If you’re bad with languages, let me help you out with this one: “Elektrobotenhuis” is Dutch for “electric boat house.” But this is not your average botenhuis. Designed by Rotterdam-based Groosman Partners, this botenhuis is also an electric boat charging station – the first of its kind in the country. I guess I’m behind the times because I didn’t even know we were making electric boats yet and now designers are creating incredible-looking charging stations for them.

The structure’s large, angled bow gives a nod to the thousands of ships that will dock and charge here each year. It houses machinery to rebuild and restore beat up boats as well a gallery that does away with the typical white wall and instead displays objects floating on the surface of the water. If that wasn’t cool enough, it’s also remarkably energy efficient. The roof holds 72 solar panels that generate and store enough energy to power 1,385 boats per year.

designer: groosman partners architecten
location: friesland, the netherlands
completed: 2011
space: 700 sqm
photos: sebastiaan jansen

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There are six individual offices connected by enclosed foot bridges. The two warehouses are connected by two bridges that lead to a unit in the middle. From that central hub, four more units connect to it from the south and one to the north. The entire complex lies within a mini forest of twenty trees, and the offices are supported by roughly hewn wooden columns meant to resemble nearby tree trunks. The construction is built entirely from wood, a sensible material for a carpenter. You can watch a time-lapse of the construction.









Images by Vincent Fillon

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That sounds like a lot of empty ad speak to me, and I was ready to write them off completely until I stumbled across an article about their “eco-classrooms” that actually makes their green-washed website seem more legitimate. The classrooms are constructed primarily from FSC- or PEFC-certified softwood timber and incorporate a sedum roof.

“The building operates without any main power or utility supply. It is serviced entirely by solar energy and even incorporates a methanol fuel cell as a backup should there be a prolonged period without sun. A rainwater-harvesting system collects water from the sedum roof for both the kitchen and composting toilets. The structure is believed to be the first building in the UK which processes harvested rainwater from a sedum roof into hot and cold drinking water using only solar power.”

No word on whether the same is true for their line of luxury tree houses, but why on earth don’t they include that on their site instead of  a bunch sustainable mumbo-jumbo? Let’s chalk it up to the fact that this is a new company and whoever is handling their brand strategy clearly doesn’t realize that in addition to the luxury crowd, there’s a large market of folks who get seriously turned on by recycled rainwater and low impact construction.

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“This is our first affordable LivingHome. It was designed by LivingHomes staff in collaboration with Make It Right, a nonprofit founded by Brad Pitt and architect William McDonough to build 150 affordable, sustainable homes in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of each C6 will help support the efforts of Make It Right.”

You can even configure your own dream home right on LivingHomes’ site. Choose an LEED level from Certified to Platinum, how many square feet of decking you want and customize the interior with flooring, cabinet and appliance options. If you need more rooms or bigger space, there are options for that, too. No one said prefab meant cookie-cutter. All you need to build you very own dream house is a piece of land – though a sense of design and maybe a construction team might help.

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The competition to design the new Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff was held back in 2007, but it was completed just recently, opening its doors to students in late 2011. The $35 million project includes a 450 seat chamber recital hall (with acoustics that will apparently blow your mind), a 180 seat theatre, four rehearsal studios and an exhibition gallery (take a virtual tour of the grounds).

Jason Flanagan, the project director said the “approach was two-fold, to design the internal performance spaces from the ‘inside out’, looking at their acoustic and theatrical functionality as major drivers, whilst in parallel designing from the ‘outside in’, thinking about the civic presence of the building in its urban context.” That sounds like a load of vague ad wash to me, but who cares – the space looks incredible.

There are three new performance spaces housed within the original, though heavily renovated building. The most fascinating part is the roof. Each individual space is “united under a single, floating roof, its heigh determined by the theatre fly tower.” This not only means that the acoustics can be tweaked to the nth degree depending on the evening’s performance, but it gives each auditorium the look of a music box with the lid lifted off so that we might gaze in at the precious contents.

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Number of years the site stood vacant: 12
Interior design: John Pawson
Why you should know him: Recently he’s done stage design for major ballets and operas as well as a temporary exhibition in the Geometric Staircase of St. Paul’s Cathedral. See all his work.
Number of floors: 5
Square-meters: 10,000 (about 33 square-feet)
Height of peaked roof: 16 meters (about 55 feet)
Estimated annual visitors: 500,000 (double the previous amount)
Estimated cost: £80 million (about $126 million)

“It’s a true icon and example of post war modernism,” Pawson said. ”The challenge was working inside the skin of an existing building. For me it’s about retuning the existing architecture so it still feels fresh. The palette we’ll use is quite quiet and simple…and will retain and enhance the extraordinary special qualities of the building.”

click > enlarge

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Granted, this is no ordinary road. The Timmelsjoch Pass cuts through the Alps along the Austrian/Italian border. Rising to 10,000 feet, building anything up there is a feat; Can you imagine trucking construction materials back and forth along those sharp switchbacks? As you might imagine, this isn’t a museum with rotating exhibitions. Its sole purpose is to pay homage to the pass itself. There’s a model of the pass in a single glass display case planted in the center of the one-room museum. There’s also some information behind the faceted glass walls, designed to echo the structure of the one of several icy caves nearby.

Tscholl was a natural pick for this project given his origins as well as his propensity for designing buildings that often jut out precariously over steep edges. Many of his projects are situated in remote locations, which means he’s used probably used to low turnouts sat his unveilings. This is a good thing because I’ve got a feeling The Timmelsjoch Experience Pass Museum is going to hit a new low on the list of annual visitors.

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Photographs by Alexa Rainer and Werner Tscholl

All three chargers (for home, travel and car) shut off automatically when your phone is fully charged, putting an end to phantom energy as well as ‘top-off stress’ on your phone’s battery (yes, even your phone gets stressed out). While it’s not the “most eco-friendly and efficient way to charge mobile devices,” as their site claims – my mom has them beat with her solar powered charger hub – it’s definitely better than the current energy sucking system, and at $22-$29, it’s affordable, too.

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The goal of making popular books available on the ground floor alongside a cafe is to encourage passersby to pop in, have a coffee and check out a new book – something people might be less likely to do if they knew they had to hike up to the top floor to browse through new releases. Or you could stay all day, “…learning in the morning, listening to a poetry performance at lunchtime, studying in the afternoon, watching first class theatre at night, and then relaxing in the cafe after that,” says Councilor Veronica Ward.

The inverted pyramid shape isn’t just a lark; Rather, it’s an incredibly creative way of meeting a design challenge. Based on their client’s needs, CZWG knew they would need to build a larger space than the site allowed for. They also couldn’t just build straight up because it would cut off the interaction between user groups on a given floor and it would have required the library to staff those additional stories – so they designed outward. Instead of going higher, they went wider and the result is a library that’s both stunning and completely unique. Piers Gough, a partner at CZWG, calls it “a futuristic Pandora’s box of possibilities.”

CZWG is producing some of the most exciting new work in architecture right now. I profiled their other recent project, a cancer treatment center in Nottingham, but readers might be more familiar with some of their higher profile work with the Smithsonian and in New York City.

As a side note, if you think this library is a stunner, check out the “20 More Beautiful College Libraries From Around the World.” Books never had it so good.





Photos by Tim Crocker

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[ frank gehry ]
Frank Gehry grew up in Canada. In his free time as a child, he would make small versions of buildings out of pieces of wood. In 1947 his family moved to the United States. That is where Frank Gehry began his university studies in architecture. He believes that architecture is art. He has said that, in some ways, he has been more influenced by artists and sculptors than by architects. This may be why his buildings often look like energetic sculptures made from bold geometric forms.

Gehry’s body of work favors the style of Deconstructivism, which is often referred to as post-structuralist for its ability to go beyond the modalities of structural definition. Its architectural application tends to depart from modernism in its absence of cultural givens such as societal goals and functional necessity. Deconstructivist structures are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas, such as speed or universality of form, nor a belief that form follows function per early modernist structures. Gehry’s own Santa Monica residence, which he applied his conceptual studies into a reality, is a commonly cited example of deconstructivist architecture, as it was so drastically divorced from its original context, it cloaks its original spatial intention.

Gehry’s style sometimes feels unfinished using inexpensive found objects and non-traditional media such as clay and has been called “the apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding”.

There are critics. Art historian Hal Foster reads Gehry’s architecture as, primarily, in the service of corporate branding. Other complains include complaints that the buildings waste structural resources by creating functionless forms, do not seem to belong in their surroundings and are apparently designed without accounting for the local climate.

Famous examples of Frank Gehry’s work include the “Dancing House” in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. This playful building, finished in 1996, looks like two dancers. His most famous building is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It was completed in 1997. Most of the curving building is covered in titanium. It looks like a dancing metal wave sitting on the edge of a river. The curved surfaces of this building and others by Frank Gehry are so complex to build that they require computer programs.
 
Frank Gehry’s buildings are so popular that some people say they create a “Gehry effect.” This term is used for a building that attracts visitors because of the architect who designed it.

To Gehry’s credit he has an ability to conceive and execute his surreal sculptural architecture. As there are critics of flying to the moon or jupiter, Gehry’s architecture is akin to space exploration. His work does inspire and someone will figure out how to apply concepts that will be less costly and more sustainable to build. [ gehry partners ]

[ project credits ]
Project Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Las Vegas 
Client Keep Memory Alive 
Architect Gehry Partners, Los Angeles—Frank Gehry, FAIA (design partner); Terry Bell (project partner); Brian Zamora (project designer); Kristin Ragins, Ronald A. Rosell, David Rodriguez, Michael Sedlacek (project architects); Andrew Galambos, Eun Sung Chang, AIA, Izaburo Kibayashi, Michael O’Boyle, Mok Wai Wan, Natalie Magarian, Natalie Milberg, Nora Wolin, Sameer Kashyap, Sarah David, Yvon Romeus (project team) 
Structural Engineer WSP Cantor Seinuk 
M/E/P/FP, Security, Telecommunications Engineer Cosentini Associates 
Lighting Design L’Observatoire International 
Acoustical Engineers McKay Conant Hoover; Nagata Acoustics 
Building Transportation Edgett Williams Consulting Group 
Life-Safety Engineers Aon Fire Protection Engineering Corp. 
Climate Engineer Transsolar 
Door Hardware Finish Hardware Technology 
Landscape Architect Deneen Powell Atelier 
Civil Engineer G.C. Wallace 
Building Maintenance Lerch Bates 
A/V Engineer Spurgeon Design and Development 
General Contractor Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. 
Size 85,180 square feet (site area), 60,000 (total building area)