Los Altos Hills 2 - Feldman Architecture

Anchored into a gently sloping site on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac, this Los Altos Hills home is a bold, modernist composition of simple forms reflective of the client’s motivation to create a speculative development for a new generation of homeowner enamored with contemporary architecture.

Two rectilinear, cantilevered forms defined by planes of stucco form an L-configuration that orients this house to open out to its rear yard and view of the hills. Linear slot windows provide scale and lightness to the long, horizontal forms while the building’s transparency is created by wide sliding glass panels which blur the boundary between inside and outside. At the east side these great openings engage private gardens and a magnificent heritage oak; at the west they extend the living room out to the rear patio with its backdrop of the rolling landscape.

The simplicity of the parti and a clear expression of materials - concrete, wood, stucco and glass - combined with attentiveness to detail has created a home, sophisticated for entertaining and comfortable for family living. (source Feldman Architecture)

Westonbirt Mess Building | Invisible Studio (Piers Taylor)

From the architect:

"A new welfare building for the Tree Team at Westonbirt, the National Arboretum – and the second of the buildings we designed for Westonbirt as part of the Tree Management Centre. This building was constructed entirely using Westonbirt’s own timber, grown and milled on site with minimal processing – building on techniques we pioneered in the Caretaker’s House at Hooke Park. The building was constructed by skilled timber framers Nick Perchard and James Symon working with unskilled volunteers throughout the project. The project has received a National RIBA Award in addition to 3 Regional RIBA Awards.

The project at Westonbirt – for the Forestry Commission – was won by us through a formal government tendering process and we included Charley Brentnall as part of Invisible Studio – the design team – pre contract, before he went on and won the formal tender to act as main contractor for the larger of the two projects, the Machinery Store. Charley ran a  course early on with volunteers to hew the enormous Corsican Pine into the main structural members, before leading the construction phase for the Machinery Store with his extraordinary team of carpenters from Carpenter Oak & Woodland and NVQ Student Carpenters, and the smaller of the two buildings was let to Nick Perchard and Jim Symon (who were originally trained by Charley) who then then led a wonderful band of Westonbirt Volunteers in the construction of the ‘Mess Room’ welfare building, many of whom have gone on to use these skills gained from Nick and Jim in their own projects.

The engineering by Buro Happold was deceptively complex: the main timber structural members are possibly the biggest ever in UK Construction (Certainly for 150 years), and very few engineers have the nous like Andrew Wylie and Graham Clarke to understand how to use the unpredictable, ungraded, un processed, untreated timber directly from site. The Sustainability Award that we gained is testament to their thinking.

And finally – the Client of the Year Award for the Forestry Commission means so much when – as the jury citation said – this is a client that totally owns these buildings now, and fully supported the experimental, risky and unpredictable way of working that we espoused from the outset, where an option would have been to have put up a few steel portal sheds. Westonbirt had never used their own timber in any of their buildings before, and certainly nothing on this scale."

Source: Invisible Studio

Juvet Landscape Hotel - Jensen & Skodvin Architects

Jensen & Skodvin Architects is a Norwegian architectural firm established in 1995 by Jan Olav Jensen and Børre Skodvin, both educated at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Juvet Landscape Hotel is located at Valldal, near the town of Åndalsnes in north-western Norway. Passing tourists are attracted by a spectacular waterfall in a deep gorge near the road, Gudbrandsjuvet. The hotel has been built in two main phases. Seven rooms and a separate spa building were built in the first phase, from 2007 – 2010. In the second phase, from 2012 – 2013, two more rooms have been added. The site for the hotel is a nature reserve. After extensive negotiations with conservation authorities, permission was eventually granted for a plan allowing for a maximum of 28 rooms to be built, given that no dynamite was used or changing of the terrain was done.

Instead of the conventional hotel, with guest rooms stacked together in one large building, the Landscape Hotel distributes the rooms throughout the terrain as small individual houses. Every house has one or two walls that are entirely built in glass, thus the experienced space in each room is maximized. Through careful orientation every room gets its own exclusive view of a beautiful and unique piece of the landscape, always changing with the season, the weather, and the time of day. No room looks out at another so the rooms are experienced as private even though curtains are not used. The rooms are built in a massive wood construction with no exterior insulation, and are intended for summer use only. Each building rests on a set of 40mm massive steel rods drilled into the rock, existing topography and vegetation left almost untouched. The glass is set against slim frames of wood, locked with standard steel profiles, using stepped edges to extend the exterior layer of the main glass surfaces all the way to the corners. The interiors are treated with transparent oil with black pigments, so that reflections from the inner surface of the glass wall are minimized. Shelves, benches and a small table are all built by the same massive wooden elements to maintain a certain degree of monotony that goes well with the complex nature views and to keep the visual presence of the interior at a minimum. The hotel was also featured in the sci-fi movie Ex Machina.

(Source: Jensen & Skodvin Architects)

Artega Scalo Superelletra - Design by Carrozzeria Touring Superleggera

In creating the new design, Touring has adhered to Artega’s strict principles. It was important that the car was visually beautiful, with perfect proportions. It also needed to be discreet, understated and unembellished with unnecessary ornamentation. Touring's new design has maintained Artega's visual brand identity while recognising the designer’s tradition of creating beauty through simplicity and purity of line.

Subtle design features, such as placing the door in the centre of the car's profile, provide a balanced shape, which accentuates the car's elegance. Other motifs, such as the razor edge wing profiles, the shut line of the door, the angle of the B-pillar and the hot air exhaust outlets for the front brakes, point to the car's dynamic qualities. Artega Scalo Superelletra uses a state-of-the-art carbon fibre monocoque with high tensile tubular steel sub-frames front and rear, in turn reinforced with carbon fibre crossbars.

The Scalo Superelletra has an original and practical three-seater layout with central driving position, offering easy access and plenty of cabin space. With total 750kW -1,020HP nominal output, 940kW - 1,278HP peak output, 1,620Nm torque and employing torque vectoring, on a target kerb weight below 1,850 Kg, stellar performance is guaranteed. Minimum range is 500km (NEFZ).

Source: Carrozzeria Touring Superleggera

Casa en la Murta - Country House in Alzira (Valencia) 2018

Reconstruction of a cottage in the valley of La Murta. The house is located on a gentle slope of orange groves facing north and the banks of the Xúquer. The arrival is made through a staircase and a large garden terrace raised on the ground, leaving the construction structured by a transversal axis that, from the access and the outside terrace, crosses the house and reaches the interior landscaped patio.

Traditional materials and techniques have been used in the work: exterior wood carpentry with enamelled alfeizars and solid steel bars, custom-made hydraulic tile interior slabs, exterior flooring of pieces of Cooked clay, restored demolition interior carpentry, decorative plaster decorations of own design, bedheads reusing the original bars... all this to recover the character of the original building and the sensations that remain in the childhood memories of the owners.

A Gradoli & Sanz Arquitectes Project.