Architecture Lab

Lan Architecture

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Project Details:
PROGRAM Housing – Offices – Retail Area – Parking
PROJECT SIZE 125 000 msq
BUDGET 120 ME
CLIENT HAR Etudes – BANK MED
DATE 2009
LOCATION BEIRUT – Lebanon
STEP Drawings
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The city that wouldn’t disappear

“As we well know, every city is singular. Yet clearly some are more so than others. Beirut is a unique urban phenomenon, literally inhabited by its history, and with each successive war or occupation finding the strength to combat its disappearance.
The 486 MINA EL HOSN, the ‘mirror-tower’ designed by LAN, is to be built in the port area, opposite the Murr Tower, the shell-riddled building that has come to symbolise the civil war. The tower is absolutely novel in concept: the building’s skin will reflect the city surrounding it. One will be able to see it from everywhere, and everywhere one’s view will bounce off its mobile surface into the surrounding city, showing Beirut in all its myriad facets.
And of course behind this innovative technology lies a guiding idea: the impressive outline of 486 MINA EL HOSN, soaring above the skyline, will enable a kind of moving and poetic visual reconstitution of the city – a way of making Beirut itself, its light, diversity, districts and cultures, the tower’s very substance.
The risk lay in constructing a new monument, a new prisoner of the city’s oppressive memory. True, the tower recreates the diverse histories and cultures that have made and are still making the city, but the building is a living, animated, changing entity. Its envelope will be an integral part of the city’s physical reality, giving it back a body, reflecting its myriad facts. In doing so, it will open up an invisible inner space, strike chords within us, almost effacing itself to become an active agent in Beirut’s reconciliation with itself.”
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Analysis
Identification of a city
What is a city? Talking about Beirut, one has to consider not a single context but a multiplicity of contexts.
At the outset, there are evidently the multiplicity, plurality and divisions that are part of the city’s very substance. With the passing years, Beirut has metabolised the communities that have forged Lebanon’s exceptional and tumultuous life into its urban structure, providing a geography and territory for all, each with their own lifestyle, culture and architecture. One only has to cross the city from north to south or east-west to savour the many perfumes of this unique assemblage. At a distance of hardly a kilometre, one sometimes has the impression of being at the other end of the world.

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The concept
From private to public, from vertical to horizontal

The 486 MINA EL HOSN is set in an area near the port close to the Marina and the Solidere district, on a plot flanked by Fakhreddine Street and Omar Daouk Street.
In a district already occupied by high-rise buildings, there was never question of merely building another tower, but rather of fashioning a new urban space, combining private habitat and public circulation, verticality and horizontality.

The 486 MINA EL HOSN project is composed of three elements:

- The Tower proper is the project’s central and most visible element. The novel design of its mirror-envelope reflects views of the city back towards the city, enabling a visual reconstruction of its manifold identity.

- The Base of the tower provides its residents with a public space playing with horizontality to create circulation and meeting places on a human scale, including a shopping mall, a public roof garden and pedestrian alleys.

- The five Blocks are intermediary residential spaces, imagined on the model of the oriental house. Acting as an interface between the project’s two other elements, they play on the dichotomy between exterior and interior.
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The TOWER

The other side of the mirror / Visually reinventing the city
The project’s central element, the tower, enables a visual reinvention of the city.

The tower is the central element of 486 MINA EL HOSN. Its insertion in a district already populated with towers and steeped in history and symbols, prompted an in-depth reflexion on the project’s meaning. It was particularly necessary to create a dialogue with the Murr Tower, a monumental vestige of the civil war and one of the city’s iconic symbols.
But one had to go further than this, to remove the tower from its immediate physical surroundings and integrate it into a broader environment encompassing the entire city, yet do this without resorting to gigantism. Hence the fundamental idea of ‘meta-territory’ which led to the concept of the tower’s envelope as a means of visually reinventing the city, visually reconnecting urban elements beyond the tower’s immediate physical and material surroundings.
The result is an immaterial, constantly changing object, an architecture of lightness, glass and finely hatched steel whose game consists in effacing the building’s tangible limits by rendering the perception of a solid object superfluous within the poetics of the blurred and evanescent.
The city of Beirut, historically marked by division, can also see the tower as an animated mirror reflecting its living and tormented history and geography.

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Interior, exterior: effacing limits

The building, 142 metres high, its structured around a cruciform volume sheathed by a solar protection based on a 25x25m square unit. The facades of the volume at the heart of the tower are in black concrete, and the design of the openings follows the functional logic of the living units. The exterior skin consists of sliding perforated sheet metal panels with a mirror finish, acting as reflectors and protection against heat but also allowing light to enter.
Our vision of the tower is reflected away to other parts of the city but can also penetrate within. The tower’s cross-shaped ground plan frees its corners and imbues it with lightness and evanescence. Its limits are effaced and only the building’s core has substance. Depending on the play of natural light and viewpoints, the tower can physically reinvent itself in the changing light and points of view.

The Bankmed Foundation will occupy the tower’s first six levels, with an access from the street. The entrance hall to the apartments, imbricated at double height, enables access from the base’s inner street. There is a service level between the foundation and apartment levels.
The surface areas of the 20 apartments (duplex and triplex) range from 750 to 1200 m². A lift provides direct access to each apartment, which are entered via a ‘lobby’ acting as a filter between public and private spaces.
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The apartment layout consists of a main living room of around 85 m² occupying one quadrant of the cross, with a smaller living room functioning as a reading room, contiguous to a more intimate ‘family room’. The dining room is located on the opposite side to the living room, next to the servants’ spaces.
Each apartment has two terraces, extensions of the dining room and living room. To make this possible, the corners of the tower were emptied to give the ensemble more lightness. These triple-height terraces provide optimum views of the city, sea and sky.
Each level is characterised by maximum flexibility and circulation around the core. A system of movable partitions and sliding doors enables the opening up of all the interior spaces and increased views of the apartment as a whole.

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The Tower’s technology

The tower has four façades, 140 metres high and 25 metres wide. The aim was to precisely orientate over 30,000 facets of identical size so that the tower can reflect some of Beirut’s monuments and remarkable districts, and that these reflections should be visible from precise areas of the city. The remaining facets are orientated to produce smooth transitions between these panoramic viewpoints.

When light encounters a reflective surface, it is reflected according to its angle of incidence on that surface. The principle of the reflective facade consisted in globally defining the orientation of each facet of the cylinder’s surface to create the desired reflection.
Working with specialists in this field, we produced an automated 3D tool enabling us to visualise different instances of the facade by changing viewpoints at will, both the reflective area and the position of the reflected images on the tower.”

Sources:
TEXT Lan Architecture
HQE CONSULTING FRANCK BOUTTE
STRUCTURE Batiserf
3D IMAGES Rsi-studio.com
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Spaceinvading

“The mining tools and delivery methods used in shipping Oya Stone are exhibited inside this unique museum and particularly interesting is an abandoned underground quarry 20,000 sq. m. in size and at an average depth of 30 m.”
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AsymptoteArch’s Channel

“The Guadalajara Guggenheim Presentation video by Asymptote Architecture. A collaboration between Asymptote and Imaginary Forces. ”

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Bustler

“The winning designs of the suckerPUNCH-curated Lavender Lake Art Factory competition have recently been announced. The international competition asked architects to submit concepts for an ‘art factory’ at the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York that will contain private/shared art studios, a storefront gallery/bar, analog/digital shops, and live/work spaces for rotating artists in residence. Both the interior and exterior realizations of the project should rethink the white boxes of modern art work and display spaces and conceive a sequence of spaces that address the diversity of contemporary art and design at multiple scales.

The jury comprised Abigail Coover (Hume Coover Studio, suckerPUNCH), Nathan Hume (Hume Coover Studio, suckerPUNCH), Mike Szivos (SOFTlab), Jose Gonzalez (SOFTlab), Armand Graham (Asymptote), Serra Kiziltan (Gage Clemenceau Architects), and Philip Mana (Studio Daniel Libeskind).

And these are the winning designs:

1st Place: “Water Fields”
Pablo Esteban Zamorano & Marcos Cardenas (Santiago de Chile, Chile)

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“An art factory, an open public space, a beach, a picnic field, a crop garden, a space for the community and for culture, a land open to the water, the city and the arts. The border condition (water-land) of this site made us think about how these limits could react with each other to create something new. An hybrid space product of a simple movement: the inundation of the site, the analysis of a close up view of the canal and the projection of that into the site as a geometry, to translate what used to be water into land but now as a construction of the memory of the canal. The Gowanus Canal is now a new public space for the city that brings the canal back to the people.”
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2nd Place: “Lavender Lake Art Factory”
David Jaubert (Brooklyn, New York)

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Given the disparate relationship between the factory typology and public place exemplified by the surrounding context, the project seeks to explore the tension between the two as an impetus for a potential hybrid type. By shifting the ground plane on the site, the project’s parti allows for the multiplicity of the datum rather than it’s displacement, resulting in a site condition that aims to extend the synthesis between the public and private domain.
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3rd Place: “Lavender Lake Art Factory”
Chiara Gambassi & Jan Kudlicka (Bucine, Italy)

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What or who influenced this project: Typical rude ambience of Brooklyn, train bridge on one side and the river on the other side. The urbanistic juxtaposition of the industry in the east and the living area in the west. Missing of the green places. So we tried to make a project which has got some similar story with the surroundings but with using new materials. Create the place with the symbiosis between the park/building.

Check the rest of the article at Bustler
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Deasy/Penner & Partners

“Sited upon small volcanic cone in the high desert midway between Las Vegas & Los Angeles, this 60-acre retreat seems to cap the mountain top with its dome-like roof: Concrete and truss beams form its dome allowing the interior to embrace 360 degrees of stark, strong almost lunar landscape. Main house of two bedrooms, 2 baths and open entertaining areas. Guest house of one bedroom and bath, lake, and ultimate privacy. Truly one of a kind property in the most impressive of settings.”
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Morphosis

“Morphosis has completed the first floating house permitted in the United States for Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation in New Orleans designed and built by Morphosis and UCLA Architecture and Urban Design graduate students.The FLOAT House is a new model for flood-safe, affordable and sustainable housing that is designed to float securely with rising water levels.”
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The FLOAT House is a new kind of house: a house that can sustain its own water and power needs; a house that can survive the floodwaters generated by a storm the size of Hurricane Katrina; and perhaps most importantly, a house that can be manufactured cheaply enough to function as low-income housing.
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Project Details:
Location New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America
Client Make It Right Foundation
Size 945 gross sq ft / 88 gross sq m
Program This single family residential unit is organized according to the planning characteristics of the shotgun house, a ubiquitous residential type of New Orleans. The primary living spaces: living room, kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms are aligned end-to-end within a 16’ x 58’ bar, and accessed from a parallel corridor, referred to as a gallery in this building typology.
Design 2007 – 2009
Construction 2008 – 2009
Type Residential

Credits:
Design Director Thom Mayne
Project Manager Brandon Welling
Project Team Alex Deutschman – Patrick Dunn-Baker – Andrea Manning
Photography Iwan Baan
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Project Description:

Make It: Affordable
A new approach to mass-producing low-cost homes that respond to local culture and climate

The FLOAT House optimizes the efficiency of mass-production, while respecting New Orleans’s unique culture and context. The Ninth Ward’s colorful vernacular houses, which local residents have traditionally modified and personalized over time, reflect the community’s vibrant culture. The FLOAT House grows out of the indigenous typology of the shotgun house, predominant throughout New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward. Like a typical shotgun house, the FLOAT House sits atop a raised base. This innovative base, or “chassis,” integrates all mechanical, electrical, plumbing and sustainable systems, and securely floats in case of flooding. Inspired by GM’s skateboard chassis, which is engineered to support several car body types, the FLOAT House’s chassis is designed to support a variety of customizable house configurations.

Developed to meet the needs of families in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, the FLOAT House is a prototype for prefabricated, affordable housing that can be adapted to the needs of flood zones worldwide. The FLOAT House is assembled on-site from pre-fabricated components:

• The modular chassis is pre-fabricated as a single unit of expanded polystyrene foam coated in glass fiber reinforced concrete, with all required wall anchors, electrical, mechanical and plumbing systems pre-installed. The chassis module is shipped whole from factory to site, via standard flat bed trailer.
• The piers that anchor the house to the ground and the concrete pads on which the chassis sits are constructed on-site, using local labor and conventional construction techniques.
• The panelized walls, windows, interior finishes and kit-of parts roof are prefabricated, to be assembled on-site along with the installation of fixtures and appliances. This efficient approach integrates modern mass-production with traditional site construction to lower costs, guarantee quality, and reduce waste.”
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Make It: Float
A flood-safe house that securely floats with rising water levels

Global climate change is triggering ever-harsher floods and natural disasters. Nearly 200 million people worldwide live in high risk coastal flooding zones , and in the US alone, over 36 million people currently face the threat of flooding. The FLOAT House prototype proposes a sustainable way of living that adapts to this uncertain reality.

To protect from flooding, the FLOAT House can rise vertically on guide posts, securely floating up to twelve feet as water levels rise. In the event of a flood, the house’s chassis acts as a raft, guided by steel masts, which are anchored to the ground by two concrete pile caps each with six 45-foot deep piles.

Like the vernacular New Orleans shotgun house, the FLOAT House sits on a 4-foot base; rather than permanently raising the house on ten foot or higher stilts, the house only rises in case of severe flooding. This configuration accommodates a traditional front porch, preserving of the community’s vital porch culture and facilitating accessibility for elderly and disabled residents.

While not designed for occupants to remain in the home during a hurricane, the FLOAT House aims to minimize catastrophic damage and preserve the homeowner’s investment in their property. This approach also allows for the early return of occupants in the aftermath of a hurricane or flood.”
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Make It: Green
A high-performance house that generates and sustains its own water and power needs

On track for a LEED Platinum Rating, the FLOAT House is an innovative model for affordable, net-zero annual energy consumption housing. High-performance systems sustain the home’s power, air, and water needs, and minimize resource consumption:

• Solar Power Generation: The roof supports solar panels that generate all of the house’s power, resulting in net-zero annual energy consumption. The chassis incorporates electrical systems to store and convert solar power for daily use, and to give back to the electrical grid during the temperate fall and spring months.

• Rainwater Collection: The sloped concave roof collects rainwater, and funnels it to cisterns housed in the chassis, where it is filtered and stored for daily use.

• Efficient Systems—including low-flow plumbing fixtures, low-energy appliances, high performance windows, and highly insulated SIPs (Structural Insulated Panel) walls and roof—minimize water and power consumption, and lower the lifecycle cost for the home owner.

• High-grade energy efficient kitchen, appliances and fixtures maximize durability and reduce the need for replacement.

• Geothermal Heating and Cooling: A geothermal mechanical system heats and cools the air via a ground source heat pump, which naturally conditions the air, minimizing the energy required to cool the house in the harsh summer months and heat it in winter.
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sources:
Text: Morphopedia
Photos: Iwan Baan
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Bustler

“Croatian architecture firm 3LHD recently finished the Zamet Center in Rijeka, an industrial port city in Croatia.

The center is a brand new building that will have a great impact on the local community. The project is a hybrid, with mixed use facilities: multipurpose sports hall, new library, civic center, local administration offices, bars, shops and a parking garage.

The design of Zamet Center is the result of an invited competition that 3LHD won the first price for.”
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Project Description:
“Situated in Rijeka’s quarter Zamet, the new Zamet Centre in complete size of 16,830 m2 hosts various facilities: sports hall with max 2,380 seats, local community offices, library, 13 retail and service spaces and a garage with 250 parking spaces.

One third of the sports hall’s volume is cut in the ground, and the rest of the Centre is fully fitted into the surrounding landscape. The building’s main architectural element are ribbon-like linear stripes stretching over the site in a north-south direction, functioning at the same time as an architectural design element of the object and as a zoning element which forms a public square and a link between the park on the north and school and B. Vidas street on the south.”
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“The stripes were inspired by “gromača”, a type of rocks specific to Rijeka, which the centre artificially reinterprets by colour and shape. They are paved with 51.000 ceramic tiles designed by 3LHD and manufactured specially for the centre. The steel construction, girder span of 55 meters and their varying height allow the natural light illumination of the sports hall. ……”

Read the rest of the article here
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OBRA ARCHITECTS

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Project Details:

PROJECT NAME Centrifugal Villa
LOCATION Southampton, New York
ARCHITECT OBRA Architects
Pablo Castro, New York / Connecticut
PROGRAM Residential housing
7-bedroom residence, guest house, 4-car garage, poolhouse and tennis area
AREA 13,250 sf

CREDITS OBRA ARCHITECTS
Pablo Castro, Jennifer Lee
PROJECT TEAM:
Selin Semaan, Akira Gunji, Luis Costa, Shin Kook Kang, Satoshi Kiyono, Kaon Ko, Bronwyn Kotzen, Fabiana Meacham, Elizabeth Snow, Elina Almuhametova, Chiara Filios, Doreen Lam
STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: Robert Silman Associates
Nat Oppenheimer, Jeff Beane
LIGHTING CONSULTANT: Peiheng Tsai Lighting Design
PHOTO CREDITS: OBRA Architects
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“The Centrifugal Villa is arranged around a hollow center, as if the heart of the house had somehow fallen outside its body. The string of subsequent spaces in its interior provide a comprehension of the whole by sacrificing their individual geometric cohesiveness to the fractured configuration of the entire composition.

The experience of the interior is characterized by constantly shifting vanishing points, at the place of their collision in each crease of the plan, large openings cutting dormer scoops on the roof, centrifugally release the views out to the surrounding landscape.

The house, defined by this idea rather than a formal imposition, cannibalizes the local “vernacular,” distorting it through hexagonal introspection of the plan and the transposed proportion of the parts.

Set on a 5-acre property overlooking an agricultural reserve, the project includes a pool-house with a separate guesthouse and garage structure.

Designed as wood post-and-beam structure, the exterior cladding is detailed with vertical board and batten seams to give continuity to the building exterior and encourage an uninterrupted rhythmic flow around the elevations.”
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OMA

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The Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in collaboration with Werner Sobek and engineers ABT, has won the competition for Rotterdam’s Stadskantoor, a new building for the city hall that will accommodate municipal services, offices, and residential units. The winner was announced this morning by city alderman Hamit Karakus.
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“The design, led by OMA partners Reinier de Graaf and Rem Koolhaas, was chosen from five submissions by Dutch architecture companies following a public consultation period and the deliberation of an expert jury, which commented: “OMA’s design was the perfect combination of innovation and suitability for the surrounding context.”

OMA conceived a modular building with repeated units gradually set back from the street as they rise into two irregular peaks. The building’s composition of smaller cells creates an impressive, complex form when viewed from Coolsingel, one of Rotterdam’s main arteries, and allows for subtlety and adaptability as the Stadskantoor abuts the adjacent municipal building from the 1950s, the Stadstimmerhuis.

The Stadskantoor’s innovative structural system generates maximum efficiency and versatility both in construction and in program: units can be added or even dismounted from the structure as demands on the building change over time, and can adapt to either office space or residential parameters as desired. Green terraces on higher levels provide the possibility of an apartment with a garden in the heart of urban Rotterdam.

The building’s concept of flexibility – together with a climate regulated by warm air stored in summer and released in winter, and vice versa, and the use of hi-tech translucent insulation in the building’s glass façade – allowed OMA to meet the design brief’s requirement of making the Stadskantoor the most sustainable building in the Netherlands.

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Reinier de Graaf commented: “Rather than posing as the city’s next superlative, the design for the Stadskantoor is partly a building, partly an urban condition – a skyline in its own right. The design attempts to mediate between the adjacent town hall, post office and Stadstimmerhuis. Through an intentional ambiguity, the mass immerses itself in the city’s diverse architectural periods, absorbing the scales and styles of its immediate context.”
OMA
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Y.TOHME/ARCHITECTS
www.yousseftohme.com

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Project Details:

DB-Project – Villa in Progress
Design Development Phase, 2009
Location  Lebanon, Qanat Bakish
Type  Residential
Project Total Area  250sqm
Construction Fees  300.000 $
Architects in Charge  Y.TOHME/ARCHITECTS
Architect  Youssef Tohme
Project Architect  Anastasia Elrouss
Collaborate Architects  Vart Bisanz, Anthony Abou Rejaily
Consultant Architects  Christophe Hurgon
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Project Description:

” In a 360˚ perspective between Qanat Bakish mountains slopes and the sea horizon, DB-project is an architectural intervention highlighting its context through extending the existing mountain site by a monumental concrete roof connecting to the land rocks from one side and standing still as a huge cantilever from the other side. A vast wooden terrace extends further over passing the roof enhancing its presence and give importance to its internal perspective. The terrace delineates the infinite perspectives framing the horizon and the mountains (from the pool, Reception, kitchen towards the exterior…). The Public lived Internal space is installed as a buffer between these two layers, between nature & its built extension.
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Roof & terrace frame not only their immediate natural site but also the magnificent landscape extending the internal space limits further where the user feels in direct contact with the Horizon. Nonetheless the Private area is fully merged within the existing site leveling, appropriating one of them where the façade towards the horizon is the only connection to the outside through a series of opening infiltrating light and interesting views.
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This specific play of space management between the public and the private empowers the architectural intervention along with its immediate and gradual context. Though it is small scale structure but it encloses a rich layering of space experience through the dual vocabulary between space and site.
DB-Project execution will start in 2010.”

For more information: info@yousseftohme.com
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0300 TV

0300TV has featured a video of the dutch embassy in berlin designed by OMA
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Project Information:

Building Dutch Embassy
Architects OMA / Rem Koolhaas
Program offices [4800sqm]; housing [1500sqm]; parking [2200sqm]
Partners in charge Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon
Project director Erik Schotte
Structural engineer Royal Haskoning
Client Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Constructed Area 8500sqm
Commission 1997
Completed 2003
Official opening March 2, 2004
Location Klosterstrasse 50, 10179 Berlin-Mitte district, Germany
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Source: 0300TV
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Archinect

ShowCase is an on-going feature series on Archinect, presenting exciting new work from designers representing all creative fields and all geographies.

Here The Latest Project University Library UBU Utrecht by Wiel Arets Architects
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Project Details:
Type: University Library
Location: Utrecht, The Netherlands
Client: University Utrecht (UU)
Architect: Wiel Arets Architects
Team: Wiel Arets, Harold Aspers, Dominic Papa, René Thijssen, Frederik Vaes, Henrik Vuust
Design: 1997-2001
Construction: 2001-2004
Photos: Jan Bitter Fotografie

“The UBU is a library located on the campus of Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Incorporating 4.2 million books, 1,000 seats, 450 parking places, 300 workstations, 3 shops, 1 auditorium and 1 bar – the UBU, comparable to a data recorder, is more than a place where people can consult books, it is a place where they can work in a concentrated fashion, but also one where they can meet other people without the need of any other stimulation except the atmosphere that the building radiates.

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“Glass and concrete panels clad the volumes of the building. The glass panels are printed with a repetitive image of a papyrus plant. Papyrus – a traditional material used in paper production – derives etymologically from the Greek byblos, which also serves as the root for words such as bibliography, bibliophile, and – in Dutch – Bibliotheek, or library. The papyrus image is replicated on each glass panel, allowing the façade to perform as a curtain which veils the library while also making subtle allusion to the nature of the program within. The pattern printed facade also mitigates sunlight entering the building, protecting the library’s printed materials. The pattern, which is also cast into the concrete panels of the exterior and interior walls, carries the allegorical motif into the various programs of the library….”

Check the Rest of the Article and the photos at Archinect
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Bustler

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“The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that ‘Team Germany’ from the Technische Universität Darmstadt has won the 2009 Solar Decathlon with their project surPLUShome. This is the second time in a row that a team from TU Darmstadt wins this international contest after already snatching the title in Solar Decathlon’s last edition in 2007.

After 9 days and 10 contests, Team Germany reached the highest overall scores, closely followed by Team Illinois and Team California. Dubbed “the big, black monolith,” surPLUShome is almost entirely covered with photovoltaic panels that managed to generate 19 kilowatts during one day of test runs—more than twice as much as some other Solar Decathlon contestants.

The Solar Decathlon—a competition in which 20 teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house—was hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy for three weeks this October. The contest is also an event to which the public is invited to observe the powerful combination of solar energy, energy efficiency, and the best in home design.”
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“The Solar Decathlon—a competition in which 20 teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house—was hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy for three weeks this October. The contest is also an event to which the public is invited to observe the powerful combination of solar energy, energy efficiency, and the best in home design.”

Check the rest of the project at Bustler
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The New York Times

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By CATHRIN SCHAER

“MICHAEL ELMGREEN and Ingar Dragset are artists who have exhibited from New York to Tokyo. But for the last 12 years, the globe-trotting artistic duo, collaborators since 1995, have lived in Berlin. And at a certain point, they decided it was time to buy.

“We were never particularly interested in property investment,” said Mr. Dragset, who is from Norway (Mr. Elmgreen is from Denmark).

The two men, once a couple but now just artistic partners, originally moved to Berlin because it was near Copenhagen, where they had lived, and because it seemed full of energy as well as inexpensive. But after a decade in Berlin, Mr. Dragset said, “We were tired of fixing up spaces and having to leave them after a couple of years.”
And, he added, “both privately, and within our art practice, we love spatial challenges — so we were looking for somewhere we could apply the concepts we had been working with in our art.”

When they saw an advertisement for the old water-pumping station in a Berlin suburb, a working-class area called Neukölln, the pair’s creative antennae began to twitch. The former pumping station, surrounded by fully grown chestnut trees and flanked by apartment buildings on a residential street, had remained empty since the early 1990s because nobody knew quite what to do with such an oversize hall stuck in the middle of a non-industrial location.

“Almost too good to be true,” Mr. Dragset said. “Especially considering the price, which was ridiculously low compared to any other European capital.” He declined to specify but said it was similar to a typical two-bedroom apartment in Oslo, which is about $700,000. The renovations cost about the same as the purchase price.

Working with two young architects, Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese, whom they met through friends, the two began renovations that took about a year. Fortunately the solid old industrial building was in good condition and drastic structural changes were unnecessary. New wiring, heating and plumbing were needed, but as Mr. Dragset explained, “basically we’ve broken down more walls than we’ve built.”

After the initial apprehension at owning their own property, Mr. Dragset said, they began to treat the renovations more like an art project, playing with the space and coming up with clever uses for the former station’s various features. For example, the four large vents in the upper floor once used to ventilate the building have been transformed into a fireplace, a table, a guest bed and an embedded bathtub.

There’s no clutter: just white walls, glacial light streaming in through old warehouse-style windows, trees silently waving at visitors from the outside and what feels like acres of floor space.

The building is now both home and studio space. Generally, the renovation materials have been inexpensive. Most of the floors are sanded asphalt covered in clear polyurethane that goes with the industrial nature of the building. On one hand, “it’s reminiscent of the building’s industrial history,” Mr. Wenk said. “On the other hand, it’s very economical.” In smaller rooms, the asphalt was sanded more finely, he explained, then tinted to reflect the personal nature of the rooms.

The farther up and back one goes, the more private the space becomes. The back boasts five levels, including two private areas for the artists, a kitchen, an attic living room and four bathrooms. And the renovated attic space is reminiscent of a playboy’s penthouse. In this upper section, a window in the roof slides back at the push of a button like something out of Dr. Evil’s lair.

“We deliberately made the borders between the work and living spaces fleeting,” Mr. Dragset said. “The combination of vast floor space and the small, quirky nooks means you can be very hidden here, or very exposed depending on your moods or needs.”
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Source: The New York Times
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