31 de enero de 2010.
© Ken'ichi Suzuki
Architects: Mount Fuji Architects Studio
Location: Shizuoka, Japan
Site area: 988.58 sqm
Building area: 232.77 sqm
Total floor area: 380.44 sqm
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Ken’ichi Suzuki
The site locates on mountainside of Izu-san, where Pacific Ocean can be looked down on the south. The untouched wilderness, covered with deciduous broad-leaved trees such as cherry trees and Japanese oaks, gives little level ground. But we saw faint glimmer of architectural possibility along the ridge. The architecture would be used as villa for weekends.
I didn’t want to just form the undulating landscape dotted with great trees as normal, nor design an elaborate architecture bowing down to the complex topography. What sprang to my mind is a blueprint for an architecture which is perfectly autonomous itself, at the same time seems to emerge as an underlying shape that the natural environment has been hiding. It’s abstraction of nature, to say.
The architecture was realized by crossing two rectangular parallelepipeds at very right angles. The lower one contains private rooms and bathroom, and sticks half of the body out to existing narrow level ground. The upper one incorporates salon and kitchen, and lies astride the lower one and the mountain ridge. It almost seems like an off-centered cross pinned carefully on natural terrain.
One axis of the cross stretches toward the Pacific Ocean on south, and the other, the forest of Japanese oak and some white birch on west. The rooms in the lower structure and terrace on it enjoy broad vista of the sea and blue sky. And gentle shade of natural forest embraces the space in the upper one. Water-polished white marble (cami #120) was chosen as interior finishing material. It glows softly like Greece sculptures to blend blue light from the south and green light from the west gradationally, thus creates delicate continuous landscape of light which suggests the character and usage of the space. Exterior is also finished with white marble. The surface get smoother as it approaches to the southern/western end till it takes mirror gloss (cami #1000) at the ends. The southern end of white cross melts into the blue of sky and sea, and the eastern end to the green of forest.
Abstraction is nothing to conflict with nature here.
Carved out of nature, it never stops being a part of nature itself, however highly abstracted. Never relativizes the nature with its foreignness, nor generate contradiction to settle for being “artificial nature” by giving up being abstract and mimicking the nature.
The abstraction inspired by Mother Nature defines the nature itself, and still, stays natural.
That’s what I wanted from this abstraction and architecture.
http://www.archdaily.com/48096/plus-mount-fuji-architects-studio/
29 de enero de 2010.
Architects: Lucio Morini
Location: Ciudad de Córdoba, Argentina
Project Team: Lucio Morini + GGMPU Arquitectos – Gramática/Morini/Pisani/Urtubey
Project Manager: Arq. Iciar Lecuona
Client: IECSA S.A. – Electroingeniería S.A.-U.T.E.
Contractor: IECSA S.A. – Electroingeniería S.A.-U.T.E.
Project Area: 950 sqm
Project Year: 2006-2007
Photographs: Lucio Morini, Sosa Pinilla
These studios belong to the Córdoba Province City of the Arts, a campus housing painting, sculpture, photography, and music schools.
They are to be lent to invited artists for short periods of time, so that they can live and work in them and develop their work within a private realm, while sharing their life and work experience with the students.
floor plans
A continuous strip defining the edge of an interior plaza, it holds 10 studios -8 for painters and 2 for sculptors- with a nearly identical design.
Each studio is a 2 story unit with a double height, glass-enclosed space facing either south (painters´ units) or north (sculptors´ units).
A large lifting glass door allows the interior of the studio to merge with the plaza.
The building is shaped by a sequence of parallel planes, a U-glass plane towards the south, and a transparent glass façade facing north. The latter is covered by a system of folding, perforated-metal shutters which vary in transparency depending on the light conditions and position; producing variations in the façade pattern.
The bedroom and toilet are located on the first floor, and the living, dining and cooking space on the second, which allows their expansion towards an open terrace.
http://www.archdaily.com/47927/city-of-arts-ateliers-lucio-morini/#more-47927
22 de enero de 2010.
© Nelson Kon
Isay Weinfeld Arquitecto designed the Sumaré house, in São Paulo, for a graphic designer who desired a “spacious house, where she could work, exercise, entertain friends and, of course, live in.”
Due to height restriction laws, the building could not exceed 2 floors, thus an underground floor was needed for the caretaker’s quarters and the atelier. Both spaces open to a lawn so the feeling of being underground is forgotten. On the middle floor, a few steps above street level, a sitting and dinning room open to a larger lawn.
In the living room, a long étagère displays the owner’s collection, ranging from works of art to design and vintage objects. The home also includes a swimming pool and a dance floor for the designer to practice ballet routines, in addition to entertaining areas, two bedrooms and all other rooms suitable to a residence.
For her private bedroom, the space is enclosed only by a screen of pre-cast concrete blocks, allowing the designer to see the city skyline in the distance. On the top level, a spacious wooden deck provides ample room for an outdoor entertaining area.
Author: Isay Weinfeld
Collabotator: Domingos Pascali
Project Manager: Monica Cappa Santoni
Team: Juliana Scalizi, Elisa Canjani, Ilza fujimura, Marina cappochi, Juliana Garcia, Leandro Garcia, Gustavo Benthien, Priscila Araújo, Fábio Rudnik
Beginning of project: April 2003
Opening: May 2007
Construction area: 598,39 m²
Plot area: 700 m²
Photos: Nelson Kon
http://www.archdaily.com/44117/sumare-house-isay-weinfeld/#more-44117
