Categories
House

Openhouse – XTEN Architecture

open-house-1

A beautifully executed house with a commanding view of Hollywood. Designed by L.A. based firm XTEN Architecture. The husband and wife team Austin Kelly and Monika Haefelfinger once said Monika is rational while Austin is the opposite. It sounds like that the Yin and Yang balance makes the practice work.

open-house-2The horizontal folding form capture ones eyes and expresses itself as the main structure while the vertical elements are obviously secondary or even non-existent at times. The sliding glass panels making up the majority of the walls disappear into carefully designed pockets.

The indoor and outdoor forms a continous space with the smooth flow of flooring material out to the balcony, taking in the city skyline in its entirity.

open-house-3 The interior is clean and minimalist with very few colours. You would not need any more colours when you have the blue sky, city lights and a well manicured green garden brought into your home every minute. I can see both the rational minimalist and the expressionist working in this design.

I would absolutely love to own it (and rent it out to make a profit) or visit this place to appreciate the aesthetics but I cannot imagine myself living in it.

Although I love minimalist designs, my domestic self is messy, I prefer things lying everywhere around me with easy access. I collect and showcase my books, my CDs, my decades of architecture magazines. I have bookcases on every imaginable vertical surfaces in my room. My dockets have to be on my table or I will lose them forever, etc etc.

This house is designed for those who love orders and neatness. I might need some external force to balance me out before I can live in minimalist houses like this.

Photographs:
designmilk @ Flickr (Licenced by Creative Common)

References:
Architectural Record

Further Reading:
Home Design Find
XTEN Architecture

[hide 5]

open-house-4

open-house-5

open-house-6

open-house-7

open-house-8

open-house-9

open-house-10

open-house-11

open-house-12

Architect’s Statement

The Openhouse is embedded into a narrow and sharply sloping property in the Hollywood Hills, a challenging site that led to the creation of a house that is both integrated into the landscape and open to the city below. Retaining walls are configured to extend the first floor living level into the hillside and to create gardens on two levels. The front, side and rear elevations of the house slide open to erase all boundaries between indoors and out, connecting the spaces to gardens on both levels.

Glass, in various renditions, is the primary wall enclosure material. There are forty-four sliding glass panels, each seven feet wide by ten feet high and configured to disappear into hidden pockets and allow for uninterrupted views and access to exterior terraces and gardens. There are also fixed glass walls, mirror glass walls and light gray specular glass panels which lend lightness to the interior spaces.

The glass walls are visually counterweighted by sculptural, solid elements in the house rendered in stone, dark stained oak, tinted concrete and plaster. The use of cut pebble flooring throughout the house, decks and terraces continues the indoor-outdoor materiality, which is amplifed when the glass walls slide away. The building finishes are few in number but applied in a multiplicity of ways throughout the project, furthering the experience of continuous open spaces from interior to exterior.

Set in a visible hillside area above Sunset Boulevard, the Openhouse appears as a simple folded line with recessed glass planes, a strong sculptural form at the scale of the site. The minimalist logic of the architecture is transformed by direct and indirect connections to nature. With the glass walls completely open the house becomes a platform defined by an abstract roof plane, a palette of natural materials, hillside, gardens and the views.

[/hide]

Categories
Civic

Spanish Pavilion, Expo 2008 – Francisco Mangado

spanish-pav-3

We did not hear too much about Expo 2008 last year in the northern Spainish city of Zaragoza, partly because it was overshadowed by the Olympics in Beijing and also probably because Australia did not participate.

spanish-pav-2The theme chosen for last year was “Water and sustainable development”. The issue of sustainable water supply is directly related to our survival on this driest continent on earth. It was quite curious that Australia decided not to take part in it.

Designed by Francisco Mangado, the pavillion was one of the main focus of the expo. The 750 classical columns made from terracotta were placed around a glass-walled hall. The columns supports a thin roof which acts as solar and water collector.

spanish-pav-1The columns were intended to draw water up with a osmosis process through the clay and the evapouration of this water would cool down the building.

The columns were arranged in a pattern resembling a bamboo forest. The strong Spanish sun cast long and dense shadow to control the heat load. The reflection of the shallow pool gave a sublime sense with the use of water, the theme of the expo.

The use of fluted columns signified the continuity of western architectural traditions into the era of conservations. The tranditional form was transformed into an energy-conserving device. I wonder if the columns had a symbolic meaning that we should look into tranditional ways of living when we fight for the sustainability of life on our planet.

Photographs: (from top to bottom)
arquitextonica @ Flickr (Licenced by Creative Common)
srgblog @ Flickr (Licenced by Creative Common)
pictfactory @ Flickr (Licenced by Creative Common)

Further Reading:
Expo 2008
Designboom
Francisco Mangado

Categories
Civic

Green Void – LAVA

green-void-21

I was in the Customs House last weekend. The overwhelming installation “Green Void” by LAVA was still there (until 10 June 2009) and it turned RED.

green-void-31Red lights and green lights indicate the exact opposite at road junctions. In the same sense, the calm, soothing green fabric installation connecting different sides and levels around the huge atrium became red: mysterious and dangerous. Looking through the tube hovering above me, I felt that it could suck me up and throw me out in an alternative universe. Just a change in colour can stir someone’s emotion.

green-void-11Slowly, green bubbles started to appear at the bottom. Were these going to spread and make the whole thing green again?

I suddenly thought of its similarities to the large number of products, building materials and architecture that claimed to be environmentally friendly. Are they truely green? Or is it just a tint of green light shone on a white surface? It might even turn into an opposite colour with a flick of switch by mistake. Many so-called “green” products use a lot energy in production, some “green” buildings requires careful control to work. Architects need to look into all that and make informed choices. Not easy.

Dr. Chatterjee wrote in Architecture Australia (May/June 2009, p.26) “The installation is capable of satifying a casual visitor as well as a highly learned audience.”

This is so true. But am I a casual visitor or a highly learned individual?

I stood there and sank into deep thinking.

Photographs:
Author

Reference:
Architecture Australia – May/June 2009, p.25-26

Further Reading:
Customs House
360 degree panorama by Peter Murphy
ArchDaily
LAVA

Categories
House

House N – Sou Fujimoto

house-n-3

House with a “box-in-a-box-in-a-box” concept for a retired couple.  They asked the architect Sou Fujimoto to reinterpret their home in a simple way when they decided to rebuild their house in Oita City (Kyushu, Japan).

Photo: japanese_craft_construction @ Flickr (Licenced by Creative Common)The outer box has no glass, so the space inside are still classified as external and not counted towards floor space. The middle box is the house.  The interplay between the outer and middle boxes creates a playful overlay of openings and solid on the walls and the roof. The inner box is the living / dinning hub in the same proportion as the middle box.

Photo: japanese_craft_construction @ Flickr (Licenced by Creative Common)I can’t help but to link this to the nesting dolls made by traditional Japanese craftsmen. Removing an outer doll to reveal an inner one is a metaphor of coming closer to your true self. The house with three shells also gives visitor a strong sense of coming closer to the real heart of the occupant’s domestic life. The shells roughly correspond to layers of privacy, public, semi-private and private in the concept of home we learnt from architectural school.

It was reported in the Architecture Review article (April 2009, p.50) that the neighbours are not alienated by the scale of the house.  All I can say is that, I wish the older generation in Australia and their neighbours are more open to ideas alternative to the usual suburban house.

Photographs:
japanese_craft_construction @ Flickr (Licenced by Creative Common)

Reference:
Architectural Review – April 2009, p.48-53

Further Reading:
Coolboom
Sou Fujimoto Architects

[hide 5] house-n-1

house-n-2

house-n-91

house-n-8

house-n-41

house-n-61 [/hide]