Style of Design

Architects: Elemental – Alejandro Aravena, Alfonso Montero, Tomás Cortese, Emilio de la Cerda
Location: Iquique, Chile.
Client: Gobierno regional de Tarapacá / Programa Chile-Barrio del Gobierno de Chile.
Engineering: Juan Carlos de la Llera & José Gajardo.
Contractor and Services: Proingel, Abraham Guerra, Constructora Loga S.A.
Budget: US $204 /sqm
Project Year: 2003
Construction Year: 2004
Execution time: 9 months
Materials: Concrete & Cement bricks
Site Area: 5000 sqm
Constructed Area: 3500 sqm
Photographs: Elemental – Cristóbal Palma – Tadeuz Jalocha

The Chilean Government asked us to resolve the following equation:

To settle the 100 families of the Quinta Monroy, in the same 5,000 sqm site that they have illegally occupied for the last 30 years which is located in the very center of Iquique, a city in the Chilean desert.

We had to work within the framework of the current Housing Policy, using a US$ 7,500 subsidy with which we had to pay for the land, the infrastructure and the architecture. Considering the current values in the Chilean building industry, US$ 7,500 allows for just around 30 sqm of built space.

And despite the site’s price (3 times more than what social housing can normally afford) the aim was to settle the families in the same site, instead of displacing them to the periphery.

If to answer the question, one starts assuming 1 house = 1 family = 1 lot, we were able to host just 30 families in the site. The problem with isolated houses, is that they are very inefficient in terms of land use. That is why social housing tends to look for land that costs as little as possible. That land, is normally far away from the opportunities of work, education, transportation and health that cities offer. This way of operating has tended to localize social housing in an impoverished urban sprawl, creating belts of resentment, social conflict and inequity.

If to try to make a more efficient use of the land, we worked with row houses, even if we reduced the width of the lot until making it coincident with the width of the house, and furthermore, with the width of a room, we were able to host just 66 families. The problem with this type is that whenever a family wants to add a new room, it blocks access to light and ventilation of previous rooms. Moreover it compromises privacy because circulation has to be done through other rooms. What we get then, instead of efficiency, is overcrowding and promiscuity.

Finally, we could have gone for the high-rise building, which is very efficient in terms of land use, but this type blocks expansions and here we needed that every house could at least double the initial built space.

SO, WHAT TO DO?

Our first task was to find a new way of looking at the problem, shifting our mindset from the scale of the best possible US$ 7,500 object to be multiplied a 100 times, to the scale of the best possible US$ 750,000 building capable of accommodating 100 families and their expansions.

But we saw that a building blocks expansions; that is true, except on the ground and the top floor. So, we worked in a building that had just the ground and top floor.

WHAT IS OUR POINT?

We think that social housing should be seen as an investment and not as an expense. So we had to make that the initial subsidy can add value over time. All of us, when buying a house expect it to increase its value. But social housing, in an unacceptable proportion, is more similar to buy a car than to buy a house; every day, its value decreases.

It is very important to correct this, because Chile will spend 10 billion dollars in the next 20 years to overcome the housing deficit. But also at the small family scale, the housing subsidy received from the State will be, by far, the biggest aid ever. So, if that subsidy can add value over time, it could mean the key turning point to leave poverty.

We in Elemental have identified a set of design conditions through which a housing unit can increase its value over time; this without having to increase the amount of money of the current subsidy.

In first place, we had to achieve enough density, (but without overcrowding), in order to be able to pay for the site, which because of its location was very expensive. To keep the site, meant to maintain the network of opportunities that the city offered and therefore to strengthen the family economy; on the other hand, good location is the key to increase a property value.

Second, the provision a physical space for the “extensive family” to develop, has proved to be a key issue in the economical take off of a poor family. In between the private and public space, we introduced the collective space, conformed by around 20 families. The collective space (a common property with restricted access) is an intermediate level of association that allows surviving fragile social conditions.

Third, due to the fact that 50% of each unit’s volume, will eventually be self-built, the building had to be porous enough to allow each unit to expand within its structure. The initial building must therefore provide a supporting, (rather than a constraining) framework in order to avoid any negative effects of self-construction on the urban environment over time, but also to facilitate the expansion process.

Finally, instead a designing a small house (in 30 sqm everything is small), we provided a middle-income house, out of which we were giving just a small part now. This meant a change in the standard: kitchens, bathrooms, stairs, partition walls and all the difficult parts of the house had to be designed for final scenario of a 72 sqm house.

In the end, when the given money is enough for just half of the house, the key question is, which half do we do. We choose to make the half that a family individually will never be able to achieve on its own, no matter how much money, energy or time they spend. That is how we expect to contribute using architectural tools, to non-architectural questions, in this case, how to overcome poverty.

Architects: Shuhei Endo
Location: Chuo-ku, Osaka, Japan
Structure System: Suspended Steel Sheet
Project year: 2005
Principal use: Public Lavatory
Site Area: 580 sqm
Constructed Area: 103 sqm
Photographs: Shuhei Endo

This work of architecture consists of a single flat steel sheet made of anticorrosive steel. Truss-shaped structural walls composed of 25mm-thick steel sheet have been set at the right and left ends, and a catenary curve made of 16mm- thick steel sheet spans the 20m gap between these support points.

Toilet booths have been set in the open space obtained below. The outer faces of the right and left walls, upon which the roof has been placed, and inclined toward each other, and during construction the shapes were fixed and joined after they had twisted and warped under the effects of gravity.

Architects: KWK PROMES
Location: Katowice, Poland
Project Architect: Robert Konieczny, Marlena Wolnik
Structural Engineer: Jaroslaw Kaminski
Design Year: 2000
Construction Year: 2001-2002
Site Area: 3,500 sqm
Constructed Area: 330 sqm
Photographs: KWK PROMES

The building is located on the outskirts of Katowice, near a forest, on land deteriorated by 4th category mining damage, where tectonic faults are a possibility. Hence the connotation of uplifted layers of soil, interwoven with one another, which was the inspiration for the form of the house.

Its structural design comprises rectangular solids contrasting with the ribbon – like structure which winds around them after it emerges from the ground. It is the leitmotif of the building, combining a variety of functions: starting with the swimming pool to the living room with a fireplace and then to the bedroom upstairs. A noteworthy feature of the ramp is elimination of stoops. Such a solution was achieved by bending the surface of the course, which made it possible to keep its outer edges straight, without bends typical for such structures.

Architects: terrain: loenhart&mayr
Location: Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
Architects in Charge: Prof. Klaus Loenhart and Christoph Mayr
Project year: 2008
Complete Complex Lenght: 395 meters
Structural design and structural planning: Mayr | Ludescher | Partner, advisory engineers, Munich
Design and planning of jurybuilding, technical equipment: Architects Sieber+Renn, Sonthofen, Germany
Photographs: terrain

The Olympic Ski Jump in Garmisch-Partenkirchen is one of the most renowned facilities of its kind, having hosted the New Year ski jumping competition as part of the international Four Hills Tournament for 55 years. Now, after the advance premiere in January 2008, the new Olympic ski-jumping sports facility, designed by the young Munich ofce of Prof. Klaus Loenhart and Christoph Mayr, terrain: loenhart&mayr architects and landscape architects, will be ofcially opened in December of this year.

Due to a required upgrade of the jump to the advanced technical standards of the International Skiing Federation (FIS), the construction of an entirely new ski jump was inevitable. Among projects by Zaha Hadid Architects, Behnisch Architects and others, an international architectural competition in autumn 2006 led to the decision to erect a cantilevering structure as the new landmark of ski sports in the valley of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. In the course of designing the ski jump, the terrain:loenhart&mayr ofce drew inspiration from the local topography of mount Gudiberg. The connecting lines of the new ski-jumping facility are an interpretation of the gentle curved lines of the outposts of the chain of mountains. Through its integrative and linear aesthetics of undulating lines, the new design of the jump ties in separate functional entities, including delivery and access points, to form a dynamic landscape-building unit. As much the goal was to develop a topographically rooted architecture for the new Olympic skijumping hill, it is meant to work in a dialectical mode: Topographic integration links up with sculptural expressiveness, giving the new jump in Garmisch-Partenkirchen its unique characteristic appearance. At the same time, its architectural impression and formal dynamics also invites associations with the risk and acceleration of the ski-jumping sport. The quest to overcome gravitation, inherently linked with ski jumping, is architecturally expressed by the cantilevering inrun of the ski jump. In the more than 100-metre-long inrun structure, athletes, coaches, press representatives, and visitors can walk up the 332 steps of the “Jacob’s ladder” to arrive at the three competition decks.

Alternatively, and less strenuously, the decks can also be accessed with the newly developed diagonal elevator. Athletes have nicknamed the new facility the “Olympic Cantilever”. The design of the inrun track is also a novelty. The jump is virtually independent of the weather in winter due to its minimal snow volume requirement and energy demand. Thanks to the additional thermoplastic track, the jump can be used in summer without having to be converted.

The entire inrun structure is covered with translucent polycarbonate elements whose appearance changes with the daylight and respective lighting. During the day, the new jump forms a harmonious unity with the surrounding snowcovered landscape. Light and shadow on the white panels establish a suggestive relationship with the surrounding winter landscape. After sunset, the artifcial light illuminates the architectural body from inside, turning the cantilevering building into an illuminated sculpture that is visible even at great distance in the valley of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

This villa is located in plot #51 of the ORDOS project.

Architects: HHF Architects
Location: Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China
Project Team: HERLACH HARTMANN FROMMENWILER with Nicole Baron, Daichi Takano, Kohsuke Uesugi and Christian Weyell
Design year: 2008
Construction year: 2009
Curator: Ai Weiwei, Beijing, China
Client: Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd, Inner Mongolia, China
Site Area: 1,521 sqm
Constructed Area: 925 sqm

Context and shape of the building

The physical context for the Ordos 100 project is limited to climatical conditions and some few regulations by the master plan done by FAKE Design. Within Ordos 100, this project is simply the HHF house. It’s making an issue out of the fact that 99 other architects are simultaneously and independently planning 99 houses with an identical program within the same master plan. The outer shape of the building and the shed roof is directly developed as an embossed writing of the letters HHF, acronym of the architects and name of the office. This logo can only be read from the air or in the model. From the street level the writing is never readable. From the ground, the shape of the roof is rising above the surrounding vegetation, reflecting the diverse light situations and various shapes of the rooms inside the building.

The outside area is planned as an extension of the nearby park. Because of the extreme climatical conditions and the low construction costs, the building is kept as compact as possible.

Construction and technical aspects

To guarantee earthquake protection even with all the empty spaces on the second floor, every floor slab is supported separately. Each of these floor slabs is lying on the central concrete core and on one outside wall, which is going without cease from the foundation to the roof. To stabalize the building, the concrete walls next to the stairs are built as buttress walls. The external wall is a rear ventilated brick construction, whereas the inner wall is a combination of a cast-in-place concrete framework with a brickwork infill. The outer shell is an exposed brickwork within a concrete frame. From the roof the rainwater is brought down in downpipes, located between concrete pilaster strips. ‘The shafts for all technical installations are integrated into the central core. In the basement the pipes are collected in a suspended ceiling, from where they are brought to the installation zone.

In the basement there is also a central air-conditioning for the whole building. The intake for the fresh air is removed from the house and integrated in the garage box. In the house the air is distributed from the core of the building.

Architects: MOS – Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample
Location: Ontario, Canada
Design Team: Fred Holt, Chad Burke, Ryan Bollom, Forest Fulton, Temple Simpson, Martin Kredizor, Jimenez Lai
Project year: 2005
Constructed Area: 186 sqm
Engineering: David Bowick, Blackwell Engineering
Construction: Kropf Industries, Penfold Construction
Photographs: Florian Holzherr

This project intersects a vernacular house typology with the site-specific conditions of this unique place: an island on Lake Huron. The location on the Great Lakes imposed complexities to the house’s fabrication and construction, as well as its relationship to site. Annual cyclical change related to the change of seasons, compounded with escalating global environmental trends, cause Lake Huron’s water levels to vary drastically from month-to-month, year-to-year. To adapt to this constant, dynamic change, the house floats atop a structure of steel pontoons, allowing it to fluctuate along with the lake.

Locating the house on a remote island posed another set of constraints. Using traditional construction processes would have been prohibitively expensive; the majority of costs would have been applied toward transporting building materials to the remote island. Instead, we worked with the contractor to devise a prefabrication and construction process that maximized the use of thee unique character of the site:

Lake Huron as a waterway. Construction materials were instead delivered to the contractor’s fabrication shop, located on t he lake shore. The steel platform structure with incorporated pontoons was built first and towed to the lake outside the workshop. On the frozen lake, near the shore, the fabricators constructed the house.

The structure was then towed to the site and anchored. In total, between the various construction stages, the house traveled a total distance of approximately 80 km on the lake.

The formal envelope of the house experiments with the cedar siding of the vernacular home. This familiar form not only encloses the interior living space, but also enclosed exterior space as well as open voids for direct engagement with the lake. A “rainscreen” envelope of cedar strips condense to shelter interior space and expand to either filter light entering interior spaces or screen and enclose exterior spaces giving a modulated yet singular character to the house, while performing pragmatically in reducing win d load and heat gain.

Architect: Manuel Ocaña Arquitectos
Location: Calle Pelayo, Madrid, Spain
Collaborators: Roberto González García, Maja Frackowiack, Michael Rabold y Sebastian Camacho (ground painting)
Project year: 2005-2006
Promotor: Benedicta Uría
Contractor: Manuel Ocaña
Constructed Area: 67 sqm
Budget: $75,000 EURO (US $104,775)
Photographs: Miguel de Guzman

This is a project where one cannot dismiss the personal dimension of the commission: the refurbishment of an attic for my mother-in-law, Canadian, my daughters’ grandmother. It is a project that detects traces, records them, and leaves new prints for the ‘next one’ that may wish to search. And the idea is to build it following a different protocol. This new construction protocol, its agents and that sort of mystique of the traces will be the ‘Project’.

An oak wood dais of 140 millimeters over furried boards seems to be the appropriate canvas to register the levels of the traces and then build the dwelling on top in order to silence them. The work starts at floor level after the usual procedures of spatial and structural cleansing. That floor, that wood surface, shall unveil the encountered traces. On the one hand detecting the traces, discovering a network of concealed geometries that are outlined when laying the floors through a precise detailing of the boards; on the other, the new traces are stamped by drawing on top of the discovered geometries the portrait of the beautiful woman that will live in the house. This involves a carpenter, an enthusiastic student of fine arts, Photoshop, the Xiladecor palette on the market, aniline and a set of gouges to engrave the drawing in the terrace. End of the first stage.

The unveiled geometry and the three rear windows determine the repositioning of the partition walls that define the two bedrooms and bathroom required. And the leitmotiv of the next step of the building protocol is ‘on top and dry’. Everything built is dry and on top of… there are no interferences; not among the materials, not among systems, not among the guilds that participate. The trace of the portrait is silenced by placing the partitions and furniture on top. There are only wonderful stains on the floor. Perhaps the next resident will discover the secret.

Wow … a modular LED-lit home radiator that is customizable in terms of shape and colors, enhanced with Chromotherapy and uses low voltage. Must be one of the most aesthetically pleasing and useful home radiator designs currently commercially available. Hellos Daisy flower-like radiator is an object of art and warmth – what could be more satisfying for a modern home decor product. Made from die-cast aluminum, it can be configured to myriads of shapes and colors. The scattered LED lights are cleverly hidden behind the flower arrangement creating indirect light suitable for Chromotherapy effect. Available in pastel and other colors, mat, rough or polished aluminium, to get a desirable visual impact. Choose from electric or hydraulic installation. The valves are hidden and the flowers are on the wall . Hellos

Teuco’s latest bath innovation brings the experience outdoors with the new Teuco Hydrospa Seaside 640 outdoor recessed bathtub. The Seaside 640 built-in bathtub is designed with two objectives in mind – a pleasing aesthetic, and a satisfying bathing experience. It delivers on both fronts. The minimal, recessed design blends into any surroundings. The bath incorporates a lower-body massage via 16 integrated jets, while relaxing in a comfortable seated position. Movable polyamide-covered headrests let you kick back in true carefree comfort. At the foot of the outdoor tub design, cushions covered in the same polyamide fabric create a comfortable spot to stretch out under an open sky. Ambient lighting surrounds the tub perimeter, while two underwater lights and a lit waterfall complete the illuminated water experience. For more information on this new recessed bathtub visit Italian company Teuco.

Where space is at a premium, or the simplicity of a minimal style is desired, the clean, contemporary look of the new Nobili Folding Faucet Snake is just what your cool culinary space calls for. The sleek “snake” design of this adjustable kitchen faucet takes what was once a utilitarian tool, and transforms it into functional fashion at its best. The adjustable design of this folding faucet bends back to reduce bulk when not in use, but when the chef hat is on, the Snake faucet does what you want it to by literally bending over backwards to meet your culinary needs. “Trasformist for shape and functionality, it amazes for its simplicity and for its expressive complexity,” describes Nobili.