Elements

Blogging the Future

Architect Louis Kahn, was known best for his design of the National Assembly Building in Bangladesh.

New Work : Ten Bangkok

images via gotarch

Designed by CASE Studio (Community Architects for Shelter & Environment) the group takes a humanitarian and anthropological approach to creating appropriate housing in informal settlements. The projects undertaken by this collective often involve community members as participants in the process of improving their shelter and environment from community surveying to group meetings and workshops. This alternative housing option for the middle class, features 10 units for a variety of persons including some of the architects. The volumes are staggered, interspersed with gardens and courtyards creating common spaces for physical and visual respite and blurring public/private boundaries. The process, as well as the aesthetic has conjured a community identity and a relationship between dwelling and context - the result is an architecture that is the fruit of cooperative design where the architects are also the clients; the clients are also the architects

Interiors : The Brick Loft

This project entailed the conversion of a former industrial office located in Joo Chiat in Singapore, into an airy & chic apartment. Designed by architects & cross disciplinary practice, FARM the spaces of the loft are bathed in light against the stark white wall surfaces and steel floated concrete floors. Conceptually the apartment borrows a localized aesthetic seen in textured ventilation blocks, painted brick and exposed, unrendered structure.

Death & Product Design

A BBC Documentary The Genius of Design programme episode "Blueprints of War."
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On the Boards : Ethiopian Airlines Headquarters

Söhne & Partner and local architects BET were awarded first place in an international design competition for the new headquarters for Ethiopian Airlines in Addis Ababa. The design of the facility is laid out similar to typical Ethiopian village with the bright open lobby serving as the central space to to commune and talk about business. The landscape is an integral part of the interiors flowing through giving the feeling of being in nature.

New Work: A-Frame

Jamaican-born designer Sean Knibb has converted a defunct IHOP restaurant in Culver City, LA into a unpretentious, yet trendy Korean-fusion restaurant. The design exposes the Douglas fir ceiling and covers the walls in white pine with unmasked knots, revealing the form of the A-frame. Colour blocks of yellow and red are used on the doors and columns as well to highlight aspects of the design. The interior spills out to a concrete patio and garden featuring low-maintenance plants and with ornamental grass.

 

Photography by Sarah Lonsdale for Remodelista and via A-Frame

House of the Week 128: 25th Street Residence

The 25th street residence is a 260m² home in Santa Monica, California by architects Shimizu + Coggeshall. The modern addition was meant to simultaneously contrast and complement the original 1920’s suburban residence. The small unused spaces were reconfigured to handle a variety of programme and improve the relationship with the outdoors.

House of the Week 125: Villa Grand Cayman

Located on an ironshore bluff on the Caribbean coast of Grand Cayman, the house is formed as a response to the nature of the site. The house, designed by architects YAR+D, is set on the highest point on a narrow plot, is oriented to receive the tradewinds via a clerestory of fixed louvres. The material palette of flat white paint and glistening dark plaster grounds the house to its environs and within the evolving idiom of Caribbean modernism.