The Curious FellowJJs on about design

Some work by friends of mine at Platform 5 architects. I love their work; intelligent and beautifully simple. I hope you like it too.

Meadowview

The site lies on the edge of a ribbon development village in rural Bedfordshire and is surrounded by mature trees, hedgerows and arable fields. A sweet chestnut clad box is cantilevered off a solid masonry and glass plinth, from across the fields, it looks like it is floating over the hedgerows. The house incorporates sustainable technologies such as rainwater recycling and a ventilation system with heat recovery. The landscaping forms a transition between the domestic and agricultural environments.

Mapledene Road

Mapledene Road is situated in a conservation area in Hackney. The property had been stripped of virtually all its period features and had become run down and used as a “crack den” leaving it ripe for modernisation. The cellular ground floor was opened up and extended to the rear to allow the spaces to flow into each other and to the garden. The kitchen and patio areas are unified by a concrete floor and London stock brick garden wall. The expansive glass roof opens up the view to the sky giving the space an external character.The project has been shortlisted for the RIBA Awards, AJ Small Projects Awards and the Grand Designs Awards 2009.

Located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, this simple yet stylish concrete and glass design makes a strong horizontal presence with panoramic views of beach and surf. Built into a majestic tree-covered slope, this beach-front house overlooks a wide wooden deck and pool. The house itself is simple, taking shape as two stacked cubes open to the outdoors. Minimalist interiors make the primary focus the view – breathtaking from every angle, inside and out.

This rustic cabin design was built by Piet Hein Eek for friend, client and musician Hans Liberg. There isn’t a whole lot to this simple, wood cabin design. Inside, this compact cottage design contains the one thing this nature dweller needed for survival – a recording studio! And if ever Liberg needs some new inspiration for his melodious compositions, this modern mobile home goes where the music takes him thanks to integrated wheels on the bottom.

This new interior for Octium in Kuwait is a beautiful example of a decorative modernism that also succeeds in evoking the memory of Tiffany’s in the breakfast-based movie from back in the day; all without stepping over the line into comical kitsch.

The interior design is the baby of no less a creative mind than Jaime Hayon, whose fantastic and almost clownish projects have been undermining the classical understanding of design for years now. In this case, he had a true stroke of genius: In the positive sense, and without shying kitsch or opulent colors and shapes, he has created a fairy-tale-like location where the only thing that is meant seriously is possibly the price-tag on the wares.

It is possible to do a beautiful underground home – albeit you need a stunning alpine landscape.

Minimalist wit?

The sustainable container-pavilion has been developed by the architect’s office MAPT in collaboration with the City of Copenhagen.

More about it ArchDaily

Saw this on Gizmodo. A 15-story office block in the heart of London was being demolished backwards in order to build a skyscraper in its place. Demolishers worked up from the ground level, dismantling each floor to reveal the concrete core of the P&O building.

When the P&O building was constructed in 1965, each floor was hung from a huge beam at the top of the tower and supported by the central core. According to Matthew White, project director, the weight had to be removed from the structure from the bottom up. “Eventually the beam will be deconstructed at roof level, leaving the core, which will be demolished from the top down.”

Upon first glance, MAD Architects’ latest breathtaking project for Chongqing, China looks like an impossibility. The project, entitled Urban Forest, features a stacked set of floors that cantilever drastically from their central support. The floors are designed to bring more nature and open space into a densely compacted urban area.

The building is a commercial high-rise whose form was inspired by the mountainous typology of the surroundings. Each one of the seventy floors is unique with a different abstract curved shape and layered slightly off-center from it neighboring floors. The floors give an organic and textured effect to the façade as it rises into the sky.

BanQ, Boston, Mass.

Architects: Office dA

Location: Boston, MA, USA

Maracon Housing by Local Architecture

In Maracon, Switzerland, it is a beautiful and contemporary house designed to respect the morphology and scale of the other constructions in the village.

Maracon Housing, images courtesy of Local Architecture