Thứ Sáu, 15 tháng 7, 2011

Café del Arco / Clavel Arquitectos

© David Frutos Ruiz
Architects: Clavel Arquitectos
Location: ,
Construction Company: Auto-construction
Collaborators: Aarón Hernández, Ricardo Carcelén, David Hernández, Rubén Alcaraz
Project Year: 2009
Project Area: 189,00 sqm
Photographs: David Frutos Ruiz


We were asked to redesign the Café del Arco, a project from the late 80’s, which closely linked the cultural and leisure life ’s downtown. Some of the requests from the client were to enlarge the bar and connect it to the terrace and the adjacent Romea Theater Plaza, to improve the cuisine in order to extend its “tapas” and “dishes” offer, and to modernize and update its look.
© David Frutos Ruiz
In order to get a continuous space terrace-café, it was necessary to apply architectural mechanisms that are able to dissolve the boundaries between the building and public space. From the very first sketch, a winding cul-de-sac layout was the leitmotif that let us deal with all those heterogeneous conditions.
Plan
Starting from the façade, and as high as possible, we developed a continuous vertical-lines surface, that wraps the building without hardly touching it. Then it turns inside, making the access, organizing circulation space and sitting places, and working as a lattice between the different spaces. Finally it sets the trace of the bar and comes back to the façade, as if nothing had happened.
© David Frutos Ruiz
This device consists of a row of vertical iroko strips over a galvanized and lacquered steel framework that provides rigidity and guarantees the right alignment of the strips. The reproduction of a complete unit on a 1:1 model was essential for the definite choice of the minimal strip section that gave us the required degree of transparency and privacy.
© David Frutos Ruiz
To reinforce the idea of an interior outside, we continued the lines from the urban pavement that crosses the Romea Theater Plaza. In this way, the project appropriates the urban space, bringing the city inside the project. The new Café del Arco captures a piece of the city.
© David Frutos Ruiz
According to the refurbishment of the space, we propose a renewed 100% led lighting: RGB light that transforms the atmosphere at night, surrounding led lines that flood the walls, and the own outside made up with backlit methacrylate pieces. The “tapas” showcase gets renewed, becoming a mobile element that automatically moves up or down, allowing to use the bar during “cocktail” hours.

Meltino Coffee House / LOFF Atelier


© FG+SG – , Sergio Guerra
Architects: Cláudia Costa
Location: ,
Project year: 2010
Photographs: FG+SG , Sergio Guerra

© FG+SG – , Sergio Guerra

Concept

A coffee grain that draws the space… a coffee made of coffee… The underlying concept was the geometrization of the coffee grain that draws the two volumes / spaces in the plan.
The grain conquers the Coffee, perforates and draws the volumes, the walls, the ceiling. Its shadow is cast in the floor, dancing in the space.
front view
The project is divided in three areas: two volumes and an interior esplanade, which is elevated from the mall floor.
The two volumes are identical and translucent. However, they have distinct uses and furniture. The 1st Volume (lounge space) comprehends a relax area where it is served gourmet coffee.
In the 2nd volume (bar space) the public can take express coffee.
© FG+SG – , Sergio Guerra
The coffee grain conquers the mall gallery and spies the public space inviting the public to enjoy the Coffee.
The grain was drawn on many scales. Then, a matrix was built in the form of 3 panels (3 meters high by 1 meter of anchor) which, inverted, created a total of 6 distinct panels.
All the walls where developed based in the study of the 6 panel matrix.
plan

Double walls

It intends to reinforce the perforation of the grain and proportionate a body to the space. For this reason the walls and ceilings were duplicated. The central part of the ceiling is higher to give space a more dynamic feeling.
The structure is in pine wood which is light and easy to build. The covering of the walls, ceilings and balconies is in MDF, painted in white. The floor covering is in linoleum.
The colors chosen were the white and the brown because of the association of these with the coffee fruit and the reflection of the light.
© FG+SG – , Sergio Guerra

Furniture

The crockery and the tables were also drawn with detail, aesthetics and comfort attention. The furniture was covered with a unique and new material that is a derivative from the remnants of coffee.
The furniture fulfills the space and appeals to sensorial feelings.

Rigolo Café / Terry & Terry Architecture

© Ethan Kaplan
Rigolo was designed to be a neighborhood cafe/bakery, combining a French-inspired menu with an inviting and warm dining space. The project involved remodeling an existing retail space of an existing 1950′s building.
Architect: Terry & Terry Architecture
Location: 3465 California Street, ,
Engineer: Santos Urrutia Structural Engineers Inc.
Kitchen Layout: Robert Yick Co.
General Contractor: Roebuck Construction
Project Area: 2000 sqf
Project Year: 2005
Photographs: Ethan Kaplan

© Ethan Kaplan
The primary elements of our design include removing the low-lying drop ceiling to reveal the existing roof structure, which gives the space a lofty feel, inserting a slit skylight into the roof, allowing natural light to flood into the center of the space.  also designed a wood ribbon wall on the west side of the interior to connect the front and back entrances; the wall also functions as built-in seating for the dining tables.
© Ethan Kaplan

Thứ Hai, 16 tháng 8, 2010

Olivomare Restaurant


Olivomare is a restaurant serving seafood in London, reason why Pierluigi Pui used such peculiar decorative language using more or less clear references to the sea world and environment.
The wide wall that characterizes the main dining room is entirely covered by a large cladding featuring a pattern inspired by the works of Maurits Escher. To counterpoint it, in the same room, there is a sequence of tubular luminescent tentacles evoking a stray shoal of jellyfishes or sea anemones.
In the small dining room, the cladding is characterized by a wavy relief meant to evoke the sandy surface of the beach when moulded by the wind, while in the toilets lobby the intricate branches of a coral reef closes in around any visitor.






Thứ Năm, 12 tháng 8, 2010

Mestizo Restaurant

 

Architect: Clarke
Location: Santiago,
Collaborators: Danilo Lazcano, Cristobal Tirado, Gonzalo Torres
Contractor: Constructora Alcoy Ltda.
Structural Engineer: Luis Soler y Asoc.
Lighting: Eduardo Godoy
Project Year: 2005
Construction Year: 2007
Constructed Area: 652 sqm
Photographs: Gonzalo Puga

This Project won a public competition convoked by the Municipality of Vitacura in Santiago in 2005 for a restaurant in Las Américas Park. The restaurant is sited at the northeast end of the park – a work by architect TeodoroFernández that is still under construction – and occupies a corner opposite some extraordinary water gardens stuck between a lookout hill and the pavement skirting the Bicentenario Avenue.

The first scheme for the competition consisted of constructing a built artifact with bits of imagery taken literally from other places. Hence, in the trial model there appeared a kid’s rubber ring, which would be the ceiling, made of an inflated PVC-lined polyester membrane, of the salon, along with lattices of the kind used for industrial watering as a perimetral support for said ceiling and a number of big lumps of granite transported from the quarry to the site. One was thus trying to generate an atmosphere with regard to an interpretation of the particular physical weight and density of each element. The aim was to create a strange sort of pavilion, a folly like those seemingly improvised ones in old parks: the Chinese pavilion, or the Japanese or the Greek, the birdhouse, and so on.


Although it was accepted by the client, this version never got made because it was thought the Municipality wouldn’t accept such an ephemeral artifact. It was decided, therefore, to change the weight and the imagery without changing the initial concept of estrangement: black reinforced-concrete beams joined to decks of the same material were set in place; these formed a “false” ceiling of the enclosure. Descending from the beams are supports that in strategic places fit with the lumps of granite of various sizes, heights and weights (as much as ten tons). Fortunately, the new model is much indebted to the early pavilions of SverreFehn and I would venture to say that it envolves the same design system as the one JosepQetglas detects in Berthold Lubetkin´s Highpoint II housing in London, except that in the caryatids have been replaced by lumps of granite from the mountains: “This bringing together of things of a formally divergent origin is a common procedure in Liubetkin. In Highpoint II, the daring, thin slab of a concrete canopy was supported by two statues, reproductions of the caryatids of the Erechtheum.
Lubetkin explained this by recognizing that any kinds of support for the concrete slab was considered a loss, compared to the formal capability of the slab to suggest a tense cantilever without supports. One way to render the support invisible was to dissolve it optically among the garden elements, seen through the canopy and next to it. In gardens one can find statues. The caryatids are part of th garden, like the bushes or the flowerbeds and only by chance coincide with the canopy and fit under it. Their politeness doesn’t let them be aware of the contact, and our gaze knows how to distinguish the different pieces: some of these face the garden and other face the building”. (Qetglas, Josep, “Lenin´s gaze”, in WAM [Web Architecture Magazine], 4).

Night Club

 

Stylish interiors for a night club in . I like the curtain-like skin that encloses spaces, as it lets light drop on it, generating an ever-changing interior.
Architects: Moomoo – Jakub Majewski, Lukasz Pastuszka
Location:
Project year: 2008











Oslo Central Station


Norwegian architects Space Group won the competition for Oslo´s new Central Station. The project consists on demolishing a big part of the existing station, to build a 4 stories tall structure that will unify the station. It will include 2 floors for offices hanging over the station. Also, an adjacent U-shaped building will be occupied by the biggest conference hotel in .
Currently, the Central Station receive 150,000 travellers every day, number expected to double in the next few years, rendering the current structure obsolete. Space Group´s project will be able to grow in stages. Construction will start on 2013, during 5 to 10 years. Quite a lot, but since the project will be done in stages it will be able to be in use during all the time.
Below, more renders by Luxigon sent to us by Space Group.