Cha’er hutong is a quiet spot among the busy Dashilar area, situated one kilometer from the Forbidden City in the city centre of Beijing. The #8 Cha’er Hutong courtyard is a typical “Da-Za-Yuan”—big messy courtyard—once occupied by over a dozen families. Over the past fifty years, each family built a small add-on kitchen in the courtyard. These add-on structures are usually considered as urban scrap and all of them have been wiped out with the renovation practices during the past years.

Different from the conventional redevelopment strategies, by redesigning, renovating and reusing the add-on structures in the hutong courtyards, the project allows Beijing citizens and the government to see new and sustainable possibilities for how to put our messy additions to good use. Maybe they can be recognized as cultural relics and critical layers of recent Beijing’s hutong life rather than things that should be erased entirely.

Text provided by the architects.

La entrada Micro Yuan’er se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The house is built in a transition area between the urban fabric of the town and the valley to the south. The walls and the stone pathways delimiting the plots of land contribute to the strong impact made by the landscape.

The lowest elevation at the base of the elongated triangular plot has the largest available area for construction.

This broader parcel of land enables a classical-type plan to be laid out (an L-shaped layout), siting the house at the low elevation, on a single floor. Its perimeter is outlined so as to provide the interior space with natural light and turn the L-shaped façades of the bedroom and lounge areas to the south respectively.

This siting and topographic relationship frees the land’s upper elevation completely, which extends over the roof onto a continuous garden.

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A “container” that changes as you design and live in it, and design it, on top of the challenge of living in such a house must continue to give you the pleasure of living there. Clothes, kitchen goods and other things related to their hobbies can be freely placed, and their living space can be filled with things that promote enjoyment and happiness in their lives.

During the design stage, a new addition to their family arrived to add to the enjoyment of their home. Without defining or limiting the future possibilities of this family, we designed a house that allows for flexibility within their daily lives, such as hobbies and family. The construction of the building is made by forming 4 boxes, each box divided into 2 layers around a central space which acts as the hub of the home in which the family gathers. The first layer of each box functions as the kitchen, bedroom, plumbing area, and work space.

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

Secondhomese is located near Spitalfields in the East End of the city of London, next to the yet alternative Brick Lane market. It is a concept of shared workspace (co-working space) that hosts some 30 companies that are as alternative as the neighborhood, small scale, and quite related to technology. The possibility of renting the different studios is multiple and very elastic in time, and these vary from a single place in a large common area with room for up to 75 people, through studios for 5, 7, 10 people, up to the largest studio which can accommodate 20 people maximum.

But more importantly in the program are the common spaces that can be used by any member: There are seven meeting rooms, several rest areas where you can read or chat, a spacious cafe-bar, where coffee is free and you can eat at noon for five pounds, and a mixed area of work-events where the large work table rises to the ceiling to leave the clean room for any activity, ranging from yoga and morning pilates to evening concerts, parties, dinners, conferences, film …

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It was with great enthusiasm that we took the opportunity to select a place in vas location for the Studio. A pre-esisting wall and a small elevation shaded by pine trees seduced us.

A regular geometry points the place and defines the studio space. The meeting of two axis defines the center with precision where the structure of the building it is also revaled. The five resulting spaces respond to the needs of the photographer.

The new building is poor in shape and in the matter that build it. It respects the character of the photographer that works in it and get close to the rural way of construction that one can see in the local landscape.

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada Studio for a photographer se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The recovery project of the Paraloup hamlet in Valle Stura, symbol of the Resistance and of the abandoned architectural and landscape heritage, is a tangible image of the relationships between natural and anthropic values; configured in the name of the identity of the place, the sustainability of the intervention, the environmental and social quality, the conservation and enhancement of the architectural and landscape heritage, it is based on the fundamental principles of conservation and restoration: recognisability, reversibility and minimum intervention.

The construction method leaves the ruins as a reading of the original wall fabrics, transforming them into containers for the designed boxes. These, made of chestnut wood, an indigenous material with very low environmental impact, have walls and ceilings made of panels with a double layer of wood and interposed insulating material and sheet metal roofing. The existing walls were consolidated and made independent.

A wooden platform cantilevered towards the plain will host an open-air theatre, a design that continues the design idea of ​​the Borgata, that of preserving the spatial and distributional value of both the huts and the existing paths.

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada Recovery of the Paraloup Hamlet se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Rotunda is an elemental garden, based on an atmospheric and poetic perception of materials, light, plants and the passing of time.

The design was inspired by historical garden pools and water bowls, circular architectures as the Pantheon, land art interventions in forests as well as natural elements like rock pools or plants with leafs that collect water as the Umbilicus Rupestres.

Conceived as a device capturing the beauty of nature, the intention is to transform the surrounding landscape into the garden itself by capturing what is outside its boundaries.

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The painter’s studio has been erected to one side of a house in Bahía Azul. A small space, it appears to be a prolongation of the terrain when seen from the entrance, but from the slope it stands out as a piece embedded in the hillside.

The space, ultimately conceived as the prolongation of its own window frame, mediates between the sea and an interior garden located at the entrance. Reached by a narrow staircase, excavated out of the rock, it leaves the user in complete isolation.

It is a sort of retreat from the surrounding constructions, basically just a wall with indirect sunlight entering from above to paint by.

The rigidity and horizontality of the design reinforce the diagonal lines of the main house.

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada Painting studio se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Antivilla, the refurbished former German Democratic Republic lingerie factory „Ernst Lück“ at the Krampnitzsee, southwest of Berlin, questions the relationship between building regulations and standards, energy efficiency together with the idea re-use and adaptive living. Built between 2010 and 2014 Brandlhuber+ together with Pichler engineers developed a combined living and studio building with a new approach.

Instead of insulating the existing structure and to save costs, the façade was covered with shortcrete. To generate an open space all non-bearing walls were removed and a functional 20 square meter core with the staircase, bathroom, kitchenette, fireplace as well a sauna were installed in the center of both floors. The space can be zoned by simple transparent PVC curtains according to the actual climate needs. In the summer time the curtains are retreated only to a 10 square meter bedroom in the 230 square meter open loft space, while in winter the heated area makes only 60 square meters of the whole floor area which includes moving the bed closer to the open fire.

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When RCR Arquitectes was asked to transform a historical building in Girona, Spain, into a modern house now called Casa Entremuros, their only constraint was to keep the entrance overlooking the street and the perimeter walls. They were then free to let their imagination run wild. And needless to say, they went fairly far.

The conception of the Casa Entremuros is groundbreaking. It relies on a theatrical metaphor. Two corridors on the sides surround an immense central space divided into different levels and heights. This is the stage. It’s facing a huge glass wall, meaning that this main volume is visible from the garden. From the outside, the house looks like an amphitheater with the garden as spectator seating. The little scenes of life that take place within the divided interior spaces seem interconnected, and yet, privacy is still an option thanks to clever organization. Everything has been made so that the various areas cannot directly overlook one another.

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