“Zicatela House” is proof that appearances can be deceiving. Designed by Mexico City-based architect Ludwig Godefroy and named for a nearby beach in the town of Puerto Escondido, it’s meant to look like a bunker to outsiders. Inside, it’s an entirely different story, with every one of its rooms and spaces designed around access to sunlight, fresh air, and views of the sky.

“The house was designed with one main purpose: to give the owner the opportunity to leave Mexico City to make a break with the megalopolis and urban habits by coming to get some rest and relax[ation] while enjoying the heat of the Mexican coast and the peaceful light of Oaxaca,” Godefroy says. “This house responds to a double landscape, on one side in the background the beach and the sea, on the other side the mountains and agave fields, the plant from which is made mezcal and tequila.”

Godefroy began working on Zicatela House in 2014 alongside his design partner Emmanuel Picault. The duo is best known for their nightclubs and bars, with their work often representing an alluring combination of modernist and pre-Hispanic influences. They based the design for this house on a Mesoamerican ball court surrounded by large symmetrical stepped walls.

The concrete and simple rectilinear shapes bring in the brutalist element Godefroy and Picault are known for, while the home’s tropical feel comes courtesy of elements like wood, greenery, and a tranquil swimming pool. What’s even more surprising, given the house’s outside appearance, is the fact that there’s no glass to be found anywhere inside. Those large shutters you see all throughout the courtyard can be closed for privacy, but otherwise, the residence is remarkably open to the world at large.

Godefroy adds that “this project has a very interesting personality of being a countryside house next to the sea, instead of a beach house. The house is based on this duality, the duality of its surroundings and its [ability] to respond to the mountains and be protective as a fortress as well as a wide-open space; giving you the feeling [of living] outside in a garden, making the border between in and out disappear.”

“Zicatela House is built on a small 300-square-meter plot, using a typology of defensive architecture, where a wall surrounds the terrain completely, helping create a 100-percent controlled area on the inside, turning it into an open-sky fortress, with only one main view towards the sky, the only permanent element in time. The house is a bunker on the outside, one of those massive concrete structures I used to see in Normandy — where I was born — protecting a Mexican pyramid on the inside, one of those I see when I travel around Mexico, the country where I’ve been living and working for 10 years now.”

The post This Concrete Bunker House Hides a Secret Central Oasis first appeared on Dornob.

Billed by the firm as a “sanctuary in the sand that acts as a gentle counterbalance to the dramatic war history of the site,” the new construction houses four exhibition spaces, each of which has been themed to reflect an element of the region’s history.

The museum is outlined by a set of incisions made into the landscape above it, which together take on a quasi-cross shape when seen from above. These openings rest just above the walkways that lead to the center of the complex: an impressive outdoor courtyard around which the exhibition spaces are organized. Both the walkways and the courtyard have been elevated to allow visitors to look down through the museum’s glazed upper walls into the galleries below. The architects decided to give the new structure a clandestine feel to contrast it with the foreboding, concrete bunker next door. The bunker was originally built as part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, whose construction was stopped dead in its tracks when the war ended.

BIG undertook this 2,800 square meter project back in 2012. The finished layout incorporates several elements that are characteristic of the firm’s design style, including ramps, active roof spaces, a connection to the landscape around it, and a complex circulation system that can be read in multiple ways depending on where the viewer stands.

By incorporating both glazing and exposed concrete, Tirpitz’ roofs and floors offer a transparency that was missing from the original bunker without detracting from its rich history.

Each one of the museum’s four exhibitions, which were designed by the Dutch studio Tinker Imagineers, focuses on a different part of Denmark’s past. In the “Army of Concrete” gallery, visitors can learn all about Hitler’s idea for and construction of the Atlantic Wall. The “Gold of the West Coast” and “West Coast Stories” galleries recount the history of the Danish coast. Finally, there’s the Tirpitz Bunker itself. All four spaces were designed to encapsulate the spirit of Western Denmark and give people a truly local experience.

From the onset of the project, the goal of the expansion was to turn the bunker into a popular tourist destination. With any luck, Tirpitz will also become a place where architects and design geeks can go to nerd out! If the museum attracts the 100,000 annual guests that it’s expected to, the local economy would certainly see a nice boost. Museum director Claus Kjeld Jensen says, “Tirpitz is an incredible, one-of-a-kind experience: violent, astonishing, dramatic, hidden — almost invisible.”

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From the description alone, you might get the wrong idea about this unusual neighborhood in a remote area of South Dakota: green-roofed dwellings sit in orderly rows amid a lush green field with views of hills in the distance, promising safety and security to your family in uncertain times, and rent is only $1,000 per year. But take a closer look at The Vivos Group’s “xPoint” and you’ll start noticing the prison-like barbed wire fences, lack of windows, heavy-duty doors, and military-style ID numbers painted on the concrete facades.

This is no swanky subdivision, but rather a former military fortress built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1942 to store explosives and munitions. There are no internal rooms or surface treatments. There’s not even electricity, water, or sewage. Yet, Vivos hopes that hundreds of well-to-do families will make an investment in the property and pay to have the bunkers converted into luxurious residences for the post-apocalyptic lifestyle.

The California-based company is known for building and maintaining fortified shelters for millionaires and billionaires, and xPoint is its latest endeavor, billed as the largest private shelter community on earth. Nobody lives there just yet, but it’s capable of housing up to 5,000 people in 575 bunkers, each able to withstand a 500,000-pound blast. Nuclear war? No problem, as long as you don’t mind staying inside virtually forever.

Each shelter is about 26 feet wide and either 60 or 80 feet long, enabling them to be subdivided into as many rooms as you like. How you lay out the interior is entirely up to you, as once you’ve paid the $25,000 deposit, you’ll be solely responsible for making the space livable. That will include paying roughly $12,000 for a new blast door seal and interior lock, exhaust and air vents, fuel tank, wiring, plumbing, hot water heaters, a septic system, and the all-important escape hatch.

The rest of the “optional” construction—meaning anything beyond the concrete shell and basic components named above – will start at roughly $20,000. Each bunker fits up to ten people comfortably. In the renderings, the bomb-proof bunkers are shown outfitted with every modern comfort you can imagine, including home movie theaters and LED screen “windows” to provide the illusion that everything outside is totally fine, and the world is as beautiful and safe as ever.

Vivos doesn’t provide much other than the land itself, though they’ll have a full-time staff around to provide maintenance and security and run a general store. Security features include military-trained guards, camera systems, and members-only access gates. They hope the development will ultimately be home to “like-minded survivalists,” noting that there’s safety and security in numbers.

Presumably, once you’ve put the cash and energy into filling your own personal survival bunker with the kinds of furnishings you’d want for the end of the world, you could take regular vacations out there to “practice” and feel like you’re getting your money’s worth. The property itself is an off-grid area covering about 18 square miles, located one hundred miles or more from the nearest known military nuclear targets.

Check out more details and sign a 99-year lease over at Vivos.

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Winter is coming. And if you watch “Game of Thrones” (and even if you don’t), you probably know it doesn’t spell skiing. In all seriousness, though, there are some people who truly are concerned about what is next for our planet: biological weapons, disease outbreaks, giant-scale natural disasters, and global war. And they are building high security shelters. “High net worth families,” in fact, are planning to escape to luxury bomb shelters that are the nec plus ultra in “life insurance.” And when they do, they hire Vivos, which means survival shelters with a museum, movie theaters, pools and restaurants. Really.

Vivos builds private and community underground shelters able to withstand any type of catastrophe. Their glamorous community shelters are based around a co-ownership concept, where the cost is shared by each party. In order to become such an all-risk shelter co-owner, you must first apply to become a Vivos member. Membership itself is free, but then the price gets steep: The Vivos Indiana shelter, which fits 80 hopeful survivors, involves a fee of $35,000 for adults and $25,000 for kids. But what you get is immense. This four-star fortress of a nuclear shelter can handle a 20-megaton blast, tsunami, earthquake and more. Inside, members will find a plethora of amenities, not limited to a theater area, a workshop, bicycles, lounge, medical supplies, you name it.

Vivos also offers so-called Deluxe Quantum Shelters for six to eight people, which can be installed on your own property with an entry tunnel. These are 40’ long x 8’ wide x 8.5’ high and are completely furnished with living area, kitchen, dinette, bathroom and shower. The Vivos Trine Shelter Complex is the most immense option, suited for up to 500 people “with an ample budget to match,” according to the company.

Then there’s the absolutely fantastic Vivos Europa One, “available to just 34 high net worth families.” Coast of admission? A whopping $3 to $5 million. Hidden deep inside a limestone mountain in the German village of Rothenstein, Germany, it’s a giant survival compound constructed by the Soviets during the Cold War to withstand biological warfare, nuclear blasts, shock waves and other horror scenarios. Vivos and his German developer partner bought it for $2.25 million, and according to estimates it’s already worth over a billion dollars.

Vivos is in charge of re-purposing this 227,904 square foot shelter for those who can afford it – and by invite only. The five-star survival complex has a mind-boggling array of amenities and features such as theaters, pools, chapels, nurseries, restaurants, an art exhibit hall, and … you get the idea. The entry will be protected by an armed security force employed by Vivos.

Each family gets “2,500 square foot of floor area, capable of two story improvements for a total of 5,000 square feet of private living quarters.” This space they can design according to their own taste and needs by hiring their own contractors and architects. The sky’s the limit. There’s also the Vivos Global Genome Vault to store – you guessed it – your very own DNA.

Ready? Vivos founder Robert Vicinio certainly is. As he said to the Daily Mail Online: “We are […] living in dangerous and changing times that the uninformed will never understand until the threats are evident. We cannot predict, but we can prepare.”

Apply for space at www.terravivos.com

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If you’re used to seeing the dreary, claustrophobic bomb shelters in movies, you’ll be blown away by this luxury underground bunker home in Las Vegas. Built in the 1970s by a wealthy businessman, the retro-fabulous subterranean home was meant to keep the owner and his wife safe in the event of a nuclear attack.

When the home was built, there were very few clues above ground as to its existence. If you managed to glance behind the right boulder and found the door, you would then travel 26 feet underground to a fascinating false world. A “yard” surrounds a two-bedroom house and a one-bedroom guest house. Fake trees, boulders and plants add to the creepily realistic subterranean world.

Unlike those bleak movie bomb shelters, this one offers luxuries that most of us don’t even get to enjoy above ground. Two hot tubs, a heated pool, sauna, bar, dance floor and putting course are built into this odd home’s underground environment. In fact, the original owners didn’t wait for the air raid sirens to go off before enjoying the bunker: they are said to have lived underground full-time.

A 360-degree mural painted around the perimeter of the bunker contributes to the illusion of being outdoors. A grill hidden inside a fake boulder (which vents to ground level through a nearby hollow tree) even let the residents feel as though they were having a good old-fashioned cookout. A two-bedroom guest house was eventually added and is now the only way to enter the underground home.

This hilariously kitschy subterranean bunker home recently went back up for sale. Via Forbes:

“The house near Flamingo Road was recently listed by Stephan M-LaForge at Berkshire Hathaway for $18 million, and judging by the photos seems to be stuck in time from the 1970s. Bizarre furnishings and decorations fill the home with a country cabin meets suburban housemaker vibe. Although the pink kitchen trim, pink toilets, green fake grass carpets could hardly be considered traditional. Collectors from the 70s will appreciate the built-in appliances including a wall toaster as well as the quirky features like a boulder encased BBQ.”

The post Retro Bunker Home in Las Vegas Complete with Fake Skies first appeared on Dornob.

There are three sizes of bunkers scattered all throughout the lovely Albanian landscape. The team has different plans for all of the sizes, and the conversions could mostly be completed with only a few minor modifications and some cleaning. The project is still in the concept stage (and may remain there permanently since it was a college project) but it seems like the perfect way to utilize these unique and fascinating existing structures.

The post Making Use of Albania’s Thousands of Concrete Mushrooms first appeared on Dornob.

Don’t let the tilt-shift photography trick you – what looks a little like a miniature model is a real set and setting; specifically, a Japanese tea house burrowed down into an overgrown backyard … like a series of old foundations, or half-excavated architectural remnants emerging from the Earth.

Set in the historic Japanese city of Hokkaido and designed by Jun Igarashi in 2006, “Tea House” could easily be mistaken from the street or sidewalk for a pile of scraps or abstract modern sculpture sitting in someones neglected garden.

Two bunker-like concrete buildings sit entrenched, surrounded by a concrete wall, creating a secluded subterranean refuge to retreat and relax in. Slim stairs lead down below, while a 360-degree slit allows air and light to pass in freely.

And, as the chairs in the picture suggest, the top serves not only to shelter the spaces underneath (when it rains or snows), but also as a table surface for above-ground tea times too (during better weather.)

About Jun Igarashi

The Japanese architect Jun Igarashi explained some of his motivations and interests for a 2011 retrospective called “The Construction of State.”

“When I started working in architectural design, I felt as if I were in the pitch blackness of outer space, without a single planet in sight,” Jun says. “Although I had studied architecture for two years at a vocational school and received practical training in the field over a five-year period at a regular firm, I had never seriously confronted things like architectural thought and theory. It was as if there were no “fixed points” that might serve as stars to help me decide where and whether or not to proceed into the dark universe. It was in this mindset that I began working as an architect.”

“Though it might seem obvious, an architectural structure is attached to a piece of land. And in designing a structure, one must treat all of the ‘states’ that exist there in an equal manner. I have created architecture using this basic approach for the last ten years. One might say that my work involves searching for ‘fixed points.'”

“As the site of my work is Hokkiado, I have repeatedly ‘constructed states’ based on necessity using ‘fixed points’ that emerge from a ‘state’ that is a compulsory or inevitable response, or ‘fixed points’ that emerge from devising my own approach in tandem with the use of a regular method. According to these experiences and repeated activities, I sometimes alter my way of thinking.”

The post A Japanese Tea House is Hidden Beneath a Flowering Meadow first appeared on Dornob.

Slated to tower nine stories tall, this monolithic plinth was half-finished (at five levels high) as World War II came to its conclusion. Over a half-century later, a new structure has appeared on top, complete with incredible cantilevers.

Scarred and shipped by air attacks and bomb strikes, the structure nonetheless survived to become the eventual basis for this daring residential design addition by Amort Architektur.

To preserve its place in history, the bunker itself was left unfixed and unpainted – a monument to the past but also a vertical urban plot for a new and dramatically lofted house.

The resulting dwelling is as clean and contemporary as its foundation is aged and weathered – all new materials (mainly brick, wood and steel), modern lines and Bauhaus-worthy asymmetries combine to create stark contrasts on all sides, while an emphatic domesticity prevails within.

Cantilevered exterior decks and interior volumes make the home visible from below, even via the steepest angles of view underneath, while also extending the inhabitable square footage and engaging views from above.

From the architects:

“Is there any information on the construction of the bunker? It was planned to be  nine storeys high, but after the construction of five floors, the war was over. The bunker has survived several air attacks. The damage is mostly recognizable on the west side, but it did not seriously harm the bunker. There are only large amounts of chipped concrete scars visible. How did the idea of building a single family home arise? The bunker is treated as an urban, vertical plot, on top of which there is something new created. The urban qualities such as infrastructure and the public park were crucial to opt for the choice of the bunker as a bulding site. The bunker itself remains completely intact as a historical document, purposely unchanged and unpainted. From an architectural perspective, these actions would be absolutely reprehensible and wrong.”

The post Bunker Penthouse Atop a 5-Story World War Ruin first appeared on Dornob.

Consciously or otherwise, architects constantly borrow inspiration from their surroundings – sometimes plants, animals and the natural environment, but other times from strange man-made objects like the four-legged concrete tetrapods used by coastal engineers to break up incoming waves, reduce soil erosion and infrastructure corrosion.

These simple shapes were once patented property, but are now free for anyone to use – including cities threatened by sudden tsunamis or industrial-oriented designers like Hugon Kowalski, compelled by their physical properties and unique structural potentials.

In his architectural version, these giant-sized variants contain four spokes radiating out from the center. The tapered cylindrical shaft facing upward serves as an above-water entrance (except in emergencies, when it must be sealed from inside if submerged). The other three act as master bedroom/bathroom, kitchen and living room.

Though a fascinating formal tribute to this long-used seaside shape, there is a limit to which these same principles are usefully applied to a dwelling. Tetrapods traditionally roll over time and are tracked between tides to determine changes in position – these residential designs are made to remain upright, and barring some gyroscopic system in their center would not help someone survive such shifts.

About the architect, via Culture.pl:

“Hugon Kowalski (born 1987) is an architect who searches for innovative and sometimes unusual solutions. He goes beyond standardized forms and habitual lines of thought as evidenced by his repudiation of traditional structures and materials.”

The post Beachfront Bunkers: Submersible Tsunami-Proof Tetrapods first appeared on Dornob.

Gray sidewalks give way to a gray stone patio, which in turn seems to rise up and form this hill-shaped gray brick house emerging from the urban landscape. Look closely, though, and you can see that the constituent curves are still formed with rectangular bricks, hence the aptly-named Pixel House.

Mass Studies and Slade Architecture worked to create this residence with an eye both to public-space interaction (wrapping around the exterior) and private comfort (within cozy curvilinear white walls and wood accents on the interior).

Viewed in context, the building shell seems almost camouflaged. However, while the outside shape reflects the form of inside rooms, the experience of the two could not be more different.

Inside, the rough convex and bunker-like brick mound becomes a dynamic series of concave corridors and winding transitions between the various floors and spaces.

The plans are deceptively simple compared to the constructed house – a pair of flat-slab floors build with conventional techniques, but wrapped in a form that took careful care to complete.

Conceptual praise aside, though, one does have to wonder if the sheer three-dimensional complexity of the design could possibly be worth the time and money spent to accomplish it – or whether it is appropriate to build something in a residential neighborhood so different from its neighbors that, overt camouflage or no, it will stand out (perhaps like a sore pixelated thumb) for years to come.

“At a micro scale this tension between the contoured natural condition and the orthogonal master plan condition is further developed in the choice of materials. By using a simple orthogonal brick, in an orthogonal order and allowing the bricks to slide out of plane to create the curved wall, the tension between orthogonal and contoured form is revealed. This tectonic tension is parallel to the tension that exists between the building and the row of houses adjacent to it and between the master plan massing and the hilly landscape.”

The post Pixel House Made of Concrete Bricks first appeared on Dornob.

The post Classic Wood Cottage Gets Underground Concrete Addition first appeared on Dornob.

Charged with creating something at the intersection of art and architecture, entrants in the “Art and Architecture” design competition created paintings, panels and sculptures, but one individual thought even further beyond the canvass box and concrete forms. His concept is one seriously weird house – essentially a block of soil embedded with living quarters, cut from the earth and elevated into the sky with cranes.

Designer Marcelo Ertorteguy submitted a piece that is at once far-fetched and down-to-earth. It is a kind of conceptual proposition – a hovering home at the intersection of nature and technology, composed of supporting cranes on either side and a carved block of soil suspended between them.

There is far more fantasy than reality to this design – it is not meant to work in the physical world on any particular level, and could not be constructed as such. The ‘house’ portion exists in limbo between the various elements, and shifts from one drawing or rendering to the next.

Despite having such fictional roots, it is hard not to wonder what it would be like to live in such a place – amorphous, mobile and changeable like a Salvador Dali painting.

More from the designer

“The Stone is a House, a petrified piece of soil cut and lifted from the ground, intervened by the machine. The House is the act itself of its own construction. It is dwelt through its transformation, starts flush with the ground working as a bunker; it unfolds as it rises revealing its expanded interior and when it reaches its maximum height acts as an inhabitable cloud.”

About Marcelo Ertorteguy

Marcelo Ertorteguy is now one-half of design duo Stereotank. “Stereotank is a design studio founded by Marcelo Ertorteguy and Sara Valente, dedicated to the research and exploration of the common grounds between architecture, art and sound. The studio works as a laboratory for design and creation of architectural artifacts, immersive installations, hybrid objects and instruments often using repurposed materials and pre-fab systems. Stereotank focus is to re-invent program with existing resources, with the aim of looking at old things with a fresh eye, relying on simplicity and intuition. Understanding urban scape as the medium, one of the main interests at this scale is the activation of public space through the insertion of participatory projects that engage, entertain and educate the users.”

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