Saturday, October 1, 2011
Brooks Avenue House by Bricault Design
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The clients for this project needed more space to accommodate the needs of a growing family, but they were reluctant to leave their location in Venice – one of the few walkable neighborhoods in Los Angeles.The solution was to maintain and remodel their existing 2000 square foot home, while creating a 1700 square foot addition and courtyard on the rear lane side. With an ideal climate for much of the year, a primary design driver was to create a seamless connection between inside and outside, while eliminating the need for air conditioning To this end, a central sculptural staircase links the ground floor with the rooftop deck, while doubling as a chimney to draw cooling breezes through the house. On the main floor, a sequence of pivoting doors opens the house to the courtyard, while on the second floor, windows fold back and full-height exterior panels slide into walls. A system of cedar battens serve as a shading device along much of the addition.
The volume of the new master bedroom extends out from the second story, creating a carport below. Its exterior is clad with a living wall system on three sides, visually tying together the courtyard greenery with the planted roof. All landscaping is fed with a combination of captured rainwater and recycled domestic greywater. The roof’s softscape is divided between a highly productive vegetable garden and indigenous, low-maintenance grasses and shrubs. The roof also supports a solar panel array that is sufficient to meet household needs.
The house features a high-efficiency combination boiler, which supplies both radiant in-floor heating and domestic hot water. A hot water recirculation loop makes hot water available “on demand,” while reducing consumption. Other features include low-flush toilets and non-toxic, low-VOC finishes, which are used throughout the house.
Nitehawk Cinema LED Façade by Caliper Architecture
Caliper Studio have designed, fabricated and installed the custom zinc and glass façade for the Nitehawk Cinema and Apartments in New York City.
PwC Café/Reception Desk by JOI-Design
Description from the designers:
The focal point of the entrance lobby is an über-hip, UFO-like “island” which functions on one side as a reception desk and then doubles on the other side as a café / bar for social events. Made from highly polished glass fibres, the dynamic, glossy white structure has been moulded into a lacy “web” symbolising a neural network and emphasising PwC’s interconnected philosophy and creativity as a leading “think-tank” of consultants. Sleek white leather barstools line the café side of the desk. Within the centre panel, colour-shifting LED lights can be adjusted to varying degrees of intensity, so that the effect can be more subdued through the work day and pumped up to a more vibrant radiance during a reception in the evening. The supple, sculptural design ingeniously sweeps around one of the building’s central support columns, transforming a design dilemma into a sexy solution.
Addidas office interior by Kinzo Architects
Description from the designers:
Round about 1,700 adidas’ staff members have moved into a new working environment at the corporation’s headquarters in Herzogenaurach, a building distinguished by an exterior and an interior which strike new paths – literally: Glass walkways cross the inner courtyard, intertwining like the laces of a sport shoe. The Berlin-based design team KINZO translated kadawittfeldarchitektur’s communicative architectural concept into a custom-made furniture and interior design which is “pure adidas” both in form and function. WORKOUT opens up new realms of creativity and possibilities for team play – and displays folders, textiles, balls and shoes with the visual quality and continuity of a film set.The “Teamplayer” serves as the arrangement’s centerpiece – the multi-functional room module does not only serve as a support for desktops and storage. It also enables to zone and structure different kinds of team areas within the open office. The distinct rhomboid side panels of the Teamplayer create the impression of a honeycombed “space within a space”, transparent and airy but also clearly staked off as the workspace of a particular team. Whether Teamspace, Slotty or Wheels – as characteristic for every team effort, no WORKOUT element works entirely on its own. All parts are functionally and esthetically designed to work together: furniture as a team!
In workshops with adidas’ staff members the WORKOUT system was directly “tailored” to meet the users’ needs. WORKOUT is manufactured by renowned German office furniture specialist Planmöbel. In cooperation with KINZO, they have also been able to venture into new directions in regard to materials and surface structures: The entire furniture system is being refined with an environmentally friendly powder-coated finish. The result: Every WORKOUT furniture has been coated and sealed with a monolithic surface.
Floating House by MOS Architects
MOS Architects designed the Floating House on Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada.
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Description from the architects:
The Floating House is the intersection of a vernacular house typology with the shifting site-specific conditions of this unique place: an island on Lake Huron. The location on the Great Lakes imposed complexities to the house’s fabrication and construction, as well as its relationship to site. Annual cyclical change related to the change of seasons, compounded with escalating global environmental trends , cause Lake Huron’s water levels to vary drastically from month-to-month, year-to-year. To adapt to this constant, dynamic change, the house floats atop a structure of steel pontoons, allowing it to fluctuate along with the lake. Locating the house on a remote island posed another set of constraints. Using traditional construction processes would have been prohibitively expensive; the majority of costs would have been applied toward transporting building materials to the remote island. Instead, we worked with the contractor to devise a prefabrication and construction process that maximized the use of the unique character of the site: Lake Huron as a waterway. Construction materials were instead delivered to the contractor’s fabrication shop, located on the lake shore. The steel platform structure with incorporated pontoons was built first and towed to the lake outside the workshop. On the frozen lake, near the shore, the fabricators constructed the house. The structure was then towed to the site and anchored. In total, between the various construction stages, the house traveled a total distance of approximately 80 km on the lake. The formal envelope of the house experiments with the cedar siding of the vernacular home. This familiar form not only encloses the interior living space, but also enclosed exterior space as well as open voids for direct engagement with the lake. A “rainscreen” envelope of cedar strips condense to shelter interior space and expand to either filter light entering interior spaces or screen and enclose exterior spaces giving a modulated yet singular character to the house, while performing pragmatically in reducing wind load and heat gain.
Cubed Bench and T4 Shelves by Rock Paper Tree
Rahim Tejani of Rock Paper Tree has combined wood and concrete in his design of the Cubed bench and T4 shelves.In both pieces, the concrete and wood are capable of being repositioned for different uses.
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