Architects: Bureau for Architecture
Design team: Naseem Alizadeh
Photography: Steve Maylone
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

The Matchbox House is a four bedroom house in a rural area near Ann Arbor. The house only has 1740 sf of conditioned space and a one car garage. The concept for the house in elevation came from the iconic shape of a four-sided house, much like a child would draw. In this case, the 5th side (the bottom) is expressed since the house is raised on an inset concrete plinth. The idea was for the house to read as a small object dropped into the woods.

Aside from the construction footprint of the house, septic field and driveway, the remainder of the site was left untouched as a natural wooded setting. No grass (and therefore no irrigation) has been used, the area of the septic tank now has a native meadow mix. The entire site, exlusive of the footprint of the house, is permeable (including the driveway).

In plan the house reads as a matchbox, with an exterior sleeve and interior container (in this case, split into 4 quadrants). They appear to slip past each other and the outer sleeve, thereby creating some exterior space which is still protected by the outer sleeve.

The house has received LEED Platinum Certification and has a HERS score of 46. In addition to an undisturbed site, no basement and a one car garage, the house is much smaller than the current average American home but still feels quite large and spacious inside, since all interior space is used and maximized (there is no attic, so upper floor rooms follow the line of the 45 degree angle roof).

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Architects: Modscape
Photography: Ben Johnson
Location: South Yarra, Australia

While deceptively unassuming from the street, this art deco apartment block in South Yarra conceals a Modscape designed extension that exhibits the true nature of adapting architecture to lifestyle.

© Ben Johnson

The architects clients purchased the apartments to use as a three storey home for their growing family with the intention of converting the home back into apartments as each of their children moved out. Our solution translated into a 102 sqm, three-module addition that introduced three clearly defined floors to each apartment level, consisting of an open plan kitchen/living/dining area to the ground floor, a bedroom and study to the second, and rooftop deck to the third.

The success of the project depended on a careful balance of materiality and form between the buildings despite the different eras of architectural style. Rheinzink cladding in a standing seam profile was chosen for its long term durability and attractive patina to ensure the extended spaces would complement the brick façade and improve with age.

Internally, the new spaces display a pared back style punctuated by European design and minimal ornamentation. A Morso fireplace, AGA oven and Corian benchtops in the kitchen/living/dining area are complemented by Modscape standard features, while an interior décor of Scandinavian inspired furniture maintains the design language between the old and new spaces.

Due to the tight nature of the block, the addition was then blended with clever landscaping and an in-ground pool in the yard to utilise every square inch of the site and complete the integration.

© Ben Johnson

© Ben Johnson

© Ben Johnson

© Ben Johnson

© Ben Johnson

© Ben Johnson

© Ben Johnson

© Ben Johnson

© Ben Johnson

© Modscape

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Architects: Studio mk27
Team members: Marcio Kogan, Maria Cristina Motta
Interiors: Studio mk27; Diana Radomysler
Photography: Fernando Guerra
Location: Bragança Paulista, Brazil

The MM House organization is set by the intersection of two perpendicular axes on a single ground floor. Along one axis is the horizontal volumetry of the house, with its green roof that lifts the grass of the land and merges with the surrounding construction. Along the other axis, there is emptiness: a wooden deck and pool.

At the intersection of these axes, a terrace holds the social spaces of the house, including a kitchen and a living. With permanent cross ventilation, the atmosphere is inviting, even with the high temperatures of São Paulo state, in southeastern Brazil. This terrace is the transition between interior and exterior. It divides the house into two blocks of wood. The southern block contains the garage and TV room while the northern block holds rooms, kitchen and services. The ceilings create a spatiality: over the terrace it is a low concrete porch and over the living room it is inclined as the roof design and made out of wooden slats.

The climate issue is key for the habitability of the house. All spaces are provided with ventilation through wooden folding doors, brises-soleil that can be fully opened. Moreover, the green roof acts as an insulator, besides creating the peculiarity of the volume.

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Architects: SPARK
Project Director: Jan Felix Clostermann
Project team: Eldine Heep, Leonardo Micolta, Javen Ho
Interiors: One Plus Partnership Limited
Landscape: Hassell/Hong Kong
LDI: Chongqing Design Institute
Structure: Chongqing Design Institute
Photography: Jonathan Leijonhufvud / Fernando Guerra
Location: Chongqing, China

SPARK’s playful Clubhouse in Chongqing has opened to the public. The Clubhouse is the first part of a series of leisure facilities SPARK designed for a large villa community in the outskirts of Chongqing.

Apart from the 5,500 sqm clubhouse SPARK’s masterplan proposal includes a 12,000sqm hotel and a 13,000sqm outdoor retail street which will be completed early 2013.

” The uniqueness of the site was the source of inspiration for our design”, says Jan Clostermann, Director at SPARK. The design aims to embody the site’s steep topography, beautiful greenery and scenic views in the spatial experience of the architecture. The hotel, clubhouse and retail elements become part of a scenic route from a panoramic lookout fifty meters above the community down into the valley. Along this dramatic descent program has been carefully placed to respond to the topography and community needs. Thus, in the process of meandering through the landscape, one engages in activities that foster a healthy community and social interaction.

The clubhouse forms the centre point of this leisure route. It functions as a mediating icon that brings residents, visitors, and all the elements of the master plan together.

It was formally conceived as a continuous folded loop that pivots from a common double height space. The common space links together the different programmatic elements of the building; including a gym, a swimming pool, children playground, offices, arts-and-crafts classrooms, meeting rooms, a restaurant and a café. The design responds to the client needs by allowing this common space to be temporarily utilized as a showroom and sales floor for the villas. Surrounding the clubhouse is a shallow reflective lake abundant with carp and lotus. Wooden platforms outline the periphery of the building and bridge across the lake to connect the lobby with the residential villas.

Like the hotel and the retail street SPARK aimed to embed the clubhouse into the existing topography. There is a 5 meter level difference between the side facing the street and the side opening up to a shallow lake.

The roof folds down towards the main entry forming outdoor seating continuing the scenic route along the roof down towards the water. Thus the clubhouse seems to grow from the ground when approaching the main entry, and rising out of the reflecting water surface five meters lower on the opposite side of the building.

This terraced space is echoed in the interior spaces where the visitors enter into a low ceilinged space to descend into the double height space that is now used as the sales room.

The materiality aims to blend the building into its natural setting by employing is a simple palette of textured granites and glass.

By embracing the existing topographic conditions and integrating the water edge to be one of the main features of the design, SPARK has created a memorable indoor – outdoor experience for both residents and visitors alike.

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Architects: BARCODE Architects
Photography: Christian van der Kooij
Location: Belgium

Barcode Architects design for the extension and renovation of Markthuis is completed. The design is driven by the desire to optimize the daylighting in the house and the wish of the client to reserve a prominent place for his large collection of art and hunting trophies.

In order to maximize the spatial experience most of the interior walls are removed to remain with one open living space extending over the first two floors of the villa. Downstairs are comfortable spaces for receiving guests while on the upper first floor more intimate and private areas with an open plan kitchen, study, and lounge area are situated. A large atrium connects the two layers and provides space for an exclusive, double high exhibition wall with an impressive amount of artefacts. The wooden staircase is placed as a freestanding piece of furniture within the vide, on one side guided by a 6 meter tall piece of glass. The glazed element separates the kitchen and the entrance lobby from the rest of the house and offers exciting plays of light and shadow.

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Architects: Bercy Chen Studio
Size: 1600 square feet
Location: Austin, USA

Shore Vista Boat House is located on a bend in Lake Austin across from Canyonland Nature Preserve in Austin, Texas. The site is suggestive of the elliptical form that maximizes the beautiful views of the undulating hills beyond. Rounded edges of the dock, along with the curved glass railing, peel away, allowing more of the landscape to be captured into the visual frame. Access is provided to the lake level via a series of stepping‐stones and a sweeping, gently inclined, curved stairs to the second level. A lowered beach area, allowing one to ease effortlessly into the water, is strategically located at the basin of a waterfall, providing endless hours of enjoyment for the owners’ young children.

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Ezra Stoller, Photographer by Nina Rappaport, Erica Stoller

Ezra Stoller’s iconic photographs of 20th-century architectural masterpieces, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, are often cited in aiding the rise of modernism in America. Stoller (1915–2004) elevated architectural photography to an art form, capturing the mood of numerous buildings in their best light.

Living and working in New York from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s, Stoller photographed buildings by such architects as Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, and Louis I. Kahn. His striking images earned him the admiration of critics and contemporaries, but few people are aware of the stunning breadth of his oeuvre, which also included domestic and industrial spaces and important editorial depictions of American labor in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ezra Stoller, Photographer ($48, hardcover) a long-awaited and lavishly illustrated survey of Stoller’s artistic accomplishments, examines the photographer’s full range with a fresh eye and unprecedented scope, offering a unique commentary on postwar America’s changing landscape.

You can buy this book at Amazon.

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China is also moving toward sustainable construction. In fact, it’s specifically mentioned in the government’s current five-year economic plan. A new international conference center and opera house in the seaport of Dalian was designed by Austrian architect Wolf D. Prix of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU. The facility will keep energy use to an absolute minimum – in part, through the use of thermal energy, natural ventilation and solar power. It’s a futuristic concept that’s aimed at allowing the structure to generate as much of its own energy as possible.

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Architects: Horst Architects
Interior design: Aria Design
Location: Laguna Beach, California, USA

We see here a hillside site overlooking the Pacific Ocean with a design that must adapt to a unique natural environment, structural regulations, and geological conditions. Integrating the disparate needs a young family has for open and inviting communal spaces, along with environments which are private — yet not exclusionary. Balance distinctiveness with the site safety and material “resilience” required with small children. This site fulfills a dialogue of dualities through design and materiality. Communal space is expressed as transparent volumes which blur the distinction between interior and exterior elements, while engaging the notion of limitless possibilities.

Private spaces retain accessibility while providing solitude through opaque, inwardly focused elements and carefully positioned windows. The two blend seamlessly through limestone walls suggesting earth-bound permanence and visual weight, along with a metal butterfly roof floating seemingly weightless above clearstory windows, so as to lift and transcend the physical realm. This duality is further engaged with furnishings and accessories ranging from antique to modern, strategically placed in rooms with a clean, austere simplicity.

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Architects: Andrea Maffei Architects
Design team: Arata Isozaki & Associates
Landscape design: Catherine Mosbach, Alessandro Rocca
Location: Bergamo, Italy

Andrea Maffei Architects know that an high office building can force to excessive vertical transfers, it is also clear that if the incidence of the cores – stairs, lifts and services – is too high compared to surface area, the cost of construction and management are increased exponentially. But it is clear that beyond these two aspects, although important, the decisive argument for each new architecture lies in the relationship with its surroundings, and in this case it is the city of Bergamo.

The architects do not believe that a building nearly 90 meters high in this specific location, not far from downtown, is the most appropriate response for a measured city like Bergamo, where not only the maximum height of the recent buildings is much lower than 90m, but especially enjoys the extraordinary presence of the Upper Town and the hills. It’s clear that the Bergamo New Province Headquarter of the province of Bergamo will certainly stand out in the urban landscape, and so it will have its own image, authoritative and recognizable, but to give priority to this aspect raises the risk of scratching its singularity and to homologate to other cities of less excellence. It ‘s true that the reference of the new project is not only the existing Bergamo, especially since the new building is also entrusted to start a new phase of development of the city beyond the railway track, in the south of Bergamo. But even this extensive and important urban redevelopment – and so the various local constructions that will compose it in a long time – have to establish a non-hostile relationship with the existing city.

These considerations brought to the idea of ​​”rolling on” the tower itself horizontally, proposing a more condensed but still unusual architecture and a strong identity built around a simple rule that can bring to the city several different images of the building. The project does not rise up to 88m, as allowed by the rules, but develops the required surfaces horizontally within the limits of the competition, designing a two-storey circular base on which to place the horizontal skyscraper that wraps up himself up to a maximum height of 46.2 m.

The architectural presence of the new building was then tested in the most important overall views of the city. More and more people around the world know Bergamo due to the international airport, and the image of the city is the one they get from the airplane.

This is a view similar to the one is always possible to the citizens – and to the tourists – when they look out from the old walls of the ancient city, looking toward the land.

The draft of the new headquarters of the province distributes the functions of two-storey circular base and then over 9 floors of the skyscraper horizontal spirals on itself. The first two floors are large open space characterized by a structural grid 8 × 8 m apart from the two cores of 12 × 12m continuing on the upper floors. On the ground floor are provided for the functions of primary interest to the public: a conference room with 286 seats for various events, a library, a nursery for employees, a cafeteria attached to the canteen on the first floor basement. These functions are surrounded by offices, also illuminated by an inner courtyard on the first floor. The horizontal skyscraper on the upper floors is based on the form of 1.5 m in front of the offices to allow a subdivision according to the dimensional forms required by the rules of the competition. Based on that, the skyscraper is developed in each arm in groups of 3 floors with 4 modules of 12m each, for a maximum length of 48 m per side. This choice allows to rationalize the structure of the building through a bridge trusses with diagonals always great to step 12m. The small width of the sides of the building, equal to 13.5 m, allows facilities to focus only on the façade and leaving the interior completely free from any other columns. This allows you to always have a large open space, where office partitions can be placed in various ways and that will give greater flexibility for future use. This modularity is repeated, turning 90 degrees and rising symmetrically to the upper plans with a growth effect of spiral building around a courtyard. This solution avoids the project from a heavy impact like the idea of a monolithic vertical tower, which would be intrusive on the skyline from Bergamo. This allows a visual permeability from various points around the connection between the two sides in Bergamo, now divided by the railway. Two angular cores allow you to reach the various levels of the building through panoramic lifts, emergency stairs and glass panoramic lifts inside. The cores contain two ducts for the passage of the plants at different levels, rising up from the basement. The empty building’s interior is characterized by trees that rise from the court on the first floor. The building consists of three large terraces L shape as well be used for public events. The first, covering the first floor, semi-circular, is a large square raised, partially covered, and allows a 360 degree view of the landscape. The L-shaped terrace on the 5th floor overlook to Upper Town and to the city center. This creates a “sky lobby” for large events open to the public, given the exceptional panoramic view of the city from an outdoor area, but covered by the upper floors and therefore possible to be used in case of bad weather. The 8th floor terrace overlooking to the South and Bergamo allows a constant view of the new transformation of the city. The offices will be equipped with floating floors, ceiling panels of perforated aluminum soundproofing, air-conditioning system with “chilled beams” for environmental well-being without direct jets of air on the body. The lights of the offices will be equipped by the dimeric system with a computer controlled light at different times of the day to have the same amount of light in offices all the time.

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