227: Building Around What Stays
Branco del Rio's cowshed-to-home in Portugal, Studio NRG's aluminium chair, Farrell Wray's gallery around a gum tree, plus Jon Testa, ANONIMAL, and IGArchitects.
No clean theme this week, so here is the honest tension instead. Half of these projects refuse to start from nothing. A cowshed, a barn and a caretaker’s house become one home in Portugal, granite kept, everything above it rebuilt. A college walkway in Melbourne is reopened as a gallery cut around a lemon-scented gum that was already there. A chair in Los Angeles is cast from aluminium pulled out of scrap car rims. The material and the tree and the old walls came first, and the design had to make room for them.
The other half go quiet. Jon Testa photographs pine-paneled rooms as the two people who filled them slowly leave. IGArchitects stacks seven offset concrete slabs into one continuous room on a lot with no space to spare. Different instincts, same restraint. Nobody here is trying to be loud.
In Los Angeles, Colombian designer Nicolás Riaño Guerrero of Studio NRG casts the Lilium chair from aluminium salvaged from car rims, a limited-edition seat shaped like a flower petal to make metal read as warm.
From Set in Stone: On a walled, sloping site near Santa Maria da Feira in northern Portugal, Branco del Rio Arquitectos turns a cowshed, barn and caretaker’s house into one home, keeping the granite and rebuilding above it in timber.
From Concrete Stories: At Marcellin College in Braybrook, west of Melbourne, Farrell Wray Architects rebuilds a walkway bridge as a concrete gallery cut open around an existing lemon-scented gum, its trunk passing through the ellipse.
The rooms in Wading, the series by Burlington-based photographer Jon Testa, are paneled in the same knotted pine and slowly emptying of the two people who filled them.
From Japan Guide: The counter sits at the highest point of NIWA FUKUOKA, a café by ANONIMAL design community lifted onto a rooftop in Fukuoka, Japan, where a curved earthen wall traces the ridgeline of the mountains hidden behind the building.
From Jutaku: On a tight lot in a dense Japanese city, IGArchitects builds Building Frame of the House as one continuous room, where seven offset concrete slabs stack into a single 60-square-metre volume.
