Our friends from CHA:COL shared with us their urban strategy, PARENTHESIS, with us.  When the New School of Planning and Architecture decide to relocate an institution, CHA:COL imagined this new school as an interconnected whole where the plan connects disparate structures with the natural environment.  Set in India, the country already has a rich history of education that synthesizes the exterior with the interior, so CHA:COL’s strategy enforces this pedagogical mentality.

More about Parenthesis after the break.

Set on a site characterized by the South Central Ridge to the North, Residential Development to the South and major Commercial and Institutional buildings to the East and West, the existing terrain was fairly undulated and rocky–conditions that appeared ideal for proposing a zone to recharge groundwater and enhance local flora. These environmental features could then be enhanced to accomodate outdoor program usages and become a social space as well.

The site is diagonally sliced by a feeder road that helps unify the Academic and Residential zones.  Programmatically, the residential zone is located to the West of the road, and a private zone and Academic program to the East.

The Ravine became a primary armature for organizing built structures around it so the design strategy was therefore defined by ‘bracketing’ this ravine. Programmatically, it allowed the school to function as a continuum between the interior and the exterior.

The school component was based on research of ‘vertical studio’ prototypes which allow flexibility for modular studios to be reconfigured based on academic considerations.  The three zones of studio, research and housing were therefore, proposed to be integrated as far as possible by the exterior environment.

© James Ostrand

Architects: Stanley Saitowitz | Natoma Architects
Location: Tampa, FL, USA
Project team: Stanley Saitowitz, John Winder, Neil Kaye, Markus Bischoff
General Contractor: Skanska USA Building
Civil Engineering: WilsonMiller, Inc.
Structural Engineering: Walter P. Moore and Associates, Inc.
Project year: 2010
Photographs: Richard Barnes & James Ostrand

Museums began in ancient times as Temples, dedicated to the muses, where the privileged went to be amused, to witness beauty, and to learn. After the Renaissance museums went public with palatial structures where the idea of the gallery arose, a space to display paintings and sculpture. Later, museums became centers of education, researching, collecting, and actively provoking thought and the exchange of ideas. By presenting the highest achievements of culture, museums became a stabilizing and regenerative force, crusading for quality and excellence. The role of the modern museum is both aesthetic and didactic, both Temple and Forum.

© Richard Barnes

The design of contemporary museum can be characterized by two polar approaches. On the one-hand buildings which aim to be works of art in themselves, independent sculptural objects as signatures of their architects. The new Rome Museum is the most extreme example, where the building opened empty, without any art to compromise its architecture. On the opposite end of the spectrum are museums as containers, as beautiful jewel boxes, treasure chests whose sole purpose is to be filled with art, like the Tampa Museum.

This museum is a neutral frame for the display of art, an empty canvass to be filled with paintings. It is a beautiful but blank container, a scaffold, to be completed by its contents. We are interested in openness, in unknown possibilities in the future, in Architecture as infrastructure. We have created compelling space in the most discreet way, avoiding the building as an independent sculptural object, and using space and light to produce form.

© Richard Barnes

A glass pedestal supports the jewelbox of art above. The building floats in the park, embracing it with its overhanging shelter and reflective walls. It is a hovering abstraction, gliding above the ground. The building is not only in the landscape, but is the landscape, reflecting the greenery, shimmering like the water, flickering like clouds. It blurs and unifies, making the museum a park, the park a museum.

The long building is sliced in the center. This cut divides the programs in two, the one public and open, the other support and closed. Each of the two sections is organized around a court, one the lobby, the other a courtyard surrounded by the offices and curatorial areas.

sections 01

The 40’ cantilever provides a huge public porch for the city, raising all the art programs above the flood plane. The walk along this porch, flanked by the park, focussed on the river, leads to the lobby. The procession through this quiet and levitating space is the preparation for viewing art.

© Richard Barnes

The lobby is at first horizontal, with entirely glass walls, two clear, two etched. The clear walls allow the site to run through the space, linking the Performing Art Building on the north with the turrets and domes of the University of Tampa on the south. Above the glass, the perforated ceiling wraps from the exterior into vertical perforated walls that turn into an upper ceiling, perforated again by a series of skylights. The galleries are reached from the lobby below via a dramatic cinematic stair reaching up. Below the stair is a bed of river rock.

Off the lobby is a long glass room that houses the café and bookstore in a storefront along the riverwalk.

We have built the most expansive and generous field of galleries as instruments to enable, through curation, a world to expose art. They are arranged in a circuit, surrounding the vertical courtyard void. The galleries are blank, walls, floor and ceiling all shades of white, silent like the unifying presence of snow. The floors are ground white concrete with a saw cut grid to echo the illuminated white fabric ceiling above. Linear gaps in the ceiling conceal sprinklers, air distribution and lighting.

© Richard Barnes

The second segment, around the open court, contains all the support for the museum. Offices surround the court on three sides. A bridge on the lower level is a secondary crossing from preparation to storage, a place for museum staff to be outside.

The image of the museum results from the nature of its surface – it does not symbolize or describe. It disengages through neutral form, providing a kind of pit stop in the attempt to represent. It is a moment to savor things in themselves.

By day the surfaces appear to vary almost, but never quite. They are smudged and stammering, with moray like images of clouds or water or vegetation, a shimmering mirage of reflections. It is an expansive and illusive image of a museum about things we don’t quite know, about things we don’t quite see.

By day, light reflects on the surfaces.

© Richard Barnes

© Richard Barnes

By night, light emanates from the surfaces.

By night the exterior become a canvass for a show of light. The art from within bleeds out onto the walls and escapes into the darkness. By night it is the magical illumination of the skin changing colors and patterns in endless variations which turn the building inside out, revealing it secrets as it broadcasts light, color and form into the city, duplicated in its reflection in the water.

This museum is both timeless and of our time, an electronic jewel box, floating on a glass pedestal, a billboard to the future, and a container to house works inspired with vision and able to show us other ways to see our world. The museum hovers in the park, a hyphen between ground and sky.

© FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

Architects: Comoco
Location: Castelo Novo, Fundão, Portugal
Project Team: Luís Miguel Correia, Nelson Mota, Susana Constantino with Vanda Maldonado
Client: Fundão Municipality
Engineering: Direcção-Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais (DGEMN)
Building Contractor: General Contractor: STAP – Reparação, Consolidação e Modificação de Estruturas, S.A.
Landscape: Serrasqueiro e Filhos, lda
Project Area: 3,650 sqm
Project Year: 2003-2008
Photographs: FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

The project’s brief requested the conservation and valorization of Castelo Novo’s Castle and surroundings. Moreover, it suggested also the creation of a space where people and visitors could enjoy it as a place of permanence. To answer these demands, the design solution created a “body” without a rigid boundary, organic, working independently of the existing structures but using them as a support. The construction was designed as a continuous abstract object, non-identifiable with a unique and specific purpose.

site plan

© FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

The object changes with the characteristics of the site. While in the church’s square it acts as a volume defining the limits, in the interior of the Castle’s walls, its shape is transformed into a pavement layer with ramps and stairs creating a pedestrian pathway which is suspended from the ground by metallic structure. This solution allows the visitors to admire the archeological findings without damaging them. The pathway finishes in the castle’s Main Tower where a “steel box” was inserted in its interior containing a multimedia room. This box allows also the creation of a platform where visitors can enjoy a panoramic view of the landscape. All the construction was made using lightweight metal structures which can allow a clear distinction of the new object from the existing structures and, at the same time, the reversibility of the operation.

A fancy restaurant, an ice cream shop, a café, a cool restaurant and even a Kentucky Fried Chicken for the third part of our previously featured restaurants in ArchDaily. Check them all after the break.

Conduit / Stanley Saitowitz | Natoma Architects
Conduit Restaurant emerged from the found circumstances. The ground floor commercial space in a new residential building had a low ceiling and a tangled maze of plumbing, sprinkler and electrical conduits serving the residences above. To cover these pipes would have further reduced the space (read more…)

Leggenda Ice Cream and Yogurt / SO Architecture
In the industrial zone of Ramat Ishay northern Israel, Inside an old abandoned carpentry shop a new branch of the Leggenda ice cream and yogurt was put up. To design a space with an airy and calm feeling, that the customer desired, in the space we had to work with, was rather difficult. This difficulty was caused by very low ceiling of only 2.30 m (read more…)

Café/Pastry Shop in Sintra / extrastudio
In an urban condition without any specific references, a residential suburb between Sintra and Lisbon, this project is inspired by the nearby Sala de Musica (the Music Room)in Palacio de Queluz and by the Patisseries and Cafés from the beginning of the XX century, where the substance that characterizes its interior is completely autonomous from the construction where it’s inserted (read more…)

Fast Food Restaurant – KFC / PK Arkitektar
Fast food restaurants like Kentucky Fried Chicken are usually known for the standardized look. The architecture in these places seems to never take much consideration on the specific location and surroundings. In Keflavík the intention was to make a design that would brake with these aspects (read more…)

Tori Tori Restaurant / Rojkind Arquitectos + ESRAWE Studio
Considered one of the best Japanese restaurants in Mexico City and due to its remarkable success, Tori-Tori is now moving to a bigger location in the same area of Polanco, Mexico City, where Architect Michel Rojkind and Industrial Designer Hector Esrawe teamed up to make it happen (read more…)

Miron Ibrahimpasis from in/out arh studio, along with architects Lamila Simisic and Jasmina Dizdarevic won the competition to design Bosnia and Herzegovina pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo 2010.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

Introduction
In following the theme, Better City – Better Living, this year’s Global exhibition strives to show current ways of living in modern cities. With this in mind, we were inspired by brilliant architectural examples from our country’s past. Working with a theme of our medieval fortified cities, we applied that concept as an idea for arrangement of interior space.

We believe that this suits the competition guidelines that allow for limited space and incorporates the idea of “one world, one city.”

Idea (Concept)
While searching for an appropriate pattern for this presentation and analyzing competition parameters, 5 scenes + VIP and its symbolism of 5 elements, we came up with schematics for the interior of our structure which correlate with the relationship and placement of elements: wood, fire, earth, metal and water.

Following the basic rule of movement of these elements in coordinate system, this seemingly simple concept has transformed the entire interior of our structure into a complex space.

Outside is adorned, as a mandatory element, with children’s drawings.

Interior
The interior is comprised of 5 scenes. The First Scene, the Nucleus or City Space, in its horizontal formation as well as in its vertical attainment of light, represents an idea of Agora- the city center. Four cells encompass the core (Nucleus), creating separate spheres, which in their characteristics match one another, yet information they contain within is sphere-specific and unique. Canvas (netting, sails) cascading (flowing, spilling) from the ceiling serves not only as an interior design stratagem; it also acts and directly contributes to the presentation, making the space playful in all its manifestations.

Exterior
The external structure is defined by the complexity of its internal form.

The interior design is such that it flows outward, transforming itself into (protective) bands (stripes), which envelop the structure. We chose to (include) this in an attempt to create unity (equilibrium) of (between) interior and exterior space. Bands embedded into the façade reflect the playfulness of the children’s art imprinted on them; they are the harmony of childhood games shown through facade’s webbing. The bands are installed in two layers. Mounted on wheels, the interior layer by its clockwise (left to right) movement enables the façade to be changed in given intervals.

Conclusion
Our goal was to create a unique space, a space that contains and combines different segments of our country’s presentation, while at the same time arranging (organizing) the interior in such a way that a visitor would feel comfortable in an abundance of information presented to him/her.

The complexity of the interiors, created by following simple rules, creates a plethora of possibilities for this exhibition’s presentation. Our intention is to compel a visitor to step out of his/her (stagnation of) ( step out of their daily lives) status quo and float (sail) through our space

© Ramiro Ramirez

Architects: ELEMENTAL
Location: Monterrey, Mexico
Client: Instituto de la Vivienda de Nuevo León (IVNL)
Engineering: Area of projects and technological innovation, IVNL
Urbanization & Specialization: Area of projects and technological innovation, IVNL
Site Area: 6,591 sqm
Initial House Area: 40 sqm
Expanded House Area: 58.75 sqm
Initial Duplex Area: 40 sqm
Expanded Duplex Area: 76.60 sqm
Project Year: 2010
Photographs: Ramiro Ramirez

Restrictions

Santa Catarina is a city of 230,000 inhabitants, located in the state of Nuevo León, in the northwest of Mexico. This project is Elemental’s first outside of Chile.

site plan

The Government of Nuevo León, México, commissioned us to design a group of 70 homes on a site of .6 hectars in a middle class neighborhood in Santa Catarina. The required density suggested the application of the typology we developed for Iquique. However, the climate in Santa Catarina is very different from the northern dessert climate of Chile. The 600 mm of annual rainfall required us to adapt our proposal to this new question.

© Ramiro Ramirez

The commission to develop this middle class neighborhood with the financing of US$20,000 per dwelling (almost double the funds we had for the housing projects built by Elemental in Chile). However, the construction standards and building codes significantly raise the construction costs. In this case, it was pertinent to use the strategy of investing state resources to build “the difficult half” of the home, especially given the capacity do-it-yourself building observed in Mexico, ensuring a promising future for the expansions.

The Project

ELEMENTAL Monterrey consists of a three-story continuous building that in section superimposes a home (first floor) with a two-story apartment above (2nd and 3rd story). Both units are designed to technically and economically facilitate the final middle class standard of which we will hand over the “first half” (40 m2). In this sense, the difficult parts of the house (bathrooms, kitchen, stairs, and dividing walls) are designed for the expanded scenario, that is, for a home of more than 58 m2 approx. and an apartment of approximately 76 m2.

© Ramiro Ramirez

Secondly, given that almost 50% of the m2 of the complex will be self-built, this building is porous so that the growth can occur within the structure. On one hand we want to frame and give rhythm (more than control) to the spontaneous construction so as to avoid deterioration of the urban environment over time, and also make the process of expansions for each family easier. The proposed continuous roof above the volumes and voids protects the expansion zones from rain and ensures a definitive profile of the building toward the public space.

section

© Ramiro Ramirez

Third, experience tells us that in lower class neighborhoods the green spaces tend to be “earth spaces,” due to the scarcity of maintenance and the distance that exists between green space and the home that makes it difficult for neighbors to take care of. What we did in this case was to surround the green space with building, reducing the distance between communal space and the home to a minimum. This permitted us to define a collective space with secure Access that gives space to the social network and generates favorable conditions for maintenance and care.

All the apartments have direct Access from the public space and parking, a condition especially relevant in a country where every family can have access to an automobile.

The Chile-based practice was nominated by Catherine Ince, new curator of the Barbican Art Gallery, for its social housing scheme in Mexico.

The Monterrey housing takes on the “half house” concept that ELEMENTAL pioneered in the Chilean city of Iquique. The idea is that the basic house is provided for residents who then expand and adapt their property themselves.

Also shortlisted in the architecture category were Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI centre in Rome, Tony Fretton’s British Embassy in Warsaw, David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin, 6a Architects’ Raven Row exhibition centre in east London and Herzog & de Meuron’s TEA cultural centre in Tenerife.

Seen at bd online.

© Kris Vandamme

Architecture: BURO II
Location: Brugge, Belgium
Interiors: BURO Interior & Frederic Declercq
Project Area: 10,207 sqm
Project Year: 2010
Photographs: Kris Vandamme

© Kris Vandamme

A new treasure for Bruges

With its central location and rich history, this site is of major importance to the World Heritage City of Bruges. Tourism is an important engine of the local economy. The conversion of this building into a hotel with conference facilities will finally, after many years, remove an eyesore from the Hoogstraat. The project consists of two parts: the renovation of the three historic buildings on the Hoogstraat and a new development on the Groene Rei.

© Kris Vandamme

© Kris Vandamme

The modern development replaces a property of little value built in the 20th century. The new addition to the cityscape of Bruges is conceived as a bronze treasure chest set with gems. The architectural form of a box with a chamfered roof can also be found in the Bruges Belfort (which houses a treasury as well as the town accounts).

reference image

elevation

The new hotel development comprises 118 hotel rooms and 9 seminar rooms and provides underground parking for 38 cars.

© Toshiyuki Yano / Nacasa & Partners

Architects: Suppose design office
Location: Hiro, Kure city, Hiroshima, Japan
Site Area: 78.34 sqm
Building Area: 37.39 sqm
Total Floor Area: 66.46 sqm
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Toshiyuki Yano

This spacious house is a home that has two gardens.

ground floor plan

© Toshiyuki Yano / Nacasa & Partners

The site is located in a shopping district alongside the main highway, a harsh place to satisfy the demands of a client desiring a home with bright gardens. There are no outdoor gardens here, so we decided to plan outthe kind of place that you could almost call a real garden, by bringing to the indoors materials that evoke – elements of the outdoors – garden-like elements such as light and raw materials. By setting up garden rooms that at first sight make you feel as if you are in a real outdoor garden – despite being indoors – we have created a distinction between the indoors and outdoors, and by putting characteristically “outdoor” things such as plants and bicycles in the rooms, as well as books, artwork, and pianos, we have portrayeda life in which these elements are all mingled. We struggled to achieve this new outdoors-like form by changing the way we looked at things just a little bit, by unconsciously recognizing these “inside and outside” elements. The garden rooms, where the indoors and outdoors mingle, show that rather than being a home that cannot allow the sort of metamorphosis it has seen thus far, this home is comfortable with these changes.

© Toshiyuki Yano / Nacasa & Partners

By participating in putting the finishing touches on the buildingﾕs interior design, we think that we have created such a home.

Peter Pichler Architects, a young team based in Bolzano, Italy, have worked with well known names such as Zaha Hadid and OMA, and now, their studio’s first building will be realized in a few months. The client, the German photographer Cellina von Mannstein, will now reside in the northern part of Italy, surrounded by the Alps. With the intention to keep the two dominate trees on the site and to capture one of the them within the volume of the building, a “green atrium” was created between the built volumes that cuts the building in two parts.

More images and more about the residence after the break.

Clad in black aluminum panels to resemble an old and edgy camera, the residence is comprised of a main housing element and, of course, a photo studio.  The housing areas are distributed on two levels which are slightly shifted to create a canopied entrance on the northern part of the first level and a balcony on the south side of the second level.  An open floor plan on the first level bleeds into a south oriented terrace with pool.  The entire floor is framed by a platform and is lifted from the ground to provide better views.

The tree in the atrium is visible and accessible by large sliding glass windows.

The photo studio, which rests on the west side, is characterised by a great glass facade that filters light.  The facade can alternatively be transformed into a vast projection wall (provided by an integrated projection surface) to be used as a “drive-in-theatre” for presentations.