A new pavilion made from board-marked in situ concrete is embedded into the banks of a small manmade lake, with a single window and jetty at the level of the water. It is entered from within the existing main house via a 40m long underground tunnel made whose galvanised steel structure has been left exposed. The interior of the guest suite is lined with reclaimed oak. Careful renovation of the ruins of an eighteenth century farmhouse has provided an additional pavilion dedicated to an artist’s studio. Existing brickwork has been retained and the figure of the original walls has been completed inside and out in polished in situ concrete. A new plate-steel roof overhangs the existing footprint to create covered outside spaces to work. It’s structure is balanced on four large windows which are organised to specific views of the surrounding landscape.
The project was won in an invited competition.

Text provided by the architects.

La entrada Two pavilions se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Located on the heights of Dieppe, the Oscar Niemeyer Sports and Cultural Centre represents the revival of Val Druel district. Named after the master plan’s designer, the project incorporates the natural slope creating a balcony which reveals landscape qualities. Its refined shape accentuates the surroundings, as the pétanque strip terrace and the nearby woods.

The main space offers a seven metres ceiling height and a three-sided view. Inner activities can be seen from the car park and the pedestrian lanes, passers-by can even look through the building. The separation between inside and outside is blurred, the Centre itself provides an alternative walk connecting the lower and higher esplanades. Design sobriety is balanced by attention to detail and quality of materiality.

The project combines raw materials (cast concrete, larch wood, white painted hollow bricks) and produces a kind of preciousness, as witnessed by the oblique line carved in concrete to guide visitors towards the entrance hall, or by circles of light which underline the acroterion at nightfall, reminding curtain folds.

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La entrada Oscar Niemeyer Sports and Cultural Center se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

With the installation of the lift to connect the different levels in two parts of Gironella, the Cal Metre road became a new everyday route for the town’s people and, as such, needed to be developed. The proposal was to restore the avenue as a place to walk and linger, recalling its use as an approach to the late nineteenth-century textile colonies. The project also set out to include the space of this old thoroughfare in the public space of the town as a new place to pause and view the riverside landscape, a potential venue for such varied events as trade fairs, shows and other possible activities associated with the industrial warehouses.

The project enhances the existing trees, mostly plane trees. It comprises a central strip of acid wash concrete and 60% of permeable surfaces right around the perimeter. At the edges, the intervention is softened by a greenway, with joints of 5 and 15 cm, providing transition and protection. Along the avenue, five patterned “carpets” are created, paved with reused cobblestones from the streets in the old town of Gironella, laid with open joints, which form the resting areas, in each case with an existing tree and two concrete benches. The existing fence was removed and replaced by a metal bar railing that allows views of the river.

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La entrada Cal Metre’s path se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Spanning a long and narrow 60-metre plot in West London, 6a architects designed a series of three individual buildings, comprising offices and archive, a top lit studio space, and a kitchen, library and ensemble of ancillary rooms including a yoga studio and sauna to produce a studio complex for photographer Juergen Teller.

Each unit is punctuated by a garden designed by Dan Pearson Studio, which introduce a sequence of external rooms alternating back from the public thoroughfare of the street through to increasingly private interiors. Planted with deciduous trees and climbers growing from broken concrete slabs, the gardens are inspired by those that spring naturally in ruinous or untouched corners of the city, especially those documented in R.S.R. Fitter’s classic book, ‘London’s Natural History’.

Other careful details make sure to ground the project in the architectural vocabulary of its site; the sawn timber shuttering used to texture the concrete façade matches the height of a stock London brick, while the external walls mesh the new building with the residual fragments of existing brick boundaries on either side. A roof terrace frames a typical city view of clay chimney pots and narrow gardens.

La entrada Photography Studio for Juergen Teller se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Creation of a 75m² T4 accommodation, upstairs, accessible from the rear façade. The ground floor is summarily redeveloped to be used as an independent garage.
The living space, with a comfortable volume, opens fully onto a large loggia overlooking the main street of the village, facing south. The loggia, with its adjustable sunshades, provides certain living comfort in summer. Of the three bedrooms, two overlook the quieter rear street.

The composition of the openings upstairs respects the original symmetry of the building, with its arched stone portal, overlooking the main street. The mullions of the loggia are made of raw concrete to blend in best with the existing stone facade.

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

On a former industrial area that was dominated by large factories with shed roofs, a new residential neighborhood is planned / The project acknowledges the history of the location through its architectural formulation which gives the school its specific identity / In the big, three story school building, day care and kindergarten are directly accessible from the outside through individual entrances, while the primary school on the first floor and the middle school on the second floor are each accessed by an individual staircase from the central lobby / On each floor, two large streets act as internal access for the different departments / A sports building with a triple gym and auditorium, built in exposed concrete as a contrast to the metal clad school building, marks the end of the complex towards the railway tracks.

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La entrada School Reitmen se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Andrew Burns Architecture has completed the first stage of a major rural campus in the Greater Blue Mountains National Park. The commission was awarded through an invited competition process, comprising a number of the country’s leading architectural practices.

The project places emphasis on the experience of the student, creating a place that extends and enriches the education of the individual, building their sense of wonder, respect for nature and for one another. The architectural task is to synthesise the poetic qualities of the site with robust, utilitarian building forms to accommodate a pioneering and transformative educational program.

The buildings are arranged around the unifying gesture of the ‘Crescent’, responding to the landform of the escarpment and providing a degree of containment to the south where the escarpment backdrop falls away. The linking gesture of the Crescent provides a practical approach to site servicing, enabling consolidation of services across multiple buildings where appropriate.

La entrada Cranbrook School Wolgan Valley se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

This Community Cultural Center exhibits the archeological and textile wealth of Teotitlán del Valle, a village in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The principal volume, facing the village square, houses the Museum which will host the collections and activities of the present Teotitlán Museum of History. In formal terms, the project is governed by the aesthetics of the immediate context, which determine the height, color, and materials used. The secondary volume contains the Municipal Library and a service zone. The area occupied by both buildings on the site represents just 18% of the whole surface area, leaving a large public space of plaza and gardens. This helps to improve the pedestrian routes passing across the site and connecting with the main square, inserting the new public spaces created by the Cultural Center into the circuit of existing plazas that define the urban structure of the village.

La entrada Teotitlán del Valle Cultural Center se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The brief began with a requirement for a loose fit building able to accommodate apartments and offices/studios across column free floors. Enough time was available to investigate context and a number of possible solutions for a replacement building that would sit within the all but vanished boundaries of an C11th limestone Norman abbey. One able to integrate, extract and perhaps make new a broader and better sense of context than that now dominated by late C20th pastiche.

Originally built by Baron Jordan Briset, the abbey was expanded and remodelled until its C16th dissolution precipitated a gradual erosion through subdivision and conversion into grand houses for the newly protestant barons. Oliver Cromwell replacing them with a new home on the Close before the restoration saw yet further subdivision into smaller rented properties that by the C19th briefly housed Marx and Lenin. Lastly and ignominiously a furniture sales room occupied the then still intact abbey kitchens and dining hall before fire and the 1970’s left only a few stones and the road layout as a memory of the abbey enclave.

La entrada 15 Clerkenwell Close se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The existing apartment and commercial building dating from 1900 was part of a protected building ensemble situated in the city center. The task was to converse in this building. During an extensive analysis of said building’s structure, planners determined that the historical structure was in a poor state.

The committee for urban design and the committee for the preservation of historical buildings in the county agreed that a new building is an appropriate solution.

The design was based on the idea that the new building should continue to be part of the existing ensemble, which was a set of three attached houses. The characteristics of the ensemble are the horizontal arrangement, the sectioning into three parts; base, middle and roof section, and the mural openings in the façade with standing window formats. The typologies were included and interpreted in a contemporary fashion. The structuring of the building happens through outward shifted offsets.

La entrada Bahnhofstrasse Aarau Building Refurbishment se publicó primero en Global Spaces.