Vitra-Haus: Herzog & De Meuron

Build me a house! When someone asks you this question, probably the first thing that comes to your mind, is the typical house you used to draw when you were a kid. The rectangular volume with the triangle on top of it. We scrabbled this form so many times on sketch papers and showed it to our parents proudly. Herzog & de Meuron were asked by Vitra to build a space that would house their furniture designs.  The Architects started with the Pitched House contour, they extruded & came out with the space. So simple yet so captivating. The space was left hollow from the inside, the only thing kept was this contour. The design of the volume challenges our way of perceiving the typical pitched roof houses. The design is stripped from its functional purpose and the form was used as it is. The same shape is stacked on top of each other to create the Vitra house, the volume interlinks with each other and create a chaotic relation between each other. The volumes are unifies by both their shape and their color, however together they meet randomly and open up to different areas of the vitra campus. The interior of the volumes offer a continuous flow of vision; the walls are white to make the displayed items stand out.

Looking at the Vitra house at night is intriguing. The only thing you see is the typical archetype house form lit, for a second it looks like a 2D yellow plane. It stands out in front of the dark outer walls finish. This relation is also obvious during daytime, where the white inner walls contrast with the dark outer ones.

Build me a house! Stack the houses on top! I do not care about the inner walls. To me they do not exist. The relation is now with the inner space and the outer skin, how does the two dialogue with each other? I think Herzog & de Meuron created the perfection relation. Although the skin contrasts with the inner space, yet the two seem to complement one another. At the first glance the project might seem a bit bulky, but then one can notice that the vision is continuous throughout the inner spaces, nothing cuts your sight, a delicacy the architects succeeded in achieving.

The Open Box House by A-cero

Description from A-cero:

A-cero presents Open box house, a new project in the outskirts of Madrid. It is a 750m2 house designed according to the A-cero sculptural philosophy. This is inspired in the “Oteiza” work, a very important Spanish sculptor. With a powerful look, Open box is notable for its façade in concrete granulated in some face and brandering in other faces. The house´s plot has is 2.600 m2. It has three storeys. The basement takes the garage and facilities and the ground floor has the living room, kitchen and servant’s quarter. In the first floor are the private rooms (4 bedrooms) and a library. The interior design includes furniture designed by A-cero and the Italian company Fendi. The landscaping has been designed by A-cero too. It is a Japanese garden As a conclusion, an A-cero work in which you can see its looking for the quality, comfort and design excellence.

Oteiza work

A look back: Villa Savoye 1929

‘The approach is by car and as one passes under the building (a demonstration of urban doctrine), and follows the curve of industrial glazing (of which the geometry was determined by the car’s turning circle), it becomes clear that one is to be drawn into a machine-age ritual. The plan of the building is square (one of the ‘ideal’ forms from Vers une architecture), curves, ramp and grid of structure providing the basic counterpoint to the perimeter. The section illustrates the basic divisions of a service and circulation zone below, a piano nobile above, and the celestial zone of the solarium on top: it’s the section-type of Le Corbusier’s ideal city but restated in microcosm. If the Villa Savoye had been a mere demonstration of formal virtuosity it would not have touched expressive depths. The tension of the building relies on the urgent expression of a utopian dream. Icons of the new age such as the ship and the concrete frame blend into forms born of Purist painting. The rituals of upper middle-class existence are translated into an allegory on the ideal modern life which even touches upon the Corbusian typologies for the city: separate levels for people and cars, terraces open to the sky, a ramp celebrating movement. The fantasy is translated into conventions that avoid arbitrariness and that reveal Le Corbusier’s ambition to make an equivalent to the logic, order an sense of truth he had intuited in the great styles of the past. Rationalism was a point of departure, but not the aim. He wished to re-inject the ideal content that relativism and materialism had destroyed.’                                                             William Curtis, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, 1986

        designed by Swiss architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret

The villa is considered  as a representitive of the bases of modern architecture. It is also a demonstration of Le Corbusiers “Five Points” of a new architecture

1. Support of ground-level pilotis, elevating the building from the earth and allowed an extended continuity of the garden beneath.
2. Functional roof, serving as a garden and terrace, reclaiming for nature the land occupied by the building.
3. Free floor plan, relieved of load bearing walls, allowing walls to be placed freely and only where aesthetically needed.
4. Long horizontal windows, providing illumination and ventilation.
5. Freely-designed facades, serving as only as a skin of the wall and windows and unconstrained by load-bearing considerations.

Architecture in Words

Scotland-based artist Chris Labrooy experiments with his typography, using 3D modeling, to create fonts resembling iconic architectural projects. From Tadao Ando to Frank Gehry, he translates their architectural into their names. Each typography has a style that looks like the architecture of the person who built it. interesting, check his website for more interesting typographies and designs.

The Wyckoff Exchange

project: The Wyckoff Exchange

Architect:  Andre Kikoski Architect

Andre Kikoski Architect’s design approach in the this project, as in all of its work, is aimed at creating a dynamic, fluid piece of architecture. As an expression of AKA’s trademark resourcefulness and lyricism, and as an innovative approach to recycling buildings and creating a destination environment with an extreme economy of means, Wyckoff Exchange is truly a welcome development in this quickly evolving neighborhood.

“We wanted to create an iconic building to speak to Bushwick’s up-and-coming status as a center of art and creative energy,” says Kikoski, “so we devised a unique aesthetic that’s dramatic, inventive, and inspired by the neighborhood’s industrial past. With state-of-the-art technologies and construction techniques, we were able to realize this 100-foot-long, eighteen-foot-tall façade in only two inches of depth.”  [Dezeen]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photographs are by ESTO/Francis Dzikowski.