Logical reaction to the surroundings, to the economic context (crisis) and social context (peripheral neighborhood in a ravine); to the climate (over-exposed latitude to UV rays); to the requirements of the developer: construction completion from August to December, in-fill of an urban block in a plot of 43,20×13 meters, physical connection to levels of the existing building to the north.
This Child Day Care Center will house 68 children in the center of Brussels. There is limited space available in this building block that also hosts 3 schools, a music academy, after-school care & many more organizations to guide children from the day they enter into Day Care till the day leave school at the age of 18. This project is situated on the first floor of an existing building block. In order to get on this floor there is a concrete path to guide children and parents to the entrance. The same vocabulary of concrete curves is repeated in the terrace on the second floor that serves as external playground for the 68 children of the Day Care Center. In order to limit the weight of the concrete construction a system of modulation of supporting beams of the concrete terrace was designed. This project has been awarded the price of sustainable exemplary building project of the city of Brussels – year 2013 because it is designed to be a very low energy consuming renovation/extension of an existing building.
Article source: gmp Architekten von Gerkan, Marg und Partner
“What is Vietnamese building culture?” This question is asked in a country the architecture of which was for many years defined by the former colonial powers, France and Japan, and by the separation of the country into North and South Vietnam with the two capitals, Hanoi and Saigon.
Designed by Dutch practice Mecanoo, together with US based firm Sasaki Associates, the Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building in Boston houses the Boston Public Schools (BPS) department and plays a central role in the reactivation of Roxbury’s Dudley square.
The Beach house design addressed two major issues of local architecture. The first issue was one of providing a building that corresponds to the privacy of the family. The second was to intervene with the native architecture and extend it to fulfill today’s modern demands.
The house is on a small and irregular lot overlooking the bay of Lima. The limited space -105 m2- poses a vertical development program which is distributed in four levels: 1st service, 2nd social area, 3rd master bedroom, 4th bedroom sons and roof.
A two-family house is a building with a wall that divides it into two halves. The dividing wall is the only wall in the entire house. It cannot be crossed anywhere. It has to fulfill functions conventionally assigned to several architectural elements. It is the load bearing structure and the installation core, its folds define all of the rooms and it determines how the view from the entirely glazed building is divided between the two living units. The simplicity of the concept, the reduction of the architecture to a single element, creates substantial dependence and, in turn, makes the building very complex. It is only through that dependence that the wall acquires a compelling and cogent character although, in itself, it can follow any chosen course.
The office, perhaps more than any other single building type of the present day, carries the true notions of the ideologies it is born in.
The R4 building addresses the question how scale and location inform an inner-city office type, and how exactly this contextual necessity might in fact perfectly reflect an environment of unforced, informal, perhaps even natural work efficiency.
As part of the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the International Prize of Catalonia, the pavilion was conceived as a visual catalog of the various stakeholders involved in its long history. The original request, due to reasons of schedule and budget, was to design an exhibition at one of the smaller rooms of the Palau Robert; the will of the exhibition is to give visibility and recognition to the award. The project comes from the conviction that the small budget allocated can actually build a large and notorious space in a central location of the Palau . The challenge is to consolidate and qualify an illuminated and waterproof space, with the minimum possible installation.
We performed the interior design for the Tokyo office of AKQA, a global ideas and innovation company. Since their office is located on the first basement floor, we strived to create an appealing environment where the agency could pursue its developmental and creative activities by using the site’s open spaces, six-meter ceilings and natural lighting.
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