The zigzag

Jean LurçatCollège in Saint Denis is at the junction of two basic fabrics: one landscape and one cityscape.An area of scattered low-rise detached housing which is unstructured but constitutes the neighbourhood’s identity and presents a friendly human scale on Rue Diderot and Rue d’Alembert. The Parc des Sports which opens onto the La Courneuve landscaped park and provides the school with an open perspective and a strong link with green spaces and gardens of the city.The school is both in the middle of nature surrounded by greenery and very near to the low-rise housing around it. The challenge with this building is that it must be integrated into the site without masking the park landscape, while linking the domestic, maternal scale of h... More

The Groninger Forum is a lively podium for information, presentation and participation, where interaction and flexibility play a central role. The building is designed to fit seamlessly into its surroundings, whilst offering a new prototype for interdisciplinary relationships. The main occupants of the building – museum, library, cinema and archive – collaborate on activity and event programs, creating a varied and dynamic venue. Along with the numerous meeting places for visitors – news café, restaurant, bookshop, roof terrace, sky lounge and zig-zagging escalators - the architecture supports and encourages this collaboration and the participation of the public. The glass façade also plays an important role in the relationship between the... More

Featherstone Young were appointed by Providence Row to design a new arts and activity building as part of the Dellow Centre - their day care facility in Wentworth Street in London's East End. Providence Row is a homelessness charity that provides support to homeless people in Tower Hamlets (one of the UK's most deprived districts) and the City of London. The Dellow Day Centre provides essential services such as food, clothing and showers, helping to restore users’ health and dignity. The new building will allow Providence Row to operate a range of structured and meaningful activities for their users. The ground floor will house a bike workshop, enabling users to develop their skills and set them on the first steps towards employment. The... More

The location is on the edge of the planned 650 apartments which was finished year ago. Also this apartment block is social type and was sold to Slovenian Housing Fund. The given urban plot of the building was 4 floors high, 58 meters long and 15 in width. Since the orientation of the building is towards the busy highway the apartment opening together with balconies are shifted as 30 degrees window-wings towards the quieter and south orientated side. In the future also 2 more blocks are planned on both longitudinal sides; therefore there are no direct windows towards east and west. Each apartment has view towards its own balcony, sometimes there is also a glazed loggia. On this way intimacy is created and there will be no direct views... More

Architecture as an experience. Sensory architecture, experienced through the architectural tour, through the surprises, the turns and the bends. Architecture as a challenge. The forms and spaces contained, as well as the times are pushed to the limit. Complexity and record time: three months to project and build. Dramatic and expansive architecture that reflects the frozen instant of trains crashing in the air. Located over the side lane of the highway in the entrance to Toluca, in the edge of a 300 meter long insubstantial industrial installation that used to pass unnoticed, the new object appears with the spectacular nature of a window display. Half way between Mathias Goeritz’s The Snake and Munch’s Scream, this zigzagging origami ris... More

The museum building, dedicated to the oeuvre of Appenzell artists Carl August Liner and his son Carl Walter Liner, belongs to the category of the monographic museum. However, the rooms are not designed to house particular paintings by either of these two artists, but rather, are dimensioned to accommodate changing presentations of the work of father and son as well as exhibitions of contemporary art. The rooms are therefore more general than specific in nature. They are quiet, simple spaces that seek neither to exaggerate nor to compete with the works of art. They show a minimum of detail, have bright walls, poured concrete floors, and are illuminated by daylight coming in through windows set in the gabled roof overhead. The dimensions o... More

Located in the foothill of Mt. Fuji, Japan Guide Dog Center is a place for training guide dogs. The number of this institution is only a few in Japan, and this program was totally unfamiliar to us. In order to design a building with unique program like this case, there are many criteria to be met. However, instead of answering one by one, we were thinking how to create a place satisfying those criteria – sometimes contradicting such as independence-wholeness or security-openness, for example – at once seeking through the theme of designing distance. The final idea came up with a format of connecting small buildings by a corridor, which sounds very simple rule. The buildings are designed according to the phase of dog training and gather... More