Aujourd´hui Valéry

quarta-feira, 4 de janeiro de 2012

terça-feira, 3 de janeiro de 2012

House on the slope of a Castle_by Silvestre Navarro Arquitectos

"HER"

The building is situated in a landscape of singular beauty, fruit of a growth of evident nature. The mountain, crowned by the castle, is covered by a mantle of houses that, by means of a system of aggregation by juxtaposition of simple pieces generates a fragmented white tissue that adapts to the topography. The project proposes to be integrated in the surrounding, being respectful with the strategies of adaptation to the environment and also with its materials, showing the constructive moment that responds to the new inhabitants requirements. This way the house is conceived like a piece deposited on the land, that adapts to the drop. A piece constructed in the same white lime, with the same predominance of walls and gaps, that uses the lands edge to place the gaps and integrating itself to the fragmentation of the surroundings.

The empty double space articulates the interior space of the house in which we find the nucleus of communications disposed parallel to the cut of the mountain without touching it. On the ground floor you can find the garage and the wine cellar. Over this floor there are two additional floors with four rooms. Two of them, the bedrooms, are in the intermediate level which opens to the lateral street; the other two are in the superior level, which look over the roofs of the houses in front, having an excellent panoramic view of the Ayora Valley. One of them, the study, also opens to the double central height; incorporating it to its proper space. On the other side of the empty space, over the mountain, there are the day areas that look over the garden illuminated by the southern light reflected on the oxidized slope of the castle.Photos and words: Courtesy of Jorge from Silvestre Navarro Arquitectos

Nagasaki Hotel Resort_by Kengo Kuma Architects

"Garden Terrace"_Design Concept

One of the biggest tasks for this project was to integrate three entirely different volumes in the program— big box, small box and something linear— into common identities. One of the identities is the box, which is also a roof, and the other is an architecture ‘made’ of, but not ‘covered with’ natural material, which in this case is wood.

In the main hall which has the biggest volume, the wall on both sides is inflected at the top to be transformed to the roof. Under the roof is solved as the void of thin pillars and small boxes of glass, rather than as a solid, so that its ‘roof-ness’ is emphasized, to function dual roles.

As for the ‘made of wood’ aspect, it does not necessarily mean using lots of wood for the exterior and interior of the large building. Trees are naturally much smaller than buildings, so there is a huge gap of scale between trees and the volume of this architecture, making it difficult to achieve the idea of ‘made of wood’. We therefore created wooden panels in the size that comes in the midway between a tree and the volume of the building. This worked well to make the architecture be felt ‘made of’ wood. The size and the positioning of the windows are at random to link the composition of the wood panels and the windows. Thus it is possible to feel that the whole architecture is virtually made of all these elements – openings, panels and other units, particles.