Aspiring architects will be in their element! Explore this illustrated narrative history of buildings for young readers, an amazing construction in itself.
We spend most of our lives in buildings. We make our homes in them. We go to school in them. We work in them. But why and how did people start making buildings? How did they learn to make them stronger, bigger, and more comfortable? Why did they start to decorate them in different ways? From the pyramid erected so that an Egyptian pharaoh would last forever to the dramatic, machine-like Pompidou Center designed by two young architects, Patrick Dillon’s stories of remarkable buildings — and the remarkable people who made them — celebrates the ingenuity of human creation. Stephen Biesty’s extraordinarily detailed illustrations take us inside famous buildings throughout history and demonstrate just how these marvelous structures fit together.
So hey guys, a lot has changed since my last upload! First of all I’d like to thank Ali and the rest of TheDareArts for awarding me 2nd place in the 30k Recr…
McClean Design completed the San Vicente House in California.
Project description
Designed for a family with three small girls this house needed to respond to the busy street it is located on. We came up with a sequence of entry which uses several devices to separate the occupants from the noise beyond. The drive court is screened from the street by high gates and tall landscaped elements. This area connects to an inner courtyard through a curving glass screen designed to allow the light to pass through but shield from the cars and noise. The courtyard contains a waterfall and an infinity edge pool both of which help to instill a feeling of calm as you approach the house. Our hope is by the time you enter into the two story entry hall you have left the rest of the world behind. The L shaped plan of the house maximizes the expansive back yard while further screening potential noise such that the rear yard is extremely quiet and peaceful. The garden also contains a pool and guest house.
The house consists of master plus four bedrooms on the upper level with a family room, art room and gym. The lower level has formal living and dining rooms, family room, media and office plus associated secondary spaces. The house is finished in cool grey and cream limestone with light plaster and paint tones and bronze metal accents.
The client requested a design for their home that would melt into the surrounding paddy landscape and also provide a safe, stable living environment for generations to come. The architect responded with a plan that incorporates multiple courtyards, ensuring the privacy necessary for an open lifestyle, even if homes are built on surrounding lots in the future. If two generations with different schedules eventually share the home, the courtyards will also provide a comfortable degree of distance between the living spaces occupied by various members of the household. Photographer: Kaori Ichikawa
Architects: Studio Aula
Location: Shiojiri, Nagano, Japan
Architect In Charge: Mitsuru Yoshida,Kyoko Hoshina
Year: 2013
Photographs: Ippei Shinzawa
From the architect. Our client is a family with a couple in fifties, their two children and mother. In Cocoon house our mission was making-over in which the premise is narrow at the approach and deep inside. We try to functionally make use of it with its old garden. For instance, on the north side facing to a road we laid storage and space to take in light and winds.
The vertical bar screen in Japanese style blocks others’ eye and a fine devise to hold such functions. Also we put a multipurpose earth floor to make an entrance as well from the north to the south garden. This assures the functional elements such as a corridor and a storage space, also becomes a public space to combine inside with outside and to get visitors. The inside materials of construction are flamed in squares as iconic form, and the layer with the chequer patterns reminding of the thread of cocoon managed to generate the diversity of forms. We have also done the makeover of the garden. The old one was conventionally symbolic with chunks of stone work allegedly representing a ship on the sea. but we redefined it to satisfy the quality of life converting with the steppingstones led from the earth floor. Although industrialized houses are spreading over in the neighbourhood we have aimed integration of the old and the new in Japanese symbolic landscape.
Built in a unifom neighbourhood, this house aims at utilizing a garden with an old pine tree and the stone work and caring for the Japanese way of life and traditional forms; the earth flooor corridor works in some functional ways; the bar screen taking in light and wind under the large roof protects privacy; the bamboo fence encourages simplified maintanance on the owener’s own.
They used to live in an old house in a hamlet with depopulation in the Kiso region. It was a sericultural farm house built with wood, paper, and mortar in the Meiji period (about a hundred years old). Also Kiso is surrounded by conifer forests and clear water in a mountain range which is quite filled with natural beauty in Japan. The client loved the house and the neighbourhood, but an accidental mischief occured and it determined moving to a newly purchaseed secondhand house with a lovely old garden in adjacent suburbia.
After all this house turned out to be poorly earthquake-proof which leads to demolition and rebuilding. Our goal in this project is to capture Japanese style in order to confort the client family.
We managed to make use of much wood for the interior and the beam construction and to care for their remembrance of the old house and the locality. Actually they own a mountain forest in the hamlet and we used the Hinoki (Japanese cypress) timber planted in their son’s birth for a part of constructual materials.
Architects: Manuel Cucurell, Sebastián Virasoro
Location: Roldán, Santa Fe Province, Argentina
Project Team: Guillermina Borgognone, Ciro Rádice, Florencia Rinaldi, Germán Rodriguez.
Construction: Gustavo Farias
Exterior Furniture: Silvestre Borgatello-Estudio Loess
Project Area: 139.0 m2
Project Year: 2013
Photography: Gustavo Frittegotto, Manuel Cucurell
From the architect. This project is located in an area of the emerging farm pampa in a process of transformation, product of the economic growth in Argentina in recent years and the illusion of leaving the chaos of the city.
There, a new urban development seems to replicate a predominant scheme of soil use and productivity: an imperative of rationality of loads and maximum benefits in the yield of the land.
These are developments that have displaced crops leading to neighborhoods without public space. There are no sidewalks with trees and shadows, only internal roads and minimal services. Paradoxically, these areas in the Argentine plains seem to edit a colonization of the pampa. More than a century ago, through the railway stations, the immensity of the plains were inhabited. In these colonies, the new settlers had to face the empty immensity, the fear of darkness, and the distance at night.
This scene is repeated today, but not long from now, these areas will end up consolidated, setting up a new event: the privacy of the inhabitants will be invaded by the inability to build party walls and by the density with which these neighborhoods are designed.
Cisura House
How to conceive a spatial structure that beyond housing the activities required, is able to respond to the contingencies of a scenario and people in transition? A structure that can meet the need for protection and shelter at first, and over time, transmute into privacy.
“In response to these concerns, introspection is the argument that guides and sets the search criteria.” The fissure, both concept and action, is a gesture that gives the project its expressive character, bringing in light and determining different spatialities where inside and outside are expressed as ambiguous and indistinct concepts.
Introspective and anonymous atmospheric experiences are possible by designing small courtyards within the interior spatiality, which opens even the possibility of experiencing showering under a summer rain.
The house is therefore conceived as an open system, an ordered set of elements and associated factors that interact with each other. Each of the parts has a specific function, which integrated and dependent on each other keep the whole operating.
The coherence of the project as unit arises from the symbiosis between the factors of the system, those of the environment in transition, and those of the complex web of emotions that belong to all of human creation.
Anonymous Architects have designed the BIG & small House in Los Angeles, California.
Project description
Starting with a vacant lot that was half of the typical minimum lot size, the objective was to compensate for the relatively small footprint of the house.
To achieve this there are only 2 full height walls inside the house which makes the main interior room nearly as large as the building footprint. This gives the house an open lofted feeling with very high ceilings and abundant natural light.
It is an inversion of expectation, so that the smallest house contains the largest room. What the house lacks in square footage it provides in volume.
The free plan of the vacant lot is preserved since the house touches the ground only at the four small piles, giving full access to use the space between the house and the lot. The footprint of the foundation is in fact less than 20 sq.ft. and the house doesn’t touch the ground at any point.
The plan of the house follows the shape of the site which is an asymmetric parallelogram. This form resulted in unusual geometry inside and outside the dwelling and explains the shape of the house. The elevations of the house are designed to mirror the plan.
n-lab Architects designed this house for a family in Luxembourg.
Description from n-lab Architects:
The clearly defined volumes play with the concepts of heaviness and lightness. A walk around the single-family house reveals firmly anchored volumes and floating bodies creating large overhangs. The four facades were treated with regard to local conditions. The few openings to neighboring buildings are partially covered in wooden slats in order to filter the views from and to the most private areas. The largest opening is on the garden side, where the entire first floor is raised off the ground.
Photographer: Eiji Tomita The site is kasai-city Hyogo. The site is on a busy road. It is difficult place that a building is open toward south. Therefore, I have thought of point as admitting light into the room except south. I have thought that make size of building smaller as much as possible, and I have made the appearance of house a one-story building. I have thought that this house was built big slope roof. This house glazes corner of the ceiling at a slant. I have planned admitting sunlight and outside green into there. Thus, there is open space by that sunlight. This house have been used a tile and a board of Japanese cedar fifty-fifty for the material of one floor. The earth floor is the training room for host avocation, and is disposed kitchen and bath room due to making a functional space. This floor was used a board of Japanese cedar was living room, and I have thought this space makes comfortable space.
