Kew Gardens celebrates Donald Insall restoration of Temperate House
After a five-year-long restoration, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew has reopened Temperate House, the largest remaining Victorian glasshouse in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Covering 4,880 sq m and housing a staggering 1,500 species from temperate regions around the world, this is one of the most striking centres of plant research today. Donald Insall Associates was the project’s conservation architect, as part of a multi-disciplinary team charged with repairing, restoring and bringing the historical building back to life.
Another Apartment.- Tsuyoshi Kobayashi. Park House. Tokyo. Japan. photos: Koichi Torimura
Marta Minujín, The Parthenon of Books, 2017, steel, books, and plastic sheeting, Friedrichsplatz, Kassel, documenta 14, photo: Roman März
Entryways of Milan
First impressions count, especially in Milano. In this unprecedented photographic journey, editor Karl Kolbitz opens the door to 144 of the city’s most sumptuous entrance halls, captivating in their diversity and splendor. These vibrant Milanese entryways, until now hidden away behind often restrained façades, are revealed as dazzling examples of Italian modernism, mediating public and private space with vivid configurations of color and form, from floors of juxtaposed stones to murals of minimalist geometry.
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(Source: architectureatlas.wordpress.com)
Juergen Teller Studio in London
Across a long and narrow plot in West London, 6a architects has designed a series of three buildings and gardens for photographer Juergen Teller.
With few views out, daylight comes through concrete beams that march the length of the site and support north lights in the roof or from the gardens that separate the buildings. Poured concrete external walls mesh the new building into the residual fragments of existing brick boundaries.
The new buildings contain offices, an archive, a top lit studio space, a kitchen, a library, and an ensemble of ancillary rooms.
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OMA. ( C+S, DUEBARRADUE) Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice, Italy. photos: Delfino Sisto Legnani, Marco Cappelletti
Ecological Plastic Bottle House
One family’s mission to exemplify sustainability took on a whole new life as a surprisingly beautiful home.
La Fábrica in Barcelona
In the words of the architect Ricardo Bofill:
We found enormous silos, a tall smoke snack, four kilometres of underground tunnels, machine rooms in good shape… This was in 1973 and it was our first encounter with the Cement Factory. This cement factory, dating from the first period of the industrialization of Catalonia, was not built at once or as a whole but was a series of additions as the various chains of production became necessary. The formal result was given, then, by a series of stratified elements, a process which is reminiscent of vernacular architecture, but applied to industry.
Keeping our eyes moving like a kaleidoscope, we already imagined future spaces and found out that the different visual and aesthetics trends that had developed since World War I coexisted here:
- Surrealism in paradoxical stairs that lead to nowhere; the absurdity of certain elements hanging over voids; huge but useless spaces of weird proportions, but magical because of their tension and disproportion.
- Abstraction in the pure volumes, which revealed themselves at times broken and raw.
- Brutalism in the abrupt treatment and sculptural qualities of the materials.
Seduced by the contradictions and the ambiguity of the place, we quickly decided to retain the factory, and modifying its original brutality, sculpt it like a work of art. The result proves that form and function must be dissociated; in this case, the function did not create the form; instead, it has been shown that any space can be allocated whatever use the architect chooses, if he or she is sufficiently skilful.
“Presently I live and work here better than anywhere else. It is for me the only place where I can concentrate and associate ideas in the most abstract manner. I have the impression of living in a precinct, in a closed universe which protects me from the outside and everyday life. The Cement Factory is a place of work par excellence. Life goes on here in a continuous sequence, with very little difference between work and leisure. I have the impression of living in the same environment that propelled the Industrial Revolution in Catalonia.”
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(Source: architectureatlas.wordpress.com)