

The second result of this “stacked” strategy, are the common spaces filled with tropical green. By looking at the plan view of the complex, a series of inner courtyards appear on the empty spaces between the blocks. The project  turns then into a rich vertical community, apart from the single tower projects seen in the area. Extensive residential amenities and facilities are interwoven into the lush vegetation and offer opportunities for social interaction, leisure, and recreation.

The Waterpod ProjectTM has been floating around the New York area for the past few months gaining a lot of attention. Beginning in Newtown Creek, between Brooklyn and Queens, the Pod is moving down the East River and Hudson River. As reported by Melena Ryzik for The New York Times (view her articles here) this experimental project investigates the blend of community living and artistry. Showcasing artworks, performances and such, the WaterpodTM, is an eco-conscious environment that was designed “In preparation for our coming world with an increase in population, a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental conditions, people will need to rely closely on immediate communities and look for alternative living models; the Waterpod is about cooperation, collaboration, augmentation, and metamorphosis,” explained Mary Mattingly, a photographer who thought of the Waterpod idea.

More about the WaterpodTM after the break.