A house inside a mountain in Villa Vals, Switzerland

Dutch architect Bjarne Mastenbroek of Amsterdam-based SeARCH visited Villa Vals as one of those tourists in the late 1990s. Taken by the awe-inspiring landscape and surprised to discover that it was possible to build up to three stories on the almost-hallowed ground next to the baths, he began investigating erecting a house there. But to purchase land in the area, which is dominated by traditional timber-and-stone farmhouses, required Swiss citizenship. Mastenbroek partnered with Rotterdam-based architect Christian Müller (who is Swiss by birth), and, while financing the project himself, brought in a group of silent owners.

In keeping with Mastenbroek and Müller’s characteristic approach of integrating architecture into the landscape or urban fabric, the team first focused on keeping the view across the valley open, not only for their residence, but also for the baths, which sit catty-corner up the hillside. They envisioned a subterranean building, one with intertwined interior spaces that would fit together like the pieces of puzzle. “We knew we would not be able to build this house in the Swiss style — in a perfectionist way,” says Mastenbroek, citing financial constraints and noting that it wouldn’t be as compelling a solution. “You can never compete with the thermal baths’ perfection — that radical, minimal, pure approach,” he says. “So we went for a more experimental, almost industrial building. We developed a kind of nonperfection that was interesting for us, and we collaborated with other designers from the Netherlands to make a Dutch interior.”

Though experimental, the house also embraces local building traditions, most notably with its facade, made from split stone recovered from the site — the ubiquitous Valser quartzite of the thermal baths and Vals rooftops — and by incorporating an existing structure on the site. Originally, the limit of the plot for sale by a local farmer ran right through one of the simple stone-and-wood bi-level livestock barns that are emblematic of the Alpine hillsides. To safeguard the barn, the property line was redrawn and the architects incorporated the building into their plan, shoring it up, pouring a new concrete floor and stair, and using it as a mudroom that connects to the house by way of a 72-foot-long, stepped concrete tunnel.

From the article Villa Vals. By Beth Broome

Keep on reading

http://archrecord.construction.com/residential/recordHouses/2010/10_Villa_Vals.asp

The power of light: Aurora Borealis by Robert Lepage

Quebec´s silos. Picture by Michelle Loiselle

Those who live close to important harbors know how ugly the silos are, and worst of all, they block the view to the city and the sea. In Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires, the view is enhanced with Calatrava’s bridge and the towers, but it feels different when you walk around. Impossible to hide they are industrial dark buildings. Here we have the examples of Puerto Madero and Bahia Blanca Harbor, also in Buenos Aires.

Silos at Puerto Madero and the Calatrava´s bridge. Picture from travelpod.com

Silos at Bahia Blanca Harbor. Picture from soydewhite.com

And here is a bright solution in the city of Quebec, by Robert Lepage, the prolific artistic director responsible for such productions as Cirque du Soleil’s Kà in Las Vegas and the upcoming staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Quebec´s silos. Picture by Michelle Loiselle

“The massive grain-storage terminal blocks city views to the Saint Lawrence River, and Lepage has been staring at the 1,968-foot-long building since 1997, when he moved his production company, Ex Machina, into a converted firehouse facing its 81 silos. In 2008 he began to realize his vision.

Working with longtime collaborator Martin Gagnon, principal of Ambiances Lighting & Visual Design, Lepage created The Image Mill, a series of video images condensing Québec City’s 400-year history into 40 minutes, which he displayed around two outer walls of the structure using 27 freestanding Christie projectors. During its first season, the projection — presented by the City of Québec, with the Bunge of Canada and the Port of Québec, to celebrate the city’s 400th anniversary — attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers.

This prompted the municipality to extend it for five summers — and to commission the designers to devise a new spectacle to add on to the work.

The resulting Aurora Borealis is a light installation that washes the Bunge with a re-creation of the northern lights via 574 LED luminaires integrated into the landmark. According to Gagnon, “Producing an impression of the northern lights is a project we’ve had in our pocket for a long time.” Aurora Borealis follows presentations of The Image Mill in the summer but is also shown during the rest of the year, from dusk until 11:30 p.m.”

Reference: Aurora Borealis. Ex Machina paints a luminous illusion

Keep on reading

http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/lighting/archives/2010/05aurora_borealis/aurora_borealis-1.asp

Sakais´ huts and territoriality: the hut as dwelling, refuge and sepulchre

I´ve found an old book on line, at project Gutenberg.org, called ¨My Friends the Savages. Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula)¨, written by Giovanni Battista Cerruti (1908). It was interesting for me to read that this tribe had three three types of huts: on the trees in plain ground, on the ground in the hills, and on the trees but specially built for those who were badly sick.

Let us see how Cerruti describes them:

From chapter XI

The hut (dop) of the Elder is the centre around which all the others are erected.

To defend themselves against wild beasts and other animals, as well as against the humidity of marshy ground, the Sakais of the plain often build their huts either up a tree or suspended between stout poles.

But on the hills there is no necessity to do this and the rude habitation is constructed on the ground with green branches and leaves, the roof and walls being of such poor consistency that they do not afford the very least protection. Wild beasts, as a rule, never venture into open spaces and besides are kept afar by the glare of the fires but the inclemency of the climate on those heights would render a more substantial residence desirable for comfort.

There is no furniture or other sort of household goods in the Sakai's dop. His bed consists of dry leaves and the same bark they use for their waist-cloths, strewn upon the ground. Some of them possess a coverlet, worth only a few pence, but for which the poor creatures have paid its weight in gold by means of articles given in exchange. The majority have not even this.

The hearth is placed in the middle of the hut and is made of four pieces of wood surrounding and closing in a heap of earth.

Three stones placed upon this serve to sustain the cooking-pot.

As I have said, they have no tables, chairs, stools or cupboards, and also the inventory of their kitchen utensils is very short: one or two earthen-ware pots (when they have not these they use bamboo canes for cooking), a couple of roughly-made knives, a few basins composed of cocoanut shells, and some bamboo receptacles which officiate as bucket, bottle and glass. The ladle with which they distribute their food is also of cocoanut shell.

Their plates are... banana or other leaves, adapted for the purpose, that are thrown away after they have finished eating.

At the top of the hut are hung the blow-pipes, and well-filled quivers. They are kept there for a little heat to reach them, this being considered essential to the efficacy of the poisons.

But, if a person is ill, the malady is a serious one, and the sourcerer cannot find a cure, a kind of territoriality is developed among the members of the tribe, isolating the unfortunate person; in the worst of cases, the hut built for him/her could be his/her own sepulchre.

From chapter XIV

if the malady is a serious one this cure fails, a sure proof that the spirit is one of the most dreaded class and must therefore be heroically fought by means of the chintok, as follows.

The village in which the afflicted person lives is closed in by numerous traps, and planted all round with poisoned arrows so that nobody can come near, even if someone were to succeed in crossing that original cordon sanitaire without any fatal consequence he would most certainly be killed inside it as it is feared that another evil spirit may be imported by an outsider, in aid of the one they are trying to get rid of.

Over the body of the infirm they form a canopy of medicinal herbs; the Alà and the company present paint themselves in the most horrible manner possible and as soon as it is quite dark (any sort of light is absolutely forbidden) they dispose themselves around the invalid and begin to madly beat their big bamboo canes. Their frenzy and the noise they make cannot be described; it makes one shudder, and the sound can be heard several miles off.

But it is intended to heal the poor wretch in the middle who, if he does not succumb to the violence of his disease, has a good chance of dying from the torture endured.

The diabolical concert lasts until the garrulous harbingers of the sun announce the dawn but is repeated after sunset for seven days during which period only the men are permitted to go into the forest in search of food.

If on the seventh day the patient is still alive he is left in peace unless a relapse should render another night of music necessary, and if he dies it is believed that the malignant spirit would not depart without taking the soul of his victim with him.

The most frequent illnesses to which the Sakais are subject are rheumatic complaints and very heavy colds which not rarely turn into severe bronchial and pulmonary ailments. Both are due to the cold at night against which they take no pains at all to protect themselves. Their huts shelter them from the rain but not from the air.

Some contagious skin diseases are also prevalent amongst them.

Directly somebody is seized with this malady a tree is selected at some distance from the settlement up which a little bower is hurriedly made and the person attacked is placed there and left with a little food at hand. Next day the relatives go to see if he or she is living and call out their demands, in a loud voice, a long way off. If there is a movement or an answer they go nearer and throw up some food but if there is no sign of life they hasten back and leave the corpse to decompose in the bower that now serves as a sepulchre.

Reference

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28189/28189-h/28189-h.htm

All pictures are in the book and published by Project Gutenberg.org

Spiralling Upwards. Comments on Frank Lloyd Wright´s Guggenheim

The Guggenheim Museum in the old times. Photo from The New Yorker

I´ve been lucky to visit this museum in 2005. Our minds are accustomed to see different type of buildings, mixed in the cities, but it must have been an urban shock 50 years ago. The avant garde design, in the middle of the classic city.

The Guggenheim is to be lived. When you walk down or up the ramp, you feel dizzy, and it was not only me, there was a young woman feeling terribly sick. The whole experience is unforgettable, since you see it while you walk through the sidewalks, it´s really impressive.

Last year, it was the 50^th Aniversary since it was opened. And The New Yorker dedicated an article to this event. Let us read some excerpts:

In 1959, when the Guggenheim Museum opened, traffic on Fifth Avenue moved in both directions. As you drove northward, the bulbous form emerged from behind flat-fronted apartment buildings like a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I first saw the museum that way, as a nine-year-old, and the idea that this beguiling object had been created to display art, or that it might not be up to the task, seemed beside the point.

Fifty years later, it still does, even though the charge that the building upstages the art has become part of its legend. Staff at the Guggenheim like to refer to the building as the most important object in the museum’s collection, which makes it odd that the Guggenheim hasn’t had a major exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work until now. Its fiftieth-anniversary show also marks the recent completion of an extensive restoration of the building and the fiftieth anniversary of the death of its maddening, egotistical, duplicitous creator. Wright died, at ninety-one, in April, 1959, six months before the museum was finished. He last saw the building in January of that year, when he was photographed looking out from the spiral ramp with the contractor, George Cohen.

Notably absent from that picture was the museum’s director, James Johnson Sweeney, who fought with Wright over almost every aspect of the building. Once the architect was gone, Sweeney painted the interior white, instead of the ivory that Wright had wanted; rather than hang the paintings directly on the backward-sloping walls, where Wright wanted them to appear as if they were on artists’ easels, he installed them upright, on metal rods projecting from the walls. Over the years, the building has been pushed and pulled in all kinds of directions, rarely to its benefit. Taliesin Associated Architects, the inheritors of Wright’s practice, put up a garish addition behind the museum; later, it was demolished to make way for a limestone slab by Gwathmey Siegel, and a bookstore was stuck in the open space beside the rotunda. It’s wonderful now to see the Guggenheim at least a bit closer to its 1959 condition, the reinforced-concrete surface of the exterior smooth and voluptuous rather than cracked and shabby. Planters, complete with live plants, and a fountain that Wright installed in the rotunda are back in use. They’re hardly his most sophisticated gesture, but it’s pleasing that the Guggenheim resisted editing them out.

Wright envisaged the Guggenheim as “a curving wave that never breaks.” When it opened, John Canaday, in the Times, called it “a war between architecture and painting in which both come out badly maimed.” But Wright’s conception has always functioned better than its critics have admitted, if never as well as he himself predicted. Works of artists like Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly play off well against the curves, but the space overwhelms anything small, delicate, or highly detailed. This makes the Guggenheim the progenitor of every architecturally assertive museum since, and beside works like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao or Daniel Libeskind’s glass-and-metal shards in Denver and Toronto, it now looks almost demure. What strikes you when you walk into Wright’s rotunda today is how intimate and comfortable its magnificence is. Art is none the worse for half a century of being seen here.

Reference

Spiralling Upward. By Paul Goldberger. The New Yorker, may 25, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/skyline/2009/05/25/090525crsk_skyline_goldberger?currentPage=1

Advancing in the construction of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia

The expiatory temple of La Sagrada Familia. Photo by Mark Burry.

This is an article written by Josephine Minutillo in August 2009, for Mc Graw Hill Construction: And End in Sight for a Centuries-old Building Project?. It is interesting to see that the money to continue the expiatory church of La Sagrada Familia is obtained from tourism and donations:

Chartres Cathedral’s imposing spires, rising heroically above the wheat fields in the countryside southwest of Paris, are a testament to the interminable construction that went into Medieval churches. While the shorter spire was begun in the 12th century, its taller, more flamboyant neighbor was not completed until some 400 years later. The campaniles of Barcelona’s Sagrada Família (Holy Family) church are equally impressive, and along with the cranes that hover above them, represent the most visible elements of an unmissable construction site in the center of a bustling metropolis—a unique, modern-day example of a complex building more than 125 years in the making.

Unlike Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, in which the master builder remains largely unknown, the Sagrada Família is the vision of one very well-known architect—the eccentric Catalan Antoni Gaudí, whose Modernista buildings created a sensation in fin-de-siècle Barcelona. But much like Chartres, which battled destructive fires on numerous occasions, construction of the Sagrada Família suffered huge setbacks during the devastating Spanish Civil War in the decade after Gaudí’s death in a streetcar accident in 1926. Crucial drawings and building models were lost during the conflict, making Gaudí’s ultimate vision for the temple less clear for his successors. Efforts to interpret that vision have been the source of controversy ever since. (Manifestos are presented every few years urging a halt to construction, claiming the building as it exists today is just a caricature of Gaudí’s work.)

While progress on the building in the decades that followed may have seemed slow, less than 10 percent of the planned church had actually been built during Gaudí’s lifetime. (The first stone was laid in 1882, a year before Gaudí was appointed architect.) The continuation of construction depended on several factors, not least of all funding. As an expiatory church, the Sagrada Família relies entirely on private donations; no money is received from the government or Catholic Church. When more towers began to rise, slowly revealing what would be Gaudí’s most radical design, the construction site gained increasing appeal as a tourist destination. The donations of a steady stream of visitors—nearly 2.5 million annually—coupled with advances in construction technology, have brought astonishing progress to the building in recent years.

Expiatory church of La Sagrada Familia. Image from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/

http://continuingeducation.construction.com/article.php?C=585&L=5

Read more about Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia

http://myriammahiques.blogspot.com/2009/12/nativity-facade-of-templo-expiatorio-de.html

Presentación: Morfología Urbana de las Ciudadelas de Chan Chan

Esta es una presentación de conferencia en powerpoint, configurada como libro digital. Para leer más sobre las ciudadelas:
http://myriammahiques.blogspot.com/2009/10/description-of-chan-chan-citadels-in.html
http://myriammahiques.blogspot.com/2010/05/digital-photocollages-on-chan-chan-peru.html

Multimedia en la cocina!

Encontré hoy esta nota en MSN y quisiera compartirla con arquitectos, diseñadores y también cocineros. Personalmente, me gusta mucho cocinar, y mis preferidas son las cocinas muy luminosas con muebles blancos, grandes ventanas al jardín, mesadas de granito de colores, especias y plantas por todos lados, con cuadros y elementos decorativos étnicos. Y los pisos, de cerámicas, antideslizantes, y que no se note cuando los chicos tiran comida o bebidas....Por esta razón, me gusta tener una rejilla para poder baldear. Una costumbre que no tienen los norteamericanos, ni siquiera en los baños; pueden imaginar el desastre que se hace cuando se tapa un inodoro y no hay donde desaguar, y el agua se va deslizando lentamente hacia las alfombras….

Parece, según esta nota, que las nuevas cocinas tienden a ser laboratorios, y vaya a saber dónde quedarían las enseñanzas humanistas del arquitecto Livingston. Recuerdo su texto sobre las cocinas y su énfasis en las cocinas abiertas para que la gente charlara mientras se cocinaba y preparaba la mesa. Opino como él, pero siempre propongo un cerramiento virtual, como una isla o estantes, o mesada entre el comedor y la cocina, que sirva como desayunador, porque no me gusta que las visitas estén husmeando entre los trastes sucios.

Me encantó este horno que a la vez cocina a vapor, y debiera haberlo tenido para cocinar mi Flounder fish el otro día, ya que se me deshizo completamente. De las firmas aquí mencionadas, conozco Miele como una empresa de productos de gran calidad, pioneros en Argentina del reciclaje (en los años ´90 eran los únicos que traían incorporados en sus muebles dos cestos de basura para reciclar). El problema con mis clientes, en esa época, un mueble de cocina standard salía 6000 U$S y los de Miele 36000 U$S, y muchos suspiraban y se inclinaban por la manufactura nacional.

Con Miele también conocí las mesadas Corian, muy bonitas por cierto, como las que usamos en EEUU, pero, aún prefiero la piedra natural, el granito de colores vivos me apasiona, nada de gris mara. La nota a continuación es de Inmaculada Tapia. Publicada el día de hoy; las fotos pertenecen al artículo.

La cocina se convierte en un espacio multifuncional donde mientras vigila los fogones o el horno más vanguardista, hay hueco para el home cinema y puede contestar correos electrónicos.

La cocina es un espacio no sólo reservado para elaborar los menús del día. Aún cuando eran lugares acotados por las paredes se transformaban con facilidad en mucho más. Hoy, el nuevo interiorismo apuesta por los espacios integrados y ha convertido a la cocina en una gran sala multifuncional en la que todo cabe.

La domótica y los electrodomésticos en los que tecnología y vanguardia constituyen un todo, facilitan la evolución más destacada de la cocina.

La firma Poggenpohl se caracteriza por integrar en la cocina todo tipo de tecnologías multimedia, apostando por un concepto de cocina adaptado a cada necesidad y en especial que sirva de elemento de unión para la familia en la que alimentación, ocio y trabajo se pueden complementar.

Desde hace varios años, la firma alemana ha incorporado la domótica a la cocina en la que si lo desea incluye tecnología de control remoto Smart-home y permite integrar desde una biblioteca, a la oficina, pasando por un "Home Cinema" con pantalla de gran formato, e incluso dispone de un espacio propio para el hardware del ordenador con acceso a Internet, teléfono y agenda electrónica.

Los muebles, como no podía ser de otra manera, tienen una perfecta comunión con el espacio, inevitablemente de grandes proporciones con materiales de alta calidad, muy cercanos al concepto de lujo.

Las superficies de cristal acrílico macizo, uniformemente coloreadas, de Parapan de color negro, gris claro o blanco contrastan fuertemente con los expresivos chapados de madera noble de peral suizo, nogal y estructura de madera tipo zebrano. Combinados con aluminio y cristal confieren a la cocina un nuevo aspecto que vive de armonías y contrastes.

En la nueva colección presentada en la Feria de Milán, el arquitecto y diseñador Hadi Teherani ha manifestado que la colección + Artesio ha perseguido un enfoque global, intentando ofrecer una coherencia atmosférica. "La existencia del ser humano se basa en la habitación, eso es el aspecto esencial. El poder cocinar en una cocina, entonces, no basta".

Elmar Duffner, gerente de Poggenpohl, comenta que siempre intentan ir más allá y como ejemplo señala sus clásicos aparadores altos o el dining-desk multifuncional, "utilizable como cocina, mesa comedor, o también como mesa de trabajo".

Los frentes de la nueva colección mezclan mate en color arena, tierra o alabastro, también se ofrece con frentes de madera genuina de pino cepillado o nogal, así como con frentes de cristal lacado en color arena, tierra, Mallow o alabastro.

La limpieza de líneas es una constante también en las propuestas de cocinas de la firma italiana Santos. Frentes de muebles sin tirador y encimera de acero son parte de esa dinámica que combinadas con el color blanco refuerza la sensación de luminosidad de la cocina en la colección Blanco Minos Brillo.

Esta cocina está dividida en dos zonas. Un área con una zona baja en la que se integra la zona de fregado y cocción y que lleva adosada una mesa en laminado compacto apoyada sobre pata metálica. Y una zona de columnas en la que se integran los electrodomésticos y donde se crea una zona de trabajo auxiliar gracias a los dos muebles persiana.

Gracias a la península se pueden integrar dos ambientes: el de trabajo y el de comedor. De esta manera, además de facilitar los movimientos y ganar en comodidad, "estar en la cocina" adquiere una nueva dimensión en la que todos tienen cabida.

Horno a vapor

Si a la versatilidad en el mobiliario le añadimos unos electrodomésticos que permitan una alimentación sana y fácil de preparar se llega a la conjunción perfecta.

Mièle dispone de un horno a vapor con presión (Cocivap), que supone la mejor alternativa a la cocción tradicional de los alimentos, pero preparados en menor tiempo y conservando su sabor, aspecto y nutrientes.La temperatura se puede ajustar manualmente en pasos de 5°C, entre 50 y 120 grados. Esta posibilidad permite que las temperaturas por debajo de los 100ºC se puedan utilizar para descongelar, recalentar y cocinar alimentos delicados sin presión.

"El vapor producido en un potente generador de vapor independiente envuelve el alimento por completo. Todo se calienta rápidamente y por igual", explica Sven Luce, responsable de producto. A partir de una temperatura de cocción de 100°C se cocina con vapor al 100 por cien, lo cual constituye una diferencia notable con respecto a aparatos similares donde siempre se utiliza una mezcla de oxígeno y vapor.

El método del Cocivap protege los alimentos del oxígeno, que es el que destruye las vitaminas. No se produce ninguna oxidación que daña tanto el aspecto como el contenido de nutrientes, lo que impide que los nutrientes se disuelvan, como ocurre cuando el alimento está sumergido en agua.

Permite la elaboración de alimentos con distintos tiempos de cocción diferentes. Y lo que es especialmente práctico: mientras el arroz se hace al vapor, se puede añadir primero la verdura y después el pescado, ya que el proceso de cocción se puede interrumpir en cualquier momento.

Si se decide por la vitrocerámica y necesita una moderna campana extractora, el modelo DA6000 es una magnífica opción para resaltar. Está integrada en la pared de manera que una vez que se deja de utilizar queda integrada de forma que pasa desapercibida.

Manejo táctil sobre cristal con indicación por pilotos LED para la iluminación del área de cocción y la iluminación indirecta es todo un acierto.

http://estilodevida.latam.msn.com/articulo_efe.aspx?cp-documentid=24368743

A city’s death by fire. A poem by Derek Walcott

The great fire of London. Image from http://www.infobritain.co.uk/Great_Fire.jpg

 After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,

I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire;

Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I

Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.

All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,

Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;

Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales

Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.

By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why

Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?

In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;

To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath

Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,

Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

From http://www.poemhunter.com/