Located in the Belgian village of Steenokkerzeel, this 30 meter (98.4 ft) water tower was originally built between 1938 and 1941. It was in service until the 1990s and was even used as a watchtower by the Nazis when they took over Belgium in World War II.
In 2007, Bham Design Studio set forth to completely renovate and convert the former water tower into a single family home. The exterior was completely restored to its original state, while columns were repaired, joints were removed and top floor windows were enlarged.
Tag: inspiration
Ensamble Studio
Antón García-Abril, (Madrid, 1969) is a European PhD Architect, full-professor at the School of Architecture and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and he is currently developing a second doctoral thesis about “Stressed Mass” at the School of Civil Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. He received the Spanish Academy Research Prize in Rome in 1996. He has been associate professor at the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (E.T.S.A.M.-U.P.M.) for a decade, invited professor at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University in 2010 and Cornell University in 2008, and visiting critic and lecturer in different universities and institutions in America and Europe. In 2000 he establishes ENSAMBLE STUDIO leading, together with his partner Débora Mesa, a cross-functional team with a solid research background on the lookout for new approaches to architectonical space, building technologies and urban strategies. Their built projects are exposed structures that explore the essence of materials to create space. The Music Studies Center and the SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela, the Martemar House in Malaga, the Hemeroscopium House in Madrid, The Truffle in Costa da Morte (Spain) and more recently the Reader’s House in Madrid and the Cervantes Theater in Mexico City have been internationally published. Their office has been awarded with important prizes like The Rice Design Alliance Prize to emerging architects in 2009 or the Architectural Record Design Vanguard Prize in 2005, and was selected by SANAA to participate in the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2010. This year Antón has been elected an International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for his services to international architecture, and has been curator of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale presenting “Spainlab”. He co-founded with Débora Mesa the Positive City Foundation in 2009, with the aim of forwarding their views on urban development, and they are in the process of setting up a research laboratory at MIT, the POPLab (Prototypes of Prefabrication Laboratory).
CYBERTECTURE
Cybertecture is the revolutionary concept that provides a symbiotic relationship between the urban fabric and technology. Pioneered in 2001, Cybertecture forges both the hardware of the built environment and software systems and technologies from the micro to macro scales of development.
The genesis of Cybertecture is in response to man’s progress into the 21st century, where working and living environments need to adapt and evolve to cope with the demands of modern working life. It plays an integral part in this evolution by providing awareness and connectivity via seamless integration of technology into the fabric of space.
Cybertecture designs, from technology, products and interiors to systems, buildings and masterplans, allow flexibility and accessibility to inform, adapt, react, communicate, manipulate and control environments, whilst being sustainable and environmentally considered in application and context.
Cybertecture embraces the future through continuous innovation and evolution of design and technology. It provides a myriad of solutions, all of which are diverse in individual application but holistic to the overall user environment, and always being integrated with innovation being pursued.
Cybertecture is the logical progression in the evolution of design and technology. Innovating locally and affecting globally, it addresses the fundamentals of sustainable and balanced designs, with every step taken in consideration to local and global impact.
In a world fast growing and developing with limited resources, Cybertecture aims to create more awareness with healthier environments to live, work and play in.
By Far my favorite Architects of our time.
ARCHITECTURE comes about as a result of the synthesizing by the architect of creative responses to input from the client; data gathered from the site and the climate; and an understanding of structure, materials, space and light. Working from the inside-out, the architect guides the growth of an IDEA resulting from the combination of these responses to a completed design which is as much a portrait of the client as it may be of himself.”
- Bart Prince
From the architect. At the end of a single lane road cut into a hillside, on a dry west-facing slope near Juliaetta, Idaho, the owners wanted to restore a pioneer vineyard (the first known vineyard in the canyon). Preserving the most ideal land for the vineyard, we located two structures – one above a flood plain, the other perched on a narrow basalt cliff overlooking a spawning pool on the Potlatch River. The owner and guest quarters are housed in one structure and the other is used for special events such as wine tasting.
ArchDaily - Article
River Place
Bridge House cautiously. It is made of two rolls of steel with concrete floors and steel decking, has a roof made from plantation pipe and fitted with transparent glass walls. Another example of narrow houses, is certain to bring out feelings of entry Worth $ 175,000, Bridge House is situated in one hour drive from Adelaide. The bad guys from Max Pritchard Architect wants to bring out the adventurer in you. Apparently, people think nothing is more challenging than living in a bridge “” surrounded by lush green scenery
Joaquín Alvado Bañón has recently completed the Pool House, a project that research the relation between architecture and water, in Orihuela, near Alicante, Spain. It is a rethinking, in a sustainable way of life, to transform the way of promoting the east side of Spain.
Architecture twists and turns seeking nature, it looks towards the mountains of Orihuela, and it pokes out above its limitations. It is difficult to differentiate its limits, it is a city but also a landscape, it is a private space but at the same time it takes over a public space of the street. The built parts are reflected and fragmented through the use of reflex glass in the steel carpentries.
Three personalities and one environment formally, these are three independent volumes fused into one project. Each volume has its own personality and privacy. The meeting points between the parts are made by horizontal and vertical stairs, a “Y” bridge and double heights favoring expected and unexpected relationships. Semi-private and private places for meeting are intertwined as in life itself.
The Martemar House appears on the site like a singular architectonic object, like a stranger outside the typical architectural style of the area, understanding every scale of the context. Taking advantage of the opportunities but ignoring pre-established trends.
The house stretches on two allotments some meters above sea level, from where distant landscapes can be viewed, profiting therefore from exceptional panoramic views of the sea and the mountains.
The structural system of the house consists of two main portal frames: one in concrete formed by a beam 2.75 m. high which makes up the garden facade, and the other a steel frame overlooking the entrance. The two frames support five steel trusses, each of them with a different aesthetic and structural vocation. These five linear structural elements organize and delimit three functional strips, which establish relational sequences between them in a play of solids and voids, physical relations and visual connections, intercommunications between interior and exterior spaces.
The structure remains visible, exposed and provides the architecture with its image and its form.
Ensamble Studio - Martemar House
This project exists on a 55-acre property in the remote hills of Malibu with unique topography and panoramic views looking out to a nearby mountain range, a valley, and the Pacific Ocean with islands in the distance. In searching for inspiration, I imagined a roof structure that would allow for a un-obstructed view of the mountain range and distant views. The client, a woman, requested curvilinear/feminine shapes for the building. The progenitor of the building’s form was envisioned as a floating curved roof. It soon became apparent, that in fact, an airplane wing itself could work. In researching airplane wings and superimposing different airplane wing types on the site to scale, the wing of a 747, at over 2,500 sq. ft., became an ideal configuration to maximize the views and provide a self supporting roof with minimal additional structural support needed.
For the Greek, Hemeroscopium is the place where the sun sets. An allusion to a place that exists only in our mind, in our senses, that is ever-changing and mutable, but is nonetheless real. It is delimited by the references of the horizon, by the physical limits, defined by light, and it happens in time.
Hemeroscopium house traps, a domestic space, and a distant horizon. And it does so playing a game with structures placed in an apparently unstable balance, that enclose the living spaces allowing the vision to escape. Heavy structures and big actions are disposed in a way to provoke gravity to move the space. And this way the place is defined. The order in which these structures are piled up generates a helix that sets out from a stable support, the mother beam, and develops upwards in a sequence of elements that become lighter as the structure grows, closing on a point that culminates the system of equilibrium. Seven elements in total. The design of their joints respond to their constructive nature, to their forces; and their stresses express the structural condition they have. By the way this structure is set, the house becomes aerial, light, transparent, and the space kept inside flows with life. The apparent simplicity of the structure’s joints required in fact the development of complex calculations, due to the reinforcement, and the pre-tension and post-tension of the steel rods that sew the web of the beams.
Ensamble Studio - Hemeroscopium House
New York Times article
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