Tag Archives: living roof

Stackable prefabricated modules are here to create futuristic LEGO-inspired buildings

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PolyBloc is a prefabricated, modular housing solution designed to confront the demands of rapid urbanization and globalized lifestyles.

As the ways we work and live evolve, so do the ways we confront architecture. In direct response to rapid urbanization and the fall of the nuclear family, city architecture, in particular, is seeing major changes. In collaboration with pioneering companies who share their goal of “reimagining today’s habitat,” Paris-based architecture studio Cutwork developed PolyBloc. Designed as a prefabricated building system that implements industrial production and modular construction, PolyBlock is a “means [of] confronting the rising housing crisis.”

Designer: Cutwork

Noting the world’s inevitable pull towards shared spaces and mobile lifestyles, the creatives behind PolyBloc set out with the aim of revolutionizing urban architecture. Initially conceived as PolyRoom, a prefabricated single-room, 21-square-meter (226-square-foot) unit defined by its flexibility and multi-use nature, PolyBloc marks the studio’s larger-scale progression.

Focusing on the reproduction value and modularity of PolyRoom, Cutwork went about developing PolyBloc as a means of “creating adaptive, flexible housing solutions in different contexts, from urban to rural.” Adaptive and flexible in its very purpose, each PolyRoom is outfitted with concealed, multi-use pieces of furniture that save and create space for growing needs.

Designed to be a centralized room without an established purpose, PolyRoom takes cues from Japanese design concepts like ‘washitsu’ and ‘tatami room,’ design modes that reconfigure spaces to accommodate residents’ needs. With this in mind, each module comes stocked with multifunctional furniture like disappearing beds, foldable storage cabinets, and telescopic rail systems that transition partitions and doors to create more floor space.

To further each module’s appeal to cohabitation and multi-usability, PolyRoom is outfitted with living roofs and facades that utilize automatic irrigation systems to embrace different cities’ unique biodiversity. Finding flexibility and multifunctionality in a modular building method, PolyBloc is composed of modules that stack together like LEGO building blocks.

The PolyRoom units from Cutwork essentially can be constructed in bulk and stacked together to form full-sized residential complexes in different cities much quicker than traditional building methods allow. Forward-thinking in their creative process and mission, Cutwork explains, “It’s not only about building objects and spaces; it’s about crafting the systems to build [objects and spaces]–systems to help solve the challenges ahead.”

The post Stackable prefabricated modules are here to create futuristic LEGO-inspired buildings first appeared on Yanko Design.

This modern eco-home features a garden roof and integrates the surrounding forest into its design!

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Hugging House is a modern eco-home architecture concept that features a garden roof and incorporates the natural landscape of the land into its layout.

Noticing the devasting changes that come with climate change, most modern architects look to the natural world for inspiration to help preserve it. Whether that means building a self-sustainable home using a ‘passive house’ construction method or incorporating biophilia into the design scheme, architects interpret earth’s many ecosystems in exciting and different ways.

Cuba-based Veliz Arquitecto conceptualized a modern eco home called Hugging House that integrates the land’s rolling terrain and surrounding trees into the layout of the building.

Hugging House is a large, bi-level, cantilevered home located somewhere with dense forestry and overhead treetop canopies. The two sections that comprise Hugging House merge together as if in an embrace. Concrete slabs comprise the home’s surrounding driveway that leads to the ground level and outdoor leisure areas.

Veliz Arquitecto’s Hugging House is still only in its conceptual phase, but if brought to life, Hugging House’s location would be fully incorporated into the layout of the home. Describing the design in his own words, Veliz Arquitectos notes, “We have taken advantage of the slopes of the land in order to create visual connections at different heights with the existing vegetation and beyond the landscape, as well as [used] the premises with which we always try to characterize the project.”

Choosing to merge the outdoor areas with the home’s entire layout led to some exciting design choices including a garden roof and abstract overall frame. The Hugging House’s garden roof is located in a terrace-like enclosure where residents can lay out and feel as close to nature as if they were sitting on the ground below.

In addition to the garden roof, Hugging House features a swimming pool, fire pit, and concrete driveway. On the inside, residents and guests can enjoy a living room, kitchen, dining room, bathroom, and laundry room.

Designer: Veliz Arquitecto

The inside also features garden walls and ceilings to further the home’s biophilic design principle. 

Upstairs, natural stone walls give the bedroom a sultry, cozy appeal.

The dining area and bar room feature bright and dark design elements respectively. 

A floating staircase brings guests from the living room to the second floor. 

This passive house features a living green roof that merges the home with its forested surroundings!

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Hill House is a passive house designed and constructed by Snegiri Architects with a living green roof that blends the home seamlessly with its natural woodland surroundings.

Passive houses and green homes are rising in popularity, cropping up across the globe, and slowly, but steadily establishing a new standard for residence architecture. Photovoltaic panels, living roofs, and rainwater collection systems are some of the most common sustainable and energy-efficient elements that grace the outside and inside of such homes. Snegiri Architects, a firm based in Saint Petersburg, Russia, finished work on a passive residence called Hill House, complete with a living green roof that merges the home with the nearby forest.

Building new homes, especially passive houses, in dense woodlands without felling trees is a near-impossible task unless you incorporate them into the home’s layout. Managing to preserve the forested lot’s preexisting trees, Snegiri Architects built Hill House to be entirely integrated into the surrounding environment. Plotted with diverse plant life and shrubbery, Hill House’s living green roof sprawls with a grass carpet filled with stonecrop and dwarf plants including chamomile and sedum.

The gradual incline of Hill House’s green roof conceals the home’s structural presence, bringing the home inch by inch into the bordering woods. The rest of Hill House’s exterior strikes a balance between black-stained wood-paneled facades and natural, unstained wood-paneled eaves. With this contrast, the home blends naturally into its surroundings, but its interiors remain bright with light window accents.

From top to bottom, the Hill House undoubtedly reaches the energy efficiency standard set by passive house building techniques. The terrace and most of the rooms are oriented towards the home’s sunny side to collect the maximum amount of sunlight during the day and energy-saving windows prevent the heated or cooled air from leaving the home. The home is also ventilated with air recovery, and Swedish slab, monolith, mineral wool, and linseed oil-soaked larch all provide the home with insulation from its foundation to its roof.

Designer: Snegiri Architects

The rolling green roof of this modern art museum was built with to merge art preservation with futuristic technology!

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On one hand, museums are known for keeping paintings and artifacts of ancient civilizations with preservation being the goal. On the other, more modern museums incorporate some of the most advanced technology of today into their exhibitions to introduce the exciting possibilities for the art of tomorrow. Enacting his own preferred modern technology to conceptualize a modern art museum for the city of Tehran, architect Milad Eshtiyaghi hopes to evolve this relationship between today’s technology and the preservation of Islamic and Iranian art.

Known for designing bold, daredevil retreats stationed on the edge of mountain summits and cliffsides, Eshtiyaghi maintained the same mythical energy for his most recent rendering of Tehran’s Modern Art Museum. From an aerial viewpoint, Eshtiyaghi’s museum does not form any distinct shape, progressing past geometric, sharp angles for a gleaming white roof that slopes and bulges like a white tarp covering a wild landscape. Modern museums are generally known for their conceptual architecture, a form Milad Eshtiyaghi executes well considering his wide array of escapist hideaways. The green space that surrounds Eshtiyaghi’s museum tightens the museum’s abstract energy with rolling green roofs that mimic the overlapping lines of soundwaves, offering a place to rest on its manicured lawns.

Inside, the shapelessness of Tehran’s Modern Art Museum provides an eccentric stage for contemporary art exhibits. The museum’s tower wing spirals above the rest of the exhibition space, bringing guests to the museum’s highest vantage point via a web of winding, interconnected staircases. Etched along the tower’s facades and the museum’s main lobby, circular holes infuse the museum’s industrial interior with plenty of sunlight. Throughout the museum’s interior and exterior spaces, Eshtiyaghi hoped to communicate the significance of modern technology when used for art preservation, merging the age-old practice of museum work with today’s technological advancements.

Designer: Milad Eshtiyaghi

Without any distinct shape, Eshtiyaghi’s Modern Art Museum welcomes contemporary art, for all its abstract, shapeless glory.

Like many modern museum spaces, Eshtiyaghi’s Modern Art Museum features an outdoor plaza and interconnected green spaces.

Various vantage points puncture the museum’s facades.

The museum’s tower spirals above slopes and bulges of the museum’s white roof.

Holes are dotted across facades to bring in natural sunlight to the museum’s industrial interior.

 

Rolling green roofs mimic the flow of soundwaves.

Inside, staircases interconnect to form webs of walkways for guests to explore.

This tiny living home made from wheatgrass, jute, and felt brings nature into our brutal cityscape

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Getting close to nature through architecture comes in many forms. Some homes take to glass facades, dissolving the barrier between the outdoors and inside, then some homes feature blueprints that wrap around trees, incorporating their canopies and trunks into the lay of the house. Omri Cohen, a student designer at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, has a different idea. Cohen developed the Living Shell, an architectural shell built by growing jute, felt, and wheatgrass into a form of a textile that’s laid over a bamboo frame.

Turning to textile technology, Living Shell was born from Cohen’s quest to evolve layers of wheatgrass root systems into elastic, textile materials. Settling on the shell’s curvilinear structural shape, the wheatgrass textile wraps over its bamboo frame, forming layers of insulation and shade while it continues to grow. Cohen found durability in the inexpensive building material he developed from jute, felt, and wheatgrass. Layering the different roots together in a pattern that allows room for sustained growth periods, the textile’s thickness and durability increase over time as the roots continue to interlace and grow. While he has yet to build a life-size Living Shell, Cohen crafted 1:10 models to demonstrate the feasibility of introducing the Living Shell into rural and urban environments alike. Connecting the structure to an irrigation system, the textile overwrap would most likely receive nourishment from a programmed watering method.

While Living Shell functions like a house, it would more likely offer natural refuge hubs for small animals to gather nesting materials from and inhabit. Additionally, Cohen developed Living Shell so that urban dwellers and rural farmers have the opportunity to watch nature in action, for all of its natural growth, regenerative, and decay processes.

Designer: Omri Cohen

Layered around a bamboo frame, Cohen’s Living Shell is made from a textile developed from jute, felt, and wheatgrass.

Before building its life-size debut, Cohen created tiny 1:10 models of Living Shell.

Following tests to show how wheatgrass root systems grew through textile sheets, Cohen settled on some that could be woven together into a single textile sheet.

Cohen found a textile sheet that he could sew together and integrate the seeds of jute, felt, and wheatgrass.

Wheatgrass growing through the textile sheets.

The growth process of wheatgrass shows that the textile’s thickness would increase with continued irrigation.

These bee-friendly living roofs on the Leicester city bus stops is part of their goal to become carbon-neutral by 2030!

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Everything from honey bee colonies to honey production is on the decline. Even walking down the street, the bees crawling on the sidewalks seem to look weaker and weaker as the days get hotter and pollution only increases. Air pollution, drought, pesticides, and global warming all contribute to the overall decline in bee populations across the world. Doing something about it, city officials of Leicester, United Kingdom have installed green roofs on top of their bus stops called Living Roofs or Bee Bus Stops to attract pollinators like bees and to make the city a little greener.

The bee roofs will cover thirty bus stops around the city of Leicester with a mix of wildflowers and sedum plants, luring in pollinators like butterflies and honey bees. Conceived as a mode of climate resilience, the Bee Bus Stops will help bring in more biodiversity into an otherwise declining cityscape and absorb rainwater that falls on the roof to produce a natural, blooming garden atop each roof. In cities across the globe, concrete can get monotonous. Integrating natural gardens into the city fabric will help break up that monotony with some greenery, birds, and insects. Introducing Bee Bus Stops to the city of Leicester will also help mitigate the effects of urban heat islands by absorbing some of the heat during the summer months, collecting air pollutants in the process.

Built on a ten-year contract with Leicester’s city council and Clear Channel UK, the Bee Bus Stops will feature solar panels once the city has the means to attach them to every bus stop for green energy and smart lighting. Leicester’s deputy city mayor councilor Adam Clarke leads the city’s environment and transportation initiatives. On the city’s future goals of reaching carbon neutrality by 2030, Clarke explains the potential of the Living Roofs to bring them there,

“The new, modern shelters will be great for passengers and the mix of solar power and living roofs is another step forward for our ambition to be a carbon-neutral and climate-adapted city by 2030. The new shelters will also be a perfect complement to our work to deliver a new, carbon-neutral bus station at St. Margaret’s.”

Designer: Leicester City Council

Thirty bus stops across the city of Leicester have tacked on wooden boxes to their roofs, attracting pollinators like butterflies and honey bees.

Leicester’s Living Roofs mark the beginning of the city’s green initiative to become carbon-neutral by 2030.

This sustainable office building uses passive energy practices and promotes biodiversity with their green roof!

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CABI is an international nonprofit committed to solving problems related to agriculture and the environment through fact-based scientific expertise, improving the lives of people across the globe– those who work for CABI needed an office that reflected their mission. Taking on the project, Scott Brownrigg designed a sustainable headquarters based in the UK that features a rolling green roof and encourages biodiversity through highly energy-efficient building practices.

CABI’s new headquarters in Wallingford hones in on passive sustainability as its main focus. The building’s location and orientation were specifically chosen to minimize solar gains, allowing for shade in the warmer months and plenty of sunshine during the colder months. To achieve natural air ventilation, the building dons a perforated facade, allowing cool air to flow throughout the interior day and night, and then heat recovery ventilation pre-warms fresh air during the winter months. While this means for maintaining natural airflow is energy-efficient and passively sustainable, it also works to keep office workers comfortable in the age of COVID-19, allowing for fresh air to enter the building throughout the day. While all the energy-efficient practices take place inside the building, CABI headquarters’s exterior promotes biodiversity through a living roof, attracting insects and birds to its sprawling green hills.

Scott Brownrigg firm director Ed Hayden describes a sort of symbiotic relationship between the building and its occupants that was achieved through, “A traffic light system [which] alerts users when the building gets too hot or doesn’t have enough fresh air. It will prompt occupants to open their windows and increase the levels of fresh air in the building.” CABI has come a long way since its conception in 1910, hosting close to 180 members inside its new, sustainable headquarters.

Designer: Scott Brownrigg

From the outside, CABI’s new headquarters appear as two rolling hills.

CABI HQ is filled out with floor-to-ceiling windows that dissolve the barrier between the outside and inside, bringing its occupants even closer to the environment.

Inside, office workers enjoy natural air ventilation through the building’s perforated facades.

Scott Brownrigg designed CABI’s new headquarters to merge seamlessly with its surrounding environment.

Situated in the middle of a manicured lawn, CABI’s location was specifically chosen to minimize solar gains.

A perforated facade allows fresh air to flow into the building throughout the day.

A traffic light system was put in place to indicate when the office could use some fresh air, signaling workers to open their windows.