MAY
In the small Spanish town of Cantabria, Fernandez-Abascal y Muruzabal working in collaboration with Ortiz y Barriento, has designed a parish church, that although abstracted to a minimal form, will be immediately understood and recognized as a Catholic place of worship by the parishioners.
The church is richly decorated, but not by applied paints and arts, rather by the materiality of fabric and finishes. Read more
APR
The clue is in the odd sounding name. This project is two houses owned by the same family that have both been renovated and extended using the same architectural language.
The thrust of the design is to increase the site density by creating a house with three levels of accommodation, unusual in Australia as houses tend to be low and sprawling. But it is in the way the designers, Andrew Maynard Architects, have embraced the complexity of the Victorian houses and married this with the new architecture that is perhaps more unusual in Australia where reverence for older buildings is a relatively recent phenomenon than is common in many European cities. Read more
JAN
Look closely, this is an all glass building!
In the home town of Winy Mass, a founder of MVRDV, the market square had suffered WWII damage which had destroyed some of the buildings. The resulting open space was too large and lacked the facilities that helps to keep such town squares activated.
MVRDV were invited to fill-in the gap with a new building, but the local people wanted vernacular architecture, something the practice is not known for doing! Seven proposals later, and a solution was found that borrowed a barn form from local historic farm buildings. The barn-like enclosure was then created with an all glass envelope which was then printed with images of the original town square architecture at 1.6 times real-life scale.
NOV
For the well heeled, these dancing towers creating 96 apartments will provide cause to party for the lucky occupants. Grove at Grand Bay, as the project is officially known, will be built in Coconut Grove overlooking Sailboat Bay in Miami.
What more could a billionair want? Read more
SEP
This is the second post today looking at the radical houses of Makoto Tanijiri of Suppose Design Office. In some ways this house is the opposite of the other. Where the House in Miyoshi appears to be a black box from the exterior with no windows, this house is all window, although they are translucent rather than transparent. Where Miyoshi is heavy Tousuien is light, and so on.
So what would explain so many of the tactical moves in Miyoshi being overturned in Tousuien? The context appears to be the obvious answer, but I made it fairly clear that the response to context in Miyoshi was to turn its back on the site virtually ignoring it.
With the translucent envelope of Tousuien, there is arguably a similar sentiment, but the communication between street and interior is also acute if rather mysterious. There is no direct looking out or looking in, but there must be a sense of performing for an audience if your every bleary shadow can be seen from outside. Again, the house asks something from its occupants for the privilege of living there. Read more
