Interesting brickwork

The Elements is a private new build house in Hampshire, completed in early 2017 by Winchester based architects AR Design Studio. Adjacent to the stunning River Hamble and its popular marina, it is nestled within meadows rich in native wildlife. With a global collection of friends and family, the client required a large home in which to regularly host and entertain. The home focuses on accommodating a number of guests in the homeliest way possible, providing an experience of a ‘home-from-home’. It is hoped that the home will create lasting memories among visiting friends and family. The massing for the home is divided into three interlocking blocks. Two blocks, one for guests, the other for the family, are connected by a central entra... More

A farm in the sloping Pajottenland landscape becomes a private family home and veterinary practise. A masoned brick shaft that connects the practise, the private home and the garden brings order to a cluster of existing buildings. The shaft was nicknamed ‘the rabbit hole’. It leads to an inside yard, which is also finished in brickwork. From the higher location of the castle of Gaasbeek, the brick roofing of the rabbit hole can easily be spotted. Just like the castle, it has become a visually strong and culturally defining element in the landscape. Once inside the house, other unexpected surprises await the visitor’s eye. Even the smallest of windows frames the age-old landscape with its seventeenth-century castle. Architecture and surrou... More

When the newly-named St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel re-opened its doors on 5th May 2011, it was the culmination of five years of careful and resourceful restoration and £200 million of investment. Working alongside specialist brickwork contractor Irvine Whitlock, Lime Technology supplied its hydraulic lime mortar to ensure the sympathetic redevelopment of one of London’s landmark buildings. Designed by George Gilbert Scott, the Midland Grand Hotel opened in 1873. However, the grandiose, gothic-style hotel welcomed its last paying guests some 76 years ago and was used as offices up until the 1980s. To make the building once again viable as a hotel, it required significant structural works including partial demolition and substantial... More

OMEGA BLOCK – ANGLO COLOMBIANO SCHOOL The Omega Block Building, located in the Anglo Colombiano School, is the summary of three buildings in progression, which are adapted to the morphology of the triangular area disposed for its development. A grand staircase, or tiered seating, ensures a fluid connection between the base plane (ground floor) with level above, while offering a congregational space. With this element, the scale of the building changes, and re-interprets the use of the atrium space. The dominant materiality of the project, large format brick and slender pre-stressed concrete elements (beige in color), binds the outside spaces with that of the large internal atrium space. Further tonal and material compliment is found... More

In 2005, Molenaar & Van Winden was commissioned to carry out renovation and renewal work at plot 7 of Potahof, a 1960s housing estate. The new design has respected the outlines of the original plan: one high building and three lower companions set around a covered car park whose roof provides a open-air deck for residents. The architecture of the ensemble is further characterised by piers decorative brickwork a variation of surface and volume, and the monumental ceramic reliefs that highlight the individual housing units. More

In Utrecht’s museum quarter, just south of the city centre, there was for many years a vacant plot on the corner of Lange Nieuwstraat and Vrouwjuttenstraat. This site in the midst of historical buildings is now occupied by ‘Het Zwarte Huis’ (The Black House), a complex containing six apartments with semi-underground parking and the new premises of Bakers Architecten. The streetscape is characterized by heterogeneous, lot-by-lot development with distinctive corner buildings. Het Zwarte Huis is a contemporary addition to the existing urban fabric, in which the notion of ‘living above work’ has been accentuated by placing the dwellings in a solid volume on top of a glazed podium. Lange Nieuwstraat begins at Domplein and runs via a gentle curv... More

The site is located in the west of the historical center of Morcote in a quarter of residencial villas. It’s a slope with a fantastic view over the sea of Lugano. By foot it’s attainable in about 10 minutes from the center, but the quarter itself doesn’t have any cultural identity. The site offers quietness, a optimum of sun and a good overview. Therefore the architecture of the new building becomes the important task to create a place with a strong identity with a relation to the nucleus of the village and the surroundings. The house is orientated exactly to the small port-town Porto Ceresio on the opposite seaside. To intensefy this conception in the upper floor we nearly closed the walls lateral to evitate the union with the surrou... More

29-Jan-2018 Introduction The Dovecote Studio forms part of the internationally renowned music campus at Snape Maltings, founded by Benjamin Britten in abandoned industrial buildings on the Suffolk coast. Snape Maltings is a nationally important complex of Grade 2 listed industrial buildings, many of them still derelict. The plan for their regeneration included expansion of the music campus, better landscaping, provision of a new visitor centre, and construction of a musicians’ café. The Dovecote Studio completes the project with a studio for visual artists within one of the most sensitive structures on site, the ruin of a dovecote located prominently on the edge of the marsh. Although small in scale, the Dovecote Studio adds significantly... More

These two new homes house two generations of the same family (A renovated Victorian House for the parents sharing a rear garden with a new Mews house for one of the daughters). The now grown-up family had recently moved out of their long-term family home and wanted these new homes to maintain some sense of continuity with their former lives. Two intertwined themes run through both homes, those of memory and tectonic expression. The memories of the family are used as a conscious architectural driver throughout both houses. Their social rituals are given tangible form within the design of the new houses. Typical domestic objects are distorted in material and scale to form a psychological landscape specific to the occupants. The daught... More

Fitzroy High School is a government 7-10 school in inner urban Melbourne. The school had been closed in 1992 but was subsequently reopened in 2004. Fitzroy High School has a strong design curriculum and is a state leader in implementing progressive education models in the class room. In 2008 the scope of the school will be increased to include post-compulsory level students, with the addition of years 11 and 12 raising the projected enrolment from 375 to 600. To facilitate this expansion, McBride Charles Ryan have been engaged to design and document a ‘new school model’ simultaneously accommodating and expressing the requirements and aspirations of a 21st century school. MCR’s design provides for the additional 225 students and 12 staff acr... More