Month: March 2021

Parking garages present an aesthetic challenge to even the most creative design minds. Their vast scale and monotonous appearance are necessitated by function, but result in the difficulty of making the garages visually interesting instead of simply overbearing. Cladding a parking garage in a unique material can add visual interest and texture to achieve a more human connection. However, this in turn creates concerns about still bringing light and air into the garage.

Scale defines spatial experience. From a single room or space to entire masterplans and urban designs, moving between scales shows how designers zoom in or out. Working across programs and contexts around the world, architects are exploring the possibilities of scale to shape human experience. For unbuilt work, these proposals combine ideas of structure, materiality and form to redefine typologies and the future of urban environments.

Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks with Russian architect Totan Kuzembaev about flexibility in buildings, the freedom in design, and that even after leading a successful practice for almost twenty years, he still keeps searching for how to make architecture.

A soft integration in the landscape accompanies the development of the city. Neither in the center of the town nor really on its outskirts, regarding the urban development of the northern part of the street Pierres, blanches, the location of the project offers the opportunity to reinforce the development of the city by asserting the public character of this facilities and equipment.

The design of this boutique Yoga studio is based on the idea of flow – a term used in yoga practice to describe a sense of fluid movement and meditation. Within the space, these ideas manifest through smooth transitions between spaces and the extensive use of malleable materials such as fabrics and hempcrete. The entrance opens up onto a large reception area with a central desk doubling up as an occasional bar. A reconfigurable sofa follows the soft curve of a large screen acting as a space divider. On one side a large water fountain reminds visitors to wash their hands while the other side leads into the practice rooms.

Simply placing the word “smart” before any kind of architectural or technological term, or any term for that matter, seems to convert it into something new and futuristic. Some examples, such as the smart city, smart industry, or smart commerce show us that the “smart” adjective is already more common than we think, and that, moreover, it doesn’t sound that strange anymore. The smart building is also a novel concept used in today’s architectural world. The difficulty of discussing this concept, as with every innovative yet ambiguous term, is finding a clear definition of it. There is already much writing on it, and we won’t find an absolutely clear definition, but generally, we could define a smart building as: “A construction that strives for full energy efficiency in its usage, reaching this goal thanks to integrated and automated management and control of all its systems.”

Our clients were very open about us creating an entirely new way of living for them. We designed the house to allow the public to see through and into the building. The ground floor offers privacy, seclusion and retreat.