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Scooped by
Lauren Moss
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Wharton's new San Francisco Campus in the historic Hills Brothers Coffee Plant earns LEED Gold with the help of Gensler.
The campus expanded the school's presence on the west coast by moving into the historic Hills Brothers Coffee Plant on the Embarcadero. Designed by Gensler, the sustainable renovation of the space into a word-class teaching facility schools some of the other buildings in the city with eco-conscious materials, a green cleaning program and locally-sourced food for the cafeteria.
Gensler designed the adaptive reuse of the 37,000 sq ft facility, which includes state-of-the-art group study rooms and amphitheater-style classrooms with HD video conferencing. Renovation and upgrades included a strong focus on natural daylighting, use of locally-sourced and eco friendly materials as well as the installation of energy efficient lighting, equipment and systems.
Considered ahead of its time even in the 1960s, when it was first built, the Palazzo Campari building, (now La Serenissima) located in the historic centre of Milan is today a refurbished modern wrap.
New owners commissioned firm Park Associati to refurbish the landmark on the corner of via Turati and via Cavalieri in the historic centre of Milan, with careful attention to the preservation of its character. They also wanted to turn an inefficient building into an efficient one and provide a modern make-over.
Other distinct features like reclaiming space on the ground floor opened up the areas, while pulling back elevations made it possible to eliminate cold bridging.
This, along with other energy-conserving measures got the building a Gold LEED certification. Useful floor area was relocated, allowing new spaces to be built and given away for tertiary use. Meanwhile, the landscaped courtyard, which forms the heart of the complex, has been reinterpreted in a contemporary setting...
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Scooped by
Lauren Moss
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Barwon Heads in Victoria is undergoing a period of significant change. Heritage restrictions currently protect older fishing shacks whilst the remainder of the seaside town is progressively being redeveloped. The architecture now emerging is significantly contributing to the evolution of this small coastal township. The interesting circular building form of this house emerged from the architects Jackson Clements Burrows exploring circular forms, which resulted in a circular skylight over the first floor living areas and the overall shape of the house mirroring and immersing the structure into the Ti-tree dominated landscape. The house is wrapped in a skin of vertical cedar battens, which not only provide privacy and solar protection but also blur the division between the built form and the landscape...
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Scooped by
Lauren Moss
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A consortium led by Australia’s LAVA has won an international competition to design a national stadium and sports village in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Its concept blends traditional Ethiopian architectural and construction practices with new technology to create a modern piece of infrastructure. The team was selected by Ethiopia's Federal Sport Commission (FSC), which wants to replace the current 25,000-seat national stadium with a 60,000-seat stadium and related sports facilities. FSC wants to begin construction in 2014. Traditional Ethiopian architecture includes examples of excavated historical structures, including ancient rock churches as well as dwellings and cisterns. The team's concept, which includes a sunken arena surrounded by grandstands formed from excavated material, captures elements of those traditional treatments in the stadium’s design...
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Scooped by
Lauren Moss
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Incorporating the ruins of a former mill, the Bogbain Mill residence designed by Scottish studio Rural Design, does not lack originality. In developing the new building plans, the architects started gathering ideas from the site, where old walls were inhabited by green plants, as nature was taking over: “Our clients brief was for a large family house. We were keen to re-imagine the building in a progressive form, layering a series of forms over the ruins to create a clear juxtaposition of old and new. All the forms create new and intriguing courtyard spaces, allowing our client to engage in his passion for gardening.” Even though the interior use of wood and stone pays tribute to the character of the building, once inside, it is difficult to believe this impressive residence was once a former mill. Space and elegance are the main characteristics of this home in Scotland, which we invite you to discover in detail.
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Scooped by
Lauren Moss
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The building is essentially a cover protecting the remains of a Roman assembly (thermal baths, forum and domus) in the archaeological site of Molinete Park in Cartagena, Spain.
This cover is certainly another piece in the urban area of Cartagena whose main architectural challenge is to reconcile very different architectures, from the roman times, passing through baroque to contemporary architectures, making them vibrate together in the neighborhood. It is a transition element, between very different city conditions, in size and structure, from the dense city centre to the slope park.
The primary goal of the project is to respect the existing remains, using a long-span structure, which requires the least amount of support for lifting the cover. The intervention unifies all the remains in a single space, allowing a continuous perception of the whole site. The cover also generates a new urban facade in the partition wall.
The project also pursues a sense of lightness and is conceived as an element that allows light. The inner layer is built with a modular system of corrugated multiwall translucent polycarbonate sheets. The outer layer, constructed with perforated steel plates, qualifies the incidence of light and gives a uniform exterior appearance.
Besides to the steel structure, the project proposes an elevated walkway parallel to the street. It is a very light structure hanging from the steel beams. Conceived as a glass box, with a faceted, partially visible geometry, it builds the street façade and allows a view of the ruins from three meters height. It is also accessible for disabled visitors. This high path permits an overall vision of the roman remains.
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Scooped by
Lauren Moss
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Green roofs are not new; they have been used for thousands of years because they helped insulate, thrived in the sun instead of rotting, and other than the increased structure, they were cheap as, well, the dirt that they were planted in. Then flat roofs came in and were covered in tar and asphalt, which needed a lot of maintenance. Engineers and architects didn't worry much about them; nobody could see them. Roofs became parking lots for equipment.
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Lauren Moss
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A mantra here is that "the greenest building is the one already standing." There have been far too many posts about the loss of yet another Paul Rudolph houseor the razing of yet another brutalist classic. Often it is claimed that modern buildings are energy sinkholes and are impossible to modernize. Then there is the Williams-Levant house, built by architect and former Frank Lloyd Wright employee Barry Byrne in 1934 for the pianist/ comedian Oscar Levant in Westport, Connecticut. It not only has been saved and modernized, but it actually has been renovated to Passivhaus standards, no easy feat, by Doug Mcdonald of Mudagreen.com, with Ken Levenson and Gregory Duncan as Passive House consultant...
The original Passivhaus standard was designed for new construction, with siting and sun angles being an important consideration. You can't do much about that in a renovation, so a special standard, EnerPHit, was developed by the German Passivhaus Institute. It calls for a reduction in thermal bridges, improved air tightness, high quality windows and a LOT of insulation, resulting in energy savings of between 75 and 90%...
Read the complete article for more on the strategies employed in the modernization of this historic structure.
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Scooped by
Lauren Moss
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Revisiting traditional construction techniques, French architecture studios JKA and FUGA have converted an 1826 farmhouse into a luxury villa. Conceived as a sundial and exposed in its four façades to the path of the sun, Villa Solaire responds to its environment while maintaining historic integrity.
Located in the district of Pied de La Plagne, Morzine, France, the volume was singled out by the municipality as a landmark for traditional architecture. Seeking to preserve its appearance while allowing light to enter the building, the architects used a traditional technique of decorative cut-outs within the uniform wooden cladding in a simple and contemporary pattern.
"Throughout the year, the surrounding roofs and buildings cast their shadows on the façades," state the architects. "The pattern within the cladding is designed to respond to the path described by these shadows". JKA and FUGA further explain that the house was conceived as a sundial, exposed in its four façades to the path of the sun: thus the name Villa Solaire...
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Lauren Moss
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House DS is a minimalist extension to a farmhouse residence in Belgium and a beautiful example of residential restoration, preservation and reuse... A typical Belgian farmhouse, known as a ‘fernette’ inspired this addition to House DS in Destelbergen, Belgium. Architects Graux & Baeyens addressed the client’s request of ensuring the addition would provide ‘spacious, bright and contemporary living’ and molded the idea of 4 rectilinear volumes as extensions of the existing building, creating a stark contrast between old and new, past and present. A fifth volume in the form of a pool house also serves as a shed for additional storage. The proportions of the new volumes, the unobtrusive appearance of its minimalist interiors and the well-designed layout of the spaces that connect the two structures present an elegant way of two styles coexisting.
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Lauren Moss
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The intervention in the church of the convent of Sant Francesc, located in the Catalan town of Santpedor, converted the building into a cultural facility, allowing the building to be put to use as an auditorium and multipurpose cultural space. In the future, a third stage will allow the upper floors of the chapels to be used as a historical archive. The renovation of the building has been developed with the goal of differentiating the new elements constructed (using contemporary construction systems and languages) from the original elements of this historical church. With the aim of preserving all aspects of the building’s past, the intervention has not hidden traces, wounds or scars. Thus, they have remained visible depressions, holes where the altarpieces once were, traces of missing elements. The construction and the building methods used have sought to strengthen the church without deleting the signs of deterioration the building has suffered. The intervention has sought to preserve the building’s historic legacy by adding new valuesthat enhance it and give this ancient convent a unique, contemporary form...
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Lauren Moss
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On England's Suffolk coast, architects from London firm Haworth Tompkins have made unlikely bedfellows of prefab architecture and historic building preservation. Dovecote Studio was created from the ruins of a Victorian-era dovecote, which was used as a frame for a Cor-ten steel "lining". The inner form was lowered by crane into the aging brick structure. Say the architects: "The result is a building that from a distance evokes the ghost of the original structure, but, seen from close to, reveals itself as entirely new." The new form functions as an artist's studio, with a skylight in the north side of the roof that illuminates the plywood interior, which includes a mezzanine with a desk and corner window overlooking marshes towards the sea.
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Lauren Moss
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For buildings of comparable size and use, old buildings are almost always the greenest buildings. Buildings eat up a huge amount of energy—about two-fifths of the country’s total use—so to suppress their appetite for power, efficiency entrepreneurs are churning out a suite of nifty technologies, like automatically shading windows, smarter thermostats, and high-tech heating and cooling systems. But a new report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab concludes that constructing new, energy-efficient buildings almost never saves as much energy as renovating old ones. Renovated buildings outperformed new buildings on energy savings in every category: single-family homes, multifamily complexes, commercial offices, “urban village” mixed-use structures, and elementary schools. Though the conclusion may seem counterintuitive in an age of ambitious LEED standards in many new buildings, consider that it uses more energy and creates more impact to construct an entirely new building than to fix up one of the same size for the same purpose. The only exception to the lab’s finding was converting a warehouse to a multi-family dwelling, which required enough extra materials that creating a new building was the greener choice...
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Scooped by
Lauren Moss
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Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum chose its new home in the city’s Depot District carefully. Located in a former produce warehouse, the project calls attention to the city’s history of railroad transportation and red brick architecture while emphasizing its commitment to sustainability and adaptive reuse. Led by Brooks + Scarpa Architects, the project included renovation of the existing 21,000-square-foot structure and the addition of a 900-square-foot entry pavilion. The glass-enclosed lobby reinterprets the location of the original building’s loading dock with an expanded and folded canopy that announces the building’s new purpose and balances the effect of daylight on its interiors.
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