Articles by Andreas Luco

Located in a residential environment on an irregularly shaped terrain, Casa CB125 uses its placement to create distinct spaces and paths. Part of the challenges of this project was to develop a simple architectural programming with only a few square meters of construction and with a limited proposal, but on a terrain of nearly 1,0000m2. How would we manage to place a house of approximately 400m2 on a terrain that is more than twice as large, without making the house look small?

The project was achieved by linking all the interior spaces with the exterior by gardens and terraces, allowing energy savings and natural light. The program is distributed in an L shape, creating a set of openings and transparencies that blur the interior-exterior limits. Concrete works as a structure and finished at the same time, achieving a palette of materials.

Elsewhere, an Austin-area vacation rental company, commissioned Sean O’Neill to design their first cabin. The goal was to create a compact living space with everything one would need for a weekend of focus and fresh air. The atmosphere the architect aimed to recreate was that of a Texas porch. It’s a serene feeling of sitting outside in the heat, the breeze, and the rain under the shade of a roof. A 10′ folding glass wall allows the entire living space to become a porch.

Composed of 16 units, the project’s intent was to develop affordable housing for a diverse clientele, ranging from families to young professionals, while offering living spaces and delivering construction of high quality, thus respecting the neighbourhood and its context. Guided by the prevailing concept of openness, the building was designed with double aspect apartments. This was a key element of the project, allowing all users to have a view of the inner courtyard and to the front of the building and ensuring residents can enjoy natural daylight throughout the day.

Drawing inspiration from famed artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s adobe houses and patio paintings, architecture firm The Ranch Mine has designed a modern courtyard home in the American desert southwest on the site of a former parking lot. “Weave” is a new house that stitches together modern conveniences with the southwestern vernacular in a historic district in the heart of uptown Phoenix, Arizona.

A single-family house designed in suburbia of Tokyo. Instead of regarding a suburb as a subordinate of metropolis, this young couple’s suburban life could be truly centered by working more then three days a week from home. This change made us to come up with a new (or non-modern) house-type with the same budget as the neighboring mass-produced houses. It required much more diverse spaces to accommodate their working environment and places for multiple hobbies (indoor-outdoor), without increasing total floor area.

The existing house was a low key queenslander in one of the leafy ‘O’ streets of Yeronga, Brisbane, Australia. There were issues with overland flow (the back garden is effectively a creek during storms). There was some very odd planning which disrupted the flow of the house & had resulted in a very poor use of some spaces (a small room with an 80’s type 45 degree wall on the western side).

This project gutted and re-built a classic split-level house from the early 1980’s. A long angular space was completely opened up, to create an airy sense of volume not possible in Vancouver anymore, since high ceilings heights are not allowed in any new house. Constricted stairs, dropped ceilings and non load-bearing walls between the living areas were removed, but the existing exterior shape of the house was not changed or enlarged. Old window locations were preserved to leave the house’s structure almost completely intact, and then elongated to let more light in. Since the house is on a prominent corner site, corner windows were added to create panoramic views out into the established neighbourhood.

In the citycenter of Roosendaal a beautiful urban villa has recently been completed which reflects in its architecture on the directly surrounding historic buildings. It is not often possible to create a villa of this size within the historic center. The house presents itself in a clear but quirky way in wood, steel and concrete. The width of the plot in relation to the surrounding buildings gave rise to splitting the volume into two. Parking on site has become possible because the living volume has been “lifted”.