Our projects from the archives this week include a 15 meter cantilevered vernacular house, a bamboo sustainable campus, and two projects – a house and a cultural center – that both utilize perforated metal as an exterior facade. We couldn’t help but include the hundred foot house, a gallery with a rain skin of natural cedar, a guest house that was assembled in just one day, and a museum and house that both incorporate polycarbonate as a main material in the design. Featured after the break are these projects and their highlights along with a link to their original project feature on ArchDaily.
Balancing Barn
The cantilevered house measures 30 meters long, with a 15 meter cantilever over a slope, plunging the house headlong into nature. The traditional barn shaped house has an exterior that is covered in reflective metal sheeting, which, like the pitched roof, takes its references from the local building vernacular and reflects the surrounding nature and changing seasons.
At the midpoint the Barn starts to cantilever over the descending slope, a balancing act made possible by the rigid structure of the building, resulting in 50% of the barn being in free space. The structure balances on a central concrete core, with the section that sits on the ground constructed from heavier materials than the cantilevered section. The long sides of the structure are well concealed by trees, offering privacy inside and around the Barn.
The Green School
The Green School is a giant laboratory located on a sustainable campus straddling both sides of the Ayung River in Sibang Kaja, Bali, within a lush jungle with native plants and trees growing alongside sustainable organic gardens. The campus is powered by a number of alternative energy sources, including a bamboo sawdust hot water and cooking system, a hydro-powered vortex generator and solar panels.
Local bamboo, grown using sustainable methods, is used in innovative and experimental ways that demonstrate its architectural possibilities. The result is a holistic green community with a strong educational mandate that seeks to inspire students to be more curious, more engaged and more passionate about the environment and the planet.
Salt Point House
In the most basic terms, this is an open-ended cedar box house, lined in maple plywood and overlaid on two sides with corrugated screens of perforated, stainless steel. Outside, the rippled screens, veils of stainless steel, simultaneously hide and reveal, filtering readings out to the landscape and in to the structure’s pure volumes, its solids, shadows, and flickering voids.
Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center
The Diego Portales building, like no other, has been a major player during a period in Chile’s recent history that was characterized by political and social division. Therefore, it provided an exceptional opportunity to transform what was once a historical burden into a celebrated cultural center. The perforated weathered steel exterior of the cultural center creates an immediate visual link between past, present, and future.
The design for the refurbished building was to immediately address the surrounding environment, providing a new relationship to the previously unacknowledged surroundings. The architects decided to focus on four main concepts: openness to the city and its urban relationships across a large deck with loose volumes under it, the creation of new public space, the opening of the building to the community by incorporating community programs, and the legitimacy of the project through the incorporation of as many social agents in shaping a new benchmark for the city.
House in the Green Belt of Budapest
Situated on a small plot the concrete house in Budapest incorporates traditional Hungarian building materials from the seventies (raw concrete) mixed with today’s modern concrete technologies to create a design that belongs within the Budapest green belt.
T Space
This new gallery by Steven Holl features a rain skin of natural 2×2 cedar that is suspended on stainless steel screws. The interiors are painted plywood and the floor is sanded marine plywood with all the stains of the 4 month construction process exposed.
Silver Shack
Situated within the crowded urban neighborhood of Sangsu, Korea the building was inspired by its surrounding environment of recycled elements, corrugated panel roofs, and the Sangsu’s power plant. The building’s translucent polycarbonate is fixed on to a standard steel frame to show the 13MM aluminum-coated insulation and circulations spaces.
The simple massing includes studios and apartments that are supported by two hollow piles. Working within a strict budget, the architects used common construction materials in an innovative way to reach the desired aesthetic and energy requirements. The staircase is enclosed by a steel frame and polycarbonate panels, and the depth of the interior is visually uncertain, as elements are seen through a fuzzy transparency.
Hundred Foot House
Here, exterior space penetrates the interior, and the procession from outside-in-and-outside-again is monumentalized as a fully transparent slot, stitching the house into the landscape. Embedded along the slope the hundred foot house features fully operable glass facade that has the visual and experiential effect of doubling the width of the living space.
The walls and roof are considered as a continuous skin that wraps the interior with varying degrees of porosity. Throughout the house, the floor, casework, and interior partitions are unified as a single system, a single material. Storage spaces and objects float in the center of the bar, emphasizing the perimeter’s ambiguous relationship with the outside.
National Glass Museum
Bureau SLA was commissioned to turn two existing buildings into a home for the National Glass Museum – the result four pedestrian bridges that draw everything together in an elegant manner. The polycarbonate paneled pedestrian bridges are covered by a translucent skin of grey, powder-coated, aluminium mesh and they serve as a connective thread through the museum as well as a uniquely designed display space for the museum’s objects. During the day the pedestrian bridges contrast sharply with the refined old villas, whereas at night they glow in reflection of the 9000 glass objects inside them.
Guest House in Vato
The small guest house in the outskirts of Stockholm serves as an annex to the traditional home of a family whose needs have grown with time. This efficient design leaves the floor surface uncluttered and makes the room feel more spacious than what it really is. The 42 sqm little house was constructed with a prefabricated wooden frame, assembled in just one day, and clad with black sheet iron.
