//November 2009
//Architecture
Most of us have fond and happy memories of the family home we grew up in as children, but how many of us take these recollections on board when designing and building our own homes? The answer seems to reflect a common discontinuity in modern culture, where the past is preserved but rarely made part of the future. This fascinating first project by young Irish firm TAKA, demonstrates how architecture can be a process of meaningful place-making, offering spaces in which memories are born, remembered and re-enacted.
House 1 + House 2 follows the journey of a Dublin family moving from their life-long family home to two new homes – a renovated Victorian house for the parents and a new Mews house for a daughter and her new husband. TAKA, founded in 2006 by Alice Casey and Cian Deegan in 2006, are a Dublin-based practice concerned with the communicative potential of architecture, with tectonic expression and with meaning.
Determined that the new homes should maintain a sense of continuity with their former lives, TAKA have used the memories of the family as a conscious architectural driver, and their social rituals – such as Sunday family gatherings – are given tangible form within the design of both houses.
Thus the family’s ‘story’ forms a psychological landscape specific to them, creating new spaces that are reminiscent of old. An enlarged stairway offering spaces for pause is built on the daughter’s recollection of the stair in the old house being “another room”, while the insistence of the “fire being the centre of the home” is also realised in the location of an industrial scale chimney at the centre of the plan, organising the spaces throughout. Likewise, her memories of the kitchen as a social space to sit by the open fire distorts the two new ‘hearths’ – one for cooking and one for fire – into non-orthogonal shapes, suggesting uses yet open to appropriation.
The parents’ new home addresses their anxiety about moving from the old house, and a particular focal point was their social tradition of the wider family gathering for Sunday dinner. The dining table in the new home is given priority of place and assumes an almost ritual character – cast in concrete in an altar-like form and communicating its importance through its immovable materiality. As a further signifier of the special value of this space, careful thought was given to the wall behind the dining table and its construction also takes on a cultural role. In an unusual move, the bricklayer was given 100 identical glazed bricks and told to lay them in any combination he saw fit. Intended as both a marker of the process of construction and an explicit elevation of brickwork to the position of art, the result is a random graphic pattern that is not simply hung on the wall but part of the very construction that forms the building.
A similar interest in constructional expression is seen in the Mews house, and this is perhaps the most notable feature of the project. The Mews' brick façades are a playful twist on the Flemish-bond brickwork walls of the Victorian house, seeking a kind of ‘constructional context’ with its older brother. The unique bonds are the result of ‘separating’ the traditional Flemish bond into two layers, and conceptually situating the home in the space between these two layers. The extrovert front façade receives the projecting brick layer, which oscillates in appearance depending on natural light conditions. To the rear, the façade becomes a mesh of brickwork where those projecting bricks on the front leave their resultant holes in the rear wall, allowing ventilation to the rooms behind to be taken directly through this brick skin.
The finished houses are imbued with a powerful domestic character, pursued through an architecture based on memory and social ritual. A compromise between old and new, TAKA's project is a realisation of how our inheritance can become vivid and relevant to what we make now, creating spaces which are ingrained with the past lives of the future occupants, yet ready to be appropriated as a new start.
STEPHANIE COSTELLO
//November 2009
//Architecture
The multi award-winning Casa Kike in Costa Rica is not only one writer’s paradise, but an architectural aphrodisiac for the eyes. London-based Gianni Botsford Architects have breathed new life into the Caribbean by reappraising the architectural heritage of the region and reviving its indigenous techniques. By coupling them with modern design technologies and aesthetics, Botsford has created an eco-architecture that is remarkably delicate, impacting only minimally on its surrounding jungle environment.
Set in lush natural landscape nestled between mango, avocado and cashew trees, the success of this intimate double pavilion is due mainly to its absolute simplicity and a refusal by the architect to over-complicate the scheme. Two buildings, each a parallelogram, are orientated with their sides parallel to the site boundaries. Using environmental technology which plotted sun movement, prevailing winds and desired views onto the site, the architect found the optimum position and orientation for the new buildings to get the most from the site. The shape of the two buildings – parallelograms – also reacts to the environmental results, promoting the best views and ventilation while keeping the low sunlight out of the interior spaces and screening them from neighbouring properties.
The larger pavilion is the writer’s daytime studio space, a peaceful setting for work and contemplation which is home to a collection of over 17,000 books, a writing desk and a grand piano. Its mono-pitched roof elevates towards the sea shore and the end façade is completely glazed with louvred panels – a practice common in the local architecture. The louvres allow the inhabitants to effectively open the entire façade, allowing the gentle sea breeze to flow through the space. Set a short distance away and connected by a raised walkway, the smaller pavilion is the same shape but two-thirds of the size, and houses the sleeping quarters and bathrooms.
The pavilions’ wooden structure, sourced from local timber, is raised 1.2m off the ground on a series of round wooden stilts which in turn rest on small concrete pad foundations. This method, along with many techniques employed in the project, uses the precedence of native building styles and materials rather than the western-influenced architecture popular with wealthy Costa Ricans. The load-bearing element of the building is designed for both its structural and aesthetic qualities – an intricate pattern of diagonal timber beams which allow for an interior with no vertical columns. This contrasts with the exterior of both pavilions, clad with simple corrugated steel sheeting which is used on many low-cost Costa Rican dwellings.
Sustainability is an issue high on the agenda in Costa Rica, which has one of the best reputations in this regard in the world. "The house is built from what surrounds it," explains Botsford as he talks about the relationship between the architecture and its surroundings. But sourcing the local hardwoods needed for the house’s construction – Laurel, Cachá and Surá – was problematic, and work stopped for three weeks while they awaited another delivery of raw timber for the 10-metre long main roof beams. "The trees are cut down locally – there’s no stockpiling, you have to go and find the tree and get [government] permission to cut it down. And then they cut it down only on a full moon. It’s something to do with the sap apparently. If you want to built straight away without treating the wood that’s what they do."
Casa Kike not only won the RIBA international award in 2008, but was also awarded the prestigious Lubetkin Prize for the most outstanding building outside the EU by a RIBA member – a staggering achievement for a project of this scale which cost a mere £55,000. But running the project from London was not easy according to Botsford, especially when it came to dealing with the local building contractors. "Eventually we gave up on drawings and took a physical 1:20 model of the structure and said to the contractors: 'Build this full size.' That was the point at which they all understood what the project would be."
For all the timber pyrotechnics of the roof structure and the irregularity of its shape, the overall effect is that of a building which blends with – and respects – its surroundings, both visually and environmentally. This inspirational project shows what can be achieved with a modest building type and simple brief when placed in the hands of an imaginative and assured architect, and is proof that escaping the concrete jungle for Nature’s own need not cost the Earth...
STEPHANIE COSTELLO
//November 2009
//Column
One of my dreams is to fly like Superman through the streets of Metropolis, sweeping over the Daily Planet building with Lois Lane in my arms. Paragliding in the Aticama dessert of northern Chile is the closest I’ve got to this fantasy and sadly that didn’t involve skyscrapers or Lois clinging to me for dear life. However there is now another way that I might get closer to my dream and that’s by taking a walk along the High Line Park in New York. It has been dubbed a magical flying carpet and an Alice through the keyhole landscape. This is a new park suspended 30 feet in the air above the congested Manhattan streets.
For 50 years the High Line was used by freight trains to deliver goods to factories along the west side of New York, built to take accident prone trains off the streets. When they operated at street level 10th Avenue was known as Death Avenue. In the mid 1980’s three, forlorn, freight cars of frozen turkey were the last goods to be moved along the line. For the next 30 years this 1½-mile stretch of abandoned elevated railway become a secret garden in the sky - birds and the wind brought the seeds of wild grasses, fruit trees and monarch butterflies. Forgotten by all but a few it seemed it was only a matter of time before it would be pulled down to make way for the developers. That was when “neighbourhood nobodies” Robert Hammond and Joshua David formed Friends of the High Line to fight to save the bucolic self-sown landscape. They galvanised local residents, businesses, socialites and celebrities. Eventually, they persuaded new mayor, Michael Bloomberg to stop the demolition. Ten years on, the first phase of the $170million public-privately funded project, from Gansevoort to 20th Street, has just been completed.
It is a wild, low maintenance environment, a green river that flows for 22 blocks, containing woodlands, grasslands, sundecks, art installations, public squares and performance spaces. It’s a park but it’s also the new cultural anchor of the neighbourhood. The High Line offers opportunities to step out of the expected - slipping out of your Clarke Kent suit and into some blue tights, flying like Superman through
the streets of New York.
HAMISH HERTFORD
//November 2009
//Interiors
MOSAIC COFFEE TABLES
by Marcel Wanders
The first known examples of mosaic – the art of creating images from small pieces of coloured material, usually glass or stone – date back to 1500BC. This coffee table design by Bisazza, however, is distinctly more modern. For finding such an original use for this ancient artform, we name this our product of the month!
Price on application
BISAZZA.COM
//November 2009
//Interiors
CORTICA CHAISE LOUNGE
by Daniel Michalik
Cork might not be the first material that springs to mind when thinking about designer furniture, but this unconventional wood provides natural solutions to a range of product design requirements: it’s easily formed into complex shapes, is resilient and springy, waterproof, sound absorbing, and fire resistant. This full-length 72” chaise lounge by New York based designer Daniel Michalik has a place for your head, heels and everything in between. Not only does it look ultra cool, its natural flexibility allows the user to rock gently whilst providing a great degree of stability and comfort.
$4998.00
BRANCHHOME.COM
FLOAT LOUNGE CHAIR
by Daniel Michalik
Also by Daniel Michalik, this lounge chair uses cork combined with black laquered beech. The chair’s generous proportions allow for a many different seating positions whilst the cork seat feels luxurious in its tactility.
Price on application
DANIELMICHALIK.COM
‘BENCH FOR TWO’
by Nanna Ditzel
Made from solid maple and aeroplane ply, this silk screen printed bench for two by Copenhagen born Nanna Ditzel is a striking (and award winning) design.
NANNA-DITZEL-DESIGN.DK
WIGGLE CHAIR
by Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry’s now classic wiggle chair is constructed from about 60 layers of cardboard glued together to form a strong, durable material similar to plywood that he called “edge board”. The chair is robust enough to be used as an everyday piece of furniture, and is now being produced by Vitra. Check their website or Google for stockists.
$984
VITRA.COM
FLOATING WORLD PENDANT LIGHT
by Howe
This pendant light uses woven natural materials to encase three bulbs and create an attractive ambient glow. You’ll need lots of space for it though, it’s about 1.2m in diameter and 60cm tall.
£2046 + VAT and shipping
HOWELONDON.COM
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