“In this renovation, instead of designing everything from the beginning, we designed it while proceeding with dismantling,” the architects explain. “The elements of the past, which emerged as the demolition progressed, provided considerable inspiration for the design.”

Located in the Koishikawa/Hakusan area of Bunkyo Ward, an area historically full of bookbinding and printing-related facilities, the building once housed a printing factory in its lower half and a private residence in its upper half. The second owner converted the entire structure into a home. When Akira Mada and Maya Mada of MAMM Design purchased it, they wanted to restore its former live/work layout, but adapt it to their personal needs and style.

They started with the staircase, which was contained within its own dark, dim walled stairwell. At first, they envisioned knocking out the concrete walls and putting a skylight at the top to create an atrium, replacing the old stairs with new ones. But as the demolition revealed the jagged concrete edges of the walls and the internal rebar supporting the old concrete stairs, they realized they wanted to keep some of these elements in the finished product.

Thus appeared the home’s star feature, the skeletal metal staircase now entwined with living vines. Stretching the full height of the building, the stairwell is topped by a skylight that can be opened for exposure to the fresh air, with a ladder providing rooftop access. The old rebar staircase is now purely decorative, with new stairs piercing the floors and ceilings in other locations.

The rugged nature of the exposed concrete and metal contrasts beautifully with new elements the architects brought in, like blond plywood, salmon-pink tiles, and translucent partition walls. Additional plants, like small trees in oversized planters, help draw a sense of vitality into the rest of the home and out onto the balcony and rooftop.

The renovation also revealed some surprises. Had they started the process with rigid ideas of how everything should look, the architects might have missed out on some defining features that add a lot of texture and historical context to the redesign.

“In order to apply a new finish to the outer wall, I scraped off the existing plaster finish, and found the glossy tiles from the beginning of the new construction,” says Akira Mada. “I thought it would be a good contrast with the green of the newly planted trees, so I polished it and decided to use it as it is. In this way, as we proceeded with dismantling, we carefully read the existing shapes and materials, and sometimes gave them new meanings.”

The post Renovated Raw Concrete Home Features a Staircase Entwined with Living Plants first appeared on Dornob.

At last, the client was able to hire Raúl Sánchez Architects to give the space a new lease on life. That required ripping out almost everything inside and starting from scratch, maintaining only the facades, dividing walls, and roof slab. As hard as it was to get past all of these hurdles, the slow progression gave the architects a few striking moments of inspiration. They began to see the building as a vessel for what would become its defining feature: a stunning four-story spiral staircase at its heart.

“The construction process, slow and complex, at least allowed decisions to be made as the essence of the estate was revealed with the demolitions,” they explain. “Thus, once all the floors slabs had been demolished and the building was seen as a slender and tall prism formed by walls with a completely heterogeneous composition of all kinds of bricks and stones arranged without apparent order or composition, the idea of leaving all these walls exposed became conceptual: these four walls, over 15 meters high, are a museum of the building’s history, where any trace of its construction (arches, lintels, stairs, and beams), and of its use (mortar remains, furnishings, claddings) will be left unaltered, exposed in all its crudeness.”

When putting in the floors for the three upper levels, the architects chose not to extend them all the way to the original brick walls. Instead, they placed sheets of glass in between, creating a four-story void looking all the way up to the roof. Not only does this help transmit daylight through the home, it continually draws attention to the sculptural beauty of the staircase as you ascend.

The juxtaposition of the smooth spiral staircase with the textural original brick is what makes the space sing. Left exposed and visible, the remnants of the building’s past hint at a complex history that seems even more remarkable when placed beside new elements like the gleaming brass kitchen suite. The kitchen was placed on the ground floor and a bathroom lined with lacquered wood on the second.

The architects add: “In terms of materiality, a certain refinement has been pursued in the new elements to be implemented, in opposition to the crude expressiveness of the existing walls, conscious that the space must house a home. Thus, the kitchen is a frosted brass piece of furniture, shiny and with reflections, with a white marble top; the bathroom equipment is paneled with lacquered wood in a slightly cream color, with black and brass details; the ‘headboards’ of the floors are covered in white microcement; the hydraulic mosaic, microcement, and oak floors add warmth and color to the interior; and the lacquered wood ceilings incorporate registers and grids to ‘design’ these needs.”

Service elements like the electric cables, air conditioning system, and telephone wires are routed within six steel tubes running vertically along one wall, themselves forming another interesting visual element. The other levels have been left mostly empty so the occupants can use them as bedrooms, offices, or anything else they like without restrictions.

Outside, the tall and narrow home maintains its historic charm, complete with balconies at every level, but the architects added what might be one of the coolest front doors you’ve ever seen. Made of three different kinds of aluminum, it features a graphic rhomboid-based design in a tribute to the traditional tile motifs found inside.

The post A 4-Story Staircase Spirals Up the Heart of This Beautiful Barcelona Remodel first appeared on Dornob.

The 1300-square-foot apartment is Gautrand’s first private interior design project. Like many Parisian apartments of a similar age, the space started out rather dark, with a lot of small, enclosed rooms. The clients wanted Gautrand to open it up, infuse it with daylight, and make it feel more modern and playful.

“We wanted to break from the ideas and images of Bourgeois Parisian apartments and lean more towards something that is more in the order of a holiday house, like a ‘cabane de plage,’ those small but colorful shelters from which one steps out to the sun and sky,” says the owner. “We wanted to create something that leaned more towards an artistic statement, and not just a historical one. We wanted to use color and we wanted to sculpt the volumes.”

“Sculpt” became the key word for the renovation. Gautrand approached the project almost like an assemblage, slicing out some areas and bringing in new shapes and modes of circulation. Walls were removed and new voids created to take full advantage of the large windows on the eastern and western facades, allowing the light to travel to two levels of living spaces. These spaces were then divided into zones, each with their own particular style and mood.

At the center of the home stands its most memorable feature: a blocky new staircase in a soft shade of pink that makes the yellow wall behind it look even sunnier. Slightly offset from each other, the steps almost start to cantilever out to the left as they reach the landing and turn upward, arching over niches for a fireplace and shelving.

The stairs lead from an intimate, understated living room tucked beneath the loft up to a vivid yellow mezzanine with an angled ceiling, just beneath the roofline of the historic building. This level contains the primary bedroom, a guest bedroom full of built-in storage, a strikingly textural marble-lined bathroom, and a hallway topped with a long, narrow skylight. Best of all, the bedroom opens onto the full-height living room atrium via atelier-style windows.

“The goal was to create a strip of natural light, through which the sun’s influence, whether it be cold white winter light or warm summer, could cast its shadow and influence the interior, upstairs and down, throughout the day,” says Gautrand. “A traditional staircase would have interfered with the continuity of this strip of sky and so I began playing with the relief that these 20-centimeter thick pieces of cellular concrete would make, and the stairs came out of this. Then I decided to make it even bigger, so that it extended up the wall of the mezzanine and onto the wall under the skylight.”

The post A Chunky Pink Staircase Brings a Playful Spirit to a 17th-Century Paris Apartment first appeared on Dornob.

That’s precisely what visitors are faced with at KAMU Kanazawa contemporary art museum in Kanazawa City, Japan. “Infinite Staircase” is part of a group exhibition called “The Power of Things,” and it’s a new variation on a familiar theme from artist Leandro Erlich, a master of surreal sculptures and optical illusions. The installation aims to challenge viewers’ perceptions of space and encourage them to question their grip on reality.

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Looking at it in photographs, it’s hard to tell exactly how it works, except that it’s actually installed horizontally into a wall rather than vertically into an opening between multiple floors. It’s also unclear exactly how many layers of the installation are real versus illusion. Pictured from above, visitors navigating the sculpture seem to be floating sideways (or dangling dangerously) above an endless void.

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A behind-the-scenes photo posted on Instagram by KAMU provides a little more clarity. As the installation is assembled, multiple layers of materials and mirrors distort the reality of the scene. Another photo shows what the installation looks like when viewed from the side. It’s all a matter of perspective.

A previous work by Erlich, simply titled “Staircase,” takes a similar approach to mind-bending imagery. First created in 2005, the sculpture was inspired by a trip to a department store in Tokyo. “The staircase is symbolically a meeting place to me,” he told Japan Times in 2014. “But I wondered what would happen if such a staircase lost its function.”

For some people, gazing into the infinite staircase and seeing the steps as walls might result in a bit of vertigo. For others, it might feel frustrating, because it actually doesn’t go anywhere at all. Erlich, raised by architects in Buenos Aires during a military dictatorship, says that growing up in an environment when “we could not see a thing freely as it was” influenced his views about what constitutes reality.

“Swimming pools, staircases, and elevators are ordinary places that we never question, as we think we know about them already,” he says. “But is that true? Do we really know them? When we were children, the world was full of wonder and surprise, even in the everyday life. But as we grow older, we are less surprised by things around us because they become too familiar. I resist having a fixed view of things. There are many other ways to see reality.”

One of Erlich’s most popular works is “The Swimming Pool” (2004), also known as “Leandro’s Pool.” Permanently installed in the courtyard at KAMU and and forming an essential part of its architectural design by SANAA, it remains the museum’s single biggest attraction. A shallow layer of water shimmers on a reinforced glass sheet, underneath which sits one of the museum’s interior spaces. Subsequently, visitors milling around inside look like they’re underwater.

The post Surreal “Infinity Staircase” Installation Seems to Go On Forever first appeared on Dornob.

Vienna-based architectural studio Smartvoll peered into an empty industrial building that once housed soldiers and a tank station and saw something wholly unexpected. Within this simple oblong building, with its weathered bricks and hard concrete floors recalling decades long past, the architects envisioned a futuristic open-plan loft. They submitted their proposal to an international contest that called for an adaptation of the space into a luxurious residence within the larger Panzerhalle complex and won, and it’s not hard to see why.

At the epicenter of the new space is a minimalist kitchen contained within a 23-foot-long block, which itself is flanked by a pair of sweeping concrete staircases. Made of black lava stone, this monumental cabinet features a planting area for herbs and individual spaces for food preparation, cooking, and dining. A table pulls out of one end on demand. Above it soar the wing-like platforms of the gallery level, which follow the contours of the building and offer access to more private spaces.

The dramatic staircases split off in three directions. Smartvoll explains that they shouldn’t be seen as merely functional ways of accessing various levels of the home, but rather “as an electric spatial experience.”

“The stairs are an architecture within the architecture,” they continue. “Concreted in-house, the engineering is being exhausted in all respects. Tender objects with minimal dimensions but tremendous spatial impact. Something that does not allow for competition: besides the concrete, only subtle, semi-transparent materials are being used, such as Profilit to separate the guest area and curtains for the bedroom…Every other piece of furniture seems to be integrated into the construction. An unalterable picture [that] celebrates only free space.”

Everything about the loft seems to float. The staircase hovers above the kitchen, creating a lightweight roof that belies its own solidity. The curtains that delineate the bedrooms waft in the breeze. A bookcase comes out of the brick wall near the back of the home and hangs down into the ground floor below. Even the shower feels weightless, having been projected into the main space as an open glass box. Nothing about the Loft Panzerhalle is meant for the shy and reserved. Its boldness is what sets it apart from top to bottom.

“At the lower level, the room is connected to two balconies. However, even this façade aligns itself with the carriers of the concrete sculpture in the slant; the balconies look like additional alcoves of the overall concept. They feature a contemplative zen garden, including a grassy knoll, a jasmine tree, and a classic [relaxation] terrace.”

These outdoor spaces offer views of the rest of the Panzerhalle complex, including a market space that was also renovated by Smartvoll and several restaurants, salons, event spaces, and a co-working facility, all of which are unified by their buildings’ original brick facades.

The post Former Army Barracks Transformed Into an Extraordinary Modern Loft Apartment first appeared on Dornob.

At the Mercado Libre Office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a collaboration between architects and designers has produced some of the coolest tunnel-style stairs you’ve ever seen. BMA Arquitectos, Studio Elia Irastorza, and Methanoia came together to produce a working area for the company that would “boost and inspire talent and creativity,” embodying the booming Latin American e-commerce brand’s young, innovative, and distinctive style.

For the designers, that meant imagining stairs as a social space, and using them as a series of connections between floors that would allow employees to navigate the building “in a more unpredictable and personal way.” Key to the flow of the space is a principle of freedom of movement, offering users a choice of two or more different ways to move up or down within the building.

Multiple circular “tunnels” of stairs pierce each level at various points across the floor plan, each one lined entirely in medium-toned wood that contrasts with the starker, more industrial elements of the building.

The designers say they were aiming for a material palette that communicated comfort and warmth, not only from the wood, but also from living plants, lots of natural daylight streaming through massive glass windows, and oversized art pieces like sculptures and murals. They also identified multiple “areas of influence” where employees from different departments can congregate and socialize.

The architects add that the “multifunctional, fluid, and adaptable space was developed as an area that nurtures teamwork and leaves room for personal growth. It understands the office as a whole, instead of [dividing it into] separate floors, with the key instruments for integrating all of the different areas of the project [being] the ‘social stairs.’ These links are the protagonists, creating several connection points between each level. [From them,] a new type of communication arises, allowing the users to experience the office as one whole democratic space that encourages the exchange of ideas, and a dynamic workspace. Instead of [implementing] a traditional and static method of circulation, this new system embraces a non-linear movement. Since there are two links in each floor, one can walk around the nine office floors through a different path each time.”

“The core of the project resides on the sixth floor, where the stairs evolve into terraces that can even turn into a grand amphitheater. This space houses the main public area and the reception. Throughout the project, artistic interventions that fuse with the architecture through different materials and textures appear, creating a richer [sensory] experience. The other central concept introduced in the project was the use of vegetation in strategic points. Vertical divisions made of green walls and virtually enclosed spots allow certain areas of the plan to become more private and quiet for spontaneous meetings.”

The result takes what could have been an overwhelmingly large, cold, and impersonal office facility and injects it with friendliness and personality — two things a lot more workspaces could use in greater doses.

The post Step Into the Void: Tunneling Stairs at the Mercado Libre Office in Buenos Aires first appeared on Dornob.

Trend forecaster WGSN, which influences designers across multiple industries, instead backed a shade they call “neo mint,” which takes inspiration from a fusion of nature, science, and technology. This invigorating shade is subtle enough to easily work into many interior design color palettes — so much so that WGSN felt confident enough to call it a great contemporary alternative to gray, providing a semi-neutral option that still feels rich and vibrant.

In one recently renovated Montreal home, mint is the color that greets you from the very beginning. Naturehumaine Architects blended the shade with gray and natural wood tones for the facade, and the effect makes every other house in the area look drab in comparison. The green-painted section is a cantilevered addition, offering the clients a whole new bedroom, to boot.

Inside, use of the color gets even bolder. Within an otherwise neutral space, a minty central staircase acts as a striking sculptural focal point. The simplicity of the hardware-free cabinetry, gallery-like walls, and sleek fixtures lets this element shine, while the whitewashed wood brings in just the right amount of texture. Best of all, it’s all warmed up by natural wood floors and beams. The only other pop of color in the home is the cheerful yellow tilework surrounding a tub in the children’s bathroom.

Granted, the architects call the accent color they’ve chosen “sage green,” but it’s really more of a spearmint. The effect is the same no matter what you call it, of course, and “Victoria Residence” is undeniably a great example of how strategic use of color can dramatically transform the feel of a space.

The architects add that “the design concept is defined by the transformation of the house by integrating three structural architectural elements. First, the addition of Victoria’s bedroom on the back facade forms a cantilevered box attached to the facade, secondly by creating a new balcony on the front facade, and finally, in the heart of the house, a new staircase articulates and organizes the functions of the house. These three elements are distinguished by the use of a unique color in a sage green shade, which, depending on the light intensity and the changing exposure during the day, presents a wide variation in contrasts and shades.”

“In the heart of the house, this touch of color on the stairs attracts the attention and becomes a playful and geometric element. The monochrome staircase is designed as lightweight structural work, composed of steel blades and painted cabinetry panels. It defines the playground area in double height by extending the color applied to the floor. Also, this central space is surmounted by a large skylight that brings light to the heart of the house as well as to all of the surrounding service rooms, particularly the bathrooms, which are equipped with large glass imposts.”

The post A Splash of Mint Makes This Modern Staircase Pop first appeared on Dornob.

That makes it all the more shocking when you walk into a Victorian home that’s undergone dramatic modern renovations. While plenty of designers stick to clean, contemporary looks with a few preserved original details scattered throughout, others decide to go bold, eschewing just about everything identifiably Victorian in the entire space.

“Light Falls” definitely lands in the latter category. What began as a four-story terraced Victorian house built in 1851 has become a sculptural masterwork in the hands of FLOW architecture in collaboration with MAGRITS, though architecture purists will undoubtedly wring their hands at just how much the home has changed.

Set on a tree-lined road in the Kensington area of London, the house originally had two major problems commonly found in Victorians: it lacked sufficient natural light inside, and its interiors were highly compartmentalized, feeling cut off from each other. The owners wanted the layout of the home to feel much more fluid.

To achieve that objective, FLOW decided to start from scratch — to the greatest degree local historic preservation laws allowed, of course. They organized the interiors around a new central courtyard to open new visual connections and bring daylight into the darkest, deepest areas of the home, and they also added a basement and double-height rear extension.

FLOW’s official website reads: “Set within the Abingdon Conservation Area, the house was subjected to a number of restrictions, with its external appearance to be largely preserved. The approach taken was to creatively turn the constraints into strategies by concentrating the design features towards the core of the building. The design of the garden was also approached with some freedom, as a green folly that extends the indoor aesthetic towards the outdoors.”

“The courtyard’s visual effects were enhanced with a series of vertical cuts amplifying the effect of the cross-views throughout the living spaces. The staircase was set similarly, with an encased configuration that opens completely towards the bottom section to organize the sequence of the entertainment areas. At the rear, the dining room continues the motif, with a direct visual link towards the garden through the lightweight glass extension.”

The curvaceous white walls are striking enough in their own right, but what really makes the space stand out is the new latticed woodwork connecting the wooden staircases to the warm, organic flooring. These lines draw the eye from the floor-to-ceiling glazing in the living room all the way up to the skylight set into the ceiling, flowing up past openings peeking into the bedrooms.

The result lives up to both the project’s own name and that of the leading architecture firm. It’s pleasingly fluid, clean, and bright, and, as FLOW explains, “the name ‘Light Falls’ perfectly expresses the soul of the house; the cascading effect of daylight, brought in vertical motion to the center of the building, enlivens the interior spaces, and dissolves the borders between outdoor and indoor spaces.”

The post Light Falls: Timber Staircases Flow Through a Victorian House first appeared on Dornob.

The post Creative Hanging, Floating & Suspended Staircases first appeared on Dornob.

In particular, artist Pow Martinez played a key role in the creation of the exhibit. Martinez spent two weeks in June painting audaciously colorful cartoon-like spirits and fiends on a small portion of the level 1 and 2 stairway walls of the Palais. He was greatly honored by the opportunity to use the space as a giant sketch pad, adding, “It is something I don’t always do because I’m not a street or graffiti artist. It is challenging to make because of the big scale. It is like making 30 large paintings.”

Martinez explains that what visitors will see at the Palais exhibit is largely intuitive work. “I don’t work literally and make work directly based on the curatorial theme,” he says. “I think for me it’s boring and uninteresting to make work like that, to be totally direct. I want the viewer to complete the work by viewing it.”

Called among other things, “the largest center for contemporary artistic creation in all of Europe,” “the anti-museum,” and “a rebellious wasteland,” the Palais de Tokyo is the ideal venue for Martinez’s vision. One of his creations for the show features a church engulfed in flames, soldiers armed with rifles, men dangling upside down from tree limbs, a bombshell atop a white steed, and a coarse portrayal of a revolution in action.

It took Martinez a full two weeks to complete his project, changing images, filling in white spaces, making sure his murals over 50 steps of the staircase and a middle landing best captured his vision and style. He was given a floor plan and video of the area he was assigned prior to his arrival so he could make some preliminary sketches ahead of time. He says: “At first, I wanted to make like a flash tattoo style of images of my works with lots of white spaces. I found it too clean and boring like coffee shop wall art. So I ended up making it like my paintings, messy and rough.”

Pow admits that he was still a bit overwhelmed when he saw the actual space. He says: “It was hard at first because I’m not used to painting on walls in this scale.” But his innate talent prevailed and his unique characters and dark humor shone through in every single inch.

According to the curators, the Palais-wide show’s goal was to nurture artists’ insights from the bedlam of huge cities and the expected development and deceptive change these urban spaces endure. The curator press kit proposes that “the artists who emerge from them are thus the strollers of the 21st century, hackers of our answers to an urban milieu which is often too functional and standardized.”

City Prince/sses will be open at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris through the 8th of September.

The post Pow Martinez Paints Mural on the Staircase Walls of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo first appeared on Dornob.

Modern sea baths build on these early ideas either by creating “sea pools” on beaches or building floating platforms, which themselves might offer diving boards, stadium seating, saunas, bathrooms, changing rooms, boat launches, and other amenities. A new example of the latter has popped up on the island of Bornholm in Denmark, and it looks like a gorgeous way to spend a sunny afternoon.

The Hasle Harbour Bath by White Architects is a sculptural space that’s bringing a little vitality back to a town hit hard by the decline of its fishing industry. Once a hub for shipping, fishing, and ferry service, the local port has grown quiet in recent years. But the things that are truly unique about Hasle Harbour are its numerous breakwaters, which protect it from the surge of the Baltic Sea but also make it feel distant and disconnected from life on land. The architects wanted to revitalize the area and make use of its isolated waters by creating a fun public area with views of the horizon.

Made of two timber stair formations protruding from a floating concrete platform, the Harbour Bath design takes inspiration from “flying carpets” to create a viewing platform and outdoor lounge, offering swimming pools of various depths along its inner edge and diving boards for swimmers who want to interact with the open water.

“The intention was for people to walk, sit, and lie on the new structure, which gave rise to the design concept of outdoor ‘carpeting’ that folded over the breakwaters,” White Architects explain. “The largest of these, the ‘flygande mattan’ or ‘flying carpet,’ forms the main structure. Welcoming all ages and abilities, the open design allows visitors to intuitively interact with the structure.”

“The unusual name refers to the tip of the Z-shaped structure, [which] shoots seven meters above the water’s surface, evoking the dynamism of the mythological carpet. At this westerly point, visitors are rewarded with views of the Hasle harbour, the sea, and the formidable sunsets.”

Hasle Harbour Bath adds to a collection of similar destinations throughout Denmark and elsewhere in Europe and the U.K. In addition to the old Ribersborgs Kallbadhus in Sweden, established in 1898, and Copenhagen’s Kastrup Søbad, built in 2004, bathers can also enjoy The Harbor Bath by world-renowned Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in Aarhus.

If the Hasle Harbour Bath’s piqued your interest, you’ll definitely want to check out a few more unusual swimming spots, including the Kastrup sea bath and Berlin’s Badeschiff.

The post Harbour Bath: Swimming Pool Platform Set Into the Danish Seas first appeared on Dornob.

As Heatherwick sees it, Vessel is neither a building nor a sculpture. Rather, he sees it as a massive piece of urban furniture inviting the city to climb, and he hopes it will become as much of a landmark for Manhattan as the Spanish Stairs are to Rome. Consisting of 154 staircases, over 2,000 individual steps, and 80 landings, it’s meandering path spans over a mile in length when spread out from end to end. From each landing, visitors can gaze out at the inscrutable facades of office towers and apartment blocks with price tags ranging between $4 and $32 million, as well as the Hudson River beyond. If they turn to look inward, they’ll get a rather dizzying view of the structure itself.

“To create something meaningful, the studio wanted to create a structure that visitors could use, touch, and relate to,” reads Heatherwick’s description of the project. “Drawing inspiration from the ancient step wells of India, the studio sought to evoke the powerful effect of their repeating steps, flights, and landings that reach down to the earth… polished copper undersides contrast with the raw painted steel surfaces of the complex architectural framework, enlivening the structure with reflections of the surrounding city. Forming the heart of this large new district, Vessel represents the intention for Hudson Yards to create a meaningful public legacy for New York.”

It should be noted that “Vessel” is only a temporary name. Heatherwick says the structure’s final name will be determined by the public as they continue to experience it. Thus far, suggestions have been less than flattering: among those listed on the NYC subreddit are “Shawarma,” “The Abdomen,” “Staircase McStaircaseface,” “UnitedHealth Group Vessel Brought to You by Papa John’s Dot Com Bowl” and “Chalice of the Privileged.” Even professional editorials have called it everything from an “alien tribunal” to “a billionaire’s fantasy city.”

Much of the criticism surrounding the structure stems from Hudson Yards’ apparent inaccessibility to everyday New Yorkers, and the fact that it was built using $4.5 billion in taxpayer money. The complex is built above a 28-acre rail yard on the city’s “Far West Side,” which formerly represented the largest swath of undeveloped property in Manhattan, and is only half complete at this point.

Controversy aside, the public is clearly clamoring to take part in the experience of climbing Vessel, even if all they get from it is an elevated heart rate and a red face. It shouldn’t be too hard to do, either, considering 700 people can be on it at one time and climbing is totally free. Still, visitors are encouraged to snag reservations online at least 14 days in advance, as all upcoming reservations are currently sold out. Hundreds of people lined up to get inside on opening day, and social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram have been flooded with the resulting selfies ever since.

The post Climbable Escher-Like “Vessel” Maze Opens in NYC first appeared on Dornob.

China’s Zhongshuge bookstore chain is one of the retailers proving the prognosticators wrong, but unlike its peers, it’s using photographic interior design to draw people in.

On January 25 of 2019, Zhongshuge opened their newest bookstore in Chongqing. A maze of staircases surrounded by books in a space topped by a mirrored ceiling, it’s surreal interiors are marked by seemingly endless wall of books and stairs. This aesthetic helps strengthen the public’s perception of Zhongshuge as a store with an unmatched number of books — the place you go to when you want a very specific book because you know it can’t be found anywhere else.

The architect behind this dreamy space is X+Living’s Li Xiang, who has previously been responsible for similar interiors in other Zhongshuge locations across China. In all of these locations, the energy of the city is brought into the store so that as the shopper moves around, they feel like they are walking through an extension of the urban life outside. They also become just as impressed with the store design as they are at finding what they want, which they eventually almost always do. The added visual stimulation is just another way to draw the customer into the store and keep them shopping just a little bit longer.

Walking into a new Zhongshuge location is supposed to be a liberating experience for the shopper. When the one just outside of Shanghai first opened, Xiang compared it to a forest of books in an article for Architectural Record. “Trees offer oxygen for lives,” she said. “We tried to convey the idea that people need knowledge just as people need oxygen.” This makes sense, since the written word makes up an essential part of society and the transfer of knowledge between generations.

Similar to the other Zhongshuge stores, the Chongqing location gives tens of thousands of books a special home to be viewed and bought. It places the written word on a pedestal by enclosing it in a mirrored cathedral. And with all the information that’s available today, it’s safe to say there’s endless reading to do. Subjects are created every day, and more gets written every hour.

When customers enter the store, they find that the collection of stairs and placement of mirrors helps them navigate the interiors. Many people can be seen taking photographs from different landings in here, but even that just helps them discover more books.

In a way, Li Xiang has proven that a physical store can be resilient to the competition from online retailers. People will continue to visit stores just as long as they foster compelling in-store experiences that don’t come off as gimmicky. The Zhongshuge location in Chongqing is an authentic representation of both the limitless nature of the written word and our loyalty to the physical book.

The post Zhongshuge Chongqing: The Bookstore That Never Ends first appeared on Dornob.

The result was Terrassenhaus Berlin: a dramatic concrete structure featuring a series of built-in external terraces. Muck Petzet Architekten and Brandlhuber + Emde, Burlon convinced the client to make it a mixed-use facility, adding both private residences and a public rooftop terrace to the planned gallery spaces.

Fitting right in with Berlin’s stark concrete architecture and the remnants of its divided past, the five-story building creates a sort of artificial mountain that visually references the industrial heritage of its surrounding area. As the architects put it, the project “exchanges economic benefit for collective space.”

Aimed at overcoming the respective separations between living and working and commercial and residential projects, Terrassenhaus offsets flexible open-plan apartments with both the exhibition spaces originally envisioned by the property owners and a publicly accessible exterior. A lack of interior walls within the apartments lets them adapt to each individual renter, mimicking the look of the galleries around them. Shared color and material palettes across the entire project (inside and out) give it a cohesive and almost monolithic appearance.

Each one of the exterior’s five levels is set back 5.7 meters (18.7 feet) from the one below it, creating a giant stepped staircase on one side and a sort of negative staircase on the other, which itself becomes a shade-providing overhang for the ground floor. External stairs connect the communal garden with the public roof. Residents share terraces with their neighbors, each featuring floor-to-ceiling reflective curtains that can be drawn across the glazed facades for shade and privacy when desired.

If you’re wondering what it would be like to live in a building that’s constantly being climbed by random strangers, the architects suggest that perhaps we should all be a little more open to unexpected interactions with each other every day.

“Social norms in architecture structure our expectations of living together and often reduce the complexity of social interaction,” they explain. “At the same time, they form a framework in which the users can behave safely and freely.”

“The Terrassenhaus Berlin manages to raise the questions of private and public by introducing a building model for the urban context. With their abnormal depth, the terraces create a degree of distance and privacy, while at the same time, the external staircases — connecting the communal garden with the public roof — produce encounters of every kind, wanted and unwanted.”

The innovative Terrassenhaus Berlin is certainly one of a kind, and it’s among 40 projects chosen for the coveted Mies Award 2019.

The post Berlin’s Terraced Houses Invite the Public to Climb Concrete Hillsides first appeared on Dornob.

Until now, designs like that have been hard to find. But an Australian company called BCompact specializing in “innovative, clever, and sustainable creations” might have just changed the game for tiny houses, micro-apartments, and other ultra-compact spaces with an amazing hybrid system that allows stairs to be installed in areas they simply couldn’t fit into before.

Winner of a 2019 iF Design Award and the Gold prize at the European Product Design Awards in 2018, these compact hybrid stairs are just as substantial and easy to climb as any standard set, but they fold completely flat against the wall when they’re not in use. That means they can be deployed in spaces where they’d otherwise be blocking traffic, like doorways and hallways, without having to close off the opening between floors the way a fold-down attic staircase would.

Capable of covering distances between 6.5 and 10 feet and customizable to each customer’s specifications, the Hybrid Stair meets building code regulations for both stairs and handrails, unlike many other space-saving designs.

The stairs are made from specially constructed and sustainably sourced bamboo composite plywood, which itself boasts a high tensile strength and flexibility despite its light weight. They can handle loads of up to 440 pounds, and they’re all counterbalanced with a simple spring mechanism so the act of opening and closing them is easy enough for virtually anyone to perform, including children and the elderly. They can be operated from the ground or from the landing, and an optional security gate mechanism can lock them into a closed position to eliminate access, “thus creating an unsurpassed security system denying all access between floors.”

Founder Zev Bianchi explains that he got the idea “during a seven year stop-over in NYC, living in high-priced and confined conditions…partly out of necessity, to design furniture and products to help create the best living environment in the least space.”

“The world we live in is getting smaller and far more expensive! And there is a massive surge now taking place around the world to optimize the way the majority of us all live. Downsizing, compacting, and tiny home movements are just a few, and BCompact design prides itself as being amongst the forerunners of these changes and has been working with these concepts long before [they] became [trends]!”

“Being able to adapt your lifestyle to where you live now and how much you earn is becoming more and more necessary and now more accessible to people around the world, by developing creative and innovative solutions to these issues. From furniture that unpacks and disappears to flat-folding chairs and Hybrid stairs. Products that open areas to your home [and turn them] into new and usable spaces that you never knew you had; ideal for growing families or simply reorganizing your life.”

All photos courtesy of BCompact 

The post Incredible Sub-Compact Stair Design Saves You Space Unlike Ever Before first appeared on Dornob.

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