Kjellgren Kaminsky’s renovation and interior design of its own premises on Viktor Rydbergsgatan 14 in Gothenburg combines caution with bold approach. The office is housed in a 1917 listed shipowner’s villa, so all solutions are reversible and in harmony with the beautiful original decor. We have chosen a warm color scheme with soft and genuine materials that match the original wooden walls. From the main entrance you enter the office’s meeting room, a stepped seating area combined with the library. A large open space has been divided into smaller spaces using newly built meeting rooms and shelf walls. The office has been furnished with a large proportion of used and self-manufactured furniture. The work on BREEAM certification of the office is underway, which affects both the interior and the daily work.
A deliberate balance between modernity and tradition creates this unique and textured retreat in the suburbs of Kyoto.
Osaka based design studio, atelier Luke, collaborated closely with craftspeople in Kyoto, Osaka and Nagano to apply traditional finishes and techniques to the design and renovation of this postwar terraced house. The client, a Danish-Australian furniture maker, wished to modernise the home without abandoning the character that makes traditional Japanese houses unique. From this position of respect, a design approach was adopted whereby modern attitudes to living would be balanced and contrasted with tradition.
The base for the design was the desire to create a free unrestricted access to knowledge and information, as well as a collaborative and cooperative management and decision making process with emphasis on the right to see the operations and activities of government at work. This supports government accountability and helps protect other necessary rights. The new City Hall of Sandnes would celebrate the concept of openness and transparency. Designed as a welcoming house which is as accessible as possible to it’s citizens and a building that lives up to the highest requirements for a modern, efficient and flexible office space. The volume required by the program would be adapted to the local urban conditions and modified to create connections with the surrounding area and bring the inhabitants closer to the city officials and their decision making process in the spirit of true participation. With all the office spaces continuously facing the streets a courtyard is created which would be the central area of the whole Havneparken masterplan. Walking and biking, crisscrossing from the streets, would be encouraged to reach the water promenade, creating a vibrant district for pedestrians and cyclists. The importance of the building in the area would be emphasized by it’s architectural exterior design where past tradition would be commemorated with a modern dynamic and universal outlook.
I keep on design activities in Hokkaido, so most of my projects ran there. By designing in a remarkably cold, I continued thinking on response to completely different contexts from other areas. They are mainly “cold” and “snow”. Of course there are other various things to deal with, but these contexts have the great impact. In this state, I felt the possibility of “a windbreak room” and thought about the expansion and diversity.
The primary goal of the vibeeng School is to integrate sustainability and learning in a low energy school (equivalent to LEED gold). The building is characterized by its red exterior and the abrupt foldings of the roof which create “house” like images in the facade and spatial variation in the interior. At the same time the varying shapes of the roof provide optimum angles for south facing solar panels and north facing windows. Both active measures that help create a low energy school. The school itself is designed from the inside out with an overriding concept that activates the whole plot and the landscape elements that surround the school.
TRLZAK studio was asked by ekies All senses resort to give a deeper meaning to the hotel’s identity. Inspired by Chalkidiki’s special ecosystem, where rounded stone volumes and pine trees are in direct contact with the sea, CTRLZAK studio developed creative solutions that underline nature’s presence and invite visitors to reflect on their relationship with it. The typical Mediterranean Pine tree (Pinus Pinea), which is found in the region, was the archetype of the project. Starting from the lower parts of the Pine tree, the roots are translated into various paths leading visitors gradually towards the sea shore and eventually branching inside the sea itself. Going higher up the tree-trunk, one finds the tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius), an umbrella-shaped fungal species, that inspired us for the new shade coverings of the lounge area. The pine needles themselves become protagonists of the resort functioning as dividers and coverings taking the shape of articulate patterns that evolve in the restaurants, bar and in particular the Treehouse itself. Inside the tree’s branches though, there are also parasitic organisms such as the Pine Processionary (Thaumetopoea pityocampa) whose larvae form silk-like nests and constitute the inspiration for the ‘cocoon’ that wraps around the gourmet restaurant of the Treehouse. A seemingly negative connotation that creates yet a scenic setting hopefully making people reflect on their role within such a context while providing a unique gourmet experience, admiring the sea from within the tree’s embrace. The studio’s intention with the above metaphor and other related elements within the project is to underline, in a symbolic way, the transition of the visitor’s role from parasitic to symbiotic creating a harmonic relationship between humans and nature.
Naito Shinjuku was established in 1699 as a stage stop along a major thoroughfare heading out of Edo (old name of Tokyo). Dropping the “Naito,” the district started to be called Shinjuku in 1920, the same year that saw the Musashino-kan Shinjuku emerge on Shinjuku-dori Avenue, which was also home to the Shinjuku Mitsukoshi store. Local merchants opened a 600-seat movie theater in the three-story wooden structure with tiled façades. In 1928, Musashino-kan Shinjuku relocated to its current site, a new cinema with 1,115 seats housed in a three-story concrete building. During the silent movie era, Musei Tokugawa was active as a narrator here. Later, an air raid over Tokyo caused a fire to burn the entire interior of the theater, but the building survived and became a symbol of post-war recovery. Cinema offered entertainment to the populace, and Musashino-kan entered the golden age in an alliance of more than 20 theaters. But the movie-going population peaked in 1958 at 1.1 billion tickets, and rapidly dropped to 1/3 of that patronage by 1965. Amidst a declining industry, the decrepit Musashino-kan was demolished in 1966 and rebuilt. Still standing today, the building initially consisted of a retail and dining complex seven floors aboveground and three floors underground. The first movie theater in this new building had 500 seats on the seventh floor. In 1994, the Cinema Qualite mini-theater opened. The seventh floor was closed in 2002, and the third-floor theater operations changed banners from Cinema Qualite to Musashino-kan Shinjuku. For the improvements made most recently, however, aseismic reinforcement work on the entire building prompted the Musashino-kan Shinjuku on the third floor to undergo a complete renovation.
Fabryka Kavy (Coffee Factory in Ukrainian) is the first café with its own coffee roasting in town. It is situated in a building of the post-soviet period not far from the town lake and park. The café owners got premises with high ceilings and large windows which let in lots of light from the setting sun.
The client brief for this small summer house located in Halkidiki, Greece called for a low-maintenance weekend home located on a pristine olive grove hill overlooking the sea, and beyond towards the famous monasteries of Mount Athos.
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
