The Related Group / St. Regis Hotels & Resorts - St Regis Bal Harbour

As pristine white sands stretch into the golden Atlantic sunset, the all-glass St. Regis Bal Harbour dazzles amid lushly landscaped gardens filled with premier artwork, a regal icon in South Florida’s most exclusive area.


The development takes place in Bal Harbour, Florida, USA.


On nine acres of ultra-luxurious resort living, revel in the ultimate Remède Spa experience, indulge in world-class dining, and bask poolside or on the beach as signature St. Regis Butlers attend with white glove service.

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Balancing Barn by MVRDV and Mole Architects

 

This cantilevered house in Suffolk, England, by MVDRV of Rotterdam and British firm Mole Architects is nearing completion and will be the first of five homes from Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture project available for rent on 22 October.




Living Architecture  is a series of holiday homes around the UK designed by established and emerging architects. The homes also include designs by Peter Zumthor, Jarmund and Vigsnæs Architects, NORD and Hopkins Architects.



More than 50 percent of the Balancing Barn is suspended above ground with a glazed section built into its suspended floor.





Here’s a little from Living Architecture:

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National Glass Museum Holland by Bureau SLA

Dutch architects Bureau SLA have connected two houses in Leerdam, Holland, with four overlapping bridges to create a continuous gallery.



The National Glass Museum’s steel-frame bridges are clad in polycarbonate wrapped in aluminium mesh.

Exhibition spaces are spread across both existing buildings and the bridges with 9000 objects on display in glass cabinets by Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek.

Both buildings have been refurbished with one housing a restaurant and the other a library that doubles as staff offices.

All photographs are taken by Jeroen Musch.

Here’s some more from the designers:

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The New National Glass Museum in Leerdam
Once the villa on Lingedijk 30 had been acquired, bureau SLA were commissioned to turn the two buildings into a home for the National Glass Museum. It was suggested to turn Cochius’ former residence into an exhibition area and to use the second villa as offices, storage facilities and a cafeteria.

Whilst this fulfilled functional requirements, it seemed like a missed opportunity to us at bureau SLA, as the new situation would appear to be not very different from the old one. The museum would have more space, indeed, but this would not be visible from the outside.

So what would happen if we made both buildings fully accessible to the public? The museum’s employees could eat in the restaurant, the visitors could have full access to the collection of glass, including that in storage, and the administrative staff could work in the library. Furthermore, the exhibition rooms could be far more spacious. Instead of the small rooms of the existing villas, in which visitors need to climb up and down stairs all the time, circulation and exhibition spaces could to be much more generous.

The four pedestrian bridges that bureau SLA designed draws everything together in an elegant manner. Visitors can idle through extensive rooms; only one lift is needed and an enormous amount of space is gained. The bridges serve as storage space in which all the museum’s objects are on display, in cases specifically designed for the museum by Piet Hein Eek.

In the historical villas not much more needed to be done; they were elegant by themselves. Repairs were carried out where needed, with some later additions removed.

The bridges were constructed from several layers of polycarbonate panels and covered by a translucent skin of grey, powder-coated, aluminium mesh. During the day they contrast sharply with the refined old villas, whereas at night they glow in reflection of the 9000 glass objects inside them.

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The Sperone Westwater gallery by Foster + Partners architects.

The Sperone Westwater gallery by Foster + Partners architects opened in New York earlier this week, featuring a moving exhibition space that connects the floors of the gallery.


The 12 by 20 foot moving gallery allows visitors to travel between floors or can be fixed at a chosen level to extend the static exhibition spaces.

The milled glass facade of the gallery dampens noise from the street and controls the temperature and light admitted to the gallery spaces.

Photos are by Nigel Young.
Here’s more from Foster + Partners:
Sperone Westwater gallery opens on the Bowery

Sperone Westwater celebrates the opening of its new gallery on the Bowery in New York with an inaugural exhibition by Argentinean artist, Guillermo Kuitca.

Nearly 35 years after its conception, Sperone Westwater continues to exhibit an international roster of prominent artists working in a wide variety of media. Its new building, designed by Foster + Partners, doubles the exhibition area and pioneers an innovative approach to vertical movement within a gallery setting.

Responding to the compact 25 by 100 foot site, one of the features of the project is a 12 by 20 foot moving gallery, which connects the upper four exhibition floors and allows visitors to move gradually between levels. It is a prominent feature along the Bowery, visible from the street, its gentle pace contrasting with the fast-moving traffic. At any given floor, the exhibition space can be extended by parking the moving room as required, with an additional elevator and stairs providing alternative access.

The gallery offers a range of exhibition spaces, which vary in proportion and ambience. The design incorporates a double-height, 27-foot high exhibition space at street level, with a sky-lit gallery, a mezzanine floor, a sculpture terrace overlooking a park, and private viewing galleries on the fourth and fifth floors.

A setback at the sixth floor marks the location of the gallery’s administrative offices. Works of art will be stored primarily in the basement, while a library is located at the top of the building, below the mechanical floor.


The milled glass facade that houses the moving room acts as a buffer zone, protecting the building from extreme temperatures and acoustically insulating the gallery spaces.



Norman Foster commented:
‘The concept for Sperone Westwater represents both a response to the Bowery’s dynamic urban character and a desire to rethink the way in which we engage with art in the setting of a gallery. The moving gallery animates the exterior of the building and creates a bold vertical element within.’



‘Like a kinetic addition to the street, it is a lively symbol of the area’s reinvention and a daring response to the Sperone Westwater’s major program. I hope that artists will be inspired by the gallery’s new spatial and structural possibilities.’

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Modern Arta Museum of Medellin. 51-1 Arquitectos.

Peru studio 51-1 Arquitectos and Colombian architects Ctrl G have won a competition to design an extension to the Modern Art Museum of Medellin, Colombia.



Drawing on the brick structures of the local barrios, the new building will be made up of stacked boxes.

These will create a series of terraces that visitors will access by internal or external circulation.

The information below is from the architects:

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Modern Art Museum of Medellin second phase
51-1 arquitectos (Supersudaca Peru) & Ctrl G (Colombia)

Medellin is a very steep valley and the city settles on its slopes. You are always going up or going down. With the typical growth pattern of Latin-American cities, informal barrios settle in impossible geographies of very difficult access. Piled on top of each other, brick constructions from the barrios, go terracing and generating thousands of public interstices and small squares where people exercise their urbanity in flexible and ingenious ways.

Medellin’s successive governments have invested in exceptional infrastructure projects in those barrios, aiming to structure and integrate them into the ‘formal’ city with such series of public equipment as library parks, schools, squares, cable cars, bridges, etc. The city has arrived to the barrio.

After those successful emblematic interventions in the urged barrios of the North and Center of the city, Medellin now proposes itself to intervene in more affluent areas of the South.

The dismantled premises of the former steel factory SIMESA, have been turned into the ‘Ciudad del Rio’ (River City): a rigid urban development of housing and office towers dependent of a shopping mall.

Public space has been reduced to a narrow park and to the new venue of the Modern Art Museum (MAMM) in a recycled industrial building. If the informal barrios had soul and its structure what have been given, the new Ciudad del Rio has structure but lacks soul. That task the new MAMM shall do. The international invited competition called for the proposal of an extension of the museum next to the industrial building.

If formality of the city was exported to the barrios, to the excessive formality of the new Ciudad del Rio could be imported the vitality of the barrios. A Yin yang Dadaist.

As in Duchamp’s urinal taken to the museum, in this case we take the Medellin sloped barrio to the Ciudad del Rio. The alternative to the shopping mall as leisure space – MAMM’s role – must happen from the generation of a barrio.

The program for the museum competition consisted of series of rooms without any relationship among them. For us it seemed more important the relationship between the exterior public spaces that would activate the neighborhood than between the interior spaces. This condition allows to stop thinking of the project as in a conventional building.

The organization logic is based then on the basic rules of each program component having an address to the circulation and the flexibility to growth over time (just like the barrios!)

This way the project for the new museum is an informal (but strategic) pilement of blocks that create enormous potentialities in the multiple terraces generated at the interstices. Also those terraces can be seen as spatial reserves for the future growth of the enclosed spaces of the museum. We see it as an incomplete museum.

A museum which can be completed ephemerally with tents and kiosks or definitely by building the terraces until the whole building turns into an impenetrable cube.

This is not a defined and finished building, it is a barrio.

The project is planned as the new main entry of the museum articulating the new spaces of the extension with the existing ones, and with this gesture the MAMM opens itself to the neighboring ìel Pobladoî district.

The project has a vertical circulation through the interior of the blocks, thus controlled and weather protected, but also (and specially) an exterior circulation that connects one terrace with the other, bringing the public on a path from the street up to the upper platform. Each one of these terraces can be conceived as a small square, making the museum ‘a cascade of plazuelas’.

This double circulation (indoors and outdoors) allows great flexibility both for exhibitions and simultaneity of events. For instance, the temporal gallery in the third level can be accessed from the external circulation while the one in the fourth can be reached independently from the internal passages.

The lower level’s vocation is to be integrated to the adjacent park. In a simple manner, the theater can be incorporated to it and become a stage that interacts with it.

Towards the center of the museum, the piling of blocks generate a vertical central atrium that allows for a great diversity of uses. A tropical Guggengheim. A shadowbox.

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