Big Box retail is increasingly placed away from New Zealand’s small town centres, taking the life and community vitality of the centre with it. The town of Richmond called big box retail back into the main street, questioning how to maintain streetscape and commercial viability to both large and small tenancies. Big Box can entail up to 100m lengths of uninterrupted walls to the street, a scale and typology seemingly incongruous with a greengrocer or a provincial NZ townscape.
New TimeShare Kindergarten is located in the central area of small Slovenian village settlement Podgorje. The building is an extension of an existing school and hosts four playrooms and a classroom for first graders. The kindergarten’s special feature is its open plan approach with unified play space, which covers as much as 86% of the entire kindergarten and can be closed off if necessary. Children can move inside the kindergarten without restrictions, according to the so-called timeshare principle. Movement is even encouraged by a series of elements like sliding doors between playrooms, accordion doors of the central common room, and the road meandering between playrooms, which visually connects different spaces and invites children to follow it (walk, run, ride their kick scooter or bike). Even special road signs have been designed, encouraging children to mimic movements of a particular animal (butterfly, crab, lizard, etc.), and go either fast (cheetah) or slow (snail).
The project is located near Lake Rapel, on a site of 896.5 sqm. This is characterized by a privileged view of the lake and a strong slope in most of its development. The budget forces to minimize the intervention in the slope, containing the largest amount of program in the minimum of flat space available at the beginning of the site. This, together with the high temperatures presented by Rapel’s microclimate in summer, implies the following problems: high program density, excessive solar radiation and lack of comfortable space for recreation.
To create such an architectural character, which is clear, unique, in harmony to the landscape, preserves and highlights the natural surroundings, and the nature itself.
Integration to the environment
The place of the house in the quarter: the angular, square-shaped land plot which starts the row of villas emphasised with a small-volume turning, it maintains the line of the built-up area.
The project focuses on three main strategies to address the school’s requirements:
1. Maximize space. The space was not properly used since the corridor that connects the main door with the other floors was only used sporadically.
2. Equal size. The two classrooms were very different in form and size due to the plan’s layout. The target was to propose a new configuration that gives equal spaces for both.
3. Sharing activities. The new school’s philosophy has to do with sharing spaces to study and providing diverse number of possibilities to educators to perform new pedagogical practices. The two rooms in the existing condition were duplicating spaces for playing, studying, meeting, sharing, etc.
LAVA has won 2nd prize in an international competition to design a new city in Malaysia.
LAVA’s concept sees the city defined not as one iconic building, nor as a skyline, but as a central public space, a real forest. Chris Bosse, director of LAVA, explains: “Skylines across the world look the same – usually a couple of iconic towers in the centre surrounded by lots of lesser quality buildings, which all resemble each other.” “Here we have designed an inverse city skyline where the icon of the city is a public space, not an object/building. Our central space is a Rainforest Valley and demonstrates the equation: PEOPLE = CITY. From an object to a place.”
The owner of this house is a young pilot and his family for his future home space, the house landed on the site in the new developing town near the Incheon airport.
WE architecture have won a new social housing competition, consisting of 38 apartments, in Saltholmsgade, Aarhus. The proposal has been made in collaboration with the housing organization Ringgaarden and JWH Arkitekter.
The project interprets the traditional historical city houses along Hjortensgade as modern, social and green communities. Communal features are places on the roof-garden from where residents can have an overview of Aarhus.
Team: Marc Jay, Julie Schmidt-Nielsen, Barbara Drud Henningsen, Corrado Galasso, Àngels García, Alex Pavel, Alicja Szczęśniak, Josefine Rita Vain Hansen
DEGW has created a mix of “100% made-in-Italy” interior spaces for Microsoft inside Herzog & de Meuron’s iconic building, all designed in accordance with the firm’s corporate values: openness, visibility, flexibility, energy, dynamism and innovation.
DEGW’s project is part of a process Microsoft Italia has been undertaking for years in the name of a “New World of Work”, an approach to the dynamics of work that involves greater staff flexibility in terms of smart working and the use of functional and technologically innovative spaces to maximise cooperation. Well-being and the reconciling of personal and professional requirements are the linchpin around which time management and this new way of working revolve, making flexibility an important means of hitting targets.
The architectonical concept behind Estado Puro was inspired by Paco Roncero’s approach towards what is supposed to be “typically Spanish”. In his case “cuisine” is based on innovation and experiment while preserving their origins. We proposed to redefine the popular symbolic images of Spain by giving the twist to what’s traditional in order to achieve a chic and sophisticated yet folk ambient. Spanish classical comb “La Peineta” is the chosen to star such an objective.
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