Tag Archives: elemental

This cyclindrical concrete home in Mexico is inspired by the double conditions of castles

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Designed by Chilean studio Elemental, the Casa del Tec is a majestic concrete home outside Monterrey, Mexico. The house is a raffle prize that funds higher education at the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey. The Nuevo León is a three-story textured reinforced concrete shell that functions as an interesting shell for the home. The shell was completed in 2022 in San Pedro Garza García. 

Designer: Elemental Architecture 

The Casa del Tec is inspired by the double conditions of castles. “We have always been struck by the double condition of castles. They are fortresses turned inwards, protecting something inside that we cannot see, and simultaneously they are a strong, monumental, abstract presence in the world,” said Elemental.

Elemental continued to say that the house is introverted, but not shy. “[It’s] a place that almost silently takes care of private life and at the same time a place that is inevitably a declaration of principles in public life.” The circular form of the home encourages a connection between the indoors and the outdoors and orients the home in all directions. The interiors open up to the outdoors via arched windows, which also function as a thermal mass for the home’s climate control.

The second floor of the home features the entry, two bedrooms with adjacent terraces, a lounge area, and a four-car garage. An impressive wooden staircase connects to the ground floor, which is wholly glazed, creating a rather light and free-flowing space beneath the concrete shell. The ground floor includes the kitchen and a dining room, which leads to a courtyard with a pool, and an area for barbecue sessions.

The primary bedroom is located on the top floor of the home and is accompanied by a bathroom, a dressing room, and a terrace that provides views of the stunning neighboring mountains via an inverted-arch cutout. The different levels are connected with the help of a glazed vertical void. “A single glance allows you to cover the whole height of the house, from the ground floor to the open sky,” said Elemental. The interiors of the home are marked by stone, marble, and cuéramo wood. Dark grey walls and floors add an elegant element to the house.

The post This cyclindrical concrete home in Mexico is inspired by the double conditions of castles first appeared on Yanko Design.

This cliffside villa built in harmony with nature brings out the coastal mountain’s environmental beauty!

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Villa La Grintosa is an elemental residence located in the coastal city of Porto Servo, Sardinia atop a rocky massif that helped to define the home’s floor plan and harmonious layout.

Homes built in harmony with their surrounding landscapes tend to produce havens of elemental architecture. Whether the home’s layout weaves through clusters of pine trees or the rocky edge of a coastal mountainside, the challenge of letting nature decide a home’s structure is always worthwhile.

In Sardinia’s Porto Cervo, Stera Architectures, an architecture agency based in Paris, designed Villa La Grintosa, an all-season residence built to harmonize with the rocky massif it stands on.

The seaside community of Porto Cervo is no stranger to cliffside homes. With dozens of homes puncturing both sides of the mountains that give rise to the port city, Stera Architectures was in the right place when planning Villa La Grintosa.

The team of designers behind La Grintosa went into the project knowing that altering the preexisting landscape wasn’t an option. Taking it one step further, in building La Grintosa, Stera Architectures hopes to enliven the rocky massif where the home is situated.

Noting the harmony of the planning and design process, the team at Stera Architectures describes La Grintosa as an “architectural walk in harmony and continuity with nature where different universes meet and intersect.” Arranged around a central courtyard, La Grintosa’s orientation splits into two different axes–one that faces the sea and one that faces the mountain’s massif.

Arranged on two platforms, the points where these two axes meet become intersections of the home’s main living spaces. Paying credence to the home’s “architectural walk,” Stera Architectures incorporated exterior walking ramps that form a true endless loop through the home, connecting the living room on the eastern facade with the home’s lowest point.

Open-air rooms, Azulejo ceramic work, as well as the home’s uniform exterior cladding made from granite and crushed lava stone paste all work together to send home the infinite loop that Stera Architectures set out to etch into La Grintosa’s elemental layout.

Designer: Stera Architectures

The Azulejo tilework accents bring out the blue hues of the sky and coastal views. 

Open-air rooms flow between outside and interior spaces throughout the home’s floor plan. 

Curved archways meet straight-edge functional elements for a dynamic and harmonious touch. 

Outside, the taupe and gray color schemes merge with the natural rocks that surround the home.

The home’s ever-changing facade mimics the unpredictable terrain of rocky massifs. 

Outside, gray elements drape the home in an elusive guise, while the home’s white stone walls brighten the interior. 

Apple and Star Trek inspired the neat, interactive, and clean design and UX/UI for this coffee machine!

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I love coffee, I love Apple and I love Star Trek, and thereby I love the Elemental coffee machine because it combines ‘elements’ from them all! The sleek machine has a silhouette of an espresso group-head with an intuitive modern touch interface. The clean form is a nod to how easy it is to use and a freshly brewed pot of coffee is still the center of attention here.

Torres takes a very stripped-back, modernist approach, with nothing hidden in terms of the machine’s function. You can see everything you need to make a good cup of coffee which adds clarity to the simple form. The interface is completely touch-based and therefore the UI had to be intuitive while still communicating movement as well as a sense of urgency. The UI is a homage to the ‘okudagrams’, an loving name given to the interactive and usually re-organizable displays found on control panels and computer interfaces in 23rd and 24th-century starships. It started with Star Trek and then spread to every sci-fi thing ever. The idea of integrating it here was to alleviate the comparatively long time it takes for filter coffee to brew, it almost gives the illusion that more is happening than there actually is.”I wanted to avoid the basic – almost traditional at this point – style of touch UI so I went with more of a sci-fi theme inspired by TNG LCARS, but actually, you know – usable,” says Torres.

The conceptual coffee maker also incorporates a digital scale to the hopper lid and a simple twist will push the beans into the grinder. The latch would also have a switch to activate the grinder and the cover has to be shut in order to complete the circuit. There is a sneaky little MacPro reference in the internal compartments because it looked much neater than bare PCBs and offered more protection from any potential leaks. The intricate grooves on the dripper were an attempt to avoid having a sprinkler in order to distribute the water evenly to the coffee grounds. The heating element is also woven into this section to prevent hot water from needing to be pumped up the exposed pipe and potentially causing a safety hazard.

“There was limited capacity for physical prototyping, so CAD + simulation software was used to quickly iterate and solve problems with the design. Surprisingly, this actually worked fairly well, at least in this case. Blender mantaflow simulations were used on the CAD models were used to help drive the water channels and filter arrangement,” explained Torres. Now, all I can think of is getting a good cup of coffee and watching sci-fi movies.

Designer: Leo Torres