I've started to play with the Processing framework for the visualisation of our Ooo-Ya-Tsu project with art collective Qubo Gas and drummer Olivier Durteste.
Part of the visualisation design is to create a flexible particle system that will handle the interactions between the graphical elements of the projection. Here's a screenshot of my first stab at this particle system in action, for the moment driven by some simple gravitation rules.
Finishes, glass balustrades, landscaping and installations are going in as the low energy house nears completion.
Update: The building is finished and occupied. See our portfolio piece for the latest.
Qubo Gas prepared this preview of Ooo-ya-tsu, our future musical performance at l'Aéronef, next September, with drummer Olivier Durteste. Quite apt!
Mélanie and Béranger, our self-builder clients for the Gabillou barn conversion in South-West France, have been elected self-builders of the year by the popular French site Autoconstruction.net.
Congratulations to you two for your amazing work and your enthusiasm!
We are starting the remodelling and extension of a cabin on Sjusjøen, in the mountains just north of Lillehammer, Norway. Lovely little building in a stunning natural setting, rich with all the childhood memories of our client!
The Aalto University has published a preview of entries for the international competition we entered last August in collaboration with Various Architects. Shortlisted entries for the second phase of the competition will be announced later in November.
See a preview of the entries on the Aalto University website...
Replacing a 1980s bungalow on an infill site in a Nottinghamshire village, the design of this house had to complement the Conservation Area setting whilst achieving extremely high performance as a “zero carbon in use” eco-home. Designed using the PassivHaus Planning Package and executed in a palette of brick, oak, slate and zinc, the house includes a central frameless glazing porch and open stair, an integrated balcony and an extensive built-in photovoltaic array.
The south facade, designed to maximise winter solar gains while providing shading in summer, . Photovoltaic panels and rooflights are integrated into the slate roof.
Our client required a contemporary home that could be built to achieve extremely high energy performance in use. Their site was carefully selected within a characterful village setting, approached from the main village street to the North and having a good southerly aspect for solar collection. Alongside the development of our client’s brief and requirements, we carried out a careful analysis of the village layout and the materials and massing of surrounding buildings.
“The house has performed well and we are very happy with its aesthetics, comfort and technical performance. It blends in well with the village despite being obviously modern. Many passers by stop to enquire and pass comment on the house, usually very favourably. We often see cars slowing down in the road outside, almost stopping to catch a second glance.
All the energy bills for the first year of occupation, plus the running of an electric car and water rates, were covered by the return from the solar panels, leaving us only Council Tax to pay!”
In a sensitive planning context the design was developed in close consultation with the local planners and community, documented through an in-depth Design and Access Statement. The delicate balance between achieving PassivHaus design targets and satisfying Conservation Area planning requirements meant that the design was evolved and presented in various contexts. A consultation on site in the existing bungalow saw a 20% turnout of the village giving unanimous support for the scheme.
The design uses the north facade to address the village setting and large windows and solar roof to the south to maximise useful solar gain and collection. The requirement to reduce north facing glazing to meet PassivHaus design targets is offset by the provision of a frameless-glazed porch, which prevents the escape of warm air whilst providing an open welcome to visitors.
The North facade and street front, a contemporary response to the surrounding buildings of the Conservation Area.
The smaller windows and variegated massing on this side of the house respond to the scale of the village, whilst the private rear of the house presents a single expanse of roof for solar collection, free of any self-shading projections. An integrated system of flush-fitting photovoltaic panels and rooflights was selected to create a smoothly integrated roofscape. Excess heat gain is controlled by the use of integrated external louvre blinds to the large sliding glass doors on the south elevation.
The integrity of the design is maintained by the simple palette of materials: red brick, oak cladding and beams, slate roofs. A small area of zinc roofing over the glazed porch expresses the articulation of the house plan around the double-height circulation zone.
This project was shortlisted in the 2014 RIBA East Midlands Awards.
Design overview (click to enlarge).
Contractor: Nick Martin with Branch Construction
Executive architect: Parsons + Whittley
I was last week in France to meet the team of L'Aéronef, Lille's alternative music concert venue. They confirmed they were offering us a one-year artist residency to develop a musical art performance to be shown to the public in September 2013.
2hD, as architects, will be teaming up with French art collective Qubo Gas and percusionist Olivier Durteste to develop the project.
Morgan Dimnet, Laura Henno and Jef Ablézot, of Qubo Gas, are old friends of mine. We met again in September 2010 at the reopening ceremony of Lille Museum of Modern Art (LaM). The LaM had just commissioned one of their digital pieces for their NetArt collection, following the animation project they created for London's Tate Modern in 2007.
Discussing our work in the inflatable pavilion we had designed for the museum, we all got excited in the idea of exploring how our work with architectural spaces related to their large scale hand-drawn artworks and musical animations. We decided to start collaborating on an art performance and Qubo Gas brought in their friend Oliver Durteste — drummer of successful French bands The Shoes and Cercueil and solo artist DDDXIE — to participate. L'Aéronef enthusiastically supported our idea and offered us an art residency to create and produce the performance, to be staged in the venue in September 2013.
I'll be back in Lille at the end of November to start experimenting with live drawing, music and 3D digital projections. More on this later...
It's great to see our house design in a North Nottinghamshire village beginning to emerge, fully formed on site. The oak, brick, slate and zinc materials palette is looking good... But most of all, this project demonstrates that low energy housing can be built even in sensitive planning contexts.
Update: The building is finished and occupied. See our portfolio piece for the latest.
We designed the house, in its village conservation area setting, using the PassivHaus Planning Package, a method that uses tried-and-tested approaches to reducing energy use in buildings. Now the house is nearing completion under executive architects Parsons + Whittley and builder Nick Martin of Hockerton Housing Project fame — testament to a dedicated client and team.
We were contacted this summer by a French circus collective to develop a large-scale inflatable venue. One of the artists, Katrin Wolf, sent us this photo of her former trapeze act off a helium balloon. Lovely!
Photo by Katrin Wolf
A remodel project is usually a messy thing when it starts on site — plenty of dust and disruption as things get worse before they get better. However, the first steps of this project have presented a glimpse of how much better the house will be when the work is complete: with the removal of the stairs and jumble of storage rooms at the core of the house, new views have opened up from ground level to the underside of the roof.
The creation of a new heart to the house is a key part of our design, reconnecting rooms on each side of the building and linking-in a new loft space above. It's rewarding to see evidence of the value the design will bring at such an early stage.
For the background to the design, see our previous post about upgrading a 1920s house.
The original brief for this project was to create an outbuilding to an existing family house designed by renowned Norwegian functionalist architect Rolf Prag. This outbuilding would accommodate garage space and a small apartment for rental.
We designed a simple single-story building that echoed the typology of the main building, but keeping it visually more compact to respect the functional hierarchy between the main building and its servant outbuilding.
However, a year after the outbuilding was completed, the client decided to sell the main house and suggested moving to this outbuilding. Originally proposed as a joke by the client, this rapidly became an attractive option to temporarily accommodate the family, whilst their new house was being designed and built. The move, however, required a partial remodelling to accommodate a family of four...
The outbuilding then went into another iteration of design, the plot being subdivided to allow the sale of the main building. The area was also relandscaped to cater for this new use.
We merged the existing garage and storage space into the living quarters, creating two more bedrooms and a utility room. With minimal changes to the external appearance of the building, a new garden space and carport were fitted onto the tight plot, framing the entrance to the house and providing a low maintenance outdoor play space.
Planning permission has been granted and the remodelling of the outbuilding and hard landscaping work are now underway.
We have collaborated with Various Architects on an entry for the international architectural design competition for Otaniemi central campus of Aalto University, Finland.
The competition was for design of the new School of Art, Architecture, Design and Media (50,000 sqm), together with the masterplanning of the central square for the largest university campus of Finland, close to Helsinki. The site is surrounded by iconic modernist buidings designed by Alvar Aalto, who originally also masterplanned the campus.
We submitted the entry last week and it was great fun collaborating on this project with the team at Various Architects — with whom we are now sharing an office space in Oslo. The competition is anonymous, so it is not possible to show images of our entry yet, but the shortlisting for phase two of the project should be announced in November 2012.
Our Norwegian office is now sharing an office space in Oslo with Various Architects.
I originally got in touch with Various Architects via Snøhetta, who we met at the World Architecture Festival Awards 2011 — they were shortlisted in the same category as our LaM pavilion and they won!
Ibrahim Elhayawan, partner at Various Architects, worked with Snøhetta for 13 years before creating his own practice in 2008. He kindly offered me to join the new office space they were moving in to, on the top floor of Sommerrogata 17, right in front of Oslo's National Library.
The team (clockwise from top left): Jon Iversen and Asgeir Ljøen (of Modus Arkitekter), Isabell Adamofski, Ibrahim Elhayawan and Birgitte Haug (of Various Architects) and me.
The participatory arts magazine Mailout has published an article about our collaboration with artist Marcus Rowlands for our Lost Cuckoo public art project.
Written as a dialogue between Marcus, Tom and Thibaut, the article explores the role of artists and architects in the creative process and the idea of holding a creative space for public participation.
You can read the article on Scribd.
The full version of this issue of Mailout is also available online for purchase.
