LAW-COURT OFFICES BY C+S ARCHITECTS

“The project is a winning entry of an international competition. The building is a graft in the complexity of the Venetian urban system facing Piazzale Roma, the car-entrance space to the city of Venice.

At the same time it becomes the 'infrastructure' which brings an existing 19th century complex factory (Ex-Manifattura Tabacchi) to a contemporary use: in fact it houses the the technological systems  serving the whole.

The dimension of the building is measured on the huge void of Piazzale Roma facing the bridge of Santiago Calatrava, on the opposite side.
A huge, five level high space acts as a 'urban entrance' enlightened by the roof as all the ex-industrial existing buildings. 

This vertical inner space,  opened to free entrance during the day, will house, on the ground level, the commercial services which will allow to improve and give back the citizen a big public space, functioning also as an entrance to the sequence of public spaces which will be regained by the future restoration of the existing buildings. 

The new volume has a simple, archetypical, compact shape, resulting from the manipulation of the Venetian industrial building typology and the connection to the skyline of the huge parking lots. 

A five meter long cantiliver on Piazzale Roma becomes the entrance: a huge shadow which attracts the fluxes of people horizontally in the new urban system and vertically along either a linear stair or elevators which distributes to all the levels.

The linear stair is designed parallel to the elevation facing the parking building San Marco, letting us to design that elevation as a punctuation of small windows designing a special natural light in the inside. 

The material of the building is a preoxidated type of TECU copper. Copper in Venice is the material with which all the institutional (religious and laic) buildings' roofs are built with. 

In this projects, materiality and form become a metaphor representing institution: the house of justice is a big monomateric roof which welcome the citizens inside an enlightened space.

We always work with materiality and light, instigating, with pro-oxidation, the idea of subtracting material from surfaces and activationg them with light, which is what time does. Working with the idea of 'time' is archetypical in Venice.” Description of Architects.

 

Location: Venice, Italy

Architects: C+S Architects, Carlo Cappai, Maria Alessandra Segantini

Project Team: Davide Testi, Barbara Acciari, Monica Moro

Masterplan: C+S Architects, Studio CM, Technimont spa

Structural and Plant Engineering: Technimont, Studio Greggio, Progin

Area: 6.916 m² (gross)

Competition: March 1999

Year: 2012

Client: Comune di Venezia

Photographs: Courtesy of C+S Architects

OFFICE IN FOREST BY SUGAWARADAISUKE

This the head office project at Matsuzaka, Mie prefecture in Japan, parts of the City are within the limits of the Yoshino-Kumano National Park.

The project‘s target is not on the value of the object view in respect to sculptural appearance of the building , but　rather on the value of the environmental view with body experience.

Various places are created in the whole of the site with hut volumes and 4 season gardens.

The large reflect ceiling and different types of windows invite plantation colors to inside.

Body experience here changes dramatically according to seasons, weathers and human activities.

This project proposes a new approach to office design, which enables us to choose working places not only by function or work typology, but also by the experiential qualities of a space and its effect on the human body through reflected nature. 

This experience is realized by total design approach from landscape, architecture to furniture as spatial elements equivalently.

Location: Matsuzaka, Japan

Architects: SUGAWARADAISUKE

Landscalpe: Masae Kawai

Construction: KITAMURAGUMI Corporation

Floor Area: 348.01 sqm

Site Area: 1,193.30 sqm

Area: 356,44 sqm

Year: 2012

Photographs: Takeshi Nakasa © Nacása & Partners Inc.

OFFICES FOR JUNTA DE CASTILLA Y LEON BY ALBERTO CAMPO BAEZA

 

La nuova sede delle regione autonoma di Castilla y León a Zamora si trova nel centro della città medievale all’interno di in un isolato che fronteggia la cattedrale romanica.

Un muro di pietra segue il profilo del sito e delimita uno spazio in cui è iscritta una scatola di vetro formando due cortili che vengono trattati con un design minimalista contrapponendo muro in pietra a facciate vetrate in un gioco di spazi paragonabile ad un chiostro medievale.

Laddove c’è il porticato vi è uno spazio a cielo aperto, dove i muri in pietra infondono un senso di tranquillità e meditazione, e dove c’è lo spazio aperto, con il giardino ed il pozzo centrale dei chiostri, vi è un volume con la sua trasparenza che da un senso di leggerezza e ariosità.

Il contrasto tra muri di pietra e pareti vetrate determina una compenetrazione tra gli spazi e allo stesso tempo libera lo spazio racchiuso verso l’esterno come se volesse comunicare l’apertura della regione verso la comunità.

L’edificio interamente vetrato, con lastre unite dal solo silicone, sembra senza peso, una sensazione esaltata dalla soluzione adotta di una doppia parete vetrata che lavora attivamente favorendo la ventilazione e il raffrescamento nel periodo estivo e trattenendo il calore in quello invernale per l’effetto serra.

L’immagine di leggerezza e trasparenza è data anche dalle strutture murarie in pilotis e solai verniciati di bianco, contrapponendosi a quella usuale degli uffici amministrativi generalmente in spazi asettici e seriali. 

Sembra così realizzato il sogno di Mies van der Rohe, sperimentato per il progetto per il grattacielo di Friedrichstrasse a Berlino, di realizzare una facciata completamente in vetro e liberare i piani, con una soluzione metaforicamente similare alla struttura di un favo dove si evidenziano le singole celle costruite dalle api.

Le aperture nel muro in pietra perimetrale incorniciano il punto di vista della Cattedrale, del paesaggio e degli edifici circostanti arricchendo lo spazio di percezioni e suggestioni in modo elegante e funzionale. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Location: Zamora, Spain

Architect: Estudio Arquitectura Campo Baeza

Project Team: Alberto Campo Baeza, Pablo Fernández Lorenzo, Pablo Redondo Díez, Alfonso González Gaisán, Francisco Blanco Velasco.

Structural Engineer: Eduardo Díez – Ideee. Area: 12.100 Sqm.

Client:Junta De Castilla Y León. Consejería De Hacienda.

Year: 2012

YANDEX OFFICE II BY ZA BOR ARCHITECTS

“It is indicative that this office is to some extent a return to the roots of cooperation of za bor architects and the largest Russian IT-corporation Yandex*.

The first office developed for Yandex by za bor architects is in the same building of the Benois business center in Saint Petersburg, but on a lower floor. In 2008 it was a brilliant premiere published by almost all the leading architecture and design media in Russia. The project has picked up many awards.

Four years later za bor architects and Yandex had decided to repeat the success on a larger scale – Yandex Saint-Petersburg office II is almost twice as large as the previous one – it houses the entire fourth floor of the building and has a corridor about 200 meters long (total floor area 3310 sqm), but size doesn’t matter, clients wanted an «extraordinary office like no other».

So the architects had at least two challenges – first to organize a very complex space outstretched along a central corridor axis. The second challenge was to make the office a showy and impressive.

After a long thought  Peter Zaytsev, and Arseniy Borisenko, the project architects, decided to use the double loaded zoning, with meeting «cells», work areas, and unusual objects located along the corridor.

The unusual objects being provided with a particular function. As a result of this concept implementation, guests find themselves «inside» the Yandex  search service: at the reception they are met by a well-known «Search» button and a yellow arrow (an unofficial Yandex logo and a significant part of the web-site).

While passing the corridors they see the familiar user name and email password input boxes, and at each step they meet symbols and icons of Yandex services, although they are not always easy to recognize as tiny pixel icons, had turned into 3D objects.

The office guests receive a unique transcendental background, the one of which Aldous Huxley hadn’t even dreamed of. Visitors find themselves both in an amazing space which architects had transformed from linear into 3D, observing the pixel objects which grew to gigantic proportions.

Thus, according to the architects conception, guests and employees of the office are involved into Yandex net services, to which they are accustomed to work with exclusively in 2D screen.

That is why in some places miniature «icons», which grew to giant size are breaking to large volume «pixels» sprouting from the walls. Bright colors, spots scattered here and there, guide visitors through the office and cheering up the office staff.

Speaking of function, many of the major elements seem to be decorative only at first glance. The spiral elements for example are separating the informal communication zone from the corridor. The casted polymer «jellyfish» clocks contain network printers station, etc.

The project has turned out rather complex, the first thing because no one did such things before, not only in Saint Petersburg but even in Russia. Therefore, many solutions are made on the spot during on-site designer supervision.

The difficulties were not caused by 3D objects – they are made according to advertising designs technologies (their cages are filled with polystyrene foam, meeting all standards of fire and environmental safety). On the other hand – the ceiling, build up of original «blades» was extremely difficult to install.” Description of architects.

Yandex* is a Russian Internet company which operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 60% market share in that country. Yandex ranked as the 5th largest search engine worldwide with more than 150 million searches per day as of April 2012 and more than 25.5 millions of visitors (all company's services) daily as of May 2012. The company's mission is to provide answers on any questions users may have (explicit or implicit).