Brickfacadesolutions

What if a house can last at least five generations instead of two? LETH & GORI’s Brick House is a project that creates innovation by reinventing history. By revisiting materials and solutions from historic houses which have proven to be robust and have a long life span a new type of contemporary sustainable house is created. STAMERS KONTOR STAMERS KONTOR Brick House is part of a development project titled Mini-CO2 houses initiated by the philanthropic foundation Realdania. The goal of Realdania’s project is to develop affordable sustainable houses with a low CO2 footprint. A total of six houses have been built on a site in Nyborg Denmark. Each house with a different approach to how CO2 reduction can be achieved f... More

The Ilma Grove house is Austin Maynard Architect's greenest house (so far). Its planning and orientation is based solidly around passive solar efficiency. All roof captured rain water is harvested. It has solar panels, high performance insulation, recycled materials, LowE coated double glazing, low VOC materials and, most importantly, it is small. Ilma Grove house is an extension to a heritage home in Northcote, Victoria. The extension provides a lot more than just additional space to the current home for 3, it provides the environment for a sustainable lifestyle. From the beginning of the design process, the idea of a sustainable home was part of the brief. The client wanted a place which could be practical and could help their famil... More

The project consisted in the refurbishment of the existing school building and extension with the construction of a new adjacent building to accommodate the new program. The new building was designed with a remarkably modern language without however overlapping with the existing architecture. The ground level of the extension building houses a classroom, teacher's room, sanitary facilities and kitchen. The upper floor has three of the new rooms, all with a direct exit to the exterior. In the existing building the old classrooms were converted to kindergarten rooms. The original porch, now centrally located to the entire school, is used as the transition between the existing rooms and the new building, becoming a ce... More

The project involves the redevelopment of a vacant 30 years old building located in a central area within the city of Santiago, specifically in Providencia county,which is transformed into a building housing 7 apartments. CONTEXT The context in which the project is located is one of classic type of buildings, continuous façades, almost all built in the same decade, the 40`s, without any visible intervention in the past 70 years. So the first problem is how a new piece is inserted in a context like this? LIGHT To create luminous interior spaceswas the only customer requirement, a fact that became the trigger for all subsequent intervention decisions. For this purpose, it was decided to enlarge the openings in the façade, which meant... More

Heidelberg Castle ranks as one of the most important Renaissance buildings north of the Alps. Having been partially destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, and on many occasions since, the castle was abandoned altogether in the eighteenth century. Today the famous ruin serves as a museum. Receiving more than one million visitors a year, it is one of the country’s top tourist destinations and makes a lasting impression on international tourists visiting Germany. The purpose of the visitor centre is to familiarize guests with the castle before they proceed to the castle proper. The visitor centre showcases the castle’s history as well as orientating guests so as to ensure a trouble-free visit. In May 2009, Max Dudler’s design prevailed... More

The house is centrally positioned on the building plot at the edge of a residential neighbourhood and opposite a small forest. An explicit orientation to the sun shapes the tripartite composition of the house. Three gardens formally complement the composition, each garden intended for a specific time of day: morning, afternoon, evening. Filip Dujardin A symmetric spatial configuration of three cubes around an equilateral triangle, together with an asymmetric articulation at the carport, defines the building geometry. The volume is developed architectonically through a concrete and blockwork loadbearing structure, brickwork of hand-selected peat-fired bricks in Flemish bond and hardwood carpentry with prominent arched windows on the gr... More

The project aimed to convert, for residential use, the rustic annexes of the eighteenth-century Villa Saccomani, located on the moraine hills a few kilometres from Lake Garda and the city of Verona. Before the project began, the annexes, part of the villa’s prestigious, monumental park, were merely seen as areas of low, architectural value . This negative impact was mainly due to the building, in the twentieth century , of an incongruous extension obtained by elevating walls in concrete blocks on top of the original, picturesque, building which had been constructed with river stone typical of rural buildings of the area. The project foresaw, in the first instance, the demolition of the twentieth century additions stripping the building to... More

The first library of Muyinga, part of a future inclusive school for deaf children, in locally sourced compressed earth blocks, built with a participatory approach. Our work in Africa started within the framework of OpenStructures.net. BC was asked to scale the "Open structures" model to an architectural level. A construction process involving end-users and second-hand economies was conceived. Product life cycles, water resource cycles en energy cycles were connected to this construction process. This OpenStructures architectural model was called Case Study (CS) 1: Katanga, Congo. It was theoretical, and fully research-based. 5 years later, the library of Muyinga in Burundi nears completion. Vernacular inspirations A thorough study... More

The meeting centre offers accommodation to various community activities. The complex of buildings consists of successive constructions, ranging from a 19th century school building and an old town hall to an industrial construction from the 1990s. The dilapidated storage building makes place for enlargement of the meeting hall. That way the back yard becomes an outdoor space for the party room. The gabled roof is replaced by a single slope roof, making the room and space higher, and bringing a better acoustic sound in the hall. The high windows bring light and give views on the nearby church. A central entrance in the armpit of the building complex offers the building an address. The entrance hall connects the different functions and spaces.... More

The Brick Weave House sits on the footprint of a century-old stable on an eclectic block of Chicago’s West Town neighborhood. Removing the original front walls and roof created a garden through subtraction, one which is surrounded by a porous, one-wythe-thick brick screen that both reveals and encloses the private courtyard and house beyond. Variation in ceiling heights and floor levels weaves together the two-story garden at the front of the house with the single-story volume at the back through a cascading section. The screen animates the garden and interior with dappled sunlight, establishing a visual connection to and from the street. Rectangular voids in the screen throw hexagonal patterns of light inside. At night, the pattern reve... More

Concrete Slit House is a contemporary concrete residence enmeshed within a quiet Kuomingtang-era neighborhood in central Nanjing. The entire structure and roof are made from concrete pressed into a custom mould, handmade from five-centimeter horizontal wood strips to remain in scale with the adjacent century-old brick buildings. The slit in the concrete creates transparency as it responds to interior circulation, and provides different programmes with differing interior heights & elevations, thus crates in upper bedrooms half floor volume shifting for its privacy. The living room spans over two stories, the dining area extends over one and half levels, and remaining bedrooms and studies occupy single storey spaces. Even though China c... More

Based on local courtyard houses, the design evolved from the interaction of two brick houses with the surrounding landscape. Terracotta bricks were made from local clay with local knowledge, composing the structure and façades. Skilled village construction workers very familiar with the medium were able to facilitate the marriage of traditional savoir-faire with new and progressive design. Three different textures of brick skin make up the façade. An interlocking pattern leaves perforations between bricks, and protruding bricks cast shadows along the wall. Windows punctuate the texture, and the brickwork along the edges of these portals further develops abstract geometric relations while remaining loyal to the structural logic.... More

Urbanizing the Rural In 2005 the Chinese government announced its plan to urbanize half or approximately 350 million of the 700 million rural citizens by 2030. At the same time, Joshua Bolchover and John Lin set up Rural Urban Framework (RUF), a research and design collaborative based at The University of Hong Kong. Conducted as a non-profit organization providing design services to charities and NGOs working in China, RUF has built or is currently engaged in over 15 projects in various villages in China. The projects include schools, community centers, hospitals, village houses, bridges, and incremental planning strategies. As a result of this active engagement, RUF has been able to document the transformation and issues of contestatio... More

Sra Pou vocational school is a vocational training center and community building in Sra Pou village, Cambodia, built in spring 2011. The school provides professional training, hosts sustainable businesses and is a place for public gathering and democratic decision-making for the whole community. The project started in an Aalto university design studio in spring 2010. We travelled to Cambodia and met the local NGO Blue Tent that was working with the Sra Pou community. They had planned vocational training activities and were in need of a building for them, which would also be the first public building in the community. As we drew the first sketches, the project became so real and the construction so necessary that we ended up collecting fun... More