Our clients wanted to build their dream house; a house that would be their definitive family home. It had to have an urban presence, while having an open yet secure exterior space with sufficient privacy from the street. With a no expense to be spared mandate, the architect was given a large wish-list that included a 6-car garage and a 25m long pool.
Celebrating a Client’s passion for collecting modern and video art yet supporting her needs for a functional studio and guest house, the Amoroso Studio is a truly inspired multi-functional space: part art backdrop, part guest loft, part utilitarian workroom.
A replacement for a termite-ridden garage behind a Craftsman home in Venice Beach, CA, the design of the 1,060 square foot studio was driven by the Client’s commitment to collecting video and film based works by emerging artists who delve into gender, identity and socio-political issues. As an executive in the entertainment industry, her support of young and evolving talent began, in part, from her time living in London near the Serpentine Gallery. When Modal Design was brought on board the Client specifically cited the Gallery and its temporary pavilions as moments of personal delight and intrigue.
The Charlotte and Donald Test Pavilion is a 3,700 square foot multi-function space located at “A Tasteful Place” in the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society. The facility overlooks a 3.5 acre garden filled with fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers. A demonstration kitchen in the pavilion serves as a site for cooking classes, demonstrations, educational programs and special events for adults and children.
The Proscenium is a small dessert restaurant located in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City. The project is the renovation of the ground floor of a former residential building that was built as part of a large block redevelopment completed in the 1990’s. Dozens of row houses forming the block were build with similar decorative elements such as Greekish columns and moldings, reflecting the developer’s intention for instant architectural potency. This kind of ephemeral dream is regarded as chimerical or is simply neglected nowadays, and indeed most of those original decorative elements have vanished through the recent years of overdevelopment in the central commercial district, during which time the next trend has already been discovered. This illustrates how an architectural style is written and rewritten during the frantic economic growth that major Vietnamese cities are currently undergoing. Our project began with a reflection on this rapid trend cycle and ended by reclaiming the abandoned design with a new design element slid into the building.
A project that started with uncertainties instead of the usual requirements for permanent living spaces, demanded we shifted the way we approached architecture.
The project as it is now, is a house; it became a house in the process, with its actual configuration decided during construction, its final purpose and use still undecided, its duration as a house uncertain.
ASA Lanna Center is located on a highway in Chiang Mai, Northern province of Thailand. As a branch office of Association of Siamese Architects (ASA), the design aims to find the balance between keeping the local culture identity while accommodating requirements of today.
The woodland classroom building is located in a forest on the south side of the Museum’s campus. The building is a flexible space for science learning that blends indoor space with the surrounding natural environment. The stand-alone restroom building is located on the north side of the Museum’s campus, within a new outdoor exhibition area called Hideaway Woods, just up the trail from a Patrick Dougherty sculpture. We worked with the Museum of Life and Science to master plan these portions of their expanding campus and locate these small structures to minimize disturbance to the surrounding environs and, in the case of the woodland classroom, maximize connections with the natural environment.
We approached the design for this building from a position that questions the solutions currently being produced in Quito in response to the necessity of densifying the city with mid rise construction.
Can we as architects provide economically attractive solutions for the real state market while meeting the new standards set by the City Government for responsible and efficient construction? But most importantly how do we reconcile market interest that focus on the individual, hermetic apartment isolated as much as possible from the discomforts and complications of public urban living, with the urgent necessity for architecture to be the tool for place making in a disjointed, hard-edged city?
The building is located to the North-East of Moscow city centre on a street whose heritage dates back to the 17th century. Originally called Pokrovskaya street, which referred to the liberation of Moscow by the Poles, it became Bakuninskaya in 1918 in honour of MA Bakunin (1814-1876). Many historical houses have survived to this day, including the 200-year-old house at number 7- 15. In 1886, architect IG Kondratenko built the first factory building on the street, on the plots of houses No. 74 – 76. In 1885 the architect P. P. Shcheglov built a house (No. 54), distinguished by an unusually ornate facade: the pediment was decorated with the head of a lion. In 1891, the architect I. S. Kuznetsov built a house at number 78 for the manufacturer Denisov and in 1904, completed No. 94 for the clergy of the churches of the Moscow Pokrovskaya Community of Sisters of Mercy.
Lead London Team: Dominykas Daunys, Kam Dhiman, Carlos Hurtado de Mendoza, George Nishnianidze, Nikoloz Japaridze, Theo Kirn, Anton Khmelnitskiy, Vano Ksnelashvili, Jose Lozano, Albert Serrano, Davit Tsanava, Fabio Zampeze
Moscow Executive Team: Ivan Babich, Irina Bratashova, Julia Mogilevtseva, Nikita Tsymbal
Article source: Jan Couwenberg Architecture Research, Environment, Design
On the countryside of the small village of Biezenmortel, on the edge of a national natural reserve, lies an old farm. Trough several generations the farm has slowly been transforming to a biological farm, giving place for rare cows, donkeys and shelter for the herd of sheep from the adjacent natural reserve. Beside this, the farm is host for dement elderly, who come as day guests and experiencing the wellbeing at the farm. The new building is a transition between the existing farm house, the farming and the elderly care.
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