It is located in the countryside around the city of Elche, in a hot and humid climate and barren landscape. The site consists of an existing home in the center of the field, leaving undefined surroundings: bad quality spaces and no exterior-interior relationship. The first intention will be to limit the exterior spaces through a new built volume generating a triangulation between this, the existing house and the pool. The intention is to separate the lived spaces of intimate spaces in relation to the climate, solar orientation, visual, topography and vegetation. The ingredients introduced into the architectural equation (adding to implementation intentions in place and the response to the program) to IV are: structure, human scale, modulation and the atmosphere. All these ingredients are embodied through two main systems in place: Walls + Vaults and service packs. The ultimate ambition of the work is to be able to master every centimeter of the final result.

La entrada IV House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

This building, in a highly dense district packed with high-rise condominiums and office buildings, is the new home to two women in the editorial business who wish to work and live in this historical environment. They specifically request to include an office, common living space, private room for each, a guest room, and a bathroom. I got an impression that it involves a program that is somewhere between an office, and a residence, or a dormitory. The site is an extremely small rectangle of 8×4 m. To the right, the left, and across the street are large buildings of over 30 m of height standing with no setback making the site much like a small dark valley surrounded by mountainous construction.

La entrada Garden House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The refuge Lieptgas stands where in the past a wooden structure served as a shelter to the farming people. In front of the hut, a small path leads into the forest of Flims, next to it the sculpture of a hollowed dead woodpecker tree. Opposite there is a stable, together they are forming a kind of a gate into the forest. Both buildings – cabin and stable – were abandoned, about to decline. The formerly inhabited part of the ensemble could have been converted and replaced by new construction. The character of the place had to be preserved.

The new hut now stands as petrification of the abandoned structure in exactly the same place. The timber log construction of the old cabin was used as the formwork, the walls were cast massively in insulating concrete. The surface is rough, nature will soon reconquer the artifact.

La entrada Refuge Lieptgas se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

A farm in the sloping Pajottenland landscape becomes a private family home and veterinary practise. A masoned brick shaft that connects the practise, the private home and the garden brings order to a cluster of existing buildings. The shaft was nicknamed ‘the rabbit hole’. It leads to an inside yard, which is also finished in brickwork. From the higher location of the castle of Gaasbeek, the brick roofing of the rabbit hole can easily be spotted. Just like the castle, it has become a visually strong and culturally defining element in the landscape.

Once inside the house, other unexpected surprises await the visitor’s eye. Even the smallest of windows frames the age-old landscape with its seventeenth-century castle. Architecture and surroundings are splendidly interlaced. The effect is so natural that it seems to have been shaped by nature and history alone.

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada House DM se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

At Astley Castle, we started with a ruin. In places it seemed no more than a pile of stones, in others it was a ruin in the grand tradition. After eight centuries of continuous habitation, a fire had burned off its roofs, and three decades of freeze-thaw humbled its walls.

We haven’t restored it, nor left it as a broken, romantic relic. We re-established a kind of wholeness, making it stable, binding it together; but we retained a feeling of incompleteness, leaving it porous, its wounds still open. We pieced in new walls, lintels and roofs to buttress and tie the remnants. The fifteenth and seventeenth century rooms are left as open courts, rooms with ‘a fresco of clouds on their ceiling’. The house, for holiday rental, occupies the medieval core of the castle, with bedrooms below. The first floor hall is both grand and intimate, with its warm stone walls and large windows looking out to over the ancient landscape.

La entrada Astley Castle se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The project deals with the Refurbishment of the West Tower of the Huesca City Hall in order to turn it into City Archives.

Due to its position and volume, the Archives round off the set of buildings that make up the Huesca City Hall which gives the impression of being an unfinished construction, for the east and west walls are party walls and it seems as if in the past, they might have had an adjoining construction:

La entrada Huesca City Hall se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

I have wondered what architecture that demands a superb view should be. By opening only to the side that gives the perfect view it limits the relation to the near surroundings. In what way can the view be enjoyed without being too dominant?

The site is at the end of an old residential area on a hillside of Mt. Rokko. It is a large area but too steep to bring in heavy machines for driving piles. A land of 3.5m by 13.5m was left for manual digging of a foundation after keeping sufficient distance from the old retaining wall and heaped soil. Owing to its location and topography, the resident didn’t have to concern about being watched from outside too much. Thus the ground floor, which was not seen from below, was fully glazed to bring environment and townscape into the interior. It is a semi-public space, functioning as a so called LDK. Living, dining and kitchen, equipped with a toilet for guests, flexible enough to accommodate a variety of activities such as making music with friends, treating guests, and taking care of his bicycle. Space needs to be personalized, namely a bedroom, a bathroom and storage, were arranged on the first floor in the archetypal house lifted up from the ground level. The form helped the house relate to the surrounding old houses with pitched roofs. It kept sufficient volume while the height according to local building codes was met. Considering natural ventilation, openings on the first floor were placed equally.

La entrada House in Rokko se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The last remaining textile factory on Buda Island an area destined to become the cultural heart of the city has been transformed into a number of multifunctional spaces. This large volume, situated in the middle of a city block, has been adapted through two main interventions.

The first hollows out a large void in the centre of the building, bringing daylight deep into the vast floor plan. This pentagonal void houses a public staircase that gives access to a diverse range of spaces on four levels: a laboratory for manufacturing, multifunctional spaces of varying sizes and lighting conditions, music venues, and a roof terrace. The biggest part of the structure is reused. Besides saving resources, the reuse allows for a large cultural building within a limited budget.

La entrada Buda Art Center se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

In the corner premise of just 326㎡ across Kaminari-mon Gate, the building was required to accommodate plural programs such as tourist information center, conference room, multi-purpose hall and an exhibition space.

The center extends Asakusa’s lively neighborhood vertically and piles up roofs that wrap different activities underneath, creating a “new section” which had not existed in conventional layered architecture. Equipments are stored in the diagonally shaped spaces born between the roof and the floor, and by this treatment we could secure large air volume despite its just average height for high-and medium-rise buildings.

La entrada Asakusa Culture and Tourism Center se publicó primero en Global Spaces.