Articles by Valeria Silva

Belvedere was built in Hamburg’s central park Planten un Blomen as part of the “Hamburger Architektur Sommer” (the Hamburg architecture triennial) and to mark the 30th anniversary of the city partnership between Hamburg and Osaka. Designed by Kawahara Krause Architects and with a colour concept by Japanese artist Nobuko Watabiki, the pavilion functions as an interaction of art and architecture and creates a quiet retreat in the fluid space of the vast park. As a public platform it invites visitors to enjoy and experience new perspectives of this popular and familiar park.

Y House is a single-family residence with striking views of Rila Mountain, located in the town of Samokov. Designed as a modern interpretation of the typical village house, the project is a double-story rectangular volume with a gable roof. It is carefully placed as a freestanding object inside a grassy courtyard. Individual façade elements: windows, doors, loggias and wall finishes, stand out against the volume of the single geometric shape.

The commission was to design two identical houses for two families in a narrow site on a gentle slope on a lake shore.

The House 1559/36D is 836 sqm residential project in one of the privileged locations of Chandigarh flanked with green belt on one side and a view to the Shivaliks, juxtapose against an urban landscape. Our primary design response was to encourage the occupant of the space to be in a constant dialogue with either nature or art and sometimes with both. In response to David Craib’s quote “Design should never say, Look at me! It should always say, Look at this!” the most irrefutable thing was to raise the common leisure zone to the top of the house.

The CRA House is located within a residential country club in Avándaro, Estado de México. The country club, like many others in Mexico, establishes general design criteria and suggests, with emphasis, the use of specific forms and materials. Given the mountain character of the site, the regulation infers the need to preserve the rustic character of the place through architecture. In most cases, regulatory constraints are real challenges that are solved through analysis and design. In this case, the design of the house proves a stylistic hybridization strategy, with the double purpose of giving continuity to the character of the whole, while at the same time articulating, in an alternative way, the different spaces and the program of the house.

The house is located in a hilltop of the East Cape (Laguna Hills), 9km away from the nearest infrastructure network (San Jose del Cabo) in an off the grid community.  The horizontal profile of the building along with the rammed earth walls, blends the house into the landscape, very discrete from the dirt road that comes along the sea.

Young architects from Minas Gerais, Carla Cruz and Philipe Pinheiro, from the Estudio Sala office, signed the Palm Room project, an environment designed for Casa Cor Minas 2019 that was held at the Palácio das Mangabeiras, a work by Oscar Niemeyer constructed in the 50s in a 42,000 m² of land in Belo Horizonte.