Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre / Niall McLaughlin Architects. Tanpo Solar School / Csoma's Room Foundation | ArchDaily. Studio KO's Yves Saint Laurent Museum Opens in Marrakech | ArchDaily. Riverside house by Sandy Rendel features weathering steel. This riverside house in southeast England was designed by Sandy Rendel Architects with an upper storey clad entirely in weathering steel mesh, and a base of exposed concrete and glass (+ slideshow). The five-bedroom property is situated next to the River Ouse in the South Downs National Park, and is the first building seen by visitors entering the town of Lewes on the main road in from the south.
"The local planning authority aspired for a landmark building to mark the entrance to the town and stipulated a bold design," said Sandy Rendel Architects. Located on a narrow strip of land that was previously the site of a derelict workshop, the building is highly visible from the road and stands out against a chalk cliff when viewed from across the river.
It sits on top of a cast-concrete wall that was once part of a wharf, and faces out across the water. The house is separated into two distinct parts. Mesh fencing and the brick walls enclose an entrance courtyard facing the street. The Couch / MVRDV. Architects Location Area 322.0 sqm Project Year 2015 Photographs Design Team Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, Nathalie de Vries, Renske van der Stoep, Pepijn Bakker, Arjen Ketting, Sanne van der Burgh, Cristina Gonzalo, Rosa Rogina. Co-architect Studio Bouwhaven. Structural Engineer Contractor Romijn Bouw Illustrations More SpecsLess Specs From the architect. IJburg is a new district to the east of Amsterdam. On its six artificial islands, 18,000 homes will be eventually be built for 45,000 residents. The tennis club, currently with 1100 members, has 10 clay courts and a tennis school. MVRDV’s design will now fill this gap with an iconically functional building which provides both a viewing platform and a club overlooking the water.
MVRDV’s challenge was to create a building that works as a central gathering for the area. The club house is a long open volume with services on either side such as dressing rooms, a kitchen, storage and toilets. Separate roofs break down the scale of Von M's Kindergarten. German studio Von M has completed a slatted timber building with a fragmented roofline to house a kindergarten in the German city of Ludwigsburg (+ slideshow).
The Stuttgart firm converted and extended an existing residential building in the Poppenweiler district of the city to create the Kinder und Familien Zentrum. They affixed a new 1,425-square-metre kindergarten to one side of an existing block that now houses a family centre. To reflect the scale of adjacent farmhouses, the new block is split into five segments, each with its own roof that is pitched in an alternate direction to the one before. The existing structure was stripped down into a "concise" form by removing the building's bay windows and overhanging roof, and new openings were established in line with those in the additional building. The materiality of the timber slatted building contrasts the existing building, but its form and consistent window dimensions help to visually tie the two together.
Pezo von Ellrichshausen designs a building made up of 100 circles. Chilean architects Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen are presenting a concept for a megastructure built from 100 overlapping circular enclosures, as part of an exhibition in the Czech Republic (+ slideshow). Pezo von Ellrichshausen worked with architecture students from the Technical University of Liberec on the project Infinite Motive, which imagines a sprawling architectural structure made from circles in a wide variety of sizes. It is one of two works on show at the Gallery of Contemporary Art/House of Art in České Budějovice as part of the exhibition Finite Format. According to the architects, the aim of the project was to investigate the capacity for architectural experimentation when constrained to a single repeating element – in this case, the circle. The duo have produced a series of drawings exploring this, both in configurations of 10 and 100 circles. They have also built a large scale model out of cardboard, which forms a centrepiece for the exhibition.
50 Shades of Wood is a timber dentist surgery in Bruges. Declerck-Daels Architecten used different varieties of timber and "frivolous" colours for this surgery in Bruges, in an attempt to make going to the dentist more bearable (+ slideshow). The Belgian studio named the project 50 Shades of Wood after the variety of tones found in the building's silvery timber cladding, as well as its brightly coloured wooden interiors. The surgery sits in front of a red brick house on a residential street in Bruges and its silhouette is a mirror image of its neighbour. The pitched-roof volume that forms the upper portion of the building continues the line of the terrace, while a lower rectilinear volume acts as a plinth.
Its height is designed so as not to block views from the windows of the residence behind. Glazed sections of the facade are decorated with vibrant orange graphics of dandelions. The large windows provide glimpses of the dentist's painted wooden interior from the street. "It is gracious, warm and welcoming. Photography is by Thomas Debruyne. Museum in Kassel dedicated to fairytales of Brothers Grimm. This limestone-faced museum in the German city of Kassel by Kada Wittfeld Architektur houses the archives of famous literary duo the Brothers Grimm (+ slideshow). Grimmwelt Kassel (The Brothers Grimm Museum) is built on a sloping plot in Weinberg, a former vineyard near Kassel's centre. The elevated site is strewn with fragments of stone retaining walls, steps, pergolas and is supported by planted terraces. The German studio, which also designed a weathering steel museum that cantilevers over a Celtic burial ground, gave the Grimmwelt Kassel a step-shaped roof that doubles as a view point over the city.
The city was once the home to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – the Brothers Grimm – and the museum is designed to present their literary works. The brothers are best known for their anthology, the Grimms' Fairy Tales. The book of folklore stories includes Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Photography is by Jan Bitter, unless otherwise stated. Project credits: Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects — The Granary. © Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects . Published on March 19, 2015. The refurbished Granary, with its bronze-clad extension, is the headquarter offices for developer/contractor Rooff.
Located in the Roding Valley/Abbey Road Riverside Conservation Area by the River Roding in Barking, the locally listed Granary building had been derelict and unoccupied for some considerable time and was in urgent need of comprehensive restoration to bring it back into use. The Granary has been sensitively restored, with all new interventions respecting the original fabric of the building. All lean-to later extensions, internal partitions and non-original secondary structures have been removed and blocked-up windows opened again. The new extension takes its cue from the strong gabled form of the original building.
The new complex also forms the setting for a new public square as part of the regeneration of the area as a new quarter for the creative industries. Szczecin Philharmonic Hall photographed by Hufton + Crow. These new shots by Hufton + Crow provide an in-depth look at the pointy profile and expansive interiors of the Polish concert hall that was recently shortlisted for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2015 and this year's Designs of the Year (+ slideshow). The Szczecin Philharmonic Hall by Spanish studio Barozzi Veiga was one of 40 projects named on the shortlist for the most prestigious accolade in European architecture, and one of three buildings recognised in Poland, alongside Lahdelma & Mahlamäki's Museum of the History of Polish Jews. It was also among the 76-strong list of nominees for the Designs of the Year awards 2015, which features 15 architecture projects.
A series of adjoining gables give the building its zigzagging roof profile, designed to create the appearance of a row of smaller structures. It also features a translucent ribbed-glass facade that glows after dark. Szczecin Philharmonic Hall was completed in 2014 – read more about it in our earlier story. Copper panels clad the facade of Poland's Museum of Fire. Each facet that makes up the facade of this community building in Poland by OVO Grabczewscy Architekci is covered in a sheet of shiny ridged copper to create the impression of flames (+ slideshow). Katowice-based studio OVO Grabczewscy Architekci designed the Museum of Fire after being asked to create a cultural pavilion for the city of Żory in southern Poland, near both the Czech and Slovakian borders.
It serves as a tourist information and community centre, but also hosts local history exhibitions. When the medieval city was founded in the 12th century, a forest was razed to produce the open space. The name of the city is derived from the process used to create this earlier Slavic settlement called Zar – meaning fire, burnt or flames – which provided the basis for the design. "It became obvious to us, that the building should look like a fire," said OVO Grabczewscy Architekci co-founders, Barbara and Oskar Grabczewski. Photography is by Tomasz Zakrzewski / archifolio. Project credits: Curving walls create arched avenue in wedding planning venue.
Curving walls rise from opposing directions to form an aisle through the centre of this wedding planner's office in Japan by Ryo Matsui Architects (+ slideshow). Tokyo office Ryo Matsui Architects designed the Bridal Salon to provide a wedding consultation area for Hotel Nikko Kumamoto, a wedding venue in Kumamoto Prefecture, a region on Japan's south-west coast. The ivory-coloured walls lend a church-like appearance to the space, which has a reception desk at one end and a series of consultation booths to either side of the aisle.
From one end of the space, the series of partial archways visually align to form an aisle. The tips of each curving wall taper off to rejoin the ceiling towards either side of the room. "Because it is not a huge space, it was expected to become a space with monotonous depth," said the studio, who hoped the arcing walls would imply this sense of greater depth. The floors are covered in silvery carpet that matches the upholstery of the furniture. Project credits: Archea Associati creates grape-inspired buildings for expo. Round pavilions dotted across the landscaped grounds of this expo centre for a grapevine breeding convention in China were designed to resemble giant grapes, with relief patterns in their concrete facades (+ slideshow). Italian studio Archea Associati won an international competition to develop the facility for the 11th International Conference on Grapevine Breeding and Genetics, an event focused on issues relating to wine culture including agriculture and grapevine cultivation.
The approximately 200-hectare site in Yanqing County, north of Beijing, includes greenhouses, museums, a visitor centre, landscape towers and bridges spread out across an exhibition garden. The park is intended to provide a leisure facility for visitors from the city and also an educational experience for people wanting to learn about grape cultivation and wine tourism.
"Landscape pavilions have been designed as circles as a metaphor for grape bunches spread over the landscape," the architects explained. Connecting Site... ELEMENTAL - Alejandro Aravena — Innovation Center UC – Anacleto Angelini. © Nina Vidic - ELEMENTAL. Published on December 02, 2014. In 2011, Angelini Group decided to donate the necessary funds to create a center where companies, businesses and more in general, demand, could converge with researchers and state of the art university knowledge creation. The aim was to contribute to the process of transferring know-how, identifying business opportunities, adding value to existing resources or registering patents in order to improve the country’s competitiveness and consequently its development. The Universidad Católica de Chile would host such a center and allocated a site in its San Joaquin Campus. Our proposal to accommodate such goals was to design a building in which at least 4 forms of work could be verified: a matrix of formal and informal work crossed by individual and collective ways of encountering people.
On the other hand, we thought that the biggest threat to an innovation center is obsolescence; functional and stylistic obsolescence. . © Nico Saieh. Aires Mateus Associados — House for Elderly People. © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG . Published on December 17, 2012. The project is based on a attentive reading of the life of a very specific kind of community, a sort of a micro-society with its own rules. It is a program, somewhere in between a hotel and a hospital, that seeks to comprehend and reinterpret the combination social/private, answering to the needs of a social life, and at the same time of solitude. Independents unities aggregate into a unique body, whose design is expressive and clear. The reduct mobility of those who will live in the building suggests that any displacement should be an emotive and variable experience. The distance between the independent units is measured and drawn to turn the idea of path into life, and its time into form.
The building, designed path, is a wall that naturally rises from the topography: it limits and defines the open space, organizing the entire plot. Elemental builds "monolithic" concrete innovation centre in Chile. This concrete innovation centre at a Chilean university by Santiago studio Elemental has deep recessed windows designed to cool its network of communal interior spaces (+ slideshow). Elemental designed the 8,176-square-metre Innovation Center UC – Anacleto Angelini on the campus of the Universidad Católica de Chile, in Santiago. The 14-storey building, which includes three floors underground, was created as a space where companies and businesses could converge with researchers. The client requested a building with a "contemporary look" but the studio felt a "professional responsibility" to avoid the environmental and design pitfalls of the glass-fronted buildings typically associated with innovation in the Chilean capital.
A reinforced concrete construction was selected for the building, which has a facade made up of volumes of stacked concrete block-work and deep three-storey-high windows. "We thought that face-to-face contact is unbeatable when one wants to create knowledge," he said. Kings College Library by Mitchell Taylor Workshop. Mottled red brickwork was used to build the gabled walls of this English school library by Mitchell Taylor Workshop, who more recently completed a humanities building for a historic school elsewhere in the country (+ slideshow). Completed in 2011, the library building was designed by Bath-based Mitchell Taylor Workshop for Kings College in the town of Taunton, Somerset, as an extension to a mid-19th-century building.
The existing building faces a landscaped courtyard and contains the college headmaster's office. Part of the new addition was built on top of the single-storey office and cantilevers above it to shade south-facing windows that look out onto the courtyard. To complement the sandstone walls of the historic building, the extension's entire exterior is clad with a mixture of four types of brick, bonded with lime mortar to produce a surface of similar tonality and texture.
Photography is by Peter Cook. Austin-Smith:Lord's Carmelite Monastery has brick walls inside and out. Markthal Rotterdam / MVRDV. Proposed hostel by Atelier 8000 looks like it dropped out of the sky. School gymnasium by URA nestles into the landscape at a Belgian school. COBE's Copenhagen kindergarten designed as a "village for children" Helsinki University Main Library / Anttinen Oiva Architects. ORTUS, Home of Maudsley Learning / Duggan Morris Architects. Brighton College by Allies and Morrison. Cafeteria at the University Aalen / MGF Architekten. Sports & Convention Center at Jacobs University, Bremen / Germany by MAX Dudler & DIETRICH Architects. School building by Mitchell Taylor Workshop contrasts stone with brick. Archium gives stone walls to a radio broadcasting station in Nepal. Office renovation with wooden and polycarbonate partitions by Daipu Architects. Stonehenge Visitor Centre by Denton Corker Marshall opens tomorrow. Villa at Sengokubara by Shigeru Ban.
Livsrum Cancer Counselling Centre by EFFEKT. City Hall of Plomodiern / Studio 02. Paul Chevallier School by Tectoniques. Beyond the Screen apartment block with brickwork screen by OBBA. Youth Centre by Cornelius + Vöge. FINE Design Group Office by Boora Architects. North London Hospice by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. Glass Farm by MVRDV night shots. Sportcentrum Nieuw Zuilen by Koppert + Koenis Architects.