The oasis-like Verdant Sanctuary with its California xeriscape landscape that provides a buffer zone between the building and the street offers a pastoral and poetic break in an existing row of workaday buildings. Located in Palo Alto’s Stanford Research Park, Verdant Sanctuary neighbors a 1953 building designed by German architect Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) the original research-and-development facility that started Silicon Valley. Designed by Form4 Architecture, Verdant Sanctuary expresses its embrace of nature through each design element. It will be made almost entirely of mass timber and glass, and its dramatic roof design echoes the shape of a bird’s wings. Form4’s design plays off of the vernacular tradition of California Modernism, revisiting forms by inverting gable roofs and opening up the building enclosure to nature.
Wesleyan House Methodist Church embraces a challenging site in Wan Chai, Hong Kong. The building both provides a serene sanctuary space for worshippers in this bustling location and enriches the surrounding urban fabric. The project stands on a teardrop-shaped site at the corner of Queen’s Road East – a major four-lane road, and Kennedy Road. The site itself is tight: as 11,000m² of program needs to fit on an 800m² plot, the building inevitably needs to go up.
As such, the design creates a vertical church, integrating the sanctuary, chapels, activity halls, social service floors, and pastoral offices into a tower. Wesleyan House building defines its skyline by slanting gently and subtly from the base to the top to project its image as a religious institution.
The resulting skyscraper church offers unique opportunities to create signature spaces for worship. The sky chapel on the top floor of the tower boasts sweeping views of the harbor to the north and the hills to the south, creating a unique space that takes advantage of the beauty of the surroundings.
In a collaboration with Cát Tiên National Park, Free the Bears and Building Trust international, COLE have completed the design of a series of buildings serving to house bears rescued from the illegal wildlife trade and bear bile industry. The result is a modular, light filled, gabion structure aiming to fuse nature and functionality.
Building for bears in the jungle
COLE have delivered a number of innovative and diverse projects for Wildlife organisations worldwide. Therefore are no strangers to delivering work in complex and hard to access areas. The Vietnam Bear Sanctuary project however presented two major challenges. Firstly, the site was on the other side of the Đong Nai river which meant supplies had to be ferried across. A further challenge was the site being on the side of a heavily forested jungle hill, sitting in one of Vietnam’s largest national parks.
The new pavilions at East Point Park Bird Sanctuary use architecture as a means of framing one of Toronto’s most beautiful parks, while enhancing the pleasures of birding for visitors of all ages and levels of experience. Folded into angular shapes evocative of flight, sheets of laser-cut weathering steel form the pavilions for this wooded park on the Scarborough Bluffs, high above Lake Ontario. The materials palette, which also includes precast and cast-in-place concrete and galvanized grating, was chosen for durability and minimal environmental impact. The completed Phase One encompasses the Viewing Pavilion, a Bird Blind, and entry signage.
Article source: Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura
The old chapel of the Virgin of Meritxell, patron saint of the Principality of Andorra, was gutted by fire during celebrations in 1972. The Taller de Arquitectura was commissioned to rebuild the sanctuary, but steered away from the kind of archaeological approach that would have been limited to replacing the fallen stones in their original positions.
Image Courtesy Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura
The sanctuary of ‘Madonna della Rosa’ (Our Lady of the Rose), which dominates a hilltop in Monticelli Brusati, northern Italy, is the most representative building of this typical Lombardian village in Franciacorta. Around the main body of the church, built in the 14th century, the apse, a side chapel and the entrance portico have been added in the following centuries. Contiguous to the church there is the sacristan’s home, a private house on two floors, built in the 18th century.
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
