Articles by Valeria Silva

Nestled in Seattle’s Central District neighborhood, Oak & Alder celebrates the city’s past while setting the tone for its future. Complete with a rusted corten steel exterior, massive windows, and a pitched roofline, the townhome doesn’t look like other multi-family structures around town—and that’s exactly what the project’s developer, architect, and builder, Hybrid, aimed to achieve.

During the 1970s Otl Aicher developed a corporate design for the city of Isny im Allgäu, based on his image about a „city in black and white“ („Stadt in Schwarz und Weiß“). A series of 136 pictograms, portray the town, the landscape, and the region in black and white. Since then the work of Aicher has lost neither its sharpness nor its expressiveness and today still forms an integral part of the town‘s corporate identity.

Tradition and innovation. The design of the villa wants to start from these characteristics site to define that relationship with the place with which to enter into symbiosis. The main purpose was not to design a house “in the manner of the ancients”, but with the spirit of the ancients, taking advantage of new technologies while respecting the proportions, colors, and use of materials that create an intimate and lasting relationship with the surrounding landscape.