Zaha Hadid Architects have designed a retail and business centre for the resort of Jesolo near Venice in Italy. (more…)

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Sustainable and earthquake-proof All Seasons Tent Tower proposed by Slovenian architectural practice Ofis Architecture featuring tent-shaped layer for the city of Yerevan, Armenia.

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Steven Chilton of London office Marks Barfield Architects has designed a factory-shaped youth centre for the site of the what was once the world’s largest car plant at Longbridge in Birmingham, UK. (more…)

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Australian architectural practice Architects Eat recently has completed the restoration of the existing Edwardian house and named it as ELM & Willow House. The U-shaped plan was organized to enclose a courtyard, which to provide a series of visual layering between the spaces, while also creating a better relationship between inside and outside.

Our intention was to create an “Inside is outside is inside” environment, where inside and outside spaces were interchangeable elements.

Architects Eat

+ Project description courtesy of Architects Eat

This project involves restoration and alteration to the existing Edwardian house, and the demolition and construction at the rear for a new addition. The transparency and openness of the new part is a deliberate counterpoint to the introverted Edwardian house with its dark central corridor. Our intention was to create an “Inside is outside is inside” environment, where inside and outside spaces were interchangeable elements. The project evokes a certain reference to the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, and many courtyard houses in Melbourne by McGlashan and Everist.

The two mature Elm and Willow became the constraints to the project. They informed the arrangement of our new addition, and together with passive solar orientation the result is a U-shaped plan enclosing a north-facing courtyard.

The structure is suspended over the ground to avoid damaging the critical root zones of the two trees. The concrete floor and roof slabs are meticulously detailed, with significant input from our structural engineer, to appear and feel light, floaty and airy, a dialectic relationship between weight and material. This quality is enhanced by a skeletal structure of “skin and bones”, in which the non load-bearing glass sliding windows become a mere breathing skin between occupants and the outside world.

Internal planning strategies were devoted to the spatial hierarchy, in an interplay of inner and outer, and sequence of spaces. The link between the old and new is merged into the layering of spaces where inside and outside becomes one – the transparency of the borders separating interior and exterior allows the eye to perceive other elements that create the spatial order: fences, trees, stones, woods, clouds and borrowed landscape.

The addition has a passive ventilation system, whereby louver windows promote cross ventilation. The building materials specified are non-toxic and from renewable resources. The concrete structure provides thermal masses to the house with the slabs further insulated to minimise heat loss. All glazing are double-glazed to provide comfort to the interior, and the deciduous trees provide essential shading to the house during summer. Energy and water-saving fittings have been used throughout, and rain water is harvested for use in the gardens. A new carport with grid-connect solar power panels is in the design process.

It was a total of 3 years from the first meeting with the clients to the day they moved back into the house, during which the construction took 18 months, the client found passions in designing his gardens and their first child was born. It is a house for enjoyment, living in landscape with the family, and appreciation of tranquillity, intimacy and sanctuary – which were our original brief.

+ Project credits / data

Project: ELM & Willow House
Architects: Architects EAT
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Project Team: Albert Mo, James Coombe, Eid Goh
Structural Engineer: R. Bliem & Associates
Building Surveyor: Building Strategies
Builder: Sargant Construction
Landscaper: Heath Landscape
Project Area: 278 sqm
Project Year: 2007-2009
Construction Year: 2008-2009
Photographs: Earl Carter & James Coombe (j.a.coombe@gmail.com)

+ All images and drawings courtesy of Architects Eat

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Melbourne office Architects EAT have completed an extension to a house in Canterbury, Australia, suspended above the ground on steel columns. (more…)

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A new addition to the Mirror Ball collection, the Mirror Ball stand shows a new configuration featuring an array of various sized balls on a robust stainless steel stand. Tightly held in place with industrial strength clamps the stand creates an extraordinary sculptural interior lighting “tree”.

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In the project Art Trap, the Korean architecture group Mass Studies group plays with the idea of the Guggenheim Museum as a victim, in a sense, of its own success due to an over-saturation of human movement in a singular space (900,000 visitors annually) around Frank Lloyd Wright’s radical vision of a museum — a quarter-mile-long ramp spiraling around an iconic void. In the proposal for addressing this issue, the museum visitors themselves essentially become the artwork.

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A pedestrian bridge designed by American New York-based architect Bernard Tschumi and French firm Hugh Dutton Associés has opened in La Roche-sur-Yon in France. (more…)

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London architects AOC have remodelled the interior of an Edwardian suburban home at Golders Green, London, which includes a concrete hearth with a parquet pattern. (more…)

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Polish studio mode:lina architektura & consulting proudly presents:

GESTERBINE / gesture + water + turbine / The anti-steppisation device.

Problem The main reason of steppisation in Greater Poland

(Wielkopolska) is the specific location – the area between oceanic and continental climates characterized by a small amount of precipitation (even less than 500 mm a year, the country’s average of 600 mm), while high evaporation (the difference between rainfall and run-off, on average 400-450 mm per year). It’s also affected by high permeability of the soil in the central part of the Warta River bed.

The other reason of steppisation is decreasing area of forests in the last century due to agricultural needs. As a result of new field division a lot of ponds and swamps surrounded by green oasis disappeared. In addition Warta river due to the inland navigation has been drastically regulated – (straightened) – which shortened the river bed over 100 km – this means that water flows faster through the land and the hydration is smaller. This tendency has quickly lead to lowering of ground water level so important for water circulation in nature.

Resources

In terms of wind energy resources Wielkopolska is classified as “very good” due to high average wind speed and good topographical conditions – mainly flatlands.

Conclusions

During the day, when there is a high electricity demand, GESTERBINE looks like typical power plant supplying average households, farms, small offices etc. During the night, when the demand for electricity is rather low, GESTERBINE works as a self- sufficient water pump which transports river water into the land.

This water if further used to support or even create small retention water reservoirs across the land. This action should go along with planting new trees to keep the surface water as long as possible within the land in order to raise ground water mirror.

Form

Relationship between energy resources and height above the ground level is directly proportional: for distance 10m above the ground 73 W/m2, 40m above the ground 198 W/m2. That is the main reason to use a skyscraper as a platform for wind turbines plant.

Instead of using one huge windmill,a vast number of smaller turbines was chosen, to get the ability to make them work separately – when one turbine get broken the energy flow is kept thanks to others.

Human energy into energy for humanity. The form is an effect of experiments on human gesture kinetics. The idea is to transpose human body kinetic energy into vectors. These vectors are used afterwards to build an energy producing skyscraper.

Chosen method of human gesture research: human body tangled in LED lights and camera set on long exposure in the darkroom and experiments in 3D using cardboard models out of vectorized photos.

Posters for eVolo 2010 Skyscraper Competition:

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