Domus Academy is launching a new competition named Define a Creative Hub with the aim to test the talent and urban vision skills with an experimental contemporary subject.

Find more about the competition here.

Portuguese architecture firm spaceworkers transformed a typical house in the city of Oporto, into a new cosmopolitan house preserving its identity.

Here is the project description:

Intervening in a typical habitation of the Oporto urban tissue it’s by itself a reason for the memory theme run through our thought, as the memory itself begins to delineate like a program, a “tool” capable of function as a moderator element between the “old” and the “new”.

This project tries to recreate the habitation spaces (an element per se container and generator of memories), preserving the identity of the architectonic object already existent, but with a greater cosmopolitan and contemporaneous touch, searching a symbiosis between two languages chronologically distant, intending to create an “actualized” architectonic object belonging to the sensorial universe of this place from Oporto city.

Photos by Fernando Guerra | FG+SG

Special thanks to Henrique Marques from spaceworkers for sharing.

Suppose Design Office recently finished a family house in the city of Obama, in the Fukui prefecture on the sea of Japan.

The client – the director of a clinic opposite the house – wished to combine openness on the ground floor to allow for parking spaces for this clients with a more protected first floor living spaces.

Kitchen space, bathrooms, study corners and storage are strategically placed at the perimeter of the site to form a buffer around the living areas and bedrooms. Light and air are allowed in through the insertion of courtyards with glass-framed walls between the rooms.

The use of identical floorboards in internal and external areas, running along the length of the house, give a strong interaction between inside and outside, creating one continuer connected space.

Photos by Toshiyuki Yano

Via yatzer

German design studio RAUMINRAUM designed the interior of the Jackie Su Restaurant located in Bremen, Germany.

The asian street kitchen character with a contemporary and clear interior is used for this small restaurant in Bremen’s city center. Concrete walls with an artwork presenting a smiling Jackie Su, bring red Asian characters while the large suspended acoustic ceiling and unclad air-conditioning ducts emphasize the urban ambience.

Photos by Nikolai Wolff

Via Contemporist

More info here.

EMBT designed the new store for Camper in the spanish city of Sevilla.

Here is the concept of the project:

Camper has much to do with “el campo”, that is the countryside, the fields… to walk in the fields… and so we imagined shoes stepping on irregular surfaces, like when we walk on earth.

We cut different shoe forms, with hills, without hills, tall, short, for men, for women… we put those flat profiles one next to the other… and that is how our the volume of our new Camper store appeared!

Photos & Video by Pedro Pegenaute

Tienda Camper, Sevilla 2009 por estudiopegenaute

Via noticias arquitectura

• Greening an Icon: The Empire State Building.
• Photos of the exhibition Ron Arad: Restless.
• Riego van Wersch’s unique universe.
• The Franzen Lecture on architecture and the environment.
• Frank Gehry quits Museum of Tolerance Project.
• Fast Food Kiosque on the seafront at Saint-Nazaire, France.
• Smart and stylish Vertically Moving Floor that turns the surface of the pool into a usable floor.
• A video about the Design and Production of Lzf Lamps.
• Winners of the Brit Insurance Design of 2010.

Swedish designers Note Design Studio projected the interior for Cafe Foam using sheer red curtains and bands of color slashing across the walls and floors.

Here is the project inspiration and description:

“We want you to create an interior design that people either love or hate and that nobody is indifferent to!” was the conditions given to us by the owner Michael Toutoungi when we started working with Cafe Foam.

There were also two other important factors while creating the design. The first was to keep certain well-known elements from the previous interior to make regulars feel right at home and the second was creating a vivid environment that made meetings easier, protected the integrity of its costumers and enhanced the eating experience. A place for everybody.

Photos by Stefano Barozzi

Via Contemporist

Swedish architect and designer Jonas Wagell projected the Design Bar and VIP Lounge at the Stockholm Furniture Fair.

The conceptual theme for the Design Bar and VIP Lounge was the forest and the industry, a tribute to raw material, craftsmanship and refinement, which constitute the backbone of the furniture industry.

Located next to the public industry is the restricted VIP Lounge forest created with identical materials and furniture, but with radically different atmosphere and spatial character. Same, but different. Both spaces are meant to be a meeting and resting place, to simultaneously inspire, evoke emotions and surprise.

Via dezeen

FABRE/deMARIEN architects projected this unique house located in a central district of Bordeaux, France.

The house is 8 meter wide, 13 meters long and 6,5 meter high with an empty central volume that is linked to the street by a porch that shelters the parking area. This empty space is designed to allow natural lighting and ventilation of all rooms despite the compactness of the house.

The patio allows a more complex and interesting view through the rooms and passages of both floors. It also becomes an additional outside room.

The facades have openings with different characteristics depending on their location: French windows with metal balconies installed on the street side, sliding frame with glazed apron on the patio and garden sides, windows for smaller rooms, sliding frames on the ground floor around the patio and access to the garden.

The house is entirely contracted in coated masonry, the joinery is in aluminum and the floors in synthetic resin.

Photos by Stéphane Chalmeau

Via ArchDaily