226: Cutting Openings Into Mass
SANAA's La Samaritaine in Paris, PPAA's displaced cube in Mexico City, mA-style's slotted house, plus Benjamin Young, W&Li Design, and Studio Anne Holtrop in Bahrain.
Six projects this week, and five of them are about taking something away. A cube of plaster pulled out of a wall in Mexico City. Slots cut through a roof to drag light into a house that only has one open side. A 1937 customs house in Manama finished with a concrete volume that stops before it reaches the corners. Even Paris, where SANAA slips a public passage straight through the old department store, works by opening the mass rather than adding to it.
The lesson these buildings keep repeating is that space is often made by subtraction. What you remove decides where the light falls and where a body can go. Benjamin Young’s black-and-white series does the same thing with a camera, reading one landscape down to home and season. Look at what is missing first.
On a 30-tsubo lot in a Japanese neighbourhood, boxed in on three sides, mA-style architects cut slots into the roof, walls and floors of NesT to draw light through a house shared with a confectionery shop.
From Paris Guide: Between the Rue de Rivoli and the Seine in Paris, SANAA reworks La Samaritaine, threading a public passage through the old Grand magasin behind a facade of soft, undulating glass.
From Casa Mexicana: Where most houses assert a face to the street, PPAA‘s Barrancas in Mexico City carves absence into the volume itself, a displaced plaster cube that leaves a loggia where the mass should be.
Across the backroads of Marin County, California, Benjamin Young photographs Eternal Return, a black-and-white cycle that reads a familiar landscape through home, seasons, and the passage between birth and death.
The plan of Uno’s Purr-fect Time in New Taipei City turns on a single premise W&Li Design takes seriously, that a cat and its people occupy the same rooms along entirely separate paths.
From Concrete Stories: On the square at Bab Al Bahrain in Manama, Studio Anne Holtrop finishes the 1937 Customs House by adding a third volume of white hand-hammered concrete that stops short at the corners, keeping the building deliberately incomplete.
