Noho loft

This Project, Noho loft is located in New York, United States and was designed by New York architect architect which has specialties: residential, institutional, hotel, gallery and exhibition design, Joel Sanders with associate architect Andrea Steele and landscape designer, Balmori Associates for real estate developer Matthew Blesso offers a fresh take on green architecture, demonstrating that you don’t have to forgo high style in the interest of saving the planet. The design 3200 sq ft loft is predicated on the notion that if you merge building and landscape, by bringing nature in and pushing living space to the outdoors, unexpected things can happen.

The loft’s interior is awash in lush vegetation, sustainable woods and natural fibers. Exterior wood decking and plants flow into the heart of the penthouse forming a “planted core” that separates the private and public realms. A glass wall separates the bathroom from the planted zone, allowing the owner to bathe surrounded by vegetation. This “living wall” links the interior to the roof. An open staircase provides access to a rooftop garden planted with grasses and sedum, which has been transformed into a veritable “living” room furnished with a mini-kitchen, a large movie screen, and an outdoor shower surrounded by lush vegetation.

Gary Chang’s Apartment

Hong Kong architect and technophile Gary Chang has the most amazing apartment. His 344-square-foot space can be shifted into at least 24 different layouts, using a funhouse’s worth of sliding walls and detachable shelving.Chang has lived in this apartment since he was 14, moving in with his parents and three younger sisters. Back then, he used to sleep in the hallway. Now, he uses a hydraulic Murphy bed that he designed himself, which is usually hidden behind a sofa during the day. Turning his apartment into what he’s named a “Domestic Transformer” hasn’t been cheap. It only cost $45,000 to buy, but his latest design efforts came with a $218,000 price tag.“using shifting wall units suspended from steel tracks bolted into the ceiling, the apartment becomes all manner of spaces — kitchen, library, laundry room, dressing room, a lounge with a hammock, an enclosed dining area and a wet bar.” (nytimes.com)his apartment is decorated with alessi dishes, arne jacobsen cutlery, or what mr. chang calls an “altar of muji accessories”.

quotation from interactivearchitecture.org: “ultimate spatial flexibility is created through the multiple operations of the partitions. lighting. and mobile furniture. all the mundane necessities of bachelor life – books. cds. clothing, pictures. stereo, videos are stacked on a chrome factory shelving system and hidden discreetly behind floating white curtains. the central space becomes the actual space for living, working, eating, sleeping, chatting, dressing and reading. blue fluorescent tubes are carefully placed to wash the floor with an unearthly glow, while bright up-lighting articulates structural members. the main aperture of the front window offers views to the world beyond whether the actual view out of the window, or through the large scale movie screen to the fantasy world of hollywood, the real world of news, or the electronic world of internet.”

Loft 34

Project Details

• Project Name: Loft 34
• Client: Private
• Project Type: Residential Design
• Principal Designer: Oliverio Najmias
• Location of site: Palermo Viejo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Site Area: 70 square meters
• Built-up Area: 120 square meters
• Cost of Execution: 250 USD per square mete

The Cascade House by Paul Raff Studio

Oriented on a strict Cartesian axis, the house is designed to maximize its potential for natural light. The integrated design combines a high-performance building envelope with passive solar design systems as an effective environmentally-responsible strategy for its northern context. A two-storey tall expansive window along the buildings south facing elevation allows the low winter sun to penetrate and warm the house. An internal triple height slate wall captures available solar energy and keeps the house warm during evening hours. Smaller apertures within the wall dapple adjacent rooms with light while its resonance within the house frames views and anchors internal circulation.

Along the street façade is a prominent glass privacy screen made from 475 panels of 19mm vertically stacked glass. Set in a crenellated pattern, this sculptural screen allows a maximum diffusion of light while providing visual privacy from the street. The screen also becomes a striking element when viewed from the street. Even on the greyest days of the year, its subtle shifts in colour and texture imbues the street with vitality. When viewed from the interior, the ethereal light quality evokes being caught up in the crest of a wave or being suspended behind the cascade of a waterfall. At its opposite end, the room opens out to a generous terrace and pool, extending the interplay of light and water in a continuous flow between interior and exterior space

Casa Tropical by Camarim Architects

Mundaú is a fishermen’s village in an immense beach in the state of Ceará, in Northeast Brazil. 3º 10′ 42.51” South of the Equator, years are split in wet and dry seasons, with temperatures ranging from 22ºc to 33ºc. Heavy rainfall from January to July ensures a fertile ground where vegetation flourishes until December.

The clients wanted a holiday house with 3 bedrooms that allowed wide possibilities of contact with nature. We have replaced the conventional solution in domestic architecture - a compact volume with internal circulation - with a gallery that surrounds the 3 floors of the house, and corresponds to 50% of the total area. Both the wooden skin that envelops the gallery and the suspended roof, shelter the house from the Sun while keeping it permeable to the cool South wind, avoiding the need of air-conditioning.

We thought of systems in which earth, Sun and shadow, coconut trees and other trees, dunes and sea, would complement the design of the house, suggesting a condensed and sensual experience of close and faraway nature.

3 Floors: 3 Landscapes totally diverse in use and means of approaching nature. 1: the podium, at street level, looks over the garden. Two volumes sheltering ancillary functions leave an open space for permanence, with wide views over the garden, under the shadow of the house above. 2: the rooms are accessed via the gallery, which is wrapped in a wooden skin that negotiates privacy, views, ventilation and shadow, this last one treated as a living ornament. The walls have the roughness of hand crafted bricks, painted ice white. 3: the living room is a house on the trees, a wooden house on top of the concrete house. The open roof leaves space for 3,20 m high glass panels, merging coconut trees, dunes and sea in the open plan interior.

Another house was here before, a weak construction, though with a rational structure. The new house developed around this skeleton, which was reinforced to hold the wooden house on top. The difficult access to Mundaú took us beyond architecture: we designed everything from structure to services, from sliding doors with guillotine system to beds and chandeliers, we were ourselves the building contractors, completing the 490 sqm construction in 7 months. Apart specialized works such as glass and kitchen installations, the construction was carried by local masons and carpenters, with several generations of experience in native materials and techniques, and with few mechanical equipment: it is a building done with the hands. The stacking of autonomous structures, the inverted roof in cantilever, the size of the glass panels, are all new features in the region.

Landscape design consisted of elemental interventions that transformed an agricultural land in a tropical garden. We selected trees and cleaned the ground, leaving the sand on the surface. The parallel irrigation canals, which divided the land, were redesigned as long diagonals across the garden. We modelled the site and laid granite stones from the house to special areas in the garden: a table under a passion fruit pergola, a street access under the generous shadow of an old cashew tree, a lush green hideaway. For the wall, we produced precast perforated concrete panels that draw textures of light and shadow from the nearby foliage, and allow for a diaphanous, circumscribed glance of the garden. The wind that passes through the wall shakes the water and the leaves, generating a cool microclimate during the dry season.

Passive cooling is achieved by means of the gallery: it shelters the interior spaces from the tropical sun, leaving them permeable to the mountain breeze. The wooden skin that wraps the gallery filters glare, protects intimacy in the bedrooms and frames sights. Drinkable water is obtained from the roof, the deep stream or transported by truck; it is then filtered, stored and pressurized to the tap. Energy is generated from sun and wind, intense in the region, or bought from the public network. Hydraulic, electrical, gas and telecom services run in 2 vertical cores accessible from the 5 bathrooms and 2 kitchens for maintenance. In the absence of a public sewage system, we designed a sceptic tank with a super efficient anaerobic filter that cleans up to 90% of the effluent. The energy and service strategy of this house is unprecedented in the region.

Project Architects: Vasco Correia & Patricia Sousa

Putney Mountain Residence by Kyu Sung Woo Architects

The site on the southwestern slope of Putney Mountain is characterized by heavily wooded terrain, large outcroppings of ledge, and dramatic sweeping views. Three clearings in the woods frame the approach to the house from the east and open up the site to the surrounding landscape. The house consists of three simple volumes arranged around a large outcropping of exposed ledge. A living volume faces the western mountains, sleeping quarters face a southern meadow, and a shed volume houses storage and mechanical equipment.

Otake House by Suppose Design Office

The Otake house is located in the West of Hiroshima prefecture, on a high plateau that neighbors the Kamei Park of the Kamei Castle Ruins. To the South is an industrial region and a beautiful mountain range, and to the North a remarkable view of the Seto Inland Sea and Miyajima. We created a design fitting to these two contrasting and beautiful scenes.

We thought of the North side as the type of scenery you take in and savor, and the South side as the type that you place yourself in. Structurally we divided the area between load bearing zones and free zones to make a place that could have two personalities at once.

The North side is open even while closed, with the bedrooms, kitchen, dining area, and wide apertures to view the distant scenery, which at the same time are functional as load bearing parts of the structure. We wanted the South side to be as close as possible to being outside, so we got rid of some structural elements and designed a living area and terrace with a 6 meter eave, treating the terrace and living area as equal to create a free space with no division between inside and out.

Though there were setbacks after considering the structure necessary to support such a large eave, as well as legal safety standards, the building began to take shape. By covering the entire building with water proof material used in ship construction we made a unique and detailed building that doesn’t require sealants or tiling. Furthermore, because the glossy, water proof material wraps around the building inside and out uninterrupted, a nature-like space is created where you can take in the outside scenery and the building and surroundings seem to blend together,

By considering views about execution from the planning stage on, we discovered water proof materials previously unknown to us. In much the same way that an object will look different when seen from different angles, by looking at one project from the different view points of planning, structure, and execution we think we were able to move in a better direction.