Roman Quarry by AllesWirdGut Architektur

The building is designed in the deconstructivist style -with a limited palette of concrete, untreated timber and corten steel. The material choice accentuates the counterpoint of ramp and landscape by matching most of the materials to the colour of the surrounding sandstone, leaving the corten steel as the only strong visual element.

Roman Quarry
Design Team: AllesWirdGut Architektur ZT GmbH
Location: St. Margarethen, Austria
Status: Completion 2008

The quarry near St. Margarethen in eastern Austria is a special location with a 2,000-year-old history. In the 1950s, a sculpture symposium was established. Later, passion plays were performed there, and today the arena also provides a natural setting for an annual opera festival.

With the steadily growing numbers of visitors (up to 6,000 an evening), a redesign of the entire infrastructure became necessary. The underlying idea of the winning concept was to treat every area as part of the mise en scène and to integrate the rocky landscape into all phases of a visit to the theater.

Impressed by the rugged beauty of what was essentially a derelict industrial site and by the precise works the artists had installed there, the architects saw their design as a continuation of the sculptural tradition. This called for a clear, yet simple formal language.

The access route leads from the car park to the entrance structure. After passing through a short linking tunnel, a breathtaking view of the arena opens up to visitors. From here, the centrepiece of the design – a 330-metre-long ramp that is also accessible to the disabled – makes a broad zigzag over rocks, ravines and the roof of the service structure, finally leading down to the festival location, which is 19 metres lower. Especially at the turning points along this route, visitors can pause to admire the sculptural quality of the project.





The form of the ramp and the facade to the entrance structure are precisely defined through the use of preoxidized steel sheeting. This is not just a reminiscence of the industrial past of the location; it also meets quite pragmatic needs. The pre-corroded surface provides protection against the weather as well as against vandalism in the winter months. Wherever visitors are likely to come in contact with these surfaces, though – at the box office, catering counters, toilet entrances, etc. – white fibre-cement sheeting has been used, which creates a more refined note in contrast to the rough sandstone and the rusted steel.






via detail.de | alleswirdgut

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Brooklyn Children's Museum by Rafael Vinoly Architects

"The design of the Brooklyn Children's Museum is a force for shaping the creativity of young minds," says Rafael Vinoly. "Its expanded presence in the neighborhood elicits a visceral, instinctive response in children that's exciting to see."

Brooklyn Children's Museum
Design Team: Rafael Vinoly Architects
Location: Brooklyn, New York, US
Status: Completion 2008
Awards: AIA Tennessee Award of Excellence, AIA East Tennessee Award of Honor

Seeking expanded capacity to serve a growing audience of children and families, the Brooklyn Children's Museum wanted a new public presence that would contribute to the vitality of the surrounding community. Rafael Vinoly Architects has achieved this by creating a distinctive L-shaped, two-story structure that differs from its context in color as well as physical form, yet remains welcoming and deferential to the museum's existing built fabric. The plan doubles the museum's space to 102,000 square feet and is expected to expand its annual visitor capacity from 250,000 to 400,000.

The architecture of the new building is compelling and inviting to children, its glittering envelope of 8.1 million yellow ceramic tiles creating a landmark attraction. The implemented design completely reimagines the existing 1977 museum, both expanding and reconfiguring it. Two stories of new construction add a library, exhibition galleries, cafe, and classrooms. The new building's expanded plan and second-floor galleries are integrated with the existing structure through open staircases and vertical circulation cores, providing visitors with a wider array of circulation options. The design provides access to the existing rooftop terrace and outdoor theater, linking these spaces directly to a second-floor Kids' Cafe. Throughout the building, specially-designed features ensure that the architecture remains child-accessible: for instance, additional wooden handrails are mounted at a low level, and porthole windows punctuate the building envelope at a variety of heights and angles, yielding a series of unique elevated perspectives on the neighborhood.




Whenever possible, construction utilized rapidly renewable and recycled materials and also incorporated high-performance/sustainable features. The museum will be the first in New York City to employ geothermal wells for heating and cooling purposes.

The Brooklyn Children's Museum is planned to be New York City's first LEED-certified museum and the first to tap geothermal wells for heating and cooling purposes. Wherever possible, construction utilized rapidly renewable and recycled materials and incorporated high-performance/sustainable features. Photovoltaic cells on exterior walls convert solar energy directly into electrical power, and energy-saving sensors control the interior lighting and ventilation systems.







via Rafael Vinoly Architects

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Treehouse Hotel by Dass

The Treehouse Hotel is an experimental project of architecture and design that addresses essential topics to the future of our society. The theme of the sustainable city seeks from the beginning a reading of the footprint of the city, in the present and the future, in order to make it neutral in all respects: energy, carbon emissions, food, tradition, employment, housing, moving , waste, diversity, nature ...

Treehouse Hotel
Design Team: Dass
Location: Jardim da Estrela, Lisbon, Portugal
Status: Completion 2009

The Treehouse Hotel was built in the Jardim da Estrela and served as a "hotel" during Experimenta Design09. The inspiration of this Micro hotel is not architecture, but nature itself. The scale of the micro-architecture allows us to have an experimental vision of the creative process, to create and investigate new forms and features that are associated with this type of scale. It is an opportunity for developing new materials and methods of pre-production, saving natural resources.

The Treehouse Hotel is literally a living capsule built in wood, with a strong formal image. It freely resembles an abstract space-ship with its oblique planes in an overall triangular tridimensional shape. Its interior space is unified as living room and bedroom with the inherent infra-structure. The envelope is then opened with individual windows that propose specific points of view to the surrounding garden strongly related to the corporal appropriation of the interior space. With Treehouse Hotel, Dass present us an idea of living the contemporary city. Instead of a mere sequence of daily routines, urban life can also be composed of a series of peculiar moments of discovery that breaks the visual and perceptual blindness of repetition. In fact, strangeness and unpredictability can be another way of revitalizing our experience of the city, proposing new ways of seeing and feeling what one arrogantly thinks to know already. In this sense, Treehouse Hotel is truly a machine for intensifying urban life: "Rather than creating an exhibition or a seminar, the Treehouse Hotel offers the opportunity to create something beautiful, not only formal but to achieve the perfect combination between form and function, between man and his context, emphasizing the ephemeral character of Life, Nature and the City. The simplicity of the idea of creating a Treehouse that can be rent and lived becomes a message that in the event of the temporary Experimenta Design09 in Lisbon can become eternal."






via Treehouse Hotel

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Concert House Danish Radio by Jean Nouvel

Jean Nouvel’s design approach, both the container and the auditoriums and spaces within assume a vastly different character depending on the time of day you visit, with its scaffolding-like blue box by day and fun-house lighting at night.

Concert House Danish Radio/ Copenhagen Concert Hall
Design Team: Ateliers Jean Nouvel
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Status: Completion 2009

Concert House Danish Radio, which belongs to Danish Radio and is the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, sits on the outskirts of historic Copenhagen. With no built environment upon which Nouvel could establish a link to, the architect took the risk of following a completely new path. Nouvel converts the location’s lack of definition in urban planning terms into something positive by creating a presence, an identity, that is an exceptional urban building respecting the planned layout of the site.

From the outside in bright light, it looks like nothing more than a large rectangular blue box in an industrial landscape. When the sun goes down, it is transformed into an ethereal, dematerialized object with images of musicians eerily flitting across the screens of glass fiber with a PVC coating. The multilevel interior foyer also changes personality by day and by night. In broad daylight, the main lobby looks like an airport from a 1940s war movie, where sun streams through large window walls and illuminates the dark concrete floor and military-style furnishings designed to resemble flight crates for musical instruments. At night, the tough-glam lobby takes on the iridescence of a multimedia nightclub, with projections splashing polychromatic patterns and videos across various surfaces.




The Main Concert Hall, Studio 1, seating 1,809 and raised above the lobby, it looks in section like some giant clam caught among pilings within a huge (190 by 315 feet) blue cage, 148 feet high. Nouvel called in Yasuhisa Toyota, who was also the consultant on Disney Hall, to design a space that could provide the right mix of direct and reflected sound with the appropriate reverberation time, and ensure a sense of clarity without dryness. Angled walls of CNC-milled birch-veneer board with textured grooves provide reflectivity and absorption, supplemented by “wave” walls of layered gypsum board in the upper part of the auditorium. In addition, lacquered birch-veneer panels on the ceiling and a sound reflector canopy over the stage modulate the acoustics in the hall where the ceiling soars to a height of 77 feet. With the birch walls stained a warm chestnut tone and the wave walls imbued with lush reddish and ocher tints by decorative painters Alain Bony and Henri Labiole, the room has the roseate candlelight glow of traditional concert halls.





While Nouvel placed this largest hall in the upper reaches of the building, he sank three smaller music spaces about 8 feet below grade. The largest is a 540-seat rehearsal and concert hall (Studio 2); the next is a flexible black box (Studio 3), which accommodates 170 people standing or sitting for various musical fare; and a small, red concert hall that doubles as a production studio for 180 people (Studio 4). The three ancillary performance halls reveal distinct acoustical capabilities. Four strata of birch-paneled sliding doors in Studio 2 heighten the reflectivity of sound for orchestra rehearsals. In Studio 3, black gypsum-board wall panels open to absorb sound and provide a short reverberation time. Finally, in Studio 4, red aluminum-and-felt panels pivot for acoustical flexibility, for both recording and rehearsal use. Numerous music rooms, offices, and archives placed on the north end of the building supplement the performing arts spaces, and receive additional light by virtue of an elevated, outdoor courtyard.

Jean Nouvel won the competition to design the about 592,000 square foot concert hall in 2002, a fourth component of DR City, a 1.42-million-square-foot complex for Danish Radio’s offices, TV, radio, and orchestra productions.






via archrecord | Jean Nouvel

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