Dezeen – Architect Elizabeth Diller explains how The Broad Museum in Los Angeles was designed to feel “extremely welcoming” in the next instalment of Dezeen’s Concrete Icons series produced in collaboration with Holcim.
The video features The Broad in Los Angeles designed by Diller’s studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a three-storey museum that houses an expansive collection of contemporary and post-war artworks. Speaking to Dezeen in an exclusive video interview filmed at the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro office in New York City, Diller explained how the building was designed to feel inviting to visitors with a porous facade that allows light to be gently diffused into the gallery.
“It doesn’t really feel like a traditional museum,” Diller said. “There’s no sense of authority. When you step off the street, no one tells you where to go. There’s no information desk, there’s no admissions desk. You don’t pay, it’s free. It feels extremely welcoming.”
Dezeen – In the first instalment of Dezeen’s new Concrete Icons series produced in collaboration with Holcim, MAD Architects founder Ma Yansong explains how his firm’s sinuous concrete library in Haikou, China encourages visitors to use their imagination.
Yansong is the first participant in Concrete Icons, a new video series profiling the most iconic contemporary concrete buildings by the world’s leading architects. The video focusses on MAD’s Cloudscape of Haikou, a library with a flowing form cast in white concrete located in a waterside park in Haikou on the island of Hainan.
Completed in 2021, the 1,000-square-metre structure houses a library, cafe, restrooms, showers, a nursery room, and bike storage, and acts as a waystation for visitors to the park. Speaking to Dezeen in an exclusive video interview filmed at MAD’s offices in Beining, Yansong explained how the building is designed to put visitors in a contemplative or imaginative state of mind.
MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, has announced the opening of the Cloudscape of Haikou is located on the southern tip of China. A unique urban public and cultural space for citizens and visitors to Haikou, this flowing, sculptural concrete form was named as one of the “most anticipated architecture projects of 2021” by The Times of London.
A prominent port city on the southern tip of China, Haikou was once an important stop on the Maritime Silk Road. With the establishment of the Hainan International Tourism Island and Hainan Free Trade Zone, Haikou’s influence has seen a gradual resurgence in modern times. Meanwhile, Haikou’s government is also enriching the city’s cultural importance, through enhancing the social attributes of the city’s public spaces, and strengthening the connection between the city, humanities, and architecture. The Cloudscape of Haikou is one such culmination of this effort.
The Cloudscape of Haikou is the first of sixteen coastal pavilions commissioned by the Haikou Tourism and Culture Investment Holding Group to rejuvenate the historic port city, with the aim of improving public space along the coastline. Known as “Haikou, Pavilions by the Seaside,” the initiative invited teams of internationally recognized architects, artists, and interdisciplinary professionals to create sixteen landmark public stations.
This concrete waterfront residence explores the lines between landscape and architecture; blurring nature and building. In a postmodern world of dislocation, the use of landscape and topography as form-generator is a particularly cogent means to establish a sense of “poetic belonging”.
This rocky, steeply sloping waterfront site was an ideal source of inspiration to create a residence which explores this dialectical tension. The residence is massed in two forms that cascade to the waterfront.
The spaces between the forms, expressed as slip-planes, undulate like the rock formations on the Burrard Inlet shoreline. The juxtaposition of forms are loose and geometries are non-orthogonal and sympathetic to the site contours.
Basalt Architects has used marine-grade concrete to build Guðlaug Baths, a geothermal pool on Langisandur Beach in Iceland. The baths consist of a three-tiered structure, with a viewing deck on the top, a warm geothermal pool in the middle, and a cold-water pool at the bottom.
The architectural office konstantinos stathopoulos KRAK. architects, participated in the 10th Biennale of Young Architects, with an impressive holiday home, named Casa Odyssia, located in the northeastern part of the island of Corfu, in a lush landscape, with intense relief and at an altitude of 250 meters, where the user as a modern Odysseus.
In search of Ithaca; the mythical Odysseus, washed naked on the island of Phaeacus, today’s Corfu. There, Nafsika, the king’s daughter, surrounded him and led him to her father’s palace, where he received the hospitality and supplies to return to Ithaca.
The house, like a seed in the ground, grows, finding space, among the other forces of the place, the trees, the rocks; in search of the best view, the sun, the good orientation.
Professional deep-sea diver Adrian Corrigall and his wife Megan plan to build their new family home in rural East Sussex almost entirely out of concrete, with construction involving cutting-edge technologies conceived in Switzerland and never used to build a house before. However, the perils of being a pioneer soon become evident, and with both schedule and budget under strain, Adrian is forced to resume work as a diver, taking him away from the project for a month at a time.
Located just outside Winthrop in eastern Washington, the site for this small cabin lies in the Methow Valley. Nestled in the foothills of the North Cascade mountains, the dramatic views from the site and opportunity for year round recreation drew our client to this region. A strong relationship to the site topography and varying climate was key to the design.
The program for the project was to design a two bedroom cabin which maximized the connection to the surrounding natural environment and outdoor living. This cabin would initially serve as a weekend retreat from the city, and later become a permanent home. Our client wanted to create an efficient floor plan for the house, with open interior/exterior living, bedrooms above, and garage below. It was important to use durable materials throughout the exterior of the cabin due to the extreme climate and fire hazard in the area. The upper levels of the cabin sit on a concrete plinth which forms the garage. Concrete is used to both ground the cabin and retain the natural slope of the site that the cabin sits in. Above, black corrugated metal sheets are used as an efficient and weather resistant siding material. A shed roof with large overhangs on all sides protects the cabin from the heavy winter snowload. A large cantilevered exterior deck opens out from the main level, vastly increasing the living space in the summer months. Views from the deck capture the surrounding mountain ranges and natural beauty of the site.