The year 2022 can already be summarized as one of the most fertile ever in the local design industry, and at the start of the new year, we have chosen to present to you one of the most beautiful projects created during the year: A Jaffa holiday apartment to which you cannot remain indifferent. With wisdom and sensitivity, the interior designer, Keren Niv Toledano, selected items and elements that show enormous respect for the environment and the local culture, with contemporary and modern adaptation. And the result? Precise, exciting and inspiring.
On a small narrow plot (4.9 m wide, 14.7 m deep) in metropolitan Tokyo sits a wooden house. The clients are an up-and-coming manga artist, her partner, and two owls who are the new additions to the family. The manga artist made three requests: First, the house should accommodate the entire process of the artist’s work, from creative concept to completion, meetings, and giving media interviews. Second, the house should be compact and should not open to the outdoors too much. Lastly and most importantly, the house should spark inspiration for creativity. Envisioned as “a building that floats a few centimeters above our daily lives,” the architect strived to ensure that the dwelling is still tied to our tangible daily life but evokes a sense of fictional narrative.
KiKi ARCHi has completed a house in Beijing that blends tradition with modernity. It combines the owner’s classical collection hobby with the design concept that conforms to the contemporary lifestyle. By replanning and adjusting the structure, layout, daylight, and material texture of the house, it demonstrates the ‘sense of ritual’ and ‘inclusiveness’ in life, as well as the balance between space and display design.
A well-established urban residential area in the city of Santo Tirso – The intervention is inevitably a reflex response to this complex and challenging context. Urban plot, confined between neighbors and whose visible confrontations had little or nothing significant from the landscape point of view.
The pre-existence, heavily degraded and with little constructive value, lived in the typical and uninteresting duality between the street and the back courtyard. Moving away from this typology represents an attitude that is both logical and challenging, but above all, necessary and effective.
Nestled near the quiet village of Lung Tin Tsuen, Atrium House reimagines Chinese vernacular architecture to derive a new model for shared living. The area is known for its many historic houses and walled villages dating back to pre-war days. Against this historically-rich setting, the design combines vernacular aesthetic with a contemporary sensibility.
¨El Alambique¨ house, located in the Puembo region at the outskirts of Quito, between the Chiche and Guambí rivers has been located at a sloped site, overlooking a ravine. One of the design challenges was to sort out a home with a 70% first floor architectural program under the sloped topographic conditions, while allowing the internal garden to be mostly flat and fluidly connected to the inner and outdoor activities.
Mallorca is an island full of beautiful natural landscapes together with picturesque stone towns full of history and tradition. We came as unaware visitors, who learned step by step how to enter the mediterranean territory with respect to the vernacular architecture.
Our design reflects it by using traditional techniques and materials as stones from a local quarry. The stone facade, which is based on typical design that can be found all over the island as a fence or retaining walls that are constructed by using a traditional dry technique ‘Pedra en sec’. This local design has been declared as an intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2018.
Group Monument wanted to demonstrate their ‘savoir faire’ on their home base in Ingelmunster.
Their offices are situated behind a “semi-detached mansion in an eclectic regionalist style” built in 1925. Group Monument wanted to restore the grandeur of that house.
The architectural project for this house was born simultaneously from a void and from a dance: the unbuilt space of the patio separates and unites the two volumes that make up the intervention and that seem to want to communicate through a dance.
The house sought to create a relationship of dialogue, not only with the urban front in which it operates, but also with the immediate surroundings. Taking into account that this is an area in a process of constructive and use transformation, the basic premise was to design the building in relation to the pre-existing buildings, but also, and above all, to endow it with characteristics that would allow it to dialogue in the future with new neighboring constructions, something that was confirmed, since new contiguous buildings appeared in the meantime.
The Visores houses are located between two mountain ranges in the Cumbayá valley, they find their place in the world based on their orientation. The perception is complete, when what we see from the windows belongs to the house as well. Hence the importance of projecting it from the point of view of those who are going to visit it.