Tailor made to the clients individual needs, the in.it.studios team worked on the architectural and joinery aspects of the build, completing the project with both the clients requirements coupled with our unique design and expertise.

An important aspect for this build was to ensure the garden room blended effortlessly with its environment and context.  The undulating levels of the garden presented a design challenge which was overcome through the implementation of landscaped features to break the hard lines between the studio and garden.  With the picturesque garden overlooking the Thames River, it was important for the studio to be placed strategically to make the most of the scenic views it was surrounded by. Both the joinery and architectural team worked hand in hand, ensuring the design and layout would be of a high standard matching its beautiful surroundings.

With plenty of natural light entering through the studio via glazed bi-folding doors, the wood finish on the interior and exterior and a living sedum roof are all touches that provide an environmental building.  With additional features such as external spot lighting underneath the canopy, help to create a perfect mellow ambience during the night time; giving the guest house a warm and relaxing sensation. All our garden rooms are fitted with a white glass panel heater and retaining with thick insulated walls, ensuring the outdoor building is nice and toasty during those cold winter months and enabling it to be used all year round.

This particular studio has been designed with multiple functions in mind; as previously outlined it is perfect for hosting dinner parties for family and friends, or as a private retreat to enjoy a nice glass of wine whilst watching the sun set.

© Koichi Torimura

© Koichi Torimura

© Koichi Torimura

This project site having 5 borders is enclosed in too many elements, but the front road on the west side of this site facing 1st floor office and the elevated platform viewing to north, the sun to south are particularly important things. So, I thought to design the building connecting these 3 elements smoothly.

© Koichi Torimura

© Koichi Torimura

© Koichi Torimura

Shapes and environment
Ordinarily collective housing for single family is 20-30㎡ in Japan. This plan is composed of 4m×8m grid, and  bathroom, lavatory, corridor and entrance occupy it’s large area. So, living space is very small. Dwelling variation is made by only changing the wallpaper.If dwelling unit is 2m×16m, this plan widen to only one side and become corridor like room. Bathroom and bedroom is allocated on the end. This privacy area is hidden by bending the room shape, not getting the walls up.Whole volume is consist of 2 rooms fit in 1floor×3layers. Allocating 2m wide wall-like volume along the border line of lot, and controlling the position of open-air stairs, generate the method of dwelling variation by it’s shapes and relation to environment. Very thin courtyard generated by these process and open-air stairs are very comfortable space compared to ordinary open-air stairs of collective housing enclosed in neighbor buildings. Windows are aligned by a pair (symmetrical to room center line) for ventilating and daylighting the courtyard through 2m volume.

© Koichi Torimura

© Koichi Torimura

© Koichi Torimura

Imaginative power of anonymous plans
Many people will have some experience in apartment-hunting. We often encounter diversified plans. Some apartment has strangely huge balcony, and is labyrinthine, is extremely long. These fascinating aspects in particular to anonymous apartment plans are only discovering things for architects. I make an attempt to using imaginative power of anonymous plans for designing method. The possibility of generating new architecture is already in existence.

© Koichi Torimura

The programme is organised through a central spiral that begins at the entrance, then follows to the main hall, the nucleus of the new museum, a space with double headroom, that links all the spaces of the CITA, and then to the different public spaces, the multipurpose room, the educational spaces, and to the temporary and permanent exhibitions spaces.

The project establishes a more contained intervention for the ground floor, maintaining most of the key architectural existing elements such as the dome ceilings. The exhibition spaces on the first floor present contemporary ceilings that work as inverted cones that culminated on skylights to bring into these spaces a well controlled natural light. The new museum will bring a new light to this building and a sense of both tradition and modernity to Arraiolos social and cultural life.

It is adjusted close by the production-service building of the Leningrad Metro, which had a solid concrete end. The architect had to design a construction harmonious being an independent building and extension of the existing complex. The architects started from the two concepts: the building is a part of the massive volume and is a mark of the crossroads, or rather the acute corner formed here by the street and the lane. The first was clear: the solid end had to be completed as soon as possible with architectural material, to drape and with numerous folds hide at last the dull concrete five storey fire wall.

The idea to fix the corner in the urban space directed the architects in a more constructive way and the image of a building-drape turned into an image of building-hinge, or a gear. The architects designed the office complex as a sheaf of glass prisms, like a fan raying from the center of the building, and in the plan the uncommon composition really looks like a gear.

To hold the unusual “bunch” and stylistically combine with the neighboring building, on the level of 3-6-floors it is pulled by the round stone belt, which coloring and rhythm of window openings catches the tectonic structure of the building established sixteen years earlier.
author:   Anna Martovitskaya

Object: Office building on Telezhnaya street
Workshop: Studio 44
Architects crew: Nikita Yavein, Ekaterina Kobozeva, Peter Shlihter;
Typology: Office & Civic / Office block
Client: OAO “Peterburgrekonstrukciya”
Global square: 2969,4
Social square: 1785,2
Building value: 12711
Floors: 8

Bestowing the award, Evgeny Assa told that had chosen Skuratov’s project for its poetry introduced into the architecture. According to the expert, there is too little of poetry in the modern architecture, and the projects by Sergey Skuratov outline against the rest. Really, another things prevail, but Skuratov’s buildings do not veil their artistry, concern to the plastic, thoroughly worked out, like the color gradient of the brick, specially matched on computer. Or the imitation of roughness in the future facing, some bricks will be put a little deeper inside then others. Or a gift to see graphic beauty in facades development that turns from technical graphics into a conceptual sketch on a housing in general. Thoroughly worked over, the fine architecture, architecture-sculpture; what is special is that the author does not hide his dedication more to art, to say more exactly, to plastic issues, not sheltering behind technical, social, economic or some other reasoning. The height of the buildings, for example, he has defined from clearly plastic reasons, but not estimating the required height in meters for the elite residence.

Nowadays it is quite challenging to say openly about the interest in fine/pure art – daring and surprising. We have asked Sergey Skuratov, whether he feels as if he is an artist among the pragmatists, so to say an oppositionist, and has told about the troubled process of inventing exact words for the approvals of ‘Tessinski’… A kind of translation, as the architect noticed, from beautiful and poetic Russian into language of terms, that have chance “to pass”. That is an indispensable practice, poetry is appreciated only at awards, and yet not at each of them, but a trip of the project over authorities leaves out poetry.

Treated kindly by critics, ‘Tessinski’ at the approvals was to be reduced in height, so that it wasn’t seen from afar, and to the general line of housing. They said to the architect, that he had ‘enclosed’ a seven-storey building into a five-storey one (it means that the building is higher than a five-storey building should be). And then, why after all the house looks like a factory building of XIX century, but there is no total similarity? Where the accuracy of reproduction? Do explain that! But it is possible to explain either technically or copying the surrounding. The art reasoning are never taken into account in our country, an architect seems to be more of construction part, than an artist. And how the architecture manages to grow up in such conditions? Must say, it is remarkable how strong is the urge to save the context by means of cutting heads of everything that sticks out. It seems that sometimes the context is understood as a general monotony – the more it is humble, the more contextual is. Hardly it is possible to save the city this way – destroying original buildings with one hand, to replace them with its moulages.

The Skuratov’s building – is not a moulage, it looks ahead, but not back, it creates a new image of the city center building. Must notice, «Butikovsky» and the Cooper house do the same, sequentially suggesting fine solutions, which rather comprehend context than ‘fit’, creating new do not confront with traditions, exist confidently within it. Between the two extremes – denying modernism and contextual moulages – for sure there is a mid way through comprehending the city texture, solving the problems of a location, so to say, curing them. «Tessinskii» goes that way – as Sergey Skuratov has planned, it should become a core of reabilitation of its block, its transformation into modern and beautiful. And the cure follows the same way, that is not trusted neither here, nor there, according to an old architectural recipe which is rarely used, and those who dare, not always tells about that. The cure by means of beauty.

Architects crew: Skuratov S.A., Demidov N.A., Shalimov P.V.
Typology: Residential / Residential complex
Partners: The customer JSC “Kitto”
Building’s square: 1895
Global square: 12740
Underground square: 3700
Dwelling square: 6460

In the initial stages of conception, our creative team honed in on the idea of ‘walking up to the cellar.’ It resulted in a retail experience that reenacts, with a touch of modernism, the wine cellar of the traditional French chateaux, including the same type of dim lighting, humidity and room temperature.

Beyond its new design, the SAQ Signature became a meeting place conceived with today’s consumption realities in mind, and is the ideal setting for fostering ties between wine advisors and enthusiasts. One of the main challenges of the new SAQ Signature concept was to modernize the retail environment of prestigious wines without casting away its traditional facet.

The objectives of the new experience included:
- Encouraging the discovery of new wines
- Putting more emphasis on the promotion of new arrivals
- Enriching and simplifying wine enthusiasts’ shopping experience
- Making wine advisors’ day-to-day easier in order to free their time to help customers more
- Creating an environment where wine enthusiasts can meet wine producers and participate in wine related events
- Merging high-end products with more accessible ones.

The new SAQ Signature outlet opened its doors on February 12, 2010. By day two, sales had exceeded those of February/March 2009 by 25%.

Outdoor swimming pools that float on the city’s canals or rivers are familiar to us from Berlin and Copenhagen. But the Badboot cannot be compared with these two European  predecessors in any sense. The Badboot is much bigger, can be moved to another site and will be open throughout the year. Every summer for the next ten years, the platform will be able to welcome bathers in Antwerp’s docks and the swimming pool will be an ice rink in winter. You will also be able to enjoy winter barbecues and winter sports activities (such as curling) on the Badboot. It also has a restaurant with a lounge deck that will be run by top chefs of Fiskebar, the popular restaurant at Antwerp Zuid. Events can be organised every day of the year in the two event rooms and there is plenty of parking space. This makes the Badboot the perfect location for organising product launches, office parties, seminars and private events throughout the year.

For all Antwerpers
The deck is open to everybody: for barely 4 euros a swim, Antwerpers can enjoy the revolutionary outdoor swimming pool on water. ‘The Badboot is a perfect complement to the existing urban outdoor pools in Antwerp’,thinks Maarten Dieryck of the City of Antwerp. ‘Having no more than two outdoor swimming pools in the city, we have a dire shortage of opportunities to enjoy water sports in the open air. This project will provide the axis of the development of Antwerp Docklands. That’s why we believe this is a brilliant project.’It should be clear that the Badboot is a full-fledged leisure platform for the city and not a push barge that happened to be converted to a swimming pool, like elsewhere in Europe. The platform is unique in the world as regards both size and facilities and its potential to use it in all seasons. This is a scoop for the Scheldt port, which again proves its reputation as a cool metropolis.

Facts & Figures
• 120 m: the entire length of the Badboot. With several levels and a capacity to accommodate 600 people, this gigantic project makes it one of the biggest outdoor swimming pools with leisure facilities in the world. A total terrace area of no less than 750 m2, ensures that swimmers can enjoy an après-swim drink with a magnificent view over the MAS, the port and the new projects at Antwerp Docklands. In 2013, the Red Star Line Museum will open opposite the Badboot.
• Nearly the same length as an Olympic size swimming pool: including the paddling pool, the Badboot pool is 40 metres in length and therefore offers exceptional swimming facilities to visitors. Swimmers seem to dive into the dock of Antwerp Dockland’s Kattendijkdok, providing a unique experience.
• A feat of 6 months: ‘Building such a gigantic project in half a year is quite a challenge’, says Martin Seine of shipbuilders HSS. ‘This project is by far the most extraordinary project we have ever worked on.’ The construction of the boat started on 1 February 2012. Everything has to be completed at the start of August. At the moment we are right on schedule.
• 100% Antwerp Steel: all the steel is supplied by ASS, the Antwerp Steel Services nv. The vessel is built as an integrated structure in Maasbracht in the Netherlands by the HSS yard and on completion will return to Belgium.
• The original ferry – which will connect the brand new Badboot to the quayside – was built in 1964. ‘We wanted to emphasise the authentic maritime character of the ferry’, says architect Pieter Peerlings. ‘For example, right now, the original wheelhouse or bridge is being converted into a cocktail bar. By the way, we found a coin from 1964 on the MV Antoon van Dijck, so we are planning to conceal a coin anno 2012 in the Badboot. Traditions are there to be honoured’, he laughs.

Sustainable luxury: the ecological Badboot
A large scale luxury project such as the Badboot proves that luxury need not damage the environment. On the contrary, the Badboot combines comfort with ecology and utilises the latest technologies to this effect:
• Reedbed water purification: the Badboot has an on-board reedbed that purifies water – to begin with, this is the first actively ventilated outdoor purification bed on the European continent. But here too, care for the environment goes hand in hand with an attractive appearance: the entire reedbed has been equipped with designer lighting which provides a spectacular panoramic view from the restaurant.
• Thermal insulation concept: Storing water in the pool utilises the same concept as a thermos flask. There is a large buffering hold below the pool which is empty by day but fills up in the evening with the water from the swimming pool. This stops the water from evaporating while it stays warm in the buffer, resulting in huge saving in terms of water and energy.
• Re-use: the complete restoration of an existing ferry gives added value to part of the coolest project in Antwerp.
• LED lighting: almost all areas are illuminated by LED lights which use up to less than half the energy.

FRENTEarquitectura

Is a Mexican architectural practice formed by young profesionals whose main goal is to create innovative and “Responsable Architecture”, respons-able meant as the “ability to respond” (to give a clever answer to a specific need). They prioritize the analysis of the specific circumstances of each project (place, people and time) over the creative activity, thus to be able to establish the real needs to be fulfilled.  In FRENTE they generate simple architecture, of clear shapes and strong concepts, giving each project its own character.  FRENTE was considered in 2009 as the national young architectural practice with more future projection (year 4, Num. 22, January, Revista Ambientes, Editorial Expansión, México)

© Onnis Luque

© Paul Czitrom

Juan Pablo Maza

Born in Mexico City in 1974. In 1997 he graduated with a degree in architecture and urbanism at Universidad Iberoamericana where he is now a lecturer. His work has been exhibited in many venues such as the “Centre of Architecture” in New York (2005), the “Venice Biennale” in Italy (2008), “Art Basel” in Switzerland (2009), “MARQ: Museo de Arquitectura y Diseño” in Buenos Aires – Argentina (2010), and the “BAL-11” in Pamplona – Spain (2011).

© Paul Czitrom

© Onnis Luque

Along the years he has collaborated with several artists, such as Jorge Yazpik or Adán Paredes. In 2006, he won the contest for the expansion of the Experimental Museum “El Eco” (by Mathias Goeritz) in collaboration with Fernando Romero and in 2009 he received an Honorable Mention for the design of a monument for the Bicentennial Memorial of the Independence of México.

© Juan Pablo Maza

Since 2002 he is the director of “FRENTEarquitectura” advocated to create innovative and “Responsible Architecture” with the intention of improving the quality of life.

© Christopher Wesnofske

© Christopher Wesnofske

Approaching the house by the winding driveway, the gabled form, massive chimney, and shingled siding are all reminiscent of traditional houses on eastern Long Island. Looking closely, the shingles are, in fact, a woven screen of oak surveyors stakes, similar to those that dotted the steeply wooded lot when the clients first saw it. Similarly, the massive chimney that anchors the house to the site isn’t solid at all, but is actually made of thin concrete panels.

© Christopher Wesnofske

© Christopher Wesnofske

Entering the house, with a view of the pool and gardens beyond, the wall enclosing the stair looks like translucent stone.  One has to look very carefully to see that it is a double paned glass wall filled with small seashells, a reference to the nearby beaches.  The double-height living/dining room is a compatible scale and space for the large works of art and family gatherings. The fireplace surround reflects fragmented images of the art and surrounding landscape while its crystalline appearance defies its humble origins: polished stainless steel military dog tags.

© Christopher Wesnofske

Expectations were also subverted in the structural system of the house to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency. Behind the stake siding and interior gypsum board are walls comprised of precast concrete panels typically used in foundation construction. These durable and low maintenance panels are double insulated for efficiency and are a perfect scale for hanging large art. By staggering the walls slightly, tall, narrow windows admit indirect light and allow glimpses of the landscape.

© Christopher Wesnofske

By subverting expectations, this house encourages multiple readings that change, depending on time and perception. It turns this house into something more: an exploration of perception.