crescent house

Galaxy of stars in a Zen garden: The Crescent house by Andrew Burns Architects.

 

The Crescent House occupies a position verging on art. It also act as a mediator suggesting to others, ordinary things that might merit aesthetic consideration. It frames a hedge, transforms sunlight into a galaxy of stars, and calms the tumult of an outside world.

The Crescent House, designed by Australia’s Andrew Burns, is the first project of the Fugitive Structures program. The initiative aims to hold invited competitions for emerging and mid career architects to design a small scale temporary pavilion for SCAF’s Zen garden.

Inspired perhaps, by the annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, the Fugitive Structures programme has the capacity to discover new or unacknowledged talent, rather than just trumpeting architects who have already achieved global fame.

Presented in collaboration with BVN Donovan Hill, the Fugitive Structures concept references London’s Serpentine Gallery’s highly successful Architectural Pavilion series in Kensington Gardens.
Andrew Burns is principal of Andrew Burns Architect, the practice he founded in Sydney in 2008. In 2011 he won the international design competition for Australia House, a gallery and atelier that forms part of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan, selected by a jury chaired by Tadao Ando from a field of 154 entries. Andrew is currently Co-director of the Super Sydney Project and member of the Sydney Architecture Festival Committee.
‘The pavilion has an ambiguous presence, between architecture and art object. Through framing, it transforms an ordinary rose apple hedge into a landscape of beauty. The structure responds to elemental themes: darkness and light, the wonder of the night sky, the arc of the sun and the presence of bushfire on this continent.’ Andrew Burns (2013)

by editorial office Detail Daily on 04.24.13

A-frame extension

Adding 290 square feet to this already small (just 566 square feet) black A-frame in Brecht, Belgium, was all the local building ordinances allowed, but the architects at dmvA found that a single wing extended out to the side gave resident Rini van Beek all the storage and living space that she needs.

Photo credits: Frederik Vercruysse.

The “A” frame house has a long and arguably problematic tradition in timber construction. Whilst it is simple to design and build, the problem is that because the walls slope inwards, the usable area is greatly reduced, making the form fairly inefficient and the space oppressive to inhabit. Extending the house is however easy, as one can simply add another bay extruding the form lengthways.
But dmva did rather better than that when designing this tiny 29 meter square extension.
By extending to the side, the new space created has the inverse feeling of the “A” frame in that the wall of the extension leans outwards. This enables all the floor area to be used, and gives the impression that the new room is actually bigger than it is. The architects have reinforced this illusion by creating a white space with fully glazed side walls that give the feeling of sitting in the forest itself.



Van Beek’s extra space is home to her office. She works on a Tense table by Piergiorgio and Michele Cazzaniga and Flow chairs by Jean Marie Massaud, both for MDF Italia.

In the living area, a Tufty-Time sofa by Patricia Urquiola for B&B Italia, a Soft Grid blanket by Established & Sons, and a wood-burning stove by Stûv keep her comfortable.



The original building’s structural framework is a series of sloping studs; Verschueren left these intact on the side of the house to be enlarged, matching them to new vertical studs in the frame constructed for the extension.

by editorial office Detail Daily on 04.02.13

adobe brick house addition

TP-H Residence – Addition to an Adobe-brick House

The project is the addition of a dining room, reading room and two bedroom suites to an existing 1948 adobe-brick house.

Architects: Jermyn Manthripragada Architecture, Berkeley, USA
Location: Palo Alto, California, USA

Photographs: Lucas Fladzinski

The extension employs the material and formal language developed for a previous addition (the “Box Office”) completed in 2011: spare, platonic boxes of a perceptual mass defined precisely at their junctions to openings with a material thinness. This definition allows the flush glazed surfaces to register, in moments, as contiguous with the outer membrane of the stucco while at other times seem absent.

Diagrams: Jermyn Manthripragada Architecture

Ground floor plan: Jermyn Manthripragada Architecture

The three main volumes orchestrate movement and views through their various internal alignments - a row of door openings, for example, from the master bedroom at the opposite end of the addition, or an oblique framing of the dining space from the reading room. The reading of the solid/void relationship oscillates between additive and subtractive processes - on the one hand understood as a series of connected volumes while on the other seen as an initially pure box from which two L-forms are removed. The result is a rhythmic reciprocity between interior space and garden.

 

 

 

Area: 1,100 sf
Program: dining room, reading room and two bedroom suites
Structural Engineer: Kevin Donahue
General Contractor: Timothy Lemma
Completed: March, 2013

atrium house

 by editorial office Detail Daily on 01.24.13

 

Spanish minimalist Fran Silvestre Architects takes advantage of the strong Spanish sunlight to define bold, sculptural cubic forms and a sloping topography that unexpectedly allows daylight to enter the basement of this striking house.
The plan has an “L” shaped configuration that part encloses a pool on two sides leaving open a view over the Sierra Calderona mountains.
The building is pulled away from the site boundary at its back edge allowing light to penetrate deep in to the basement level and setting-up a linear courtyard that will be shady at certain times of the day. Full height glazing around the pool elevations can be drawn back creating a seamless transition from inside to out.
The architecture is disciplined, controlled, cool yet exciting! But who can manage the Zen like lifestyle the architecture proposes?
This is a house where a used teacup left hanging around for too long threatens to blemish the prospect of a perfect existence.