Pritzker inspired reclaimed architecture

Site/Program The Sonoma Retreat was created as a private exercise, meditation and relaxation space for a businessman and his family. The building, while adjacent to the main house, was sited far enough away to provide complete privacy while in use. The program involved the creation of a primary meditation / workout / yoga studio with an adjacent steam room, changing rooms, bathroom, refreshment bar, private sundeck and an outdoor shower. Design Located on ten acres of rolling hillside above the town of Sonoma in Northern California this private retreat is a freestanding structure adjacent to an existing rammed earth house. Partially hidden amongst a grove of Oaks, Manzanita and Madrone, two curved earthen walls gently carve into the la... More

This villa is designed for a couple with a collection of drawings and graphic art by contemporary artists. It comprises two bedrooms, a guesthouse, a studio/kitchen and a big hall. The storage of the artworks shapes the core of this house. The different spaces of the villa are formed by surfaces extending out of a central element. These surfaces become the display walls for the artworks. The main structure is made out of steel profiles that previously constituted a machine used for textile production, an industry once very important in the region. Inside we re-used the building site-elevator. The facade is clad with wooden slats from redundant cable-reels harvested at a local cable factory. 1000 cable reels provided enough material for t... More

Ningbo, locating in the east coast of China, is a historical and cultural city which has 7,000 years of civilization and 1,200 years of city history . Since the reform and opening up, Ningbo has become one of the most developed cities. Ningbo Museum is the symbol of Ningbo culture. It is a comprehensive museum with geographical features, showing the history of humanities and arts. Ningbo Museum costs 250,000,000 yuan, covering an area of 60 Mu (an unit of area, 1 Mu equals to 666.66㎡) with 303,250,000㎡ building areas. Welcome to Ningbo Museum’s website. From here, you will learn more about Ningbo Museum, Ningbo, and China. And welcome you to visit Ningbo Museum. You will find lots about the past and present about Ningbo, China and even t... More

This private residence occupies the site of a partially-ruined steading, or traditional farm building, within the Cairngorm National Park. The house follows the L-shaped footprint of the original structure to create a family dwelling that offers all the comforts of modern design while retaining the vernacular structure’s intimate connection with its landscape setting. Bedrooms and more private areas lie within the restored stone east wing, benefiting from its significant thermal mass, while flexible open-plan living areas are housed within a light new timber structure clad in lapped boards of untreated Larch. Sheltered from prevailing winds by the two arms of the house, a south-facing terrace offers views out over the Cairngorms and draw... More

After Fast Architecture “Ghigos Ideas” and “LOGh” are back to design an ecological and sustainable architecture, together with the students of the Interior Design course at the Politecnico di Milano. The disposal of plastic bags becomes the opportunity to complete and bring life to an unfinished public building in Ameno (Novara, Italy) during “STUDI APERTI Arts festival”. The project aims to up-cycle shopping bags turning them into a dress for an architecture: having in mind the words "nothing can be neither created nor destroyed, everything can only be transformed" students have reused the shopping bags, now banned from sale in supermarkets. It‘s a work that aims to be a step towards an ecological awareness about recycle and reuse, a... More

Following Jestico + Whiles’ RIBA award-winning Building Schools for the Future (BSF) refurbishment and redevelopment of Stoke Newington School, the school approached the practice to design a new sixth-form centre to provide for an expanding cohort. The resulting two-storey L-shaped building connects to the original school. Abutting the northern boundary, it maximises the tight site’s available space to form a courtyard between it and the original school, responding to courtyards used throughout the 1967 Brutalist design. The modest new extension subtly blends in as a subordinate form, allowing the original masonry and bush-hammered concrete building to dominate, and the bold corten frontage of the BSF addition to remain as the beacon si... More

Once occupied by a dilapidated dwelling, this new residence explores how contemporary, sustainable architecture can rest peacefully with heritage neighbours. The split-level residence follows the natural topography of the site and leads one along a continuous walkway of recycled timber before opening to the double height northern living zone. This central spine through the linear pavilion also links the internal and external spaces through a system of pivoting, sliding and louvered screens. A central courtyard allows the house to breathe and provides varying degrees of openness and intimacy, light and fresh air. Sustainable living solutions include double glazed windows with Argon gas, rain water harvested into a series of underground... More

The fire station is situated on the edge of Houten, in allotments along the De Kruisboog road, an area where the architecture of the allotments served as inspiration for Jeanne Dekkers Architectuur. Wood and transparent materials from the architecture of greenhouses were, with an emphasis on detail, translated into the building in a contemporary manner. The reference to the name Houten (wooden in Dutch) is not entirely coincidental. By using transparent materials, the work of the fire station is made visible. Despite the fragile nature of the cladding material, the building is nevertheless robust, which expresses the ruggedness of the fire brigade. The station has a simple program that eventually resulted in a clear design fully based on t... More

Fruin's Kolonihavehus is a simple garden shed is intended to provide state workers with a refuge from cramped urban living conditions. Formed than 1,000 pieces of reclaimed materials, installation Fruin's extraordinary life, including computer-controlled light sequence by Nuno Neto, sound installation by Astrid Lomholt and featuring collaborations with CoreAct. Located on the Royal Danish Library’s plaza. Performance of the Copenhagen-based company led by Anika spread around and Helene Kvint. More

Designed by Omer Arbel, 23.2 is a house for a family built on a large rural acreage outside Vancouver in the West Coast of Canada. There is a gentle slope from east to west and two masses of old growth forest defining two “outdoor rooms” each with a its own distinct ecology and conditions of light; the house is situated at the point of maximum tension in between these two environments, and as such acts at once to define the two as distinct, and also to offer a focused transition between them. The design of the house itself began, as a point of departure, with a depository of one hundred year old Douglas Fir beams reclaimed from a series of burned down warehouses. The beams were of different lengths and cross sectional dimensions, and had a... More

This house is part of the revitalization of the Rosedale neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas. It is near the University of Kansas Medical Center, nestled on a relatively secluded site with a broad exposure to the southern sun. It was the first LEED Platinum certified house in the Kansas City metropolitan area and targets net zero energy use over a calendar year but produces as much energy as it uses. The house’s barn-inspired design conforms to the neighborhood while updating the classic gable with clean lines and large expanses of glazing. Everything is streamlined including the PVs on the roof that are set flush with the wood rainscreen to retain the clean lines of the building’s form. It is a 2,500 square-foot, four-bedroom, two-an... More

The clients, their children grown, wanted to scale down their lives and build a smaller, three bedroom house, with a ground floor family room that could become the master bedroom in the future, should stairs prove too arduous. An important design directive was that the house "fit" among the traditional homes surrounding the site, built in the New England Shingle Style, as well as a place that spoke of family; that their grandchildren would have fun visiting. The client's desire for comforting images of home became the central question of the project: how to provide the familiar, while making something meaningful. The idea was to embrace the expected forms and materials of the surroundings that have come to represent domicile not in a nos... More