metal mesh veils TAO’s transient in-between pavilion in shenzhen
tao’s translucent structure echos the urban village’s vitality
A delicately symbiotic gallery space, Trace Architecture Office’s (TAO) In-between Pavilion is an urban renewal project that tucks within a compressed urban node in Nantou Ancient Town, Shenzhen. Part of the Diverse Homology Museum complex, the space within delves into the interplay between political power and geography in the Pearl River Delta region. Along the streetfront, reflecting the active state of rapid evolution in the town, the pavilion embraces a transient approach and its architecture mirrors the urban village’s vitality, adapting to temporary and fragmented additions. A light and semi-translucent metal mesh facade, like a hazy veil, gracefully blurs the indoor-outdoor boundary, embodying ambiguity and order, openness and closure, solid and void. These evolving changes unfold throughout the day, echoing its dynamic context with a diverse and vibrant spatial experience inside and out.
images by Chen Hao, TAL, Hua Li, and Mei Kejia
a transition from solid to void, openness and closure
Once a densely packed and compressed area in the north side of the town, the site sitting between two residences underwent constant renewal over time, resulting in a distinctive aesthetic of chaos and vitality. The autonomous and spontaneous construction in the urban village has resulted in a confined spatial layout and visual occlusion within the architecture. Now, it encompasses three distinct property plots that transition from private residences to a public domain. This shift prompts a proactive design response to connect with surrounding public spaces.
At street level, TAO’s architectural volume recedes from the delicate outer metal skin, creating a multifaceted space that blends the building with the street while reflecting the diversity of the urban village. A vertical street, formed between volumes and mesh skin, provides meandering access to galleries and a roof terrace, offering various perspectives of the town. When observed from the city, the moving figures strolling behind the hazy facade also inject the building with a dynamic nature.
Due to spatial limitations, the architects’ design maximizes floor area utilization, projecting volumes further outwards as floors ascend, establishing a unique physical rhythm and urban gap space. Structurally, inclined columns support the volumes on the east side and west sides, with the west side’s overhanging framework exposed externally, while the middle columns remain concealed within the walls. Different forms of space thusly emerge and embody a sense of lightweight structural aesthetics.
images courtesy Kengo Kuma & Associates
The Capilano Library connects its suburban community to nature. The library form is developed from its cross section, which is folded to form three peaks across the site, each with a different scale. Each of the three peaks responds to scale, function, natural light and view. The western peak reflects the scale of the neighborhood with a quiet edge of support spaces along the street. The eastern peak is intimately scaled, with varied seating along a serene window overlooking the nearby ravine. The design is enhanced by the mix of rectangular and polygonal ALPOLIC metal panels that were installed around the library’s exterior.
The Wolf Creek Library design was made as a community destination and as a catalyst for growth. The exterior features an outdoor reading garden and terraced seating. The library houses 5,700 square feet of adult collections, 5,000 square feet of children’s collections, a computer/learning station room, teen area, music room, sub-dividable community meeting room for 125 people and two conference rooms with smart boards and projectors. Originally, copper was considered as cladding material for the building’s iconic wedge-shaped façade. But, ultimately, it was determined that ALPOLIC’s aluminium composite material (ACM) was a superior solution.
The Saint Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church transformed a generic shop building into a place of worship and fellowship. The architects kept the interior simple but utilized box rib metal panels for the exterior. Metal Sales manufactured the T-10A metal walls panels, which are coated in Metallic Silver and Dark Bronze Fluropon colors from Sherwin-Williams Coil Coatings. A thin cross, lit up in red, is also visible on the western side of the church.
Located in the heart of Los Angeles, this new eleven unit housing project emphasizes the central importance of shared open space for the residents and the community. Formosa takes what would be the internalized open space of the courtyard and moves it to the exterior of the building to create a park. This plan, O’Herlihy’s firm says, “simultaneously creates density and green space and models a replicable prototype for incremental community-driven city development.” Completed in 2008, the 16,000-square-foot building features a red corrugated metal exterior. Sherwin-Williams was chosen for its flagship Fluropon coating to be the product of choice for Formosa.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) holds a prominent place on the National Mall. As the team outlines, the primary architectural idea for the museum was derived from the classical tripartite column with its base, shaft and capital. In Yoruban art and architecture, the column or wooden post was usually crafted with a capital resembling a crown. This crown or corona form is the central idea which has driven the design of the museum.
This new ground up campus was designed to create a unique and authentic identity for the growing Central Arizona College. The three building campus is conceptually rooted in its historic agricultural roots and Native American legacy. Structures are conceived as a series of honest, spare and no maintenance ‘academic sheds.’ Deep overhangs let interior academic spaces flow outdoors seamlessly. Corten steel and rammed earth create the primary exterior language eliminating the need for long term maintenance.
Made of black granite (Negresco) and dark wood (Oak), this sauna was designed to be a camera obscura, a box drawn to shape views of the landscape. Located in the middle of Stockholm’s archipelago, a narrow pathway brings the visitors to the sauna: a black box embedded in the rocks. The matte finish can be seen both inside and as part of the structure’s façade. As the team outlines, inside is a monolithic stone bench that faces the water through a large sliding window. On the back, a thick wall contains all the services: a small kitchen hidden behind the sliding doors and a bathroom illuminated by a skylight. At night, the small sauna resembles a lighthouse, a warm and cozy space illuminated from the inside.
Tillicharchitektur designed this building to host production and office spaces for a textile finishing and vending firm. Its iconic feature is the folded façade, which reimagines the simple cube. The matte bright surface of the anthracite pigmented concrete responds to its environment. Depending on the season, time of day, weather, and lighting, the façade continuously changes its character. In contrast to the expressive façade, the interior design leaves more space for the production process and the products in the showroom. The team explains that the limitation on few, but high class materials, is the main factor driving the interior.
On the fringe of the Vienna Woods sits this compact single-family house LOU. Resting on a steeply sloping site, the designers wanted the first impression to be reinforced by the matte black skin of the building. Inside, the project offers a spacious and varied living environment on staggered half-story levels. As the team notes, at each level, the house opens differently to the outside world. The main residential levels are nestled against the slope, separated from the garden only by an all around-strip of windows which allows looking and stepping out in every direction.
This compact wooden house was designed by architect Joris Verhoeven for himself. Located within the Drijflanen nature reserve in Tilburg, the matte building is designed to be a part of nature. With its rough black façade, it was made to fit within the context of surrounding tree trunks. The cottage house is prefabricated and constructed out of wooden cassettes filled with flax insulation. In turn, the interior of the cassettes is made of birch plywood. Other parts of the interior, such as the interior door, kitchen and stair railing, are finished in matte black, just like the exterior window frames. In this way the inside and outside of the house were made to relate to one another.
Located in Muang Thong Thani, this project is the expansion of a car care center. The building is located on a 3230-square feet (300-meter) plot of land, with a long and narrow plot that required an in-depth organization of the building. Since the space of the car care center was too limited, a new space was necessary for project extension. The building consists of four small containers and four large containers. The design team made the building exterior to be painted in matte black but the interior is white. The external envelope includes the west façade and the roof, which have metal sunshades to reflect sunlight and protect the building from the heat.
The ‘Les Marais’ project started with the design team’s fascination for the built landscape of the empty space that characterizes North American rural areas. For this design, depending on the observer’s location in the neighboring forest, the scales of the buildings are relative. The team explains that the wetland nature of this lakeside property was preserved and then the collective landscape of the built complex was designed. A large ‘plate’ of black wood links the three structures to establish a common base, while large cutouts were made in each ‘shape’, also of black painted wood, to reveal the interior materiality of the red cedar buildings.
Sited at the future land-air transport hub of Henan, this hotel was made as a “paradise city with national customs” in Zhengzhou. Ideas of Chinese ancient garden construction were introduced into the “south garden” that make the most important building the starting point of the entire array. Moreover, the matte building façade is presented in the shape of arc to match the main garden in the front. The team choose a range of matte-finish materials like frosted earthenware tile, matte composite aluminum-plastic sheet and brushed stainless steel. It is the first floor of the building that is composed of external matte façade built from 100,000 earthenware tiles.
The Devon Energy Center was designed to create a focal point for the company and the city by integrating civic-scaled spaces. The headquarters consolidates Devon’s Oklahoma City-based workforce into a single facility. Rising fifty floors, the tower’s unique three-sided footprint allows it to be viewed from all of greater Oklahoma City. The curtain wall is composed of state-of-the-art continuous floor-to-ceiling glazing and a highly articulated mullion system.
Made to house Louisiana State University’s Museum of Art, this project also included studio art facilities, a regional performing arts facility with a 320 seat main stage, a hundred-seat black box theater, and a dance recital theater. An historic older building, the “Auto Hotel,” houses classrooms, offices, curatorial spaces, and a gallery for the LSU School of Art. The innovative Bendheim channel glass rainscreen creates a highly recognizable façade, while protecting the building and the works of art it houses from the elements.
Looking out with a view to the Washington Monument, this residence was made as a multifunctional microcosm of living and working space as well as rooms for official receptions and for the staff. The strictly geometrical structure of the Swiss Embassy is a cross-shaped volume on a massive, rectangular base. The outer sides of the cross, which are part of the base too, and the the resulting exterior spaces are allocated to adjacent areas.
The ICA was the first museum to be built in Boston in 100 years. The 65,000 square foot building includes temporary and permanent galleries, a 330 seat multi-purpose theater, a restaurant, bookstore, education/workshop facilities, and administrative offices. The site is bound on two sides by the Harbor Walk, a 47-mile public walkway at the water¹s edge reclaimed from Boston’s industrial past. The ICA offers the city some of its ground floor footprint in exchange for rights to cantilever over city property with a 18,000-square-foot gallery illuminated by an uninterrupted skylight.
The C-Glass House is an elegant retreat in northern California. Set on a spectacular site, the residence opens to a panoramic view of Tomales Bay and the open ocean, while bracing against winds from multiple directions. C-Glass House brokers between the Leica-like precision of high modern glass houses and the cinematic wireframe of the Case Study generation. The home was also inspired by artists’ explorations of glazed enclosures as much as it is to the precedents of Johnson and Mies.
SHA and BNIM designed the new Visual Arts Building for the University of Iowa’s School of Art and Art History. It provides 126,000 square feet of loft-like space for all visual arts media, from ancient metal-smithing techniques to the most advanced virtual reality technologies. The building replaces an original arts building from 1936, which was heavily damaged during the 2008 flood of the University of Iowa campus. Seven vertical “centers of light” are carved out of the building’s volume filling the interior with natural light and ventilation.