Showing posts from category: architecture
Community Board 3 voted in favor of a plan to turn seven city-owned acres just south of the Williamsburg Bridge into a 1.7 million-square-foot mixed-use development.
After more than 40 years, the massive Seward Park Mixed-Use Development Project in the Lower East Side moved one important step closer to becoming a reality Tuesday evening when Community Board 3 unanimously voted in favor of the plan.
The project calls for turning five fallow city-owned lots, totaling seven acres and lie just south of Delancey Street near the Williamsburg Bridge, into a 1.65 million-square-foot mixed-use development made up of 40% commercial and 60% residential. The residential portion of the development will be comprised of roughly 900 apartments, half of which will be affordable. All together this would be one of the biggest redevelopment projects in Manhattan on city-owned land in years.
The community board approved the plan under the condition that the affordable housing be permanent instead of just for 30 to 60 years as had been suggested earlier. The city agreed to the stipulation. Affordable housing has been a major stumbling block for the project in the past. Previously, many in the community insisted that 100% of the apartments be affordable. Most now accept that some market rate apartments are needed to make the project financially feasible.
The vote is just the first step in a complex public approval process, known as the Uniform Land-Use Review Procedure, which is expected to be completed in the fall. The City Council and mayor have the final approval. If the project is given the green light, the next step would be for the city to issue a formal request for proposals to find a developer to take on the project.
“Over the course of the last three years, it has been made abundantly clear that the issue of permanent affordability was one of, if not the, highest priority for this community board and Lower East Side residents,” said City Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who represents the area, in a statement.
Aside from affordable housing, the community was also very concerned about remaining actively involved in the Seward Park development.
“Last week, the city agreed to create a task force to ensure that this community remains involved as this process moves forward,” said Ms. Chin. “This unprecedented move by the city will ensure that your voices continue to be heard in the request for proposals process and beyond. In addition to providing oversight and accountability, this task force will work to ensure that affordable housing is built and that is it built first.”
While the issues over affordability and community involvement have been settled for now, new concerns have emerged. Some residents would like to see a school added to the development and others would like to make sure that the retail space will not go to a big-box store.
The plan will now move to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer for his review and recommendations.
Cliff House, Halifax architect Brian MacKay-Lyons’ creation, has won his firm its sixth Governor General’s medal. Since Christmas, the firm has won 14 national and international design awards.
A modest wooden house soaring over a rocky cliff has earned Nova Scotia architect Brian MacKay-Lyons a 2012 Governor General’s Medal in Architecture.
“We’re still the only architects in Atlantic Canada who’ve ever won it since it started in the 1950s so it’s kind of special for sure,” says MacKay-Lyons.
This is the sixth Governor General’s medal that MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects of Halifax and Lunenberg has been awarded by the Canada Council through a peer jury process.
“Your peers are the toughest audience, in that sense it means a lot,” he says, on the phone from Lunenburg.
“If you’re a musician, you want Bruce Springsteen to say you’re good.”
Since Christmas, the firm has won 14 national and international design awards and seen the opening of the Canadian embassy it designed in Bangladesh.
MacKay-Lyons and his family are off to Washington, D.C., this week to pick up the American Institute of Architects Honor Award for the Shobac Campus, a collection of buildings in Upper Kingsburg, Lunenburg County, that serve as a home and satellite office.
Still it frustrates MacKay-Lyons that after 35 years of working in Nova Scotia his company is not designing more public buildings in Atlantic Canada.
“We have this big international reputation and we can’t get any work at home,” says MacKay-Lyons, a Dalhousie University architecture professor for more than 20 years.
“Things are very political here, very parochial. Unless you’re well connected you don’t get a chance.”
The Governor General’s Award was presented for his work on Cliff House. Perched somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, it is a timber-frame minimalist box that juts out from a cliff on stilts anchored by heavy concrete onto the rock below. Its form is inspired by the fishing shacks in Blue Rocks and Peggys Cove, says MacKay-Lyons.
The house has a row of front windows looking out to sea.
“You get a sense of vertigo when you’re standing in it. When you get to the front you are, ‘Oh, my God, I could go flying.’”
However, it’s very safe. “It’s not going anywhere.”
MacKay-Lyons describes Cliff House as “monumentally modest.”
“The way it is in the landscape, it’s very proud and forceful and yet it’s just a simple building. It’s modest and inexpensive.”
It has a light timber frame construction, the type of two-by-four construction that is typical of the way houses are built in North America.
“Small timber is the only renewable building material other than bamboo. Even concrete uses tremendous energy.”
Cliff House has also won a North American Wood Design Honor Award, which pleases MacKay-Lyons because “it’s hard to get architects to appreciate light timber frame,” he says. They prefer “sexier” wooden buildings with large timbers and beams.
“The idea of touching the land lightly is something we’re becoming more and more interested in, disturbing the land the least.
“The buildings tend to be more hovering above the land, kind of cantilevering.”
In their statement, jurors praised Cliff House saying, “Perfectly judged for its setting, it elevates plain vernacular form and ordinary materials into a potent meditation on the relationship between the manmade and nature.”
Architecture is a team sport, says MacKay-Lyons. For Cliff House, he relied on project architect Kevin Reid, who’s worked for the firm for seven years, builder Gordon MacLean and structural engineer Michel Comeau of Campbell Comeau Engineering Ltd.
MacKay-Lyons has worked for 30 years with both MacLean and Comeau. He and Comeau grew up together in Arcadia near Yarmouth.
MacKay-Lyons and his Newfoundland-born partner Talbot Sweetapple are leading proponents internationally of regionalist architecture.
Wherever they build they look to the local material culture.
In this region, their design language is “influenced by the rural industrial building tradition in the Maritimes.”
“When we build in Bangladesh, we build it all of bricks. That’s using the culture.
“Our work is about that, about the idea of regionalism, about the idea of place and looking at the local material culture wherever we are.”
Source
After a competition that included some of the world’s most prominent architects, Thom Mayne of the firm Morphosis has been selected to design the first academic building for Cornell University’s high-tech graduate school campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City.
“The goal here is to develop a one-of-a-kind institution,” Mr. Mayne said in an interview at his New York office. (Morphosis also has an office in Los Angeles.) “It’s got to start from rethinking — innovating — an environment.”
The building will get extra attention as the first part of an engineering and applied-science campus charged by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with spurring New York City’s high-tech sector. It needs to embody the latest in environmental advances and to incorporate the increasingly social nature of learning today by creating ample spaces for people to interact. And to succeed, Mr. Mayne said, it must visually connect to the rest of the city, because its setting is surrounded by water.
Mr. Mayne has grappled with academic buildings before, perhaps most notably one for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in the East Village, completed in 2009, whose concave facade is clad in a perforated metal screen and punctuated by a vertical gash.
Mr. Mayne said the Cornell project presented an opportunity to contemplate what an academic building should look like in the information age. Should it have the bullpen environments of tech start-ups or the more cloistered layout of established universities? How should it use space to foster collaboration while also carving out areas for quiet reflection?
“There is no modern prototype for a campus,” Mr. Mayne said. “You have to have a completely different model which has to do with transparency and exposing social connectivity and breaking down the Balkanization that happens departmentally.”
There are no snazzy architectural images yet, nor can Mr. Mayne speculate about what shape the building will take or what materials he might use. “I haven’t even seen the site plan yet,” he said. The only certainty is that Mr. Mayne will not inaugurate Cornell’s new campus by designing some kind of ivory tower.
“I like being able to tell you that I don’t have any bloody idea what it’s going to look like,” he said.
Daniel P. Huttenlocher, dean of the new campus, to be called CornellNYC Tech, and a Cornell vice provost, said that as a computer scientist, he was “very sympathetic to the form-follows-function view of the world” and that he was “heartened by an architect who doesn’t want to get too caught up in the form too early in the process.”
At the same time, Cornell is in a hurry, having pledged to have classes up and running by September in leased space in Manhattan (location to be announced). The Mayne building is expected to break ground in 2014 and to be completed by the start of the 2017 academic year.
Mr. Mayne’s building is part of a campus that will be developed over two decades. The campus will comprise more than two million square feet of building space at a cost of over $2 billion and will serve more than 2,000 students. It will include three academic buildings; three residential buildings; three buildings for research and development; and a hotel and conference center.
In December Cornell, in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, won the yearlong competition to build the campus, beating teams that included one from Stanford University and City College of New York.
The master plan is being designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which was among the six finalists for the Cornell campus. The others were Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, Steven Holl Architects and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson.
Mr. Mayne’s 150,000-square-foot building is expected to cost about $150 million, Mr. Huttenlocher said, which will be covered by a $350 million gift through an alumnus. The city is providing $100 million in infrastructure improvements, as well as the land on Roosevelt Island, currently occupied by a little-used hospital. The new building will include classrooms, laboratories, offices and meeting space.
Morphosis was chosen partly because of its track record of completing projects on time and at a reasonable cost, Mr. Huttenlocher said. “We can’t afford for the budget to be something that balloons out of control,” he added.
The campus is designed to bring academic and private-sector research and development together to speed the translation of academic work into usable products and services.
Mr. Mayne said he would start by talking with the engineering firm Arup about how to design a building with zero-net energy consumption that will use and produce geothermal and solar power.
While the building’s design should be arresting, Mr. Huttenlocher said it also must satisfy its tech-savvy generation of users, who will adapt the space to their needs if it fails to suit them.
“If the building didn’t function well, I think it would get hacked to pieces,” Mr. Huttenlocher said. He added that Cornell liked Morphosis’s “ability to create iconic structures whose form does not obscure or impede its program.”
Mr. Mayne said he designed spaces that were meant to be personalized and “not in any way pristine.”
Morphosis tries to create spaces that allow work to happen in the most effective way possible, Mr. Mayne said. “After that,” he added, “we should stay out of the way.”
Source: NYT
architects, architecture, architecture critic
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architecture, arts, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Cooper Union, cooper union for the advancement of science and art, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, environment, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Morphosis, Mr. Huttenlocher, Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, research, Roosevelt Island, science, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Steven Holl Architects, Thom Mayne
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Developer Larry Silverstein is said to have offered a way to to build and pay for a facility in back of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Guess what’s in it for him.
On Tuesday, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Executive Director Patrick Foye told a Crain’s Breakfast Forum about an idea proposed by developer Larry Silverstein to build and pay for a much-needed Manhattan bus garage. Mr. Foye called it “interesting, provocative,” but he offered no details.
A source said the idea, floated during last year’s leadership transition at the Port Authority from Christopher Ward to Mr. Foye, involves developing a site on West 39th Street and Dyer Avenue used most recently by Mercedes-Benz by the service road that funnels traffic to and from the Lincoln Tunnel just southwest of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Mr. Silverstein, who has a long-term letter of intent with the owner to develop that building, proposed constructing a bus garage capped by a residential tower.
Unanswered questions include how big the tower would have to be to generate sufficient income to finance the construction of the garage, and whether anyone would want to live on top of a bus garage in the heavily trafficked area. It also remains to be seen how much the Port Authority would pay.
Certainly, the idea of the Port Authority doing business again with Silverstein Properties presents political hurdles given the two entities’ complex relationship at the World Trade Center site. The developer declined to comment for this article.
On the plus side, a bus garage-cum-residential complex would solve a number of thorny logistical problems for the agency, which abandoned a bus garage development for lack of funds.
Because there’s no room inside the bus station and nowhere else to park, hundreds of New Jersey Transit buses return empty to the Garden State after dropping off morning commuters in Manhattan. They come back to the city to pick up passengers in the afternoon. A bus garage nearby would cut down on trans-Hudson River traffic, reduce air pollution and save money on fuel.
Part of the savings could be used by the Port Authority to lower terminal fees for short-haul intercity buses, including discount carriers that are under fire for using city sidewalks to load and unload passengers. Bus companies that use the terminal have already threatened to leave because they pay millions of dollars in rent and say free curbside parking for their competitors is unfair.
State legislation would actually allow the city to issue permits for private buses to pick up on the sidewalk. A bus garage could open space at the bus station for discount carriers like Megabus.com, which has a permit to use West 41st Street just outside the bus station as a depot.
“You could get more buses into the terminal,” the source said. “But you’d have to ban them from these sidewalk pickups.”
The insider called Mr. Silverstein’s idea “intriguing,” but it may be a pipe dream.
Mr. Foye would say only that he’s looking at fixing the problem. “It’s a serious question under serious review,” he said.
Source
architecture, architecture jobs, Design, Engineering, Urban Planning
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Christopher Ward, Developer Larry Silverstein, Larry Silverstein, Lincoln Tunnel, Megabus, new jersey transit, Patrick Foye, port authority bus, Port Authority Bus Terminal, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Silverstein Properties, transportation, travel, World Trade Center, WTC
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While many architects and engineers have been vying to construct the world’s tallest tower, a group in China has looked to build in the opposite direction.
Construction began last month on Shanghai’s first “groundscraper”—a structure built almost completely below the surface. The massive project will eventually take form as the InterContinental Shimao Shanghai Wonderland, a 19-story, 380-room luxury hotel surrounded by a 428,000 square-meter theme park.
The hotel broke ground about 30 miles from the city of Shanghai in an abandoned quarry at the foot of Tianmashan Mountain. The building, located in the district of Songjiang, will be grafted onto the side of the quarry with 16 floors descending down and three floors resting above the crater.
Just as the top levels of a skyscraper are often filled with elegant restaurants and the most luxurious of rooms, the bottom two floors of the groundscraper will include an underwater restaurant, an athletic complex for water sports and 10-meter deep aquarium.
The quarry’s surrounding cliffs will be used for extreme sports like bungee jumping and rock climbing.
The project’s developers at the Shimao Property Group worked with British engineering firm Atkins to bring the idea to fruition and expect to near completion in late 2014 or early 2015.
The theme park and hotel are expected to cost at least $555 million and nightly room rates should start at approximately $320.
Existing quarry
Source
architecture, buildings, built environment, Green Architecture, Green Built Environment, Landscape Architecture, modern architecture, modern buildings, Sculpture
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architecture, Atkins, China, Hotels, InterContinental Shimao Shanghai Wonderland, room luxury hotel, Shimao Property Group, skyscraper, Tianmashan Mountain, travel
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The individual home of character as the place to enjoy private family life seems to have been increasingly sidelined in these times of standard-pattern pre-assembled housing units, perhaps no longer keeping up with the need for mobility and flexibility. It therefore pleased us very much when a young family of four had the wish and the confidence to work with us to design a custom-built home meeting their needs. The objective was a flexible design that could evolve as family circumstances evolved, and would allow harmony between individual needs for time alone and family needs for time together. The house they had in mind would function like a living thing and would have a place for all the bits and pieces that make up everyday life. It would be a friendly house, with special places for feeling at peace and secure. Over a period of dialogue together, and using a series of variations, models and simulations, we reviewed in depth just what it was felt a family home should offer, and an overall concept was developed.
The building, completed in April 2005, is the result of this intensive process and reflects a very real need for new, characterful home living environments. The house in question is located in the Lichterfelde district of Berlin, in the former garden of a villa built during the prosperous Gründerzeit years of the late 19th century. The actual property is accessed via its own laneway, leading past the villa in front. As it stands transverse to the access lane, approaching visitors can look through a large window straight into the central part of the house. The glowing fire in the fireplace here is in keeping with the historic and elegant appearance of the house itself. The paved forecourt leads to the entrance area, which is designed to meet the topography of the grounds. The entrance to the house is at a sunken ground level, where there is a spacious foyer with a cloakroom and service areas. The single flight of stairs leads directly to the house’s main communal space, including kitchen and dining area. Beyond the fireplace and the freestanding stair to the next floor, and on a split level, are the living-room and the parents’ private rooms.
The upper storey has the children’s bedrooms, the gallery in front of them being intended as a shared play area. Structurally the house is a single volume, zoned off through wall and ceiling elements. The arrangement of the rooms along two parallel access corridors running from the study in the east to the patio creates an enfilade effect which can, where required, be extended or shortened by sliding doors. At the same time, the house’s longitudinal height change marks a zoning-off of private and communal space, offering the alternatives of seclusion or participation. The fireplace is at the centre of this series of rooms and can be seen from all sides. A soothing and cheering central focus. Cupboards and shelving space have been positioned along the whole length of both storeys, on north and south sides of the house, to provide the entire storage and servicing space needed for the adjoining rooms. This feature minimised the need for free-standing furniture and helped create living-space. All internal walls can be moved to meet new accommodation requirements as they arise. The organisational principles involved here were a priority in planning and the outcome contributes greatly to the restful appearance and great flexibility of the interior design. The interest generated by the external shape of the building derives from the central, hall-like interior space, in turn resulting from the remarkable horizontal displacement of the upper storey and thus also of the opening up of the interior space.
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Existing Mall
Lakeside gardens, dining rooms hovering over water, grassy new amphitheaters and underground pavilions at the foot of the Washington Monument have emerged as finalists in a design competition to overhaul neglected sites on the National Mall.
Designers and architects are dreaming big for a chance to improve the place sometimes called America’s front yard. One vision calls for a garden “museum without walls” in part of the mall called Constitution Gardens. Another would “peel up” the landscape of the Washington Monument to reveal a theater and visitor amenities below ground.
The Associated Press had an exclusive early look at the results of a competition conducted by the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall. The finalists’ concepts will go on display Monday through Sunday at the Smithsonian Castle and National Museum of American History.
The Stage II Finalists of the National Mall Design Competition
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The Taiwan Tower is a Sustainable Twin Syscraper for the 21st Century The Taiwan Tower is a proposal by Vienna-based architect Steven Ma in Collaboration with San Liu, Xinyu Wan, and Emre Icdem. This highly innovative project consists of a set of super slim twin towers that reach a height of 350 meters where an observatory and sky-park is located. The plinth of the towers is formed by an intrica…te set of museums that will exhibit Taiwan’s past, present, and future. Each of the three museums configures itself around recreational areas that include a water plaza, an outdoor theatre, a green house, and an event plaza. Another interesting feature is the location of four different types of hanging gardens along the towers’ structure with high-end residences and an aviary for endangered bird species. Among the sustainable features, the Taiwan Tower is equipped with water recycling plants, wind turbines, and a beautiful set of photovoltaic cells placed along the sky-garden and on top of the museums’ undulating surfaces.
architects, architecture, buildings, built environment, carbon-neutral office building, Design, eco building, Green Architecture, green buildings, Green Built Environment, modern architecture, modern buildings, new buildings, skyscraper
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Emre Icdem, San Liu, Steven Ma, Taiwan Tower, Xinyu Wan
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Architect and Battery Park City resident Jordan Gruzen speaking at Community Board 1’s full board meeting on March 27, in opposition to the NYPD’s planned barricades and street closures around the W.T.C.
Downtown Express photo by Terese Loeb Kreuzer
Jordan Gruzen, partner in the award-winning firm of Gruzen Samton Architects, doesn’t often make an appearance at Community Board 1 meetings, but he felt strongly enough about the N.Y.P.D.’s proposed World Trade Center security plan to show up at C.B. 1’s full board meeting on March 27 to speak against the plan.
Gruzen is co-chair of New York New Visions, a coalition of 21 architecture, planning and design organizations that first met a week after 9/11 in a pro bono effort to address the issues surrounding the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. At the Community Board meeting, Gruzen said he was speaking on behalf of New York New Visions.
“We are very concerned that the World Trade Center plan that has taken thousands of hours of individuals’ input to make it a vital, beautiful and fabulous urban place that people visit from all around the world, not be spoiled,” he said.
He referenced the Police Headquarters plaza, which his firm designed, and called conditions there “atrocious.” After 9/11 it was barricaded and blocked off from vehicle access.
“It’s a vital piece of the city that’s been allowed to fall into disrepair and we don’t want that to happen to the World Trade Center. There’s too much thought [put into it] and it’s too central to our culture and to our city’s vitality.”
In a telephone conversation after the Community Board meeting, Gruzen elaborated.
He said that for years, the members of New York New Visions had been privy to the plans for the World Trade Center site and had played an important role in formulating them. “We were treated as trusted confidantes who would put our best minds at it,” he said, “and we had some of the best names in the New York professional offices – notable architects who have a lot of integrity. At this point, we’ve been pushed aside and told [by the N.Y.P.D.] ‘it’s our decision. It’s our decision alone.’”
Gruzen said that New York New Visions concurred with Community Board 1, which has drafted a resolution spelling out the ways in which the proposed security plan would create unacceptable logistic problems for residents and businesses in the World Trade Center vicinity.
There would be checkpoints around a “superblock” and streets connecting the World Trade Center site with the rest of Manhattan would be essentially closed to traffic.
“The taxi drivers have said this isn’t going to work,” Gruzen said. “Lower Manhattan won’t be serviced the way it should be. There will be backups. I think the N.Y.P.D. is trying to be very responsible. I think they feel an obligation to the country and to the world. But the way they’ve interpreted that responsibility is having a consequence.”
Gruzen said that the members of New York New Visions did not have enough information at this point to make specific recommendations as to what should be done. “We need all the facts and we need to be treated as insiders,” he said. “We have been, for 10 years. Lately it’s been more and more difficult to access information and data, so one naturally draws the conclusion that the game is being played by the strictest and most extreme rules. That might be O.K. or it might not be. I don’t think we have the answer. All we’re saying is that with something as serious as this, we ask for a citizens’ design board to participate and be trusted and be allowed to at least express ourselves and hopefully find solutions that might lead to a ‘reasonable’ amount of risk in a high security area.”
Community Board 1 has a similar agenda. “We’ve asked for the creation of a citizens’ advisory committee so that we can work with [the N.Y.P.D.] as the study is being done to make sure that they consider the things that concern us,” said Michael Levine, director of planning and land use for Community Board 1. “If we wait for publication of the final draft Environmental Impact Statement, we have no idea what they will consider. They could ignore everything we’ve said.”
C.B. 1 chairman Julie Menin concurred. “Technically, we don’t have a right to block the plan but I think we’ve been able to show at Community Board 1 for many years that when we have an idea, and we make a lot of noise, we can get things done,” she said. “This is our time. Now is our time to try to change the plan.”
Source
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Design is complex. There is little that is more complex to design than a home, however fundamental issues offer an architect a starting point; where is the sun? How do we capture it in winter, how do we exclude it in summer?
The thin allotments that dominate Melbourne’s northern suburbs often provide indomitable constraints to solar access and therefore require the production of unorthodox ideas to overcome these constraints and convert them into opportunities.
The site faces north therefore relegating the backyard, the family’s primary outdoor space, to shadow throughout the year. In the 90s a two storey extension was added reducing solar access even further while creating deep dark space within the house. A family of five wished to create a long-term home, which could meet the requirements of three small children and their slow transformation into young adults over the years.
Rather than repeating past mistakes and extending from the rear in a new configuration, the proposal was to build a new structure on the rear boundary, the southern edge of the block, upon the footprint of what had been, until now, the back yard. The new structure faces the sun, the pure cantilevered box above acts as the passive solar eave, cutting out summer sun, while letting winter sun flood in.
Following the decision to build at the rear of the block a ubiquitous modern box was first imagined. Soon it seemed necessary to pursue the opportunity to activate this new, once shaded, now sunny facade. A seat along the new northern facade? Perhaps a series of steps like the Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti? But how does one lounge in the sun on steps. Perhaps a slope instead …. And the hill house evolved/emerged.
The new structure faces the original house. The backyard is now the centre of the house activated by the built form around it. Beyond solar gain, the benefit of the new structure being in the backyard is that it borrows landscaping from its neighbours’ gardens. The high windows about the entertainment cabinetry and the dining area are enveloped in trees. Internally one gets the sense that Hill House is enveloped by bush rather than part of the suburban mix.
Along one boundary a 2m high fence was created, but unlike most houses the Hill House has a one metre wide fence; a corridor lowered into the site to achieve head height. This in turn creates a lowered dining area. One rises into the living space. The change in floor level creates a bench seat for the Maynard designed ZERO WASTE TABLE.
Front Street no longer provides the main entry to the home. Family now enters via the side lane. The original house, now private dormitory spaces, no longer has a typical relationship to the N#@$%k street’s “front” door. The original house, as with most narrow blocks throughout Melbourne, demanded that visitors walked a long corridor past bedrooms to the living area. Stolen quick glances into dark private spaces always occurred along the journey. At the Hill House the entry is reorientated. The kitchen, the nerve centre, the hub of the house, is the new greeting point. Beyond is the park. Adjacent is the living space, the yard and the “kids’ house” beyond.
The old house is converted into “the kids’ house”. The old house is as it once was. The rear of the simple masonry structure, though spatially connected, is not reoriented, a face is deliberately not applied. It is left honest and robust. With a restrained piece of “street art” to be applied.
Andrew Maynard Architects was established in 2002 following Andrew’s receipt of the grand prize in the Asia Pacific Design Awards for his Design Pod. The core principles in the establishment of AMA was a balance between built projects and broad polemical design studies. This is demonstrated in AMA’s highly crafted built work and socio-politically based concepts both of which have been widely published and have garnered global recognition.
Andrew Maynard Architects explores architecture of enthusiasm – AMA treats each project as a unique challenge, offering unique possibilities and prides itself in experimentation. All of AMA’s designs are concept rich, left of centre and sustainability conscious; styles and singular themes are avoided. AMA specializes in ideas rather than building type, whether the project be a house in Fitzroy, a library in Japan, a protest shelter in Tasmania, a plywood bicycle or a suburb eating robot. Andrew Maynard Architects continues to be published in many prestigious international journals such as Mark Magazine [Amsterdam], Architectural Record [US], Architectural Review [London], Monument. Houses A + T [Spain], Architecture Australia, Wallpaper [London] and Pol Oxygen. AMA’s conceptual and built work has been exhibited in New York, Budapest, Melbourne, Sydney, Osaka, Milan, Sao Paulo, Tokyo and more.
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architecture, Design, eco building, green building, Green Built Environment, Landscape Architecture, modern architecture, Residential, Sculpture
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