The post Porcelain Factory Plugin Revival in China was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

The post 60s Style House | Forlì, Italy was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

The post Casa do Sobreiro | Amarante, Portugal was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

The post The D. Daskalopoulos Arts Building was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

Casa hormiga is a single-family house located in in San Fernando, Zona Norte of Buenos Aires, keeping with the scale and feel of the neighborhood.

The renovation preserves the imprint of the existing house and adds a light structure. The brick façade is left uncovered, leaving the original construction visible. On top, the upper floor is dry-laid (balloon frame) with white sheet metal cladding. The street front manifests the juxtaposition of what was and what is: the new structure, in sliding folding sheet metal shutters, gives dynamism to the facade.

Benefitting from the opportunities provided by the old building, the secondary partitions were eliminated in order to dynamize the floor plan, obtain more generous spaces and bring more light into the interior of the house. From this subtraction, a courtyard was generated, provides light and a new landscape. This perforation gives visual permeability through the courtyard-gallery-garden sequence. New elements were only added when necessary, for reasons of comfort and functionality.

The post Casa Hormiga was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

The building is defined from a structural frame that organizes the spaces and the different parts of the program, as well as the facade itself.

The main parts of the house are concentrated on the first floor, leaving the ground floor for access and multipurpose space. On the first floor, the house is organized divided into three strips; the two opaque sides, understood as container walls for use, house the service and private parts, while the central strip is understood as a free space that is projected outwards.
The ground floor contains the main entrance, the access staircase, services and two large porches. The first one is for entrance and parking, and the second one, understood as another space in the house, another multipurpose living-dining room in relation to the garden and the pool.
The materiality of the building is reduced to the use of concrete as an expressive element of the construction system. Exposed concrete in structure and concrete bricks in facades, which also enter the interior.

Nordest Arquitectura

FilippoPoli

The post House in Vilablareix was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

The site is located 5km east of Beijing’s CBD, in the middle of an isolated diamond-shaped land parcel, intersected by serval railroads and divided into fragments. While the rest of the city undergoes rapid development, this urban enclave, hidden between defunct industrial building,s has remained undeveloped in the past 3 decades.
The client’s long-term goal is to regenerate these spaces by attracting cultural and creative industries, connecting the surrounding neighborhoods currently separated by the railroads, and gradually building a mixed-use community of 140,000m².
The architectural design revitalizes this urban enclave by weaving together retail, recreational, F&B, and creative spaces. The Art Center was proposed in the core of the creative industry zone.

The approach confronts the question of “How to transform an industrial space for productivity, to an art space targeting public engagement”, with a rational design strategy involving a “spatial prototype shift”: This is an appropriation of the prototype of the saw-tooth shaped plant buildings, adapted to the multiple program of the art center, and then translated into a new composite spatial prototype designed to maximize the creative vitality of the urban block.

The façade features a perforated-folded metal cladding with a saw-toothed volume, growing out of the shape of the plant building, and gradually extending forward, twisting at the end as it almost touches the elevated railway, forming a sense of ephemeral levitation. It also enriches the surrounding neighborhood’s dull skyline, not only with its decisive shape but also with its ever-changing light effects.The industrial past is re-conceptualized in a contemporary context, translated into 3 threads of materiality: the metal cladding that shifts between reflectivity and translucency, interpreting the contemporary cultural sensibility; the shadowing surface of red brick wall responding the historic character of the site; the large transparent glass openings and oversize pivot doors revealing the inside of the vessel to the public.

HeyTown Art Center features an aluminum façade wrapping around the entire suspended saw-tooth volume. Instead of perusing a smooth and sleek image of a definite “newness” that the usage of metal usually bring to such a context, it was taken as an experiment on potential “natures” of aluminum: minimum angle of folding, jumping rhythm of corrugations, different ratio of perforation, extreme strength of the metal for vertical span, enhanced reflectivity. This is meant to achieve a tangible and frictional experience of the architecture that is in constant dialogue with its surroundings, and to create a tension from the site’s past towards its future.
In the daytime, the folded cladding brilliantly captures the changing light conditions with its varying angles, like a series of prismatic mirrors echoing the sky. At the evening begins, the semi-reflective volume starts to illuminate itself and the cold reflection gradually turning into warm translucency from the top to the bottom. The constant overlapping of such ambiguous light experience throughout the day, adds an elusive narrative to the spatial context. 

meta-project

The post Heytown Art Center was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

The house is located in a street where terraced houses have the same frontage, as well as the same layout. A narrow and dark entrance led the residents to the stairwell, to which the living areas were linked. The kitchen and technical room were in a dilapidated extension. Despite the south-facing garden, little light was one of the drawbacks of the house; moreover, because of the many lowered ceilings, the rooms felt confining and a lot of space was used up for circulation, and the stairwell.

During the renovation, a lot of attention was paid to preserving the existing structures. The characteristic existing woodwork above the suspended ceilings has been left visible, and the structural brick walls add more texture to the house. The existing layout was virtually preserved, but by changing the circulation newly functional spaces can be used for living and / or storage. All attention was focused on making unusable spaces usable and livable again.

The new extension has a sloping volume that follows the line of the plot and functions as an urban interweaving between adjacent properties. The sitting area and dining area were housed in the lowest level so that the residents are immersed in the atmosphere of the garden. The transparent extension, consisting of 2 levels with large windows, was provided with a loft, allowing abundant sunlight and open the views of the garden. While the loft opens the house upwards, it also offers a beautiful view for the various rooms.

Inside, existing wooden beams and the existing brick walls provide a nice contrast between the light wooden construction of the extension. A tiled floor provides an additional contrast between old and new. Throughout the house, sturdy materials are combined with soft, light ones: For example, the kitchen is clad in green, moisture resistant MDF, in combination with a stainless-steel worktop. The slats add texture and play with light.

On the way to the first floor, there is an office that overlooks the loft and the garden; the master bedroom enjoys the same advantages. The bathroom / dressing was linked to the master bedroom, which includes bathroom cabinet, in order to minimize unusable corners and circulation.

The second floor, the attic, has been completely opened up and divided with a glass partition that is equipped with 3 sliding doors. The doors give out to an extra bathroom and a multipurpose room that is designed to be divided into 2 children’s bedrooms.

The atmosphere and design of the garden is inspired by a journey of the residents to “Termas Geometricas” in Chile, where peace and nature prevail.

mcdm atelier

The post Rearranging Circulation was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

Located in London’s Fitzrovia – where Riding House Street opens to Wells Street – sits The Interlock, a new five-storey mixed-use building designed by Bureau de Change architects for developer HGG London, a company established to commission design-driven innovative architecture.

Riding House Street hosts an extraordinary breadth of architectural styles. From John Nash’s All Souls church at its most easterly point, the street skips haphazardly from 19th Century terraces to post war commercial buildings; concrete slab structures and 20th Century apartment blocks. The street’s piecemeal aesthetic is unified by the use of brickwork which serves as the façade material of choice, at times so abundant that it forms the road surface.

The Interlock absorbs this history and responds by taking the proportions of the neighbouring 19th Century terrace and recasting its brick façade to create a building of uncertain heritage – one that is simultaneously historic and contemporary, familiar yet foreign.

Abandoning the traditional dimensions of London brick, a collection of 44 misshapen and seemingly un-stackable clay blocks were developed.

Co-founder and Director of Bureau de Change Katerina Dionysopoulou said: “We were interested in taking these very traditional proportions and in some way subverting it – like a puzzle box that seems familiar and reveals a hidden complexity that increases the more you interact with it.”

The patterns visible across the surface are informed, in part, by the interactions between materials and structure. The bricks appear to lap up against glazing, swell and bow between floors and are inset frame-like to denote the building’s perimeter. For passers-by, the bricks appear to morph and twist like cogs. By modelling the facade in 3D, each facet could be individually adjusted to meet structural and fabrication requirements without diluting the integrity of the surface form.

Staffordshire Blue Clay was selected as a contrast to the areas existing brickwork. The marl clay was set into 14 hand-crafted steel molds and fired in oxidation to create the matt blue finish. After firing, these 14 ‘parent’ bricks were divided to form the 30 ‘offspring’. Construction of the 5,000-block landscape took place over three months. The fabrication team used 1:1 printed templates that set out the number, typology and location of each brick. When collated on site, these 188 templates appeared like a construction manuscript, with each brick a different note to lay.

Co-founder and Director of Bureau de Change Billy Mavropoulos explained: “We worked iteratively with the team at Forterra – adapting and reviewing the bricks in 3D. We were walking the line of what would be technically possible, but through this process, found a point that was both buildable and produced the richness and movement we were trying to achieve.”

Behind the façade, sit three new residential units and a café at street level with gallery beneath. The regularity of the façade’s proportion and fenestration belies the complexity of the building’s volume and massing.

At the rear, the building is set out as a series of stacked boxes of varying form and size. Each floor is shallower than the last with the deepest floorplan at the bottom and the smallest at the top. Within this stepped form sits a series of deep light wells and skylights that track daylight in to the centre and edges of the building, creating internal patios on the lowest floors and light wells on others. Facing the street, the rooms overlook the busy street and on higher floors, the rooftops and domes of nearby buildings. At the rear the light is more diffused creating calm in the private spaces.

Inside, the units are finished in a simple elemental palette – terrazzo bathrooms, natural stone worktops, sprayed-timber kitchens and oak floors.

The light-filled café at the base of the building offers a counterpoint to the weight and inkiness of the façade. With every surface washed in white, the heavy-set mullions are halved and extruded from their frames to form ribbons that curve and fold over the ceiling in a style reminiscent of ornamental plasterwork. The monochromatic palette is broken only by cuts of oak that line the floor and counter tops. The floor below the café is a purpose-built gallery space hosting exhibitions, workshops and talks.

The project represents a shared vision between developer and architect to taking London’s architecture and re-approaching it in a way that brings something new to the streetscape.

Bureau de Change

Gilbert McCarragher

The post The Interlock was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.