Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2024 i AZURE

After an especially hot New York summer, the October opening of Gansevoort Peninsula made waves with an unprecedented offering: Manhattan’s first public beach. Designed by local landscape architecture and urban design firm Field Operations, the newly minted 2.2-hectare green space is one of the final components of Hudson River Park — a 6.44-kilometre network of waterfront destinations gradually developed over the past 25 years. And while it provides city dwellers no shortage of sand (1,090 tonnes, to be exact), it also delivers so much more. Located opposite the Whitney Museum of American Art, Gansevoort Peninsula stands out among Hudson River Park’s two-dozen-plus public spaces in that it is built on solid ground — specifically, on the site of a former sanitation facility — as opposed to on piers. This allowed…

Home to the oldest university in the world, Bologna, Italy, is a lesson in longevity. Heading out for dinner during the city’s annual ceramic tile fair each September, it’s not unusual to wind up in a restaurant that has spent several decades operating out of the same centuries-old building. During this year’s 40th edition of Cersaie, one of the spots on my own after-hours pasta crawl was Trattoria Trebbi, which has served heartwarming bowls of tortellini in brodo since 1946. Contrast that with the average North American dining establishment, which is lucky to make it just five years. All of this came to mind in the wake of a presentation held on the second day of Cersaie by Mauro Rullo, head of sustainability for the Italian ceramics association. Because of…

PREFA FX.12 ALUMINUM PANELS Nestled within a conifer woodland just outside of Prague, Forest Cabin, by local firm Archicraft, was designed to reflect — and respect — its surroundings. Opting for the durability and nearly negligible maintenance requirements of aluminum shingles, the architects chose FX.12 panels from Austrian brand Prefa for both the gable roof and facade, and the Prefalz system for the roof’s flat portions — all in dark brown to give the entire structure a seamless look. Each panel has both longitudinal and transverse edging sections, which lends them a unique “crumpled” appearance while also increasing their strength. Embossed with non-repeating cant patterns, the surface characteristics change throughout the course of the day. FX.12 panels are installed as non-bearing, rear-ventilated facades. ACRYLIC BLACK Nakamoto Forestry, the leading Japanese…

How to design a building that stands out yet melds seamlessly with its context? This was precisely the challenge Zaragoza firm Peman y Franco Arquitectos faced in creating the Illueca Health Centre. Located in a developing area of the once-tiny Spanish town, the primary care facility sits on an almost 1,400-square-metre plot of land and will service 11 nearby communities. “Until a few years ago, Illueca was an agricultural town. Its industrialization began with manufacturing footwear, which became the economic engine of the area,” explains co-founder and architect Luis Franco Lahoz. “As the town grew, it needed to absorb the increase in population that industrial development would bring.” As one of the only buildings in the planned urban development to be completed thus far, the health centre — which has…

“That year, the mango tree gave us more fruit than ever.” Two farmer brothers in the locality of Yavat, on the outskirts of Pune, are recalling the time they first moved into their newly designed home, which is pivoted around the tree. Realized by architecture studio Craft Narrative, the house plays on the clients’ aspiration to “become urban”1 while maintaining the typological principles of regional courtyard houses. The 420-square-metre house sits in a fertile region amid pomegranate and sugarcane farms. “There was another tree — a neem — on the site that was eaten up by the termites, so we tried to preserve the mango,” says architect Yatindra Patil, who is pleased to see how it has begun to embrace not only the home’s courtyard but its terrace, too. At…

Christ & Gantenbein’s new bridge in Aarau, Switzerland, doesn’t just connect two different sides of the Aare river — it also narrows the gaps between several periods of local architectural history. Working in collaboration with engineering studios WMM Ingenieure and Henauer Gugler, the Basel-based architecture practice developed a row of five variable-width arches that are a marvel of contemporary construction. Yet the structure’s light grey board-formed concrete also successfully harmonizes with Aarau’s older stone buildings, which include no shortage of medieval castles. In another deft balance of past and present, a portion of the new infrastructure partially rests on two caissons that were preserved from the river’s previous overpass, which was built in 1949. (Earlier iterations date all the way back to the Roman Empire.) Spanning 119 metres long and…

Working with plastic that has been through multiple rounds of recycling poses a big design challenge. While polymers remain cooperative after being recycled once and even twice, they become far less stable after a third pass — making them much less likely to produce sturdy results with traditional manufacturing techniques like injection moulding. One solution is to develop designs and production methods that are more forgiving to these material limitations. It’s this idea that led East London design and craft studio Gareth Neal and Rotterdam research and design studio The New Raw (run by Panos Sakkas and Foteini Setaki) to partner on a two-year project. Funded by Better Factory through a 2019 European Union grant aimed at fostering sustainable manufacturing methods, the trio experimented with faster, less risky ways to…

Sweltering temperatures and lush tropical rainforests are not characteristics that commonly come to mind when thinking of Winnipeg, Manitoba, one of Canada’s coldest cities. But they are exactly what can be found when meandering through The Leaf, a new landmark in the Prairie city’s sprawling 450-hectare Assiniboine Park. An integral part of an overall redevelopment plan for the park that has been underway for close to 15 years, this addition comprises four separate yet interconnected botanical biomes home to hundreds of diverse plant species, all under one spectacular spiralling roof. Built to replace the site’s original conservatory, which dated back to 1914 and hadn’t been upgraded in decades, The Leaf biodiversity gardens were designed by KPMB (in close partnership with Architecture49, Blackwell Structural Engineers and HTFC Planning & Design). The…

In a small corner plot in Esher, Surrey, Oliver Leech Architects has designed a multifaceted, charred-timber home for the mother of its client. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a stand-alone house, rather than a compact one-storey garden suite. “They came to us to create a granny annex, but the resulting house doesn’t feel or look like that at all,” says Oliver Leech, the London studio’s director. “Other than sharing a garden, it could be its own house, which I think is part of the success of the design.” With its blackened envelope, origami-style green roof (expressed visually as a butterfly configuration, hence the project’s name) and four pitched volumes angled to create a fan-like shape, the 94-square-metre home was designed to fit as discreetly as possible into…

The pragmatic and the poetic, economy as ethic, critical regionalism: These concepts have defined Brian MacKay-Lyons’s work for over 40 years. Studying the typologies of the Maritime region, the founder of Nova Scotia firm MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects (MLSA) has honoured the vernacular while advancing it. “Vernacular is not a style or an image,” he has said. “It is a process or cultural view…By taking up new technologies and materials, the vernacular is always contemporary and forward-looking, rather than sentimental and backward-looking.” He likes to quote the Mexican poet Octavio Paz: “When joined, modernity breathes life into tradition and tradition responds by providing depth and gravity.” In December 2022, MacKay-Lyons was appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of his contribution to this dialectic between the modern and the traditional.…

Dan Doctoroff is here to listen. In the opening moments of the stage play The Master Plan, actor Mike Shara’s fictionalized Sidewalk Labs CEO takes pains to present himself as a humble servant of the public good. It’s just that, in making his point, he can’t help yelling and interrupting everyone else. Written by Michael Healey, directed by Chris Abraham and based on Josh O’Kane’s book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, the play chronicles the Sidewalk Toronto saga, which saw the global tech giant make a bold (and ultimately unsuccessful) play to build a neighbourhood “from the Internet up” on the city’s waterfront. This past fall, the production sold out a seven-week run at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre (and scripts can now be purchased through Playwrights Canada Press). The development…

ULTRA For a creative couple in a small hamlet of Long Island, Brooklyn architecture practice Worrell Yeung designed a twostorey addition to their main house, with an artist studio up top and an exhibition space (and garage) below. Wrapped in 1.2-metre-tall ribbon windows from Neon Energy (a combination of the Ultra fixed and tilt-and-turn models), the upper workshop is flooded with natural light and possesses 360-degree views of the surrounding tree canopies. To achieve the continuous run of windows, the architects worked with Silman structural engineers and devised a series of small steel columns and steel rod crossbraces for lateral support that perfectly matched the mullions. 7600 MULTI-SLIDE DOOR Western Window Systems recently updated the interlocks of its Series 7600 Multi-Slide Door, resulting in more expansive openings with slender seven-centimetre…

Bathtubs 1 AXOR Suite Part of a series by Philippe Starck, this generously sized bathtub can be equipped with an optional shelf that wraps around one curved edge to provide a surface for personal care items, candles or books. Materials Non-porous SolidSurface; metal Dimensions 190 L × 83 W × 47 D Manufacturer Axor, axor-design.com 2 BetteSuno A collaboration with Barber Osgerby, the BetteSuno freestanding bathtub features a recessed apron for a streamlined look and a protruding rim that triples as a design detail, as well as a comfortable headrest or armrest and a ledge for toiletries. Materials Enamelled titanium steel Dimensions 180 L × 80 W × 42 D Manufacturer Bette, my-bette.com 3 Cuba Countering its compact size and angular exterior, Cuba, by Italian designer Mario Ferrarini, boasts a…

Porcelain and Sintered Stone 1 Patagonia Offered in both Marazzi’s countertop surfacing range and its Grande collection of extra-large slabs, the marble-look porcelain used for this kitchen’s island and shelving niche is modelled after a type of igneous rock that combines granite and quartz to exciting effect. marazzigroup.com 2 I Travertini One of the standouts of the ongoing travertine craze is Italgraniti’s limestone-look ceramic range offered in four distinct colourways. The Radio 3D pattern featured here is sold in pairs of 60-by-120-centimetre tiles that alternate smooth portions with textural areas featuring super-thin striations. italgranitigroup.com 3 Aquatio Casalgrande Padana’s new range of porcelain stoneware bathroom furnishings includes washbasins, shelves and shower trays, which are available in any of the manufacturer’s existing large-format slabs (including Metropolis Sand, shown) and treated with antibacterial…