Parliament Hill, London, United Kingdom

The property, a semi-detached house located on a quiet road leading to Hampstead Heath, comprised a maisonette and a flat, with an old extension to the rear. The houses in the area are not generally built well and require a lot of attention to ensure that they are sound structurally.

The brief was to form a modern and enjoyable single family home for our client by extending the ground floor and integrating the rear garden with the new interiors.

The main architectural interventions to the exterior consisted of a new extension with a terrace above and redesign of the rear elevation to create large openings.

Internally, the ground and first floor layouts were remodelled extensively. The ground floor was opened up and connected to the new extension. The rear garden was excavated so as to be at the same level as the ground floor. The kitchen to the front of the house was designed with sliding doors so that it could be separated from the living room when necessary.

A large addition to the rear of the ground floor, tilted in plan from the lines of the main house in order to capitalise on the best outlook, was built to create the sitting area in the living room. Structurally the extension was challenging, since it had no column in the corner facing the garden. Two sliding doors meet at the corner with the ceiling above suspended in the air. A large opening, covered in structural glass, was formed over the extension, which lets diffused light into the depth of the living room.

The first floor of the house is dedicated to master bedroom, en-suite bathroom and walk-in wardrobe as well as a study. The large master bedroom has direct access to the rear large terrace over the new extension. — WorldArchitectureNews

Belsize Architects | www.belsizearchitects.com

Robin Hood in Queens

Public School 42 in Arverne, Queens, a five-story prewar brick edifice, had a small library in a converted fourth-floor classroom. Physically and visually isolated from the core of the elementary school’s activities, the library was relocated to the ground floor, where it replaced one of two gymnasiums.

The relocation gives the library a more central role in the school’s daily rhythms. The library’s curvilinear wall affirms its unique status within the school; its variously sized inhabitable windows operate like the cutouts in a construction fence, providing selected views from the ground-floor hallway and cafeteria.

The Robin Hood Foundation’s Library Initiative, launched in partnership with the New York City Department of Education in 2001, aims to reverse “patterns of low literacy skills and underachievement by working with community school districts and public elementary schools to design, build, equip, and staff new elementary school libraries.”

The initiative has grown from a ten-school pilot program, including Public School 42, with each designed by a local architect on a pro-bono basis, to a group of more than fifty projects citywide.

The design by Weiss/ Manfredi aspires to make the act of reading visually evident in a setting where learning and play are literally and philosophically connected.

Inside the library, a winding wood-paneled wall, conceived as a “book worm,” holds volumes and reading alcoves. Adjustments to the space’s geometry are made legible in the registration of scalar devices, such as the overlapping of flat panels to produce curved surfaces that provide a tactile and visual acknowledgment of the assembly sequence.

The architectural intent, playful and engaging, is also palpable in the library’s moving parts. A deployable white theater scrim, suspended on a circular track and printed with text to resemble a crossword puzzle, provides the impression of privacy for reading groups while remaining transparent enough for librarians to supervise the activities.

For school events, the rolling bookcases can be moved to one side of the library to create a large central space for group activities. Custom-designed rolling beanbag seats, student chairs, and other furniture can be arranged in a variety of informal settings.

With its inventively detailed prosaic materials (plywood, Plexiglas, and industrial carpeting), varied lighting, broad windows, and multiple computer stations, the library is a place that encourages learning and social interaction.

The success of the project can be measured in its use: expanded hours, including Saturdays and evenings, were instituted not long after the new library opened its doors to accommodate the school’s popular family and community programming.

New York City public schools in impoverished neighborhoods have rarely been able to afford or sustain properly equipped libraries. Reading levels at these schools have remained substantially below city averages. These facts are what captured the attention of both the New York City Department of Education and the Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit organization that leverages private funds to address poverty’s root causes through a broad range of prevention programs.

By Marion Weiss and Michael A. Manfredi (ArchitectureWeek)

Weiss/ Manfredi is a multidisciplinary design practice based in New York City. Founded by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, the firm is known for their integration of architecture, art, infrastructure, and landscape design. They were awarded the Academy Award for Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and were named “an emerging voice” by the Architectural League of New York. Interdisciplinary projects such as their competition winning Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Park have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University, and the Design Center in Essen, Germany. Princeton Architectural Press previously published a monograph titled Site Specific: The Work of Weiss/ Manfredi Architects.

Aquatics Center Opens at LA School

Culver City, Calif. - based Parallax Associates designed the new Caruso Watt Aquatics Center for the Brentwood School in West Los Angeles. The aquatics center opened in May and features a contemporary 25-meter by 25-yard, 10-lane competition swimming pool and a 5,100-square-foot aquatics building. The building is built into a hillside and composed of stacked, sand-colored, eight-inch-thick masonry to resemble stone blocks and reduce interior heat gain. Sustainable elements also include rooftop solar panels, drought-tolerant plants, two 12-foot-high retaining walls on the top of the hill, and a poolside façade of cedar piers that combine with a trellis to create shade while acting as a theatrical curtain to reveal student competitors to bleacher spectators.

How do you … design a state-of-the-art competition swimming pool and aquatics facility for a middle/high school that incorporates sustainable and dramatic design?

Brentwood School, comprising grades 7-12, is on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Its new Caruso Watt Aquatics Center houses a masonry facility with a contemporary pool designed for swimming competition and water polo events. Parallax Associates stacked sand-colored concrete to give an impression of stone blocks. Its siting takes advantage of a hillside, with stairs from the top of the hill descending into the pool area and facility entrances. The goal is that trees and drought-tolerant plants will cover the hillside and face of two large retaining walls, thus nestling the facility into the landscape. Alaskan yellow cedar adorns the poolside façade, contrasting with the masonry. The combined elements create a dramatic design that also offers large amounts of shade and reduced heat gain, eliminating the need for air conditioning. Rooftop solar panels cap the energy-efficient design.

The aquatics building

The 5,100-square-foot aquatics building houses locker rooms for students and coaches, training and equipment rooms, offices, and mechanical rooms for pool machinery. Craig Jameson, AIA, principal-in-charge, project architect, and project manager, and John Masotta, AIA, principal-in-charge, worked on the center together. “Brentwood School has limitations to the amount of space for the project,“ Jameson explains. ”By carving back into the hillside and putting most of the building in an area previously occupied by the hill, we bought a little bit of extra site area for their pool complex. The two retaining walls behind the building also keeping the back portion of the building in the shade. It keeps the building cool so we don’t have to air-condition it.”

Earthquake code required high, stabilized retaining walls. “It would have been extremely expensive to structure a single wall of that height, “Jameson says.” Our structural engineer came up with the idea of staggering the structure—making one wall two—where there is a step across the site from a lower wall to an upper wall. Breaking the wall in two dramatically cut the cost.”

Concrete blocks in a running stack bond create a more monolithic look of large square blocks. “Every two blocks are stacked, instead of doing a running bond where each masonry unit is staggered. We stacked two blocks and put them side by side, and then next we go up a row and stagger those over so we get an appearance of large square blocks instead of smaller rectangular blocks,” Jameson explains. “We played up the squareness of the two masonry units to make it look like a single unit.”

The roof sports 130 square feet of solar panels. “Water circulates into coils and the sun heats it, then it’s returned to the swimming pool,” Jameson describes. “It keeps the water at a constant temperature. It doesn’t heat the entire pool, but it supplements the water heating system and offsets the cost and the amount of energy needed to heat the pool water.”

Pool covering equipment also helps keep the pool temperature constant. Says Jameson, “There is an area to one side of the pool across from the spectator area where we have pool covers that are pulled over the pool surface to keep the heat from radiating out of the pool during the night. It saves energy.”

The trellis and pool

The building’s pool-side façade has entries to the facility and uses Alaskan yellow cedar piers and an overhead trellis to create a shaded walkway between the building and pool area. “The trellis was born out of two reasons,” Jameson points out. “One, without the trellis, you have a utilitarian building. We wanted an organized façade, so you are not just looking at doors in a block wall. Number two is that we needed to shade the building on the pool side to keep both the swimmers cool and the building cool.

“In doing this, we thought to make more theater out the place,” he continues. “The swimmers come out of the locker room as if onto a stage through a curtain. The piers are diagonal, so their broad surface faces the bleachers, where you are not able to see the back wall with the doors, and you don’t see the swimmers entering the pool until they slip out in front of the trellis piers. It’s a dynamic element and it’s beautiful to see the interplay of the shadow lines of the trellis above play against the diagonal supporting piers.”

The pool itself is slightly deeper than 7 feet, has 10 lanes for competition, and uses a rimless gutter system. “In a conventional pool the water level is eight inches below the deck, and the water splashes into a perimeter gutter,” Jameson explains. ”In this configuration, the gutter surface is up at the deck/walking surface, giving a sense of an uninterrupted surface. They say it creates a faster pool, because waves spill over the edge of the gutter in the direction of the deck and don’t bounce back towards the swimmer. It’s an esoteric consideration, but I’ve heard from several people it creates a faster pool. It’s a perception that the swimmers have. The Brentwood swimmers’ times and enthusiasm are up, and routines that took them three hours to accomplish they now accomplish in half the time. And the spirit of the team is higher.”

By Russell Boniface
Associate Editor (AIArchitect)

Nissan Americas, Franklin, Tennessee, United States

Gresham, Smith and Partners have celebrated the grand opening of Nissan Americas’ corporate facility in Franklin, Tennessee. The striking 460,000 sq ft building was designed by GS&P to enhance Nissan’s employee efficiency while incorporating sustainability in both interior and exterior environments.

“Nissan Americas new facility is a wonderful work environment for the Nissan employees and a proud addition to the Middle Tennessee landscape,” stated Rob Traynham, director of Corporate Services for Nissan North America, Inc. “With the functional and creative design of the interior spaces and the sustainability elements such as sun shades and low-E glass, which give the facility a distinctive appearance, Nissan employees are thrilled to occupy this new building.”

The building incorporates many sustainable elements, most noticeable is the inclusion of 6 ft deep aluminum sunshade outriggers which extend around the perimeter of each floor to reduce solar heat gain and improve energy efficiency. Additional energy efficient details include the design of a green roof system, digital lighting controls, a chilled water plant and an under-floor air distribution system that provides a more comfortable and controllable environment for employees. Building materials, finishes and furnishings contain high quantities of recycled content and/or low VOC’s for improved indoor air quality.

Existing on-site wetlands were improved and will add a unique natural amenity to be enjoyed by employees and visitors to the 50-acre site. More than 50,000 plantings were also added to the wetlands area. Rain gardens and ponds are integrated into the overall site and landscape design and outdoor gathering spaces were created for company and public use.

The 10-story structure is one of the largest office buildings in Franklin and will serve the needs of more than 1,500 Nissan employees.

In addition to architectural services, GS&P provided site master planning, conceptual design, workplace strategy, interior design, environmental graphics, landscape architecture, structural engineering and civil engineering services. — WorldArchitectureNews.com

Gresham, Smith and Partners | www.gspnet.com

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