Twin Houses by Felipe Gonzalez-Pacheco

The Project is the result of the dream of two families. The architect´s family and his sister´s family. Each one composed by four members, father, mother and two small child.

The houses were designed for the families to grow independently or together. For the cousins to meet at the patio, for the families to get the indispensable intimacy of a house and at the same time share the space and time with the others.

The site, a pair of lots at a corner in the neighborhood Santana, at the start of the mountains at the north east in Bogotá, a bit higher than the beautiful Sabana, with wonderful views all around.
There the architect designed two family houses very much alike. A pair of twin houses in a very special place of a city with a privileged climate, dry, sunny and always around 15 grades, where the light changes the color of vegetation every hour.

 

Two concrete containers, each one bent in to an L shape depend on each other to live individually. Each house complements its neighbor to configure the central patio and to have intimacy at the same time.

 

The shape of plain containers made out of ocre concrete are the shell of the houses that open or close the space to configure the relations with the outside. The concrete walls bend and fold to show the plasticity of the material and to let the light play. Apparent wood to the outside makes the contrast. On the second floor a last bent container makes the space for the owner’s studio, isolated from the rest.

The house lives inside from the outside. The concrete containers make the patios in a sequence descending on the terrain, the inside and the outside fuse and have the same spatial value.

The concrete shell contains all dry wall or wood walls and the houses are like a piece of luggage, hard on the outside and soft in the inside to let the changes in the family transform the space inside.

Architects: Felipe Gonzalez-Pacheco (MGP Arquitectura y Urbanismo)
Location: Bogotá, Colombia
Collaborators: Alvaro Bohorquez, Camilo Correa, Gabriel Campusano, M. Juliana Sorzano
Client: Laura Gonzalez-Pacheco y Felipe Gonzalez Pacheco
Contractor: Tierra S.A.
Project Area: 1,136 sqm
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Andrés Valbuena, Jorge Gamboa, Rodrigo Dávila, MGP Arquitectura y Urbanismo

 

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The Broad. Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro have unveiled their design for a new Los Angeles museum for The Broad Art Foundation.





This 24-foot-high space is fully flexible to be shaped into galleries, according to the curatorial needs of each installation or exhibition.

Visitors exit the exhibition space and descend back to the lobby through a winding stair through the vault that offers behind-the-scenes glimpses, through viewing windows, into the vast holdings of the Broad Collections and the foundation’s lending library operations.

“Our goal for the museum is to hold its ground next to Gehry’s much larger and very exuberant Walt Disney Concert Hall through contrast,” Diller said.

“As opposed to Disney Hall’s smooth and shiny exterior that reflects light, The Broad will be porous and absorptive, channeling light into its public spaces and galleries. The veil will play a role in the urbanization of Grand Avenue by activating two-way views that connect the museum and the street”.


Called The Broad, the three-storey museum will incorporate gallery space, a 200-seat lecture theatre multimedia gallery, public lobby and museum shop, plus archive, study and art storage space.





The building will be wrapped in a honeycomb facade that will be visible from the sky-lit top floor gallery.

The Broad Art Foundation Unveils Museum Designs
Philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad and architect Elizabeth Diller today unveiled the designs of The Broad Art Foundation, a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.
Designed by world-renowned architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the three-story museum features a unique porous honeycomb “veil” that wraps the building and is visible through an expansive, top floor sky-lit gallery that will be home to great works of contemporary art drawn from the 2,000-piece Broad Collections.
The Broads also announced a 12-member board of governors and the inaugural programming for the contemporary art museum, to be called “The Broad.”
“Today, we celebrate another important milestone – the creation of a new museum 40 years in the making,” said Eli Broad, who was flanked by more than 200 city and county officials and community leaders as he revealed the designs for The Broad at a press conference at Walt Disney Concert Hall. “Grand Avenue is the cultural district for this great region of 15 million people. No other city in the world has such a concentration of visual and performing arts institutions and iconic architecture in a three-block radius. Edye and I can think of no better home for the public art collections we have assembled over the past 40 years.”

Located across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Broad will also serve as the headquarters for the foundation’s worldwide art lending library. In addition to paying for the building, the Broads are funding the museum with a $200 million endowment – larger than the combined endowments of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MOCA. Joanne Heyler, the director/chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation, will also serve as director of the museum.
Featuring almost an acre of column-free gallery space, a lecture hall for up to 200 people, a ground floor multimedia gallery and a public lobby with display space and a museum shop, the 120,000-square-foot project will also include state-of-the-art archive, study and art storage space that will be available to scholars and curators who want to research works in the collection and borrow artworks for their institutions through The Broad Art Foundation.

Dubbed “the veil and the vault,” the museum’s design merges the two key components of the building: public exhibition space and the archive/storage that will support The Broad Art Foundation’s lending activities. Rather than relegate the archive/storage to secondary status, the “vault,” plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit. Its heavy opaque mass is always in view, hovering midway in the building. Its carved underside shapes the lobby below, while its top surface is the floor of the exhibition space.
The vault is enveloped on all sides by the “veil,” an airy, cellular exoskeleton structure that spans across the block-long gallery and provides filtered natural daylight. The public entry to the museum will be on Grand Avenue and will complement the landscaped plaza to the south that is part of the Grand Avenue Project’s master plan. The museum’s “veil” lifts at the corners, welcoming visitors into an active lobby with a bookshop and espresso bar. Visitors will then journey upwards via an escalator, tunneling through the archive, arriving onto 40,000 square feet of column-free exhibition space bathed in diffuse light.

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Heathdale House. Toronto. Teeple architects.

This private residence is located in a small urban site in downtown Toronto, overlooking a densely wooded ravine.

The palette of interior materials is limited and carefully detailed to allow each area to read as a continuous plane.






A counterpoint to these flat surfaces are created by using other elements and materials, such as lighted windows, see through fireplace, glass bridge on the second floor, glass tiles in the bathrooms, etc. to reinforce the light and the space created by the gearbox.



The layout of interior spaces reflects a traditional layout of the spaces in the degree of coating, the bedrooms on the second floor and an area Äòfamily, AO in the lower level.

These spaces, however, while organized by the concept of design of gear boxes, generously open to others, creating a system of informal movement perpendicular to the primary geometry, allowing an uninterrupted flow direction room room.

The views are created through these boxes, focused on the canyon landscape, from and through major interior spaces.

The outer coating consists of sealing U / V resistant wood panels with epoxy resin, cedar panels stained black and zinc. Each box is expressed as displaced wood-coated (exterior walls, ceilings, returns the recess).

The wood treatment is carried into the interior of the house through a variety of colored wooden panels, doors and woodwork to enhance the volume of space changed. details of stairs, kitchen cabinets, woodworking living room and wooden window frames contribute to an expression of the house, the AM sculptural form.

This private residence is located in a small urban site in downtown Toronto, overlooking a densely wooded ravine.

The house is well lined with tenements, maximizing your site oblong, generously open to the view of the ravine.

The house consists of a series of boxes stacked two stories linear. lateral changes between the boxes and allow light to filter space between floors, as well as the creation of a variety of outdoor spaces at ground level and the second grade.

A private pool, Äúretreat, AU a covered outdoor dining and small are part of the overall composition of the interiors and exteriors.

Toronto-based Teeple Architects won a Best of Canada Award for their work on the Heathdale House that sits along the Cedarvale Ravine. Beautifully designed in wood and glass with lots of natural light and spacious rooms, the Heathdale House is one that makes you want to have large social events every week. Hubby and I have been dreaming of buying up an entire corner in our ’hood to build such a house.

Location Toronto
Canada 
 Client Private 
 Building status built in 2004 
 Site type urban 
 Building area 3700 sqft 

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