Urban village

One of the greatest challenges in the design and construction of the Municipal Nursery School of Glyfada was to reassert the architect’s role as a key contributor in the creation of a new public building.

Prefabrication System

A second challenge lay in foregrounding the prefabrication system selected for the building’s implementation. The entire structure was transported from the production factory, and the total construction time amounted to six months. The prefabrication system, defined by the competition’s prerequisites, significantly shaped the building’s form, as the basic module had to be transportable by truck.

Design Philosophy

The central idea of the project was for the nursery school to respond to the scale of its users and to reproduce a model of an urban village, while a key compositional element was the archetypal image of a house as perceived by a child. Its repetition defined the new units, such as the classroom, which consists of three modules, and ultimately the entirety of the nursery school complex.

The competition brief required a single-storey structure, a prefabricated system, and a building footprint equal to the total built area. The limited internal communal spaces of the nursery are a direct outcome of these provisions.

Materials & Sustainability

The nursery school was designed so that all classrooms have three free sides, arranged around a central courtyard, while smaller patios create internal vistas from the shared spaces.

An effort was made for simple materials and conventional construction methods to produce a distinctive composition with a low energy footprint. The internal walls were constructed with a thickness of 10 cm in order to maximize interior space, while the external walls and roofs were clad with external insulation – a relatively bold approach, as it had not previously been implemented in Greece. In this way, together with the construction of pergolas from marine plywood and, naturally, the careful placement of openings, the building operates sustainably, creating conditions of comfort for the children’s activities.

Planting will soon become a fundamental component of the composition, as large plane trees will provide shade to the central courtyard and other trees will accentuate the distinct character of each season.

The project received a Distinction at the 2017 Hellenic Institute of Architecture (HIA) Architecture Awards, in the category of Public and Communal Buildings.

The post 4th Municipal Nursery School of Glyfada was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

In 2019 the freelancing sculpture artist Ms. Monika Rienoessl decided to move from the city of Vienna to the country house in which she was raised in the small village of Neuaigen in Lower Austria in order to establish her artist’s studio.

With the money she recently got from having sold her apartment, she approached the Vienna based office of Maximilian Eisenkoeck (MEA) in order to create her dream house. She envisioned constructing a minimalist, white pavilion home where she could live and display her artwork. With the experience gained in industrial construction methods, the architect developed the idea of establishing a basic structure with as few parts as possible and to use the remainder of the budget for renovation purposes of the old existing country house.

The structure of the pavilion consists of 43 tiny columns with a diameter of 60mm fixed on prefabricated concrete foundations supporting a 140mm wooden board as the roof. The interior and exterior space is only divided by an almost invisible layer of extra clear float glass. The setback of the roof provides maximum light throughout the day preventing direct solar radiation. Moreover, it removes the need for additional sunshades or cooling systems.

The old clay brick house on the main street serves as a striking contrast to the light new structure in the back. The existing house was in a very bad state of repair but it was able to be saved and upgraded with some simple but effective improvements such as the reorganization of the floor plan and some additional window openings where they were needed. Now it serves as the artist’s workshop.

The existing concrete exterior spaces were kept wherever possible. These spaces are now being used for the display of the artist´s sculptures.

Maximilian Eisenköck Architecture

The post Atelier for a Sculpture Artist was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.

After the release of a prototype and the exhibition in La Biennale di Venezia, SUMMARY studio unveils their newest project using their prefab and modular building systems.

The requirements for this project were boldly defined from the beginning: the construction should be fast, cost effective and changeable over time, which prompted the studio to use prefabricated elements and to leave parts of the project undefined, assuming the immediacy, flexibility and resources optimization as core themes.

The strategy was clear: a ground floor level for the multi-services program connected with the public space, crowned by the individual habitational units (six cabins with 45m²). Due to the differences between these two programs, an independent access was created for each function, placing them in different levels and taking advantage of the natural ground slope.

The ground floor is shaped by prefabricated slabs and structural panels in the external perimeter. This area was conceived in a very flexible way: it’s possible to add or remove compartments or let the whole floor functioning as a big open space. Thus, the users may adapt the space according to their needs.

The first floor is all composed by Gomos System units. Considering that the maximum building area permitted by law was quite small, the requested empty space was used to separate the housing units. Designed and licensed as a collective housing building, with this feature this project offers the main advantages of single houses: clearly individualized entrances and a complete acoustic separation between the different units.

In the whole building, the structural material – precast concrete – is directly exposed, without any additional finishing, thus reducing the resources, the manpower and the arts involved in the construction process and, consequently, reducing its environmental impact. This approach has a direct effect in the acceleration of the building process: all its components are fully prepared in factory and quickly assembled in situ, performing at once as structure, insulation and cladding elements.

SUMMARY

Fernando Guerra

The post Vale de Cambra was originally published on ek magazine | Architectural Publications | ek magazine – Architectural Publications.