This project was a full renovation of a vintage apartment measuring approximately 65 square meters in Sakyō-ku, Kyoto.
The clients were a couple who are both active as artists. Because they asked to install the wife’s work room adjoining the living-dining-kitchen area but in a way enabled her to shut herself off from the outside world while she was creating, we planned a large glass partition so that both rooms would retain their individuality while being loosely connected.
Located at Mariner’s Mile in Newport Beach, 3101 West Coast Highway is a renovation and adaptive reuse of a 4-story Cape Cod-style building from the 1980s into a modern articulation of the marine coastal aesthetic.
Situated on a concrete podium 6’ above West Coast Highway, this project creates a modern aesthetic by removing existing embellishments to enhance the clean and timeless geometry of the gabled roofs, all while staying within compliance with the Coastal Commission’s strict reframing constraints. The existing dormers were demolished to create inset terraces providing tenants with fresh air, natural light, and unobstructed bayside views. Removing floor slabs enable double-height spaces while opening-up bayside gable walls with floor-to-ceiling curtain walls create transparency from the street to the bayside. Tenant spaces were also demised in a north/south direction to provide all tenants with bayside views throughout the building.
The project consists in converting an industrial warehouse into a space with two main uses: 1) temporary accommodation specifically conceived for groups of people 2) organisation and promotion of events (cultural, social, marketing, etc.).
The initial strategy was to try to combine these two realities by creating a set of common areas for the living space with strong character and materiality in order to serve both situations.
There is a custom in many villages of building a house thinking of the future of the family, as a “perfectible” construction, in which parents or grandparents leave a structural skeleton, an enclosure, hoping that their children or grandchildren will inhabit it in the future according to their needs. This is how we found this house on the second floor of a building in “Plaça Major” (main square) of Betxí, that had never been inhabited before.
When entering for the first time, we were surprised by its proportions, since it was very long, 25 m, with respect to the width, just 7 m. The fact of being a diaphanous and naked space at that moment made that feeling increase.
The water and the light are two archaic and fluid elements, used to reinvent a dark and severe villa on the Geneva lake, turning it into a house with a contemporary appeal. Long corridors, dark doors and window, fake terracotta floors; in the basement, a pool tiled with an obsolete pale blue mosaic, an old sauna, all surrounded by rustic plastered walls: this was the state of the villa before the intervention. To regain an harmonious dialogue with the “genius loci” of the lake, the beginning was the pool: turn it into a kind of added “living room”, as if it was a normal room, like any other but flooded by the water of the lake.
Foster + Partners has been appointed by SHVO, the luxury real estate development and investment firm, to revitalise the iconic TransamericaPyramidCenter in San Francisco. The biggest renovation in the building’s 50-year history, this redevelopment seeks to give a new lease of life to one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks and the second tallest building in the city. The project will also expand and upgrade the adjacent Three Transamerica (545 Sansome) to a contemporary high-design office building.
Foster + Partners was selected for its prolific expertise in melding historic architecture with contemporary design, following an invited competition including several other celebrated international architectural firms.
The house of Enrichetta, Marc and Eva; a renovation project of a flat in the Poblesec district in Barcelona.
A penthouse with a magnificent panoramic view of the whole city.
The first sources of inspiration for the conversion of this flat were the Poblesec neighbourhood with its mixture of cultures, colours and styles and the great personality of its new inhabitants: a young couple and their daughter, born right in the middle of the renovation work.
Located in the heart of the Cergy prefecture park, the restructuring of the university refectory imparts a new radiance to this central facility of the campus’ student and tertiary life. Erected in 1993, the building has the privilege of being set in the François Mitterrand Park thanks to its topographical location and its openness to this large landscaped public space. The facility is thus ideally integrated into the pedestrian network, at the crossroads of the two main routes that connect the Paris-Seine University sector and the Val d’Oise prefecture.
The prerequisite for any design is the question of pleasure. The pleasure of reinventing and reinvesting a building with atypical dimensions and of giving it a new history. This totem building makes us pass from the safeguard of a collective memory of an industrial past to another form of memory, now digital.
I wanted a building that is educational in the sense that it offers itself to be read and to experience the space in all its dimensions, length, width, height, and thus reveal the architectural and patrimonial singularities. I tried to avoid a reflexive approach that would like a large central atrium lined with offices, but rather to invest the void as an experience of space and to reconnect with the industrial history of this building built in 1847.
Lower Tullochgrue is the refurbishment and extension of a traditional house in the heart of the Cairngorms National Park. A dilapidated steading has been replaced by a contemporary extension, with a timber and glass upper volume above a stone plinth, with the existing topography of the site maintained at all times.
The brief was for the creation of a home which could be used by numerous members of a large family, both collectively and in smaller family groups. This drove the creation of large social spaces, separate guest accommodation in the form of a small separate block, and refurbishment of the original house to provide bedrooms for different members of the family across a large age range, with varying levels of mobility.
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