In Japan, these are described in the Building Standards Act. The law plays a key role in protecting the investment, health, and very life of inhabitants by ensuring structures are secure in relation to their surrounding environment. A good architect has the capacity to design an attractive structure within these legal boundaries. Jun Yashiki’s “Detached Floor House” in T...
Tennessee is home to two music meccas: Memphis and Nashville. While the latter is the home of country music (and even the Country Music Hall of Fame), Memphis is synonymous with blues, soul and gospel. As Jason Jackson of brg3s architects testifies, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and others moved to Memphis where they got their breaks and changed th...
What were the circumstances of receiving the commission for this project? RMA was approached by the owner to design an addition and renovation to an existing 100 year old bungalow Please provide an overview of the project. The site of the existing Brahler Residence possesses a dramatic downward slope from the street toward a brook that bisects the lot. A densely w...
The orthogonal exterior belies the curved ceiling of the writing room, one of a number of surprises found inside. Jon Lott answered a few questions about the recently completed project. Please provide an overview of the project. The Haffenden House is a writing studio with a garage/breezeway at ground-level; library, bathtub, and writing space on the second-level; an...
What were the circumstances of receiving the commission for this project? Client called after seeing our work in the surrounding environment. We met on site and instantly formed a united design aesthetic for the project. Please provide an overview of the project. The Mojave landscape maintains an inherent beauty of textures, stratifications and materials, as well ...
OBRA Architects answered a few questions about the project. What were the circumstances of receiving the commission for this project? OBRA Architects was recommended to our client by a friend of his who attended a lecture we gave at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Please provide an overview of the project. This is a vacation retreat for an American doctor...
Portuguese studio Contaminar Arquitectos designed the residence for a long narrow plot in Texugueira, a village located north of Leiria. Named Texugueira House, the 233-square-metre building flanks a retaining wall that extends north to south along the eastern boundary of the site. A corridor follows this wall and forms the house's main axis. The three blocks all sit i...
London-based Jonathan Woolf Architects designed Lost Villa as a home for 11 inhabitants in a forest outside Kenya's capital city. It comprises three blocks that cluster around a cloistered courtyard, forming separate but linked spaces for immediate family, grandparents and household staff. A softly sloping roof binds the three buildings together and an opening in t...
Named Casa T&G, the two-storey home is located in the centre of Rosario – a city in the Santa Fe district of Argentina. Nicolás Campodonico conceived the house as a concrete volume sandwiched between two courtyards. The first of these is screened from the road by a faceted concrete facade, while a glazed wall flanks a second one at the rear. A combination of prefab...
Kyoto office Alphaville designed the faceted building in Shiga Prefecture as a workspace for a painter and designer, and as a home for the couple and their young son. "It is a space where they can spend a whole day with their only son, and will be used to regularly exhibit works as a gallery and to host parties," explained Alphaville. Corrugated metal cladding cove...
The birch ply lining sweeps around the upper floor of the apartment, before becoming a staircase that features balustrades perforated with a design of dots and crosses. These steps lead down to a master bedroom, guest room and bathroom. Carl Trenfield designed the integrated furniture for a 72-square-metre split-level apartment within a Victorian property in Snaresbook...
The youCUBE scheme was developed by local firm 5468796 Architecture for a 19- by 80-metre site on the city's Waterfront Drive that sits within a neglected industrial neighbourhood alongside the Red River. Working with a developer that specialises in building custom homes, the team designed a modular system of standard units that combine to form properties of different s...
Sheets of pale plywood were added by NAAD to the walls, floors and ceilings of the timber-framed property, creating a transient home called Ephemeral House for a client in his 20s. The plywood is left untreated throughout and the space is largely unfurnished, intended to give the appearance of a property that hasn't been finished. "The surface of the wood constitut...
Suspended over a steeply sloping hillside in La Calera, a lakeside town approximately 35 kilometres west of Córdoba, the single-storey house was designed to suit the varying topography of its site and the hot Argentinian summers. Unable to find a level ground surface, local architects Carlos Viale and Beviglia considered excavating part of the site but were worried abou...
Designed by Portuguese studio António Costa Lima Arquitectos, the wedge-shaped House in Caxias tapers in height towards the top of its sloping plot. Residents can walk from the street onto its L-shaped roof, which doubles as a viewing platform. The spaces within the building are oriented away from the road to face towards the West Jamor Valley in Caxias, a district just...
Designed by local studio Architekturbüro Scheder, Small House sits between two buildings on the edge of a forest in Hohenecken, just outside the city of Kaiserslautern in south-west Germany. There are only two rooms inside the structure, which is 12 metres long and just 3.5 metres wide. The architects were unable to make it any larger, because planning regulations stip...
G studio worked with architects Teruya Kido and Suma-Saga-Fudosan on the project. Named Tokyo Loft, the apartment occupies one of the uppermost floors of a 1980s housing block and was designed specifically to be used as short-term accommodation for tourists. Rather than offering a polished hotel-like interior, G Studio chose to deliberately create a space that combine...
Vilnius studio Aketuri Architektai was asked to design the house for a plot on the outskirts of Trakai, a lakeside region just outside the Lithuanian capital. Named House in Trakai, the 130-square-metre home features a large pointed roof that is covered in pieces of shale – a slate-like sedimentary rock. A wide strip of decking made from Thermowood – a type of thermally...
The old grain threshing mill forms part of Southside Steading, a collection of disused farm buildings that nestle into a hill overlooking a valley in the Scottish Borders. Edinburgh studio WT Architecture was tasked with converting the old stone structure – which is partially submerged into the grassy bank – into a modern retreat.The roof and interior structures were be...
Salt Lake City studio Imbue Design designed the house, called High Desert Dwelling, for a plot on the outskirts of Capitol Reef National Park in Utah. It comprises three buildings – the main house, a guesthouse and a garage. Two L-shaped volumes, both with mono-pitched roofs, intersect to form the main home. Together, they project four glazed ends in opposing directions...
London studio Claridge Architects designed the wooden house, named Oak Hill, for the grounds of a Victorian mansion block in north London. The residence takes the place of a grassy mound that once sloped against the rear of the block.The roof level of the new home matches the summit of the now-excavated mound so as not to affect views from the windows of the ground-floo...
Akio Nakasa of Japanese firm Naf Architect & Design designed the two residences to house three generations of one family. The first property accommodates a single grandmother, while the second is the home of a couple and their child. Named Arch Wall House, the structure was conceived as two separate buildings that appear as halves of a whole. Despite being different i...
Swedish studio Arrhov Frick were asked by a young couple to design the 220-square-metre home for a woodland clearing in Saltsjö-Boo, a coastal area just outside Stockholm.Surrounded by pine trees, the rocky plot faces an inlet of the northern Baltic sea. It backs onto an access road for the area which, according to the architects, is mostly populated by holiday homes. ...
Dublin office GKMP Architects – whose previous work includes an angular house extension clad in white glazed tiles and another covered in tiles that resemble brickwork – designed the extension to create more practical space at the rear of an 1860s house in the suburb of Rathmines. The owners asked the architects to remodel the ground floor area of an annex that projects...
Duggan Morris was one of three firms chosen to design the first-phase buildings of the Brentford Lock West masterplan – a project to create 520 homes on a former industrial estate next to the Grand Union Canal on the outskirts of west London. The brief called for 45 low-cost residential units and a strong visual relationship with the waterfront setting. The challenge wa...
Arnau Vergés was asked to create a multi-purpose outbuilding next to a 17th-century farmhouse in La Vall d'en Bas, a municipality in eastern Spain, as part of a renovation and extension project called Farm Surroundings. The architect had already renovated the main property to provide room for the fourth generation of the farm's owners, the Carrera family, in 2011. ...
Melbourne studio Wolveridge Architects designed the residence for a young family in Mount Martha, a beach suburb on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne. The client – a developer and builder – had already been working with the firm on a neighbouring property, before commissioning the design of own family home. "The client had a third child on the way and so was kee...
Featuring a radically flexible interior, the Grade II*-listed Rogers House in south London was designed and completed by Rogers and his then wife Su between 1967 and 1969 at the start of his career. It is cited by the architect as a precursor to the Pompidou Centre he designed with Renzo Piano. The house has been owned by Rogers' family since it was built. Rogers' son...
Japanese architect Kouichi Kimura, founder of local firm FORM, designed Cozy House for a restricted plot in a densely populated residential area of Japan's Shiga prefecture. He proposed creating an largely inward-facing house filled with a variety of spaces, from quiet nooks to more open family areas."The house is built at one of the small sites crowded with houses an...
The two-storey building is positioned close to the client's existing family home and was designed by architect Takanobu Kishimoto of Kobe-based Container Design to provide additional living spaces – including a kitchen, dining area, sitting room, traditional tatami room and a study. The main entrance opens onto a double-height space described by the architect as an indo...
London-based Haptic added an open-plan kitchen and dining room in the first of two extensions to the rear of Highlever House, a two-storey Victorian property in west London. The second is a small guest annex positioned against the brick gable of a neighbouring property at the bottom of the garden.Both are clad with narrow slats of untreated larch that will naturally gre...
Croatian office Turato Architects designed the three-storey dwelling as a summer home for a couple and their two adult children on the forested island of Krk, which is situated in an inlet of the northern Adriatic Sea. But once completed, the couple uprooted from their city home to take up permanent residence on the island, reserving their mainland home only for weekend...
Named House with One Wall, the concrete and glass building was designed by Swiss architect Christian Kerez for a plot in Witikon, east of the city. Perched on a slope, it offers residents views of nearby Lake Zurich.The building features an elongated hexagonal floor plan, and all six of its elevations are wrapped in glazing. Inside, a zigzagging concrete wall divides the...
Kichi Architectural Design designed the two-storey home for a couple and their three children in Tsukuba, a city 40 miles outside Tokyo. While the home has been given the name Circle House, it gives the impression of having three rectangular floors. According to the architect, the name originates from the building's layered form, which is intended to represent the circu...
The site for the building in Busan's Daecheong-dong district measures just five metres wide by 12 metres deep, so JMY Architects chose to combine the various functions by stacking them vertically. By uniting a three-storey apartment with a commercial gallery space used by the owner, the building aims to demonstrate the potential for restricted urban sites to merge acc...
Villa Wot was designed by Narud Stokke Wiig for a family of five and built in the backyard of an existing property that has been in the family for generations. The plot in the Tåsen neighbourhood to the north of the city centre is surrounded by traditional timber-clad houses from the 1930s, which the design aim to evoke with its basic form. "In reverence to the surroun...
