Thứ Ba, 24 tháng 8, 2010

Gather / Katsuhiro Miyamoto & Associates

Architects: Katsuhiro Miyamoto & Associates
Location: Osaka-City, Osaka,
Principal in Charge: Katsuhiro Miyamoto
Project Team: Takenori Uotani
Structural Engineering: Masaichi Taguchi / TAPS
General Contractor: Nishimura Kenchiku-kobo
Site Area: 120.34 sqm
Built Area: 72.08 sqm
Total Floor Area: 135.05 sqm (additional area 7.23 sqm)
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Courtesy of


This is a renovation project of twenty-seven years old wooden residence built in a low-storey and high-density town areas of southern Osaka City. The intent was to solve numerous problems of the existing house at once, applying a single rule, undulating lattice surfaceモ. The concept is to respond to every functional change by making undulating walls composed of the lattice surface that uses nearly one thousand 2 x 4 woods.
floor plans
Firstly, the existing area that cross over the plot area ratio was reduced and three spot gardens integrated with the interior spaces were established for the purpose of letting the light and wind in. After that, an existing steep staircase was retracted and a new atrium staircase room was added in the existing garden. These were what were modified on the plan. Then, the total of one thousand 2 x 4 woods, which would count up to 2.8 km when aligned in series, wrap around the spaces. Tilting slightly inwards or outwards and altering the rotations of blades, the entire lattice surface continuously integrates miscellaneous spaces irrelevantly, no matter if it is existing or addition or interior or exterior. As a result, interior spaces feel very spacious compared to the pre-renovation condition, although the floor area was reduced. Additionally, the lattice surface functions as not merely ornament, but as a cover of seismic reinforcement that was required legally to the existing parts. In reality, the lattice surface itself should work as seismic reinforcement, but was not permitted by the law.
section BB
Ideas were required for the details of the lattice surface’s blades. Round chamfer was treated on the shorthand sides of the visible woods, so that smooth pleats will be created equally to everywhere in the spite of the irregularly continuing curvature. Thus the, undulation of the lattice surface gives various characters to the living spaces. For example, at the place where there is a large gap between the lattice surface and the structural walls, storage is installed. A kitchen counter is shaped where the lattice surface swells large into the room. Additionally, the lattice surface standing high along the adjacent road like a lumber shop is devised to double layers of variously rotating blades, so to prevent glances from the passers-by, at the same time bring in the wind. Simultaneously, it produces beautiful moiré during the daytime and at the nighttime turns into a large lighting fixture. Unexpectedly it plays a role as a public streetlight that softly illuminates the walkway.

Cliff Treehouse

Check out this cool treehouse nestled into Maple trees near the Hudson River in designed by German-based Baumraum.  Far from a child’s treehouse, this residence provides simple interiors with a touch of elegance.  Constructed for a family with two children, the treehouse serves as an outlet for relaxation and is connected to their main residence via a slender wooden catwalk.
More images and more about the treehouse after the break.
While the residence looks to be suspended in midair, it is actually perched atop a wall of rocks and then extends off the cliff.
The oak tree carries the weight of the terrace with heavy-duty straps and steel ropes. The treehouse is propped up by two slanting supports on the front and two small stilts near the rock.
In the evening, the lighted room illuminates the tree tops.

IVY House

© Takeshi Yamagishi
Architect: Hiroyuki Miyabe / SPEAC, inc.
Location: Toshima-ku, Tokyo,
Producer: Hiroya Yoshizato (, inc.)
Architect in Charge: Tomoko Kawai (, inc.)
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Takeshi Yamagishi


This was a deserted house that called a haunted house because of the ivy covering the whole. We renovated it as a dwelling and office.
All windows were closed with the ivy and the spaces that partitioned into small pieces were very dark. However, we thought the ivy as the most charming feature and conserve it except for the one in front of the windows.
© Takeshi Yamagishi
axo
After the partitions and ceilings were removed, we reinforced the structure with the diagonal braces and walls. By this process to make the room looked wider, we arranged the member of the structural reinforcement paying attention to the 3 dimensional perspective and sequence and made the structural material of the roof and floors exposed. And all the things excepting for the wooden structure of the roof and columns of the 2nd floor was painted white.
© Takeshi Yamagishi
© Takeshi Yamagishi
The space of the 1st floor is filled with brightness giving a hint of the texture of old structure. At the 2nd floor we find the preserved wooden structure in contrast with whitened things. Now the time that had passed through this house is visualized as a charm. The ivy is growing up today ticking away time.

Artreehoose

© Richard Barnes
Architects: Della Valle Bernheimer
Location: Lake Candlewood, New Fairfield, CT,
Partner in Charge: Andrew Bernheimer
Project Manager: Erik Helgen
Project Team: Jared Della Valle, Brian Butterfield, Adam Ruedig, Suzanne Stefan
Contractor: Hammersmith Inc.
Project Area: 5,400 sq ft
Project Year: 2007-2008
Photographs: Richard Barnes


Wedged into a tight lot along Lake Candlewood in New Fairfield, Connecticut, this new home’s form and structure was derived from observations of trees and an adaptation of local building techniques. The project began with studies of leaf canopies, accumulated ring structures, and the dappled light that filters through groups of trees. Multiple study models in several media (concrete, acrylic, , plaster), investigated how light flows through perforations in these various materials. We used these models to observe, secondarily, how certain materials would be suited to creating a stable, discrete, but minimal structure. During the formative process we were interested in designing a house that seemed in large part to float and protect, much like the tree canopies on the site shelter the ground beneath them.
ground floor plan
second floor plan
The final design, a house of 5,400 square feet, involved an intense collaboration with Guy Nordenson and Associates, Structural Engineers. Together we developed a unique structural system of long-span ¾” x 16” x 27’ plywood joists which work in tandem with a series of Verendiel trusses that rest on solid billets of . The joists, made from scarf-jointed Douglas fir, assembled into 4’ wide panels using stiffening pipes to join and stabilize the plywood before being lifted into place. The slim columns on which the truss structure and this joist system rest support the cantilevered volumes which are clad in red cedar. This cedar is deployed on the exterior in two different techniques: First, it is installed with a vertical board and batten technique to exaggerate the appearance that the house was assembled as a series of stacked pieces, like the rings of a tree. On obverse faces the is installed in a jointless tongue and groove fashion.
© Richard Barnes
Organized around the central double-height volume spanned by the special long-span joists, the ground floor is primarily wrapped in monumental sliding glass panels, opening up the house and connecting the inside, quite literally, to the outside. The mobility of these panels exaggerates the weight of the two cantilevered volumes above.
© Richard Barnes
Upstairs, two cantilevers contain the bedrooms. These spaces jut out over the lake like the prow of a boat and protrude into the surrounding trees themselves. Carefully located skylights illuminate the great room and each of the upstairs spaces, as if light were coming through gaps in tree branches.

Chủ Nhật, 22 tháng 8, 2010

10 Awesome Fairy Tales House Designs

We have many benefits living in big cities, but sometimes we remember the houses discovered in fairy tales, with all those great characters, with amazing landscapes, perfect silence, small rooms and fancy roofs. Where is the childhood? Hopefully, we can find all these buildings in the real life, too. In this post, you’ll find ten awesome house designs!

Fantasy House.


Garden Conservancy Open Gardens. Dream House


587 West King Edward Street, Vancouver. William H. James – 1941


Fairy Tale House


Fairy tale house


The Flintstones’ house?


Wales. Here is Simon Dale’s amazing house.


Carmel. Hansel  – The Doll House


Giethoorn, Netherlands.


A house from Giethoorn, Netherlands. It’s like Venice here!

The Truffle / Ensamble Estudio

© Roland Halbe
Architects: Ensamble Estudio / Antón García-Abril
Location: Costa da Morte,
Collaborator: Ricardo Sanz
Quantity Surveyor: Javier Cuesta
Collaborator Companies: Tongadas & Zuncho Dolorido, SL. / Galicorte / Macías Derribos / Suministros Zurich / Ganadería Paulina
Project Area: 25 sqm
Project Year: 2006-2010
Photographs: Roland Halbe & Ensamble Estudio


The Truffle is a piece of nature built with earth, full of air. A space within a stone that sits on the ground and blends with the territory. It camouflages, by emulating the processes of mineral formation in its structure, and integrates with the natural environment, complying with its laws.
We made a hole in the ground, piling up on its perimeter the topsoil removed, and we obtained a retaining dike without mechanical consistency. Then, we materialized the air building a volume with hay bales and flooded the space between the earth and the built air to solidify it. The poured mass wrapped the air and protected itself with the ground. Time passed and we removed the earth discovering an amorphous mass.
© Ensamble Estudio
© Ensamble Estudio
© Ensamble Estudio
© Ensamble Estudio
© Ensamble Estudio
The earth and the exchanged their properties. The land provided the with its texture and color, its form and its essence, and gave the earth its strength and internal structure. But what we had created was not yet architecture, we had fabricated a stone.
© Ensamble Estudio
© Ensamble Estudio
© Ensamble Estudio
We made a few cuts using quarry machinery to explore its core and discovered its mass inside built with hay, now compressed by the hydrostatic pressure exerted by on the flimsy vegetable structure. To empty the interior, the calf Paulina arrived, and enjoyed the 50m3 of the nicest food, from which she nourished for a year until she left her habitat, already as an adult and weighing 300 kilos. She had eaten the interior volume, and space appeared for the first time, restoring the architectural condition of the truffle after having been a shelter for the animal and the vegetable mass for a long time.
© Ensamble Estudio
© Ensamble Estudio
The architecture surprised us. Its ambiguity between the natural and the built, the complex materiality that the same constructive element, the mass unreinforced , could provide the small architectural space, at different scales. From the amorphous texture of its exterior, to the violent incision of a cut that reveals its architectural vocation, leading to the fluid expression of the interior solidification of . This dense materiality, which gives the vertical walls a rusticated scale, comes from the size of the bales, and contrasts with the continuous liquidity of the ceiling that evokes the sea, petrified in the lintel of the spatial frame that looks sublimely to the Atlantic Ocean, highlighting the horizon as the only tense line within the interior space.
© Ensamble Estudio
© Ensamble Estudio
To provide the space with all the comfort and the living conditions needed in architecture, we took the “Cabanon” of Le Corbusier as motif, recreating its program and dimensions. It is the “Cabanon of Beton” the reference that makes the truffle an enjoyable living space in nature, that has inspired and subdued us. And the lesson we learn is the uncertainty that led us in the desire to build with our own hands, a piece of nature, a contemplative space, a little poem.