Interior Design Sense

Architects: Nevzat Sayin
Location: Istanbul, Turkey
Project Team: Ebru Tabak, Onur Eroguz, Bahar Unlu, Ibrahim Eyup
Structural Engineer: Gokhan Dedeoglu (Concrete) / Hudaı Kaya (Steel) / Alper Ilkı (Academic Advısor) / Nahıt Kumbasar (Academic Advısor)
Electrical Engineer: Cedetas / İpekler Elektrik
Mechanical Engineer: Serper Gıray / Kipas
Client: Umur Inc.
Project Area: 43,000 sqm
Project Year: 2003-2008
Photographs: Courtesy of Nevzat Sayin

original building

Transforming a steel production building, this already was started to construct, to a printing building, by almost doubling the usage area.
The project can be defined as reinforcement of the existing building and enlargement with annexes for needed capacity. This work is a good example for dealing with the complex program of a press industry in an already existing construction mend for another function. The new underground parking on the southside, the steel-glass prism addition on the main building, the supporting buildings on the west and the east side and the added steel office levels on top are together 30,000 sqm. Every added unit is designed for his special utilization.

floor plans

Here the most important question is the possibility to transform this big, bad building into a good one. Living in a country that thousands of bad buildings being erected every day, such real or adapted problem rises. There are lot of critical points such as; feasibility, financial issues, usage and finally the doubt for the finished work that it would be worthy of all efforts?

We made minimum intervention to the existing building. Instead of interventions compelling big scale construction, we have rather preferred to be added on the top and sidelong of the main building after the mandatory reinforcement. We have placed loaded functions such as stairs, elevators and entrance hall to the annex. We have succeeded to obtain a big whole of a 4 pieced building by binding them with proper interfaces.

Taking the interfaces as the main components for this building, we may attribute a priority to the façade of the entrance hall. Having taken over the construction rights for this half-completed structure, four meters outside the front wall we built a light and airy ten-meter high façade of aluminum-frame sheet glass and steel, forming a corridor 40 m long through which all visitors to the building pass. With a southeastern exposure, it is filled with light from the early morning hours throughout the day. Tinted glass has transformed this entrance hall into a world beyond.

In a large open office space, the feeling of a wall aligning the floor with the slanting angles of the roof truss. A “wall” of louvered windows shields office space from the shafts and pipes that extend the height of the building.

Architecture: Hutchison & Maul Architecture
Location: Seattle, Washington, USA
Structural Engineer: Perbix Bykonen
Contractor: Raven DB
Project Area: 242 sqm
Project Year: 2008
Photographs: Hutchison & Maul Architecture

floor plans

This residence for a couple and their two children utilizes the foundations and walls of an existing single-story post-war bungalow. The traditional placement of private spaces above public spaces is inverted, with bedrooms and bathrooms placed at the main floor level, while a new second story places the kitchen, living and dining spaces into one large communal room with views overlooking Cascade mountain range. A large operable skylight marks the center of the room.

The second cycle of the Holcim Awards competition has reached its pinnacle: the top sustainable construction projects out of thousands of submissions from all continents have been selected. The four winning entries are a river remediation scheme in Morocco, a greenfield university campus in Vietnam, a rural planning strategy in China, and a shelter for day laborers in the USA. A series of prize-handovers will be held at the site of each project to celebrate the winners and their highly-acclaimed examples of sustainable construction.

Almost 5,000 sustainable construction projects and visions from 121 countries entered the five regional Holcim Awards competitions in 2008. Winners of the Gold, Silver and Bronze Awards in each region automatically qualified for the Global Holcim Awards competition in 2009. The global jury was headed by Charles Correa (architect, India) and included Peter Head (structural engineer, UK), Enrique Norten (architect, Mexico/USA), Saskia Sassen (sociologist, USA), Hans-Rudolf Schalcher (civil engineer, Switzerland), and Rolf Soiron (economist, Switzerland).

More images and description of the winning projects, after the break.

Gold Award: River remediation and urban development scheme, Fez, Morocco / John Ferri, Takako Tajima, Aziza Chaouni, Dan Brunn

River remediation and urban development scheme (Fez, Morocco) is a multi-sited, multi-functional project that is centered upon the recovery of a river. Work on restoring it triggers a range of interventions in the Medina. Core components are the rehabilitation of the old city’s architecture, revitalizing public spaces and traditional tanneries, and creating new pedestrian zones.

Silver Award: Low-impact greenfield university campus, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam / Daisuke Sanuki, Kazuhiro Kojima, Vo Trong Nghia

Low-impact greenfield university campus (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) aspires to achieve harmony with all elements of the surrounding ecosystem in the middle of the Mekong River Delta: the waters of the river and the flooding of the rice fields, the mangroves, the winds and their patterns as well as with the seasonal changes of light and shadow.

Bronze Award: Sustainable planning for a rural community, Beijing, China / Yue Zhang

Sustainable planning for a rural community (Beijing, China) intelligently addresses the more efficient use of precious land by gradually lifting quality of life and living density, improving the living conditions for rural families as a harmonious and balanced response to urban development, and reducing the ecological footprint by improved resource management and use of renewable energy sources.

“Innovation” Award: Self-contained day labor station, San Francisco, USA / Liz Ogbu, John Peterson

Self-contained day labor station (San Francisco, USA) is a minimal physical urbanistic intervention with maximum social equity and neighborhood enhancement effects. The project is a small structure that functions as a labormarket and service delivery platform for day laborers who wait for casual work every morning at customary gathering points.

Architects: Kirsten Gabriëls James Webb
Location: IJburg, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Project architect: Kirsten Gabriëls
Structural engineer: Strackee BV Bouwadviesbureau, Amsterdam
Services engineer: Wolf + Dikken Adviseurs, Wateringen
Artist façade panel: Yvonne Kroese
Contractor: Bouwbedrijf Stadswerk BV, Hoofddorp
Design year: 2006
Completion year: 2008
Constructed area: 285 sqm
Photographs: Marcel Van der Burg

A site with a south facing view to a canal on the Grote Rietland of IJburg provided a unique opportunity for a family to live in a free-standing villa within 20 minutes of central Amsterdam.

The family of four, a film score composer and a business film scenario writer with 2 teenage children required a house that provided opportunities in living together but also independently. The section of the house clearly describes the programme with children on the lowered level, parents on the upper, and the ground ?oor acting as the communal, family and social area (and also bufferzone).

Similar to a typical Amsterdam canal house the ground floor is raised increasing privacy from the street. The raised ground floor allows clear views to the canal at the rear and accommodates the basement below. This visual connection to the canal is maintained at all times – through the open stairs to the upper level and the absence of any doors dividing the ground floor area. The smaller living area of the ground floor steps down to the kitchen/dining area opening both horizontally and vertically in scale. The lower space opens to the outside terrace continuing the procession to the garden and canal.

The childrens lower level (complete with kitchenette and bathroom) is accessed from the street via external stairs and becomes an independent zone from the main house. The dividing wall between the bedrooms is nonload bearing and in the eventuality of the children leaving the family home the basement could be used and rented as a separate studio apartment.

In the upper level the parents functions of study, bathing and sleeping are ordered from street to canal side. From the bathroom views across the canal are possible, and the bedroom and bathroom unite as one space with a continous floor surface.

The house is transparent from the street to the canal with the main front and back facades of full height glazing. All walls perpendicular to the street are solid timber clad surfaces. A clear demarcation of the house‘s internal levels are revealed in the facade with white bands. Horizontally laid western red cedar boards further striate the volume. The entrance facade consists of a large full height glass door and an art piece by Amsterdam artist Yvonne Kroese. The lasercut steel panel features creatures found on and around IJburg and houses the letter box and other entrance hardware.

Architects: Luca Selva Architects
Location: Binningen, Switzerland
Project year: 2008
Collaborators: Barbara Andres, Roger Braccini
Site Manager: Sabin Achermann
Landscape Architects: August Künzel Landschaftsarchitekten, Basel
Structural Engineer: Walther Mory Maier, Basel
Photographs: Ruedi Walti

There are houses that become houses devoted to art over time by the gradual addition of artwork. Others, like the house in Binningen, were built to be a house for art from the beginning. This is reflected in the traffic pattern as well as in the sequence and size of the main rooms, the position and finish of the windows and the conservative and unitary materialization. The ground floor flooring gives the impression that it has existed since the beginning of time. It consists of a stomped clay floor, made by Martin Rauch. It is the colour of honey and it has countless crazes and a velvety touch despite its hardness. The floor leads the visitors from the entrée through the corridor to the entrance hall, which are squired by large-sized photographs by contemporary artists and include rare and aged cactuses and various delicate antique physiques. This archaic floor contrasts strongly with the slender and precise aluminium frames of the sliding glass doors which constrict the passage from the hall to the living room, opening it up towards the garden and the covered seating area. This is where the interpenetration of indoors and outdoors is strongest. The angular floorplan repeatedly allows simultaneous views of interior and exterior surfaces which are both kept in the same bright white to enhance the visual continuity of ceiling and walls.

The groundfloor’s flowing sequence of spaces is perfectly suited for the successive viewing of the works of art. The rooms differ in ceiling height and lighting. The windows are placed carefully, respecting quality of the daylight as well as the views they frame. The high set window in the hall focuses on the ample treetops of the neighbouring plot, while the living room window offers a surprising view of the distant city of Basel. Only now does the visitor notice how precisely and with how much of a dramaturgical thought the house is placed, also how skillfully its polymorphic volume uses the various qualities of the site. The back side traces the boundary while the garden side’s focal point is set on the pool. The edges of the latter are designed as benches reinforcing its physical presence. The pool becomes an object set in the garden, surrounded by orange Tartan flooring that strongly contrasts with the garden’s vegetation.

Indoors, the flush mounted windows dialogue in a similar way with the images. Since the embrasure is nearly invisible, the environment seems to suddenly invade the room. The windows act as autonomous images rather than as a separation between indoors and outdoors. The entire house has an object-like appearance, mostly due to its colour. In some places the facade’s white stucco lustro is smoothed, in others it is left open-pored. This creates a variety of different shades, all similar but never quite the same.

The balanced composition evokes Alvaro Siza’s work and due to its central hall it is reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche. The house in Binningen does not limit itself to providing a neutral background for art. It takes an active part, including residents and guests in the conversation.

Architects: Mas y Fernández arquitectos / Cristóbal Fernández, Andrés Mas
Location: El Refugio, Loteo 5, Camino interior carretera San Martin, Chile
Associate Architect: Clarisa Elton
Contractor: Constructora Fernández Lira
Structural Engineer: Patricio Stagno
Landscape: Verónica Álamos, Sofía Álamos, Isabel Caroca
Constructed Area: 368.18 sqm
Photographs: Alvaro Benitez

In this project the client has a significant role by giving fundamental premises for the project. We attempted to generate non-orthogonal spaces, playing with different levels and organizing the enclosures from two interior patios that introduce natural light and vegetation to the house interior, and a family living room located in the center of the house, articulating the situations.

Moreover, the beamed steel skin is based in a green support that interacts with the environment by becoming part of itself and providing shade to the outer spaces. The nobility of its materials (concrete, stone slate, wood and metal), merely helps to such intention.

Architect/Interior Designer: Slade Architecture
Location: Shanghai, China
Client: Mattel
Architect of Record (company name): AD Incorporated (China) Ltd (Danial McCahon)
Store Concept Development and Creative Direction:BIG/ Ogilvy & Mather
Activities (Fashion Runway and Barbie Design Center Activities):Chute Gerdeman
Retail Consultant:Vertical Retail Consulting (Formerly KSA Shanghai)
Restaurant Consultant: David Laris, Founder. David Laris Creates
Graphics: BIG/ Ogilvy & Mather (façade frit pattern)
MEP Engineer (company name): Scott Wilson LTD
Structural Engineer (company name): Scott Wilson LTD
Lighting consultant (company name): Radiance Lightworks
General Contractor (company name): EDG
Furniture Fabricator: Strads Design Co, LTD
Fixtures vendor/fabricator: Kingsmen
Woodwork (company name): EDG
Façade Supplier/Installer: King Glass Engineering Co, LTD
Construction area: 2,790 sqm
Completion: 2009
Photographs: Iwan Baan

New York-based Slade Architecture has designed the first ever Barbie Flagship for Mattel. The 35,000 square foot store holds the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Barbie dolls and licensed Barbie products, as well as a range of services and activities for Barbie fans and their families.

Mattel wanted a store where “Barbie is hero”; expressing Barbie as a global lifestyle brand by building on the brand’s historical link to fashion. Barbie Shanghai is the first fully realized expression of this broader vision. Mattel worked with BIG, the branding and design division of Ogilvy & Mather, to develop creative concept, identify project location, explore featured activities and identify creative partners.

Slade Architecture led the design including the exterior, interior, fixtures, and furnishings. Slade’s design is a sleek, fun, unapologetically feminine interpretation of Barbie: past, present, and future.

For the new façade, Slade Architecture combined references to product packaging, decorative arts, fashion and architectural iconography to create a modern identity for the store, expressing Barbie’s cutting-edge fashion sense and history.

The façade is made of two layers: molded, translucent polycarbonate interior panels and flat exterior glass panels printed with a whimsical lattice frit pattern. Slade collaborated with designers at BIG, who created the final exterior frit graphics. The two layers reinforce each other visually and interact dynamically through reflection, shadow and distortion.

Visitors are enveloped by curvaceous, pearlescent surfaces of the lobby, leading to a pink escalator tube that takes them from the bustle of the street, to the double-height main floor.

The central feature is a three-story spiral staircase enclosed by eight hundred Barbie dolls. The staircase and the dolls are the core of the store; everything literally revolves around Barbie.

The staircase links the three retail floors:

The women’s floor (women’s fashion, couture, cosmetics and accessories).

The doll floor (dolls, designer doll gallery, doll accessories, books). The Barbie Design Center, where girls design their own Barbie is on this floor. This activity was planned by Chute Gerdeman Retail and designed by Slade Architecture.

The girls floor (girls fashion, shoes and accessories). The Barbie Fashion Stage, planned and designed by Chute Gerdeman Retail, where girls take part in a real runway show, is also on this floor.

The Barbie Café, also designed by Slade Architecture, is on the top floor.

Throughout the retail areas, Slade played with the scale differences between dolls, girls and women. They reinforced the feeling of youth and the possibilities of an unapologetically girlish outlook (regardless of age) by mixing reality and fantasy and keeping play and fun at the forefront – to create a space where optimism and possibility reign supreme as expressions of core Barbie attributes.

Probably the most impressive thing for someone who visits for the first time cities like New York, Shanghai or Dubai is the ridiculous size of it’s buildings. So to finish this week of Round Up, we bring you previously featured skyscraper on ArchDaily.

Tour La Signal at La Defense, Paris / Ateliers Jean Nouve
The La Defense is a 160 ha business district in the west of Paris, currently under a renewal plan to strengthen its place among the great international business districts. The renewal includes several high rise sustainable towers. One of this towers, the Tour Signal, entered an international closed competition for teams of architects/investors/developers, on which EPAD didn’t impose a site. The Tour Signal will thus endow the business district with a new landmark in 2013. The finalists for this project were (read more…)

Burj Dubai, tallest building in the world
The Burj Dubai (set to be the tallest tower in the world, while the tallest structure as of now), is almost finished. Located in Dubai, it´s the centerpise of a mixed-use development that will include 30,000 homes, 9 hotels, 3 ha of parks, 19 residential towers, a man and a 12ha artificial lake. I decided to Google about the Burj Dubai a little, and i found an interesting interview at Wired with SOM´s structural engineer Bill Baker, telling the story behind the design, the structure and construction (read more…)

56 Leonard Street, New York / Herzog & de Meuron
This 57-story residential in the Tribeca area will house 145 residences, each one with its own unique floor plan and private outdoor space. This typology makes the building look like a stack of houses, away from the traditional skyscraper form. I wonder how the concrete structure works on this building, which was done by consultant firm WSP Cantor Seinuk (who also worked on the Freedom Tower). With this height, it will surely impact the city skyline as you can see on the panoramic above (read more…)

Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower in Dubai / L-A-V-A
LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) unveiled the design of the Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower in Dubai, the first project of a series of branded towers, a new concept by PNYG:COMPANY, a company focused on branding. I´ve heard about branded towers such at the Porsche Towers by OMA, but it´s the first time i hear about a building branded after a Formula 1 champion. The design of the 59 storey luxury tower is abstracted from the geometric laws of snowflakes and Formula 1 aerodynamics (read more…)

Jumeirah Gardens / SOM & Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
The master plan for this project was designed by SOM Chicago, and consists of a mixed-use development that incorporates low, medium, and high-density zones for business, residences, retail, leisure, and recreation – a city within a city, with an estimated cost of US$95 billion. The three main towers were comissioned to Chicago based architects AS+GG (Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill), The most impressive one -and the third tallest tower in the UAE- is 1 Dubai (read more…)

Architects: Saucier + Perrotte architectes
Location: Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Project team: Alain Desforges, Andrew Butler, Thomas Balaban, Anna Bendix, Nathalie Cloutier, Dominique Dumais, Éric Dupras, Louis-Philippe Frappier, Darrell de Grandmont, Louis-Charles Lasnier, Christine Levine, Jean-François Mathieu, Claudio Nunez, Benjamin Rankin, Pierre-Alexandre Rhéaume, Samantha Schneider
Structural Engineer: Quinn Dressel
Mechanical & Electrical engineer: RYBKA, SMITH AND GINSLER
Landscape & Interiors: Saucier + Perrotte architectes
Contractor: Ellis Don
Client: University of Toronto at Mississauga, Mississauga
Constructed Area: 10,800 sqm
Project year: 2004
Photographs: Marc Cramer

Located at the edge of the Campus, the new Communication, Culture and Technology Building assumes the role of an interface. Organized along the principal façade, the building is closely bordered by a park on one side and a new courtyard garden on the other. Its main circulation creates a linear public space that provides a line of connection between the Student Centre and the future library as well as between the landscape and the building’s public and educational spaces. CCT becomes a place of transition, adjacency and inhabitation all at once.

The glazed vertical surface of this connection acts as a thickened membrane which becomes a technological filter between the existing, natural material of the forest and the tamed, controlled environment of the building and its garden. At the level of the ground, the membrane is completely transparent; the line between exterior and interior disappears. The earth plane forms a continuous public room that slips into the building, flows through it toward the courtyard, onto the landscaped roof of the garage and into the campus beyond.

The offices and most of the classrooms are oriented either towards the park or the courtyard garden. Operable windows allow significant cross-ventilation of all common areas and provide a controlled passive cooling system for the offices.

The elevation plays between the rational and the intuitive, interfering with the integrity of the planar surface, not allowing the impression to coalesce easily into one image or a definable whole.

Like the bark of the London Plane trees conserved on the site, the layers of landscape detach and lift, establishing a new topography from which grow both the building and its garden landscape. Nestled into this landscape are the building’s ‘mineral’ public functions (Multi-Media Studio Theatre, the E-Gallery and the Image Bar), each with its own identity yet tied together by the new terrain. Continuous, interwoven strands of this topography lift and wind vertically through the structure, connecting spaces between the shifting program elements, which puncture the vertical façade membrane at its upper levels. This in-between space, occupied by platforms, bridges, stairs and ramps, fosters openness and interaction between the occupants, program and the outside environment, each allowed to flow through the envelope by means of the shifting solids. Fluid public space is thereby created, reinforcing the uniqueness of the campus.

Architects: RMJM
Location: Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA
Principal in Charge: Barbara Hillier
Civil Engineer: Owen, Little & Associates, Beachwood, NJ
Structural Engineer: Leslie E. Robertson Associates, RLLP, New York, NY
Mep engineering: Atkinson Korven Feinberg AKF Engineers, Princeton, NJ
Lighting design: Brandston Partnership, Inc., New York, NY
Construction Management: Gilbane, Inc., Lawrenceville, NJ
Landscape: RMJM, Janet Garwood, Senior Associate, Princeton, NJ
Constructed Area: 3,200 sqm
Photographs: RMJM

The Campus Center at BD (Becton Dickinson and Company), a medical technology company that serves healthcare institutions, life science researchers, clinical laboratories, industry and the general public, is a 38,500-square-foot facility that bridges and blurs the boundaries between building/landscape, indoor/outdoor, roof/earth, figure/ground, and the two local business cultures of management/production. Site design focused on sustainability and the sanctity of the open space between the main buildings known as the “Great Lawn.”

This building is designed to be both a virtual and literal bridge between two pre-existing AIA National Honor Award-winning buildings on the BD campus designed by Kallman McKinnell Wood in the late Eighties and early Nineties. The Howe Building, to the west, is the corporate headquarters and company’s executive administration building. The Becton Building, to the east, is home to a number of the company’s business units, researchers and production teams.

The Campus Center is located in the “Great Lawn” between the two buildings and enables the two cultures to come together for the purposes of sharing a meal. It accommodates as many as 500 people and includes a number of dining venues, multi-station servery, kitchen, retail store, coffee bar and café, bank, dry cleaner, and support areas including a loading dock and mezzanine-level mechanical areas. There are exterior dining terraces, and areas within the building that can be partitioned into intimate dining or meeting areas.

The final design, which won a prestigious American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum in 2008, is a fusion of built structure and land form where the resultant architecture is well hidden and the landscape preserved. The finished floor is set at the lowest level of the Howe building (where the existing cafeteria is located) in order to allow the lawn to become a roof over the entire structure and connecting links. Folded concrete slabs create the horizontal planes and connect via steel structural columns that appear to sway. The building plan is given form through spatial volumes attached to the primary intersection of spline walls at the center. These primary walls define the program area and stretch beyond the building enclosure in their north-south axis to gracefully negotiate the changing grade.

A total of 5,246 cubic yards of concrete was placed for the Campus Center. Self Consolidating Concrete (SCC), more widely used in Europe but used with increasing frequency in the US, is more flowable than conventional concrete, but can be just as cohesive and achieve the same durability and strength. SCC was chosen for the project due to the complication of the Campus Center design and to accommodate the vision of exposed concrete surfaces. The increased flowability of SCC allowed the concrete to fill formwork more completely, without segregation and with fewer voids, and with no mechanical vibration which can damage form surfaces.