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HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Bjarke Ingels Group’s 8 House, Copenhagen

May 15, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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Looking out onto the Kalvebod Faelled on the edge of the Copenhagen Canal in Southern Ørestad, 8 House is the largest ever private development to have been undertaken in Denmark and comprises 61,000 square metres of residential space as well as 10,000 square metres of retail and office space. Designed by Danish outfit Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), its fundamental design principle is that all types of families and people can be accommodated within the building – young/old, nuclear/single-parent households and growing/shrinking families. Progressive in this ambition, people are accommodated in flats and townhouses which have been variously put together in non-traditional forms and tied together in a literal bow-shaped plan with two communal garden courtyards. Retail and office spaces are located on the lower floors, while there is a promenade and cycle track to the 10th floor. The building has been shaped according to access to views and light, so that one corner is dropped to ground level.

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Villa de Madame Manorama Sarabhai, Ahmedabad, India

May 1, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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After featuring Christian Pottgiesser’s incredible staircase and a Le Corbusier-inspired house last week, our latest House of the Week combines the two: a Le Corbusier house with a great stair. Villa Sarabhai is the house that Corb completed for Madame Manorama in Ahmedabad, India, in 1955. It was commissioned for her growing family on a verdant 20-acre park owned by the family. The house is constructed of brick, concrete and white rendering. The structure comprises cradle-vaults of flat tiles set in plaster without formwork and rows of bricks cast roughly in cement. The architect’s technical response to the climatic conditions of India is inventive and imaginative in multiple ways, for example the roof is covered with earth to become a garden with a lawn and flowers. However, a particularly beautiful detail is its external slide and stair combination. Made of concrete as a single entity, the slide goes from the first floor terrace straight into the swimming pool while the stair is an extracted zigzag to its side. Other great details are the gutters crossing the elevations and water spouts which project far from the facade.

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Galvani House by Christian Pottgiesser

April 24, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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As part of yesterday’s post about the tightness of space in British homes compared to Europe, The Modern House introduced the French architect Christian Pottgiesser in the images. Today, we have decided to make another Pottgiesser design our House of the Week. Galvani House was completed by the architect in 2003 and is an infill building located between two bourgeois homes in Paris. The building is a kind of rear gateway extension to a small, three-storey Parisian mansion and was commissioned to accommodate a further seven inhabitants. The site already started out with a garden which the clients wanted to retain and Pottgiesser made possible by opening up the building at ground level using glazing. Inside is a sloping rock garden with two enclosed staircases, one of which leads to the upper levels and the other leads down into the basement, a living space, which runs the length of the site, connecting the old building with the new. The visible slope at ground level cleverly hides a garage. The detailing within the house, including its unusual staircases which are suspended off the ground, its overlapping of spaces and levels, and its use of stone and timber, has been likened to the work of Mexican architect Luis Barragán. To see more information about the project and for drawings visit: Christian Pottgiesser

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht

April 21, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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Regarded as one of the very first houses that kicked off the Modernist movement, the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, the Netherlands, was designed by Gerrit Rietveld for Mrs Truus Schröder-Schräder and her three children, shortly after she was widowed. Completed in 1924, this is a two-storey end-of-terrace house that makes no attempt to relate to its neighbouring buildings. The building’s exterior is a collage of planes and lines whose components are purposely detached from, and seem to glide past, one another. Inside, the house is even more radical. While the downstairs can be considered traditional with separate rooms leading off a central stair, the first floor is a dynamic, changeable open zone and with a system of sliding and revolving panels, can be adapted for any kind of use. The interior and exterior are designed to be architecturally porous so that the rectilinear lines and planes flow from outside to inside, with the same colour palette. The windows are even hinged so that they can only open 90 degrees to the wall, further blurring the boundary between inside and out. Although Rietveld did continue to design Modernist houses, including some just over the other side of the 1960s motorway adjacent to the house, this house has been considered his greatest work.

The house is now visitable through guided tours with the Central Museum of Utrecht, for more information, see: Rietveld Schröder House

The Modern House co-founder Albert Hill wrote an article on the Rietveld Schröder House for The Telegraph in 2010, visit: The Telegraph

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Rem Koolhaas’ Maison à Bordeaux

April 10, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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This week’s House of the Week has to be one of the most architecturally exciting houses of the 1990s. Designed by Dutch practice OMA in 1998, Maison à Bordeaux is a private residence on a hilltop overlooking the city in France. The house comprises three levels, of which the lower level is a series of rooms carved out of the hill, designed for the most intimate life of the family; the ground floor on garden level is a glass room – half inside, half outside – for living; and the upper floor is divided into a children’s and a parents’ area. Aside from its playful use of materials, full-height round windows and doors, stacked volumes, elements and cantilevers, the most fascinating feature of the house is a 3m x 3.5m open elevator platform in the centre of the home. Designed as a floating floor, this platform functions as the study for the man of the house who requires the use of a wheelchair after a serious car accident several years before the house was commissioned. The floor moves freely between the three levels to become part of the living space, kitchen, wine cellar or an intimate library and office space. The house has also been the subject of an endearing and entertaining film entitled Koolhaas Houselife by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoîne about its maintenance. To see more about the film and watch a trailer, visit: Koolhaas Houselife, and for more information about OMA, visit: OMA

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Casa Collage by Bosch Capdeferro Arquitectures, Spain

March 20, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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This week’s House of the Week takes us to Spain, where despite continuing economic gloom and housing crises, young architects are producing innovative and joyful designs for houses. This house, designed by Bosch Capdeferro Arquitectures for themselves, is located in Girona, about an hour’s drive north-east from Barcelona in Catalonia. The architects, who established their practice in 2003 in the same town, renovated a gothic house – planned around two courtyards – that had suffered neglect for over a century. Bosch Capdeferro’s approach to the renovation was to retain original features – chimneys, portals, windows, staircases – and enhance their presence through the use of adjacent and contrasting stuccoed walls, encaustic, ceramic tiles and fabric sunshades. These new interventions provide the comfort and character befitting the new use of the house, as well as being a bold statement of the ambitions of Spanish design. The tiles are particularly impressive for their modern interpretation on traditional patterns and colours. For more about the architects, visit: Bosch Capdeferro. To see other period buildings with exceptional modern interiors, as well as superior conversions and extensions, penthouses and loft apartments, visit: The Modern House

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Planetveien 14, Oslo

March 13, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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Planetveien 14 is the house that Christian Norberg-Schulz designed for himself in 1955 in Oslo. Only in his mid-twenties at the time, the architect designed the house as part of a housing development with Arne Korsmo. Although Norberg-Schulz (1926-2000) was a trained and very talented architect who was distinguishing Norway’s Modernism movement from a young age, he is most remembered for his contribution to western architectural history and theory during the Post-modern period from the 1970s. In his writings and research, Norberg-Schulz took particular interest in Classical architecture and the baroque. His house was designed as part of a new private suburban development on the slopes of the Vettakollen, with striking views down to the Oslo fjord. However, the ten-house development was to be built in phases and in the end only three of the properties were built – Norberg-Schulz’s, Korsmo’s and one for the original landowner. The house is seen as an important stage in the history of Norwegian architecture for introducing concrete construction into the single family dwelling, advancing the aesthetic of the flat roof, using bold colours and interpenetrating platonic volumes. With its glazed, segmented rear elevation and visible curtains inside, the house is reminiscent of John Winter’s house in Highgate featured on the blog yesterday and currently for sale, as well as Casa Arco by Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Chile

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Marina City by Bertrand Goldberg, Chicago

March 6, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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As a rule of thumb, European Modern architecture is famed for its concrete whilst North American Modern architecture is known for its steel. One of the most impressive and delightful exceptions to the rule, however, is the post-war Marina City designed by Bertrand Goldberg in 1959, which at time of completion in 1964 was both the tallest residential building and tallest reinforced concrete structure in the world. Located on the banks of the Chicago River, downtown in the Loop, Marina City comprises two identical, primarily residential, 65-storey towers adjacent to one another and occupying a full city block. Their form, with circular plan and fanned balconies, strongly resembles forms taken from nature, in particular the corncob. The project was one of the first ‘city within a city’ schemes that aimed to reinvigorate urban centres to avoid desertion to the suburbs. It was therefore designed with numerous on-site facilities including a theatre, gym, swimming pool, ice rink, bowling alley, several stores and restaurants, and a marina at its base flowing into the river. The lower 19 floors of the tower are occupied by car parking for the apartments which were rental properties until 1977. Goldberg’s Marina City had considerable influence worldwide, at Corinthian Tower in New York and no doubt at Chamberlin, Powell and Bon‘s Barbican Estate towers in London. For flats for sale or to let on the Barbican Estate, visit: The Modern House

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Piet Blom’s Cube Houses, Rotterdam

February 27, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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The Dutch certainly like to experiment with design, and their planning regulations seem to encourage it. One of the most extraordinary and imaginative housing projects in the Netherlands has to be Piet Blom’s Cube Houses, or Kubuswoningen, in Rotterdam. Completed in 1984, this housing block was designed to be high density. By tilting the cube of a conventional house 45 degrees and resting it upon a hexagonal tower, the houses achieved small footprints but large total surface area inside. Having already completed test versions of the houses in 1974 and 1977, at Rotterdam the complex is much larger with 38 small cubes and two so called ‘super-cubes’, all attached to each other. These houses attract a great deal of attention in Rotterdam, to such an extent that one resident has made a living by opening their house up to visitors as a ‘show cube’. In 2009, the larger cubes were converted into a youth hostel by Personal Architecture run by Stayokay.

HOUSE OF THE WEEK: House on Cap Ferrat by Lacaton & Vassal

February 20, 2013
HOUSE OF THE WEEK

HOUSE OF THE WEEK

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This 1998 house by Lacaton & Vassal has to be an all-time favourite. Located on Cap Ferrat in the bay of Arcachon on the Mediterranean coast of France, the house is an excellent example of the 1990s residential architecture which attempted to take the high-tech architecture movement into the domestic setting. Lacaton & Vassal’s house, however, sets up a perhaps even more unexpected contrast, pushing this type of architecture one step further. Instead of high-tech being opposed to nature as it inherently suggests, the house demonstrates how the two need not be opposites. The plot was one of the few remaining available on the coastline and one of sand dunes covered with arbutuses, mimosas and pine trees. The architects desired to retain the site’s special features and avoid unnecessary damage to the landscape which can be seen all across the bay already. To do so, the architects drove twelve micro-piles into the ground in between the trees and assembled a metal frame to support the enclosing walls of the house on top. The house’s walls were built around the existing tree trunks of the site so that they penetrate vertically straight through the building. These trees traverse the house in special holders adapted to their swaying, their growth and their maintenance in a good state of health. The elevation of the side of the bay was left open and glazed; the three others are more closed and intersected with transparent bays and windows. The height beneath the platform is variable, but always sufficient to permit one to pass under it.

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