vongundlach.com

Courtesy of Fuse Architecture

This 4 bedroom 3 bathroom home encompasses the feel of an ideal family beach retreat. The main concern when designing this home was that the clients wanted to fill the home with as much natural light as possible. The previously standing home was demolished in order to build a completely new design because the previously standing home was dilapidated and in need of significant repair.

Architect: Fuse Architecture
Location: California, USA
Contractor: Ekers Construction
Project Year: 2008
Photographs: Courtesy of Fuse Architecture

Courtesy of Fuse Architecture

The previous home was on a very narrow lot, which made it hard to have any natural light in the back of the house, which gave the home a dungeon feel. Through intricate detail and clever placement of windows, the natural light issue was able to be addressed and ensure that the home filled with light throughout the day as well as highlight the gorgeous beach views.

Courtesy of Fuse Architecture

plan

plan

© Peter Zaytsev

Yandex is the biggest and leading internet company in Russia, CIS and Russian-speaking countries. The Yandex office in Moscow is the 2nd office by za bor architects designed for this company. The office occupies all seven floors in one of two wings in the newly constructed business center «Krasnaya Roza» (eng: Red Rose) in Moscow. The wing is close to rectangle in section and consequently the office space is concentrated around the technical core with riser pipes. This construction peculiarity made it necessary to create sanitary facilities and other premises that demand water use — such as kitchens and coffee points — around them.

Architect: za bor architects, Arseniy Borisenko and Peter Zaytsev
Location: Moscow, Russia
Project Area: 7000 sqm
Project Year: 2010
Photographs: Peter Zaytsev

© Peter Zaytsev

The original columns and work frames have been preserved. At the client’s request, za bor architects used a layout with individual rooms strung along the corridors. To soften the impression, the role of internal walls is played by a glazed partition. Translucent orange coating has been used to add bright and vivid color to the gray and white interior. The ceilings have been visually expanded in the corridor, and the communications have been painted in deep gray color, while in the work areas ceilings from Ecophon — sound absorbing material used in cinema interiors — have been used for additional sound isolation.

© Peter Zaytsev

Internet wiring and electrical cables were made on the raised floor. As the flooring has been chosen to carpet tile, which allows you quickly access any point in the hidden under-floor communications.

© Peter Zaytsev

Dynamic volumes and expressive furniture are the main hallmarks of za bor architects style. This distinctive approach has been used by za bor architects to develop the concept reflecting the idea of a sky-rocketed exponential Yandex development. Since Yandex offices are known for their informal atmosphere and attitude to working process and since they work round the clock, besides large and small conference halls and traditional general working zones the project includes a sports hall, a kitchen, coffee points etc.

© Peter Zaytsev

© Peter Zaytsev

© Peter Zaytsev

© Peter Zaytsev

plan

plan

© Courtesy of stARRT

A few days ago we featured, in progress, the WHATAMI project, winner of the 2011 Young Architect Program at the MAXXI. We are excited to announce that we have just received material from the finished project.

Architect: stARRT / Simone Capra, Claudio Castaldo, Francesco Colangeli, Andrea Valentini
Location: Rome, Italy
Project Year: 2011
Client: MAXXI Foundation and MOMA
Project Area: 600 sqm
Photographs: Courtesy of stARRT

WHATAMI is based on the manufacturing of an artificial archipelago-hill, generating smaller green areas in the garden and potentially outside the museum. WHATAMI is the corruption of “What am I”, the industrial declination of the first puzzle invented in the XVIII century for fun-learning by John Spilsbury. It could be dismounted along the geographic boundaries; a tribute to the maps of Alighiero Boetti, which is dedicated to the square of the MAXXI.

© Courtesy of stARRT

The hill works as a garden, injecting “green” into the concrete plateau of the museum’s outdoor space, allowing it to serve as a stage and/or parterre for concerts, other events, and as a space to rest and look at the museum itself. The artificial landscape will be punctuated by large “flowers” providing light, shadow and sound.

© Courtesy of stARRT

The materials proposed for the installation involve a two-fold recycling process; naturale elements will come back to their original sites, the high-tech objects will be replaced in one of the abandoned places of the city needing for a rehabilitation.

© Courtesy of stARRT

Click here to view the embedded video.

Network_LA Transit is a conceptual design response by Gensler Los Angeles to an open invitation by Sci-Arc, The Architect’s Newspaper and LA Metro to shift people from their cars to public transit.

More after the break.

Increasing the movement of people, not cars should be the goal of any public transit initiative. For this ambitious project, Gensler Los Angeles proposes an integrated set of ideas to adapt the current system to improve its performance at the various scales based on user needs. The belief is that a more responsive system and an improved user experience ultimately leads to the means to meet that challenge.

This design proposal is based on four ideas:
• Increase vehicle choices in the LA Metro system to include alternative modes of transportation, which provide various scales of public transport efficiency.
• Increase flexibility of public transport by keeping existing transit stops but liberating the routes that connect them so that it may respond more immediately to user demand. Also provide it an efficiency advantage with dedicated lanes and pull-in stops to allow for bypassing, as well strategically located underpasses.
• Leverage existing data to increase flexibility and optimize choices by overlapping the location of all ground transport, stops and users through GPS to coordinate their relative positions, needs and capacity in real time. To complete this triangulation, a GPS enabled app – tripFinder – automatically scans the network to sort and provide the user with the optimum trip itinerary while also optimizing the current status of the public transit fleet.
• Expand the network and fill in the transport voids by granting access to this real time information through the selling of licenses to more and other alternative ground transport entities. This business could also be a potential profit center for LA Metro.

The result is user-driven, on-demand system that responds to the needs of each individual rider, allowing the network to organically adapt to the shifting needs of its ridership to improve overall service. Los Angeles, as a city of multiple centers whose relationships are constantly changing, can now have transit routes that adapt to the needs of its passengers rather than forcing passengers to use multiple fixed routes.

Thus a software solution that manages the users needs in real time, and assisted by a series of relatively small and achievable infrastructure improvements could form the solution to Los Angeles Public Transportation inefficiencies; thereby avoiding the type of large grand scale infrastructure work that is very disruptive of daily city life while risking being obsolete before it is complete. This type of solution also speaks to the Los Angeles culture: in proposing a public transport system with personalized service, it reasserts the individualist mentality that has powered Los Angeles’s mythology for generations.

NETWORK_LA transit Gensler Los Angeles

Ideas By:
Richard Hammond
Robert Jernigan
Hae Sun Kim
Alex Webb
Li Wen

Animation By: Tam Thien Tran

References:
Commute Cost
Based off of research by commuter transportation services and
www.commutesolutions.org
Co2 Level
United States Environment Protection Agency www.carbofund.org City Ranking Information
Random Comprehensive study on traffic congestion in urban LA
10/02/2008
2006 American Community Survey

courtesy of Mark Tyrrell Studio & Daniel Griffin

Sydney based Tyrrell Studio has collaborated with Daniel Griffin to create a first prize winning entry to the 2011 international design competition Ideas on Edge Parramatta. The competition received over 150 entries, 40% international and the remainder from around Australia. There were 3 equal winners. Images of the winning entry and a narrative from the architects after the break.

courtesy of Mark Tyrrell Studio & Daniel Griffin

Tyrrell and Griffin’s winning concept focuses upon blurring the physical and metaphysical boundaries between the local culture of Parramatta, and its local ecosystem, finding moments of architectural drama at their junction. The scheme recognizes that the site is located at a brackish point of the river where the fresh water from the inland meets the salt water from the coast. This mixing of waters produces a highly diverse ecosystem at a local level. It is a place where species of fish meet, where salt and freshwater tolerant plant species are found and where hundreds of birds are attracted to the mix.

Interestingly, the site also occurs at a key urban point where the busy urban spine of Church Street meets the river. Unfortunately, Parramatta has progressively turned its back on its river, which has become a forgotten drain rather than a living, changing natural focus for the city. The design breaks down a series of abrupt and divisive river edges by laying a generative grid over river and land. The grid resolves itself into a variety of functional built elements in the design but also acts as a conceptual tool to blur land and water.

Next, a series of ‘program intensifiers’ are layered on the design. Local culture is intensified through the creation of an urban incubator for innovation and ideas. This takes the form of small studio spaces, research labs, aged and childcare, performance spaces and university and corporate support shopfronts. Together, this small-scale urbanism plugs into the disused rear of shops and creates a humming cultural district which moves out over the river.

courtesy of Mark Tyrrell Studio & Daniel Griffin

The ecology of the site is intensified through a large sculptural building called ‘The Birdshell’. The building is a conference center, but its facade accommodates and is designed around a celebration of urban bird life. Hard concrete becomes a soft and living veil. From within the conference center, birds create a shadow play on the walls. The form of the shell is designed to both amplify the varied bird calls and to draw in and cool breezes from the river. It is an open aviary of an urban scale. The site is allowed to flood regularly, and runoff is collected in a mosaic of rain gardens that treat storm water from the urban core of the design and release it clean to the river. Ultimately, the river has no edge in the final proposal; it is an urbanism ‘of ‘ a river rather than ‘beside’ a river.

The Parramatta City Council has been talking about turning Parramatta into Venice since mid 2010. However, Parramatta council does not need to copy the European model. Griffin and Tyrrell’s winning scheme aims to show that Parramatta has its own unique and Australian landscape identity, which should be fused with its own local culture to create a catalytic urbanism suited to Sydney’s second city, not Italy’s.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mateo Arquitectura just sent us a video of the PGG Headquarter building we recently featured. If offers some splendid imagery of the design. Check it out.

© Josema Cutillas

Architects: Urbanismo y Arquitectura Doblee – Silvia Echeverria (doblee) y Borja Izaguirre Larrañaga (doblee), Cristina Arregui y Beatriz Gil
Location: Navarra, Spain
Project area: 653 sqm
Project year: 2009 – 2010
Photographs: Josema Cutillas

© Josema Cutillas

The project, beside giving content to the program of a medical doctor’s office, tries to generate a dialog between the interior of the building and the public space that surrounds it, having in it counts the sun and the spaces of privacy of the consultations.

elevations 02

With the volumetric game between the ground floor and the first one, one seeks to mark and to delimit the zone of access, generating a porch and, in turn, to provide to I build of the well-deserved character of municipal equipment.

© Josema Cutillas

In the ground floor there develops the whole program that gives service to the patient, since they are the consultations and the offices. In the first plant there are located two bedrooms, a kitchen and a lounge of the operatives who work at night.

© Josema Cutillas

The consultations are connected between them and arranged so that in a future they could be extended it was doing the garden that stays in the southern part. These consultations are orientated towards the court of olive trees that works as filter between the Doctor’s office and the housings of to the side.

plan 02

The intention is that the new building passes to form a part of the public square, reorganizing and revaluing the playgroud and the existing green spaces.

Little Tokyo Design Week: Future City (LTDW) celebrates the power and energy of cutting edge design and technology emerging from Japan and its intersection with current trends materializing in Los Angeles. The four day festival open to the public, July 14th to July 17th, will present a series of programs that integrate Little Tokyo’s Big Three cultural institutions (Japanese American National Museum (JANM), Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC), and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, community partners, retailers, and restaurants and will engage local and international designers, artists, architects, filmmakers, corporations, and students from the Southern California region to explore possible scenarios for a ‘New Urban Lifestyle.’ LTDW is produced in collaboration with Community Arts Resources (CARS). More information can be found  here.