Monte Silo - Gigaplex Architects

Program:

Our charge was to design a house for a newly single man with two grown daughters from whom he expects multiple grandchildren. Earl, the client, is foremost a sound engineer, but also a screenwriter (of course), director and producer in the film business, with many big Hollywood pictures to his credit, and hence he has to be on the road for lengthy periods of time. He requested a home both cozy in scale and yet comfortable for weekend guests up to fish the bountiful Provo River, which runs just alongside, to the south, and onto which he has access for a three-mile stretch.

The goal was to provide both a visual and an aural connection to the blue ribbon waters coursing just a grandchild’s stone throw away. Earl had seen and witnessed several of the firm’s previous projects, and hence, from the very get go he asked that a cylinder be incorporated. It wanted to be smart. Shockingly, he also asked that the whole project be completed very inexpensively.

Solution:

Not one but two corrugated metal grain silos, with a short, complementary link, were incorporated in order to help modulate the space and increase the square footage enough to comfortably house grandchildren, who will certainly be born with bamboo flyrods in their hands, and other guests, and to provide the required nooks, niches and other interstitial spaces enough to reek of coziness and holing up in the mountains until another job might raise its ugly but otherwise very real and seemingly necessary head.

Architects: Gigaplex Architects

Location: Woodland, Utah, USA

Client: Jonathan “Earl” Stein

Project year: 2006

Constructed area: 147 sqm

Photographs: Gigaplex

Brunner house - Luca Selva Architects

The house is situated in Witterswil, a village in the agglomeration of Basel, approximately 15 minutes by tramway from the city center.

The already existing pavillon-like structure served as a doctor practice. The new owners (a pastor’s family with three children) acquired it in 2005 with the idea of expansion and turning it into their home. In order to leave the surrounding garden area untouched the architects proposed to extend the structure vertically rather than horizontally, thus respecting the building’s original footprint. A new ground floor as well as an upper floor were built onto the existing basement structure.

The floorplans display the architects’ research into the succinct division of spaces by minimal means. The ground floor plan is characterised by the generous hall, a space where family life takes place and where the children may play or do their homework.

The architectural ambition was to avoid a strict didactical extension in which the new part is dialectically opposed to the old, therefore accentuating their differences. The idea was to create one single new entity, a new house. After the demolition of the pavillon superstructure a new wooden framework was built onto the existing basement structure. The architects now had to find a suiting shell, one that is able to show that a new structure has been added to an existing one.

The semitransparent copper cladding, with its dark brown colour against a black background evokes timelessness, preciosity and elegance. It gives the building a familiar air and it reminds the onlooker of something that seems to have always been there rather than emphasising on being new. The windows are set onto the facade like picture frames (also in copper) and depict its depth.

Architects: Luca Selva Architects
Location: Witterswil near Basel, Switzerland
Project year: 2005-2006

Project Architect: David Gschwind

Copper Contractor: Leonhardt AG, Basel, Switzerland

Main Contractor: Risi Holzbau AG, Allschwil, Switzerland

Photographs: Ruedi Walti

White Cave - Takao Shiotsuka Atelier

The house is built on a hill looking down at a town area. The site’s shape has an irregular form. There is a height difference of 2m in the site. The north side is adjacent to a neighbor with this height difference. In the west and the south sides trees grow thick right next to the neighbors. And to the East, you can see the town area.

Walking to the site through a path that goes side by side, causes the scenery to change as we walk, and feels very attractive. We arranged the building parallel to the path and saved the height difference inside the volume placed across the site.

We wanted to give the building the same variety as the complex surroundings of the site and its irregular shape, causing disorder but not confusion, on a single operation. The angle of the walls is slightly changed to add more dynamism to the spaces as the user moves. Even the relation with the surroundings, that control and distances views and light, became complex.

The outside walls and the roof have a rough concrete finish, and the openings express the thickness of the concrete that form the volume. We wanted to continue with the characteristic silence of the place, given by the surrounding concrete wall, the ancient burial mounds park and the dense trees. We thought that the appearance of a hard static concrete volume responded to the surroundings of this location.

Architects: Takao Shiotsuka Atelier

Location: Oita, Japan

Client: Private

Project year: 2006-2007

Site area: 419 sqm

Constructed area: 132.6 sqm

Contractor: Hokoku Co. Ltd

Photographs: Toshiyuki YANO (Nacasa & Partners Inc.,)

House 2 - Eduardo Berlin Razmilic

Through an unconventional implantation, House 2 articulates the house’s every-day program in a single level. Opposing the site’s natural slope, the house and garden develop 3,5 meters above street level, via an elemental ground operation that transforms the preexistent rise in two main horizontal plans, above and below. Both realms are gradually articulated by architectural operations.

More than a parking lot, the 500 square meter court, porous and transparent, amounts to an access plaza, carefully designed and partially sheltered by the second’s level large volume. This liberated place directs the observer toward the Central Patio, open at the center of the second level volume, and manifest in the plaza by a rectangular water tank. This Patio not only articulates the houses three stories, but also generates it’s entrance through the staircase.

The program’s proposition is clear and simple: one walkway circumscribed to the Patio, and articulated by the family room, meeting place by definition and reinforced by this duality of passing versus staying.

As in a screenplay, this circulation tells the story of the program in absolute equal terms: bedrooms, living room, kitchen, terrace, etc., create all possible programmatic relations without interference. Thus the house scale is preserved in a rectangular single story program holding over 500 square meters, with large spaces, with control levels common to compact projects, but autonomies common to disaggregated plans.

The third level holds a den and a large open terrace that dominates the Andes views and the abundant vegetation. This roof terrace relates to the lower level through circular perforations in the floor/ceiling contributing light but also showing each other reciprocally thus anticipating the whole through allusive fragments that allow our minds to reconstruct it.

By this unusual implantation, House Two relates and governs over three grand exterior spaces (plaza, garden, and roof terrace) allowing exteriors for an area equivalent to the original empty site’s of 1,600 square meters.

In a minor scale, the house presents itself with simple Cartesian lines, net spaces, and rigorous studies on perforation of vertical planes. Most details lie in the very essence of the nude concrete applications, reflecting particular emphasis in material junctions and encounters in order to maintain elements at a minimum.

Architect: Eduardo Berlin Razmilic

Location: Las Condes, Santiago, Chile

Client: Withheld

Technical Advisors: Eduardo Valenzuela, Gonzalo Santolaya, Juan Grimm

Site Area: 1.600 sqm

Constructed Area: 600 sqm + terraces

Project year: 2005

Construction year: 2006 - 2008

Main Materials: Nude Concrete, Stone & Glass

Photographs: Sebastián Sepúlveda & Eduardo Berlin