rough sheds, sydney london

Tinshed by Raffaello Rosselli
Amy Frearson | 21 June 2013 ● Dezeen
Australian architect Raffaello Rosselli has repurposed a corroding tin shed in Sydney to create a small office and studio apartment. Rather than replace the crumbling structure, Raffaello Rosselli chose to retain the rusty corrugated cladding of the two-storey building so that from the outside it looks mostly unchanged. The project embraces that it will continue to change with time through rust, decay and repair.

“The humble tin shed is an iconic Australian structure,” he explains. “As the only remaining shed in the area it is a unique reminder of the suburb’s industrial past.”

The architect began by taking the building apart and replacing its old skeleton with a modern timber frame. He then reattached the cladding over three facades, allowing room for three new windows. The frames of the windows are made from sheets of Corten steel that display the same orange tones as the retained facade.

“The materials have been left raw and honest, in the spirit of its industrial economy,” adds Rosselli. In contrast with the exterior, the inside of the building has a clean finish with white walls and plywood floors in both the ground-floor living space and the first-floor office.
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*Photography by Mark Syke, apart from where otherwise indicated.

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Collage House, London

Dezeen Published on Feb 13, 2017
Movie explores Jonathan Tuckey’s home in a 19th-century workshop 14 years on
Filmmaker Tapio Snellman has documented the ageing process of architect Jonathan Tuckey’s home, 14 years after he overhauled a 19th-century London workshop to create it. The architect, who is the founder of London-based firm Jonathan Tuckey Design, renovated and extended the steel fabricator’s workshop in 2002 to create a unique home for his family and their dog. He left the bare brick walls tarnished with black marks and chose “simple and everyday” materials to rejuvenate the character of the building, but also because they would weather well. Snellman, who shot Collage House in 2016, captures the ageing of these materials – including nicks and scratches on a series metal fixture and doors by splitting the screen into four – a trick he repeats throughout his film. “The split-screen sequences talk about the occupants and about the way architecture is integrated seamlessly with family life and personal expression,” Snellman told Dezeen. “The four simultaneous views create one strong spatial impression without any single image dominating the effect,” he told Dezeen. Both moving and fixed larch plywood panels clad the exterior, while beach plywood sheeting used as a floor lining inside the house, along with a concrete covering. Douglas fir stud work was planed and left exposed to partition spaces. This enables zones of activity to be defined, while also maintaining openness throughout.

Movie explores Jonathan Tuckey’s home in a former London steel workshop
Eleanor Gibson | 13 February 2017 ● Dezeen
This photography taken by James Brittain when the project completed in the early 2000s shows how Tuckey overhauled the industrial building by partially demolishing walls to create a central courtyard. “Plywood has weathered beautifully on both the interior and exterior and the scuff marks of 15 years use now tell the personal story of the family,” Tuckey told Dezeen. “The concrete floors have patinated and subsequently become more beautiful,” he continued. “The exposed brick was already there but continued to age gracefully as it was used to hang pictures and the kids used it to draw on it.” A space that forms a central part of Snellman’s film is the open-plan kitchen-cum-dining room, which occupies the former workshop. Here, he captures diagonal patterns of light that floods in through the long skylight between the original wooden bowstring beams restored by Tuckey. Snellman contrasts colour footage with black and white in the film, as well as tracking members of the family through the house. “The very controlled track shots try to eliminate the viewers awareness of the presence of the camera, as if the space would be seen at its most intimate, when no-one is present,” the filmmaker told Dezeen.

Ground floor plan [click to enlarge]

First floor plan

When renovating the building, Tuckey’s aim was to maintain as many of the building’s existing features as possible, while also creating plenty of playful spaces that catered to his then-young children. He divided the long and narrow building, which widens at the southern end, into three parts. He also demolished one of the existing buildings to create a courtyard and a small pond. The entrance hall and living area occupy the northern end with a mezzanine above, while the kitchen-cum-dining room occupies the central space. A walkway links these spaces to the two-storey structure added to the southern side, which houses the bedrooms and a bathroom. Since the original renovation, Tuckey has reconfigured the arrangement of the bedrooms, as his now teenage daughters needed more space. The children’s bedrooms have moved upstairs from the downstairs, while the single room used by the parents was divided into two interconnected rooms. A pair of hatches in the bedrooms open to the rooftop terrance, which was also only recently completed by the designer.
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

This post is offered in the public interest.

Dezeen: Harbin Opera House, north east China | MAD

### dezeen.com 16 December 2015
MAD’s sinuous Harbin Opera House completes in north-east China
Beijing studio MAD has completed an opera house in the Chinese city of Harbin, featuring an undulating form that wraps two concert halls and a huge public plaza. The opera house is the first and largest building that MAD has designed as part of Harbin Cultural Island, a major new arts complex among the wetlands of the Songhua River. The 79,000-square-metre building features a three-petalled plan. One houses a grand theatre with space for up to 1,600 visitors, while the other is a more intimate performance space for an audience of 400. The building is designed to mirror the sinuous curves of the marsh landscape, with an exterior of smooth white aluminium panels and glass. These contrast with the rooftops, where a textured surface of ice-inspired glass pyramids allows light in from above. According to MAD, the building is designed “in response to the force and spirit of the northern city’s untamed wilderness and frigid climate”. “We envision Harbin Opera House as a cultural centre of the future – a tremendous performance venue, as well as a dramatic public space that embodies the integration of human, art and the city identity, while synergistically blending with the surrounding nature,” said studio founder Ma Yansong.

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█ MAD Architects: http://www.i-mad.com/

MAD has designed several cultural buildings, including an artificial island of art caves, an icicle-shaped wood sculpture museum also in Harbin and Chicago’s proposed George Lucas Museum. Curved surfaces are a recurring theme through them all, picking up Ma’s ambition for a new style of architecture, referencing the landscapes of traditional Chinese paintings.

“We treat architecture as a landscape,” he told Dezeen in an interview last year.

The smooth surfaces of the opera house’s exterior continue inside.
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█ Photography by Adam Mørk and Hufton + Crow.

Related stories:
China Wood Sculpture Museum by MAD
MAD reveals concept design for George Lucas’ Chicago art museum
MAD Architects unveils slimmed-down design for Lucas Museum in Chicago

Related movie:
MAD wants to “invent a new typology” for high-rise architecture, says Ma Yansong
In this exclusive video interview filmed in Venice, Ma Yansong of Chinese architects MAD explains his concept for a “shan-shui city”, a high density urban development inspired by traditional Chinese paintings of mountain ranges.

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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

Dezeen: Skinny house, Sant Cugat + Beyoncé-inspired skyscraper, MEL

### dezeen.com 2 July 2015 at 1:45 pm
Josep Ferrando slots a skinny house between two existing properties in Spain
By Jessica Mairs | Photography by Adrià Goula
Concealed behind a historic facade, this narrow residence by Barcelona architect Josep Ferrando is wedged between the party walls of a pair of houses in the Spanish city of Sant Cugat. The 225-square-metre residence fills a gap measuring less than six metres wide between two existing buildings in Sant Cugat – a town north of Barcelona that is also home to a picturesque Medieval monastery, an architecture school and a chocolate factory. The proximity to Barcelona and the surrounding Catalonian countryside makes Sant Cugat a popular location, resulting in a dearth of land in the town centre. This led Ferrando to squeeze the family home behind the facade of an old row house, right up against the walls of its two neighbours.

Entitled 176 House E+M after the names of the clients, the residence sits opposite the town’s Medieval monastery. The historic facade of the original property was preserved, and the new concrete block was built behind. Due to a drop in ground level across the site, the living room is sunk below ground at the front but sits slightly above a garden at the back. An atrium area with the living room provides an additional source of daylight for the kitchen and dining area above. Three house-shaped volumes made from chipboard are suspended within the upper floors of the narrow building. These timber pods enclose a child’s bedroom, the family bathroom and a study that links with a roof terrace overlooking the garden. A pivoting flap opens or closes the child’s bedroom to the atrium, offering views over the kitchen.
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### dezeen.com 6 July 2015 at 1:46 pm
Beyoncé-inspired skyscraper to be built in Melbourne
By Amy Frearson
Australian firm Elenberg Fraser has won planning approval for a 226-metre-high Melbourne skyscraper that will feature a curvaceous form taken from a music video by Beyoncé (+ slideshow). The new Premiere Tower at 134 Spencer Street will boast a series of curves and bulges designed to make it as structurally efficient as possible, but that also reference one of Beyoncé’s music videos.

The shape is an homage to the undulating fabric-wrapped bodies of dancers in the singer’s music video for Ghost – a song from her self-titled 2013 album, which was originally published as one half of track called Haunted but released as a stand-alone music video. “For those more on the art than science side, we will reveal that the form does pay homage to something more aesthetic – we’re going to trust you’ve seen the music video for Beyoncé’s Ghost,” said the Melbourne-based studio.

beyonceVEVO Published on Nov 24, 2014
Beyoncé – Ghost
BEYONCÉ Platinum Edition.
Music video by Beyoncé performing Ghost. (C) 2013 Columbia Records, a Division of Sony Music Entertainment

The 68-storey structure, which was approved by planning officials in May, will be located at the west end of the city’s central business district. It will contain 660 apartments, as well as a 160-room hotel. Parametric modelling – a type of computer-aided design that allows complex shapes to be created in response to data constraints – was used to develop the unique form, which will swell in and out at various points around the facade.
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

Dezeen: 3 projects #materials

17 March 2014
Wooden strips coil around staircase at Strasbourg hotel by Jouin Manku
Les Haras de Strasbourg (France) is a hotel and restaurant project unlike any other. Composed of a four-star hotel and Michelin 3-starred chef Marc Haeberlin’s first brasserie, Les Haras presents an original solution to the question many provincial cities are facing: how to redevelop and harness the potential of their architectural heritage. Managed by the Institute for Research into Cancer of the Digestive System (IRCAD), presided over by Professor Jacques Marescaux, the project allies architectural creativity and technological innovation, two particular areas of French expertise, with philanthropy, an unprecedented mix for a historic redevelopment project in France.

Parisian studio Jouin Manku created this 55-room hotel inside an 18th century building previously used as an equestrian academy, with a restaurant that features a staircase wrapped in a spiral of wooden strips. The pieces of oak around the stairs, which link two floors of the hotel’s brasserie, create handrails on one side and a balustrade around the top.

“The interior design for the hotel and brasserie is characterised by its authenticity and modernity,” said the designers. “A particular idea of luxury and comfort inspired by the equestrian world, restrained and subtle.”

The staircase sits between a circular bar and open kitchen at the entrance level, where informal seating and a few dining table are located. Upstairs, guests dine beneath the original wooden roof supported by chunky beams and columns. Private booths are created within pods and large curved seats covered in saddle leather, while long tables extend down the length of the space to accommodate larger parties. Stonework around the windows has been left exposed and the walls are finished with rough plaster.

The wood structure is also highlighted in the simple bedrooms, which are painted white and decorated with leather details on the headboards and furniture.

Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku have expressed their vision of this former stud farm and historic site, in a design that is both elegant and simple. They have deliberately chosen to limit the range of materials used; solid wood, natural full hide leather and blackened or brushed metal to transpose the original life of this emblematic Strasbourg building into something resolutely contemporary and simple, whose architectural details attest to the studio’s creativity.
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14 May 2014
Hotel Hotel Canberra lobby, Australia, by March Studio
March Studio was commissioned to design the lobby for the Nishi building, a multi-storey apartment building located in Canberra’s arts and culture precinct New Acton. The building houses two floors of hotel rooms, wrapped around a central courtyard and light well. The ground floor contains Hotel Hotel’s lobby, reception, concierge and bar, as well as retail and hospitality tenancies. The grand staircase links the apartment block with the hotel, whose design was developed by 50 artists, designers and makers including Japanese studio Suppose Design Office.

The space features thousands of pieces of recycled wood, which are fixed around the walls and ceiling to create irregular patterns around the building’s precast concrete pillars. “Freed to scatter up the walls and across the ceiling, the suspended timber filters exterior light and views into and from internal spaces,” said March Studio in a statement. “Spidery, pixelated shadows are cast on the floor and bare walls.” The lengths are supported by steel rods that run from the ceiling to the ground floor, while sparser clusters of timber-covered steel rods line the front of the entrance.

Each tread of the staircase is made up of three different types of glue-laminated timber profiles. Longer lengths of timber profiles protrude from the middle of the staircase to create an illuminated central balustrade. The staircase leads up to the hotel lobby and bar, which occupies two floors of the building. Here, chunky lengths of concrete and timber create bulky pieces of furniture, while decorative lighting fixtures hang from the ceiling and circular skylights bring in daylight from overhead.
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29 December 2014
David Ben-Gurion’s former home renovated by Pitsou Kedem Architects
A Tel Aviv flat that was once the home of Israel’s first prime minster has been renovated and extended by local firm Pitsou Kedem Architects to create a new basement level with industrial-style fittings. A framework of chunky black I-beams supports the ceiling of a new basement floor, added to the flat formerly owned by the late David Ben-Gurion, who was instrumental in the founding of the Israeli state and was prime minister between 1955 and 1963. The project, called Past Turned Into Space, involved reorganising the interior of the ground floor apartment, which is located within a two-storey block designed by Ukrainian architect Yosef Berlin in 1925.

“Since the construction elements we created were totally new, we took care not to hide them but left them exposed in order to tell the story of the renovation.”

The protected building features renaissance-style arches with segmental keystones, balconies and pale pink plasterwork, and is located within a UNESCO heritage site in Tel Aviv. This meant the architects had to contend with severe building restrictions to add the subterranean level that would enable them to expand the residence into a 220-square-metre duplex apartment. A palette of exposed concrete, glass and steel were continued throughout the interior, lending an industrial appearance to the interior spaces that contrasts with the building’s ornamental facade. “We chose to use concrete and steel because we treat them as timeless materials,” said the architects. “This combination with a preservation building felt right.”
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

*Images:
Les Haras de Strasbourg – via Jouin Manku
Hotel Hotel, Canberra – Peter Bennetts unless otherwise stated by Dezeen
Tel Aviv apartment – Amit Goren, with styling by Eti Buskila

Norman Foster: SkyCycling utopia above London railways #ThinkBig

Or how to put DCC and NZTA to shame for their dangerous, low-design segregated cycle lane solution at Dunners. See the latest DCC / NZTA report, Summary of Cycle Safety Options Made Public, at Comments.

Foster SkyCycle [click to enlarge]

So Big Norm’s a cyclist, and when he gets a wee bit of work in New York City from time to time he likes to travel The High Line [Wikipedia]. But then. He had a gazumping thought about London congestion.

Foster is the only architect on Britain’s rich list.

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### dezeen.com 2 January 2014
Norman Foster promotes “cycling utopia” above London’s railways
News: British architect Norman Foster has unveiled a concept to build a network of elevated pathways above London’s railways to create safe car-free cycling routes, following 14 cyclist deaths on the city’s streets in 2013.
Entitled SkyCycle, the proposal by architects Foster + Partners, landscape architects Exterior Architecture and transport consultant Space Syntax is for a “cycling utopia” of approximately 220 kilometres of dedicated cycle lanes, following the routes of existing train lines.
Over 200 entrance points would be dotted across the UK capital to provide access to ten different cycle paths. Each route would accommodate up to 12,000 cyclists per hour and could improve journey times across the city by up to half an hour.
“SkyCycle is a lateral approach to finding space in a congested city,” said Foster, who is both a regular cyclist and the president of Britain’s National Byway Trust. “By using the corridors above the suburban railways, we could create a world-class network of safe, car free cycle routes that are ideally located for commuters.”
If approved, the routes could be in place within 20 years, offering relief to a transport network that is already at capacity and will need to contend with 12 percent population growth over the next decade.
“To improve the quality of life for all in London and to encourage a new generation of cyclists, we have to make it safe. However, the greatest barrier to segregating cars and cyclists is the physical constraint of London’s streets, where space is already at a premium.”
According to the designers, construction of elevated decks would be considerably cheaper than building new roads and tunnels.
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### dezeen.com 28 November 2013
Sandwichbike flat-pack wooden bicycle by PedalFactory goes into production
A flat-pack wooden bicycle that can be assembled in less than an hour has gone into production. PedalFactory claims the Sandwichbike can be unpacked and put together in just 45 minutes. The single-speed bike is constructed from 19 parts that are packaged and delivered in a box along with the tools required to assemble it. The Sandwichbike was launched in Amsterdam on Sunday 1 December 2013. This innovative wooden bicycle is now being shipped.
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“If you can make a sandwich, you can make a Sandwichbike.”

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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

*Images via dezeen.com

Dezeen >> 2010 review

Dezeen architecture and design magazine
2010 review

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Post by Elizabeth Kerr

little designer specials

### Dezeen January 1st, 2010 at 12:01 am
Designer New Year cards
By Rose Etherington
Happy New Year! Here’s a selection of our favourite New Year cards from designers, including this confusing one from Madrid designers Luzinterruptus.
The cards

Post by Elizabeth Kerr