Glass house

Situated on the northern side of S.Miguel Island, the plot has an open view over the sorrounding fields and woods. The client expressed a desire of openness and harmony with nature, and very little concerns about how he would like the interior of the house, except from the wish of including memories of old travels through some objects.   The design keeps the action of building minimal, as aethereal as possible when working with concrete, shaping a simple frame and the border between inside and outside, giving it flexibility. So we designed and built a floating concrete box. The concrete frame does not touch the ground, and the living space is separated from the outside only through a set of sliding glass panels. In a plot sorrounded... More

The other studiolo on Fifth AvenueA study and guest annex for a folk art dealer at a fabled Manhattan address. Tucked in the southern most back corner of the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 1000 Fifth Avenue one can find an original 15th century studiolo designed by the Italian architect, Francesco di Giorgio, for the Ducal Palace of Federico da Montefeltro at Gubbio. About 1000 addresses south down Fifth Avenue and six centuries later one can find a contemporary studiolo for the owner of the nationally known and beloved folk art gallery, the Splendid Peasant.   With an existing home in the art-deco style apartment hotel-cum-mythologized lower Fifth Avenue address, the client sough... More

The Ghost Structure, renamed the Remembrance Structure in 2019, is a pavilion on the grounds of the Menokin Foundation in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Menokin is a former tobacco plantation and the site of the 18th century house of Francis Lightfoot Lee, one of Virginia’s signers of the Declaration of Independence. The rural 400 acre site is located in the Northern Neck region of Virginia, close to the Chesapeake Bay, in an area of early colonial settlement. The Ghost Structure was commissioned by the foundation to help accommodate an increased number of school groups and visitors, to demonstrate 18th century timber framing techniques, while also acting as a literal and metaphorical platform to open conversations about the role... More

This is a project in Connecticut (US) to repair a residence designed by Joe Black Leigh, and add a new house to the site. New Canaan is known as a town where many houses from the 1950s by such architects as Philip Johnson and Marcel Breuer still remain, and the one we worked on was the residence for Joe Black Leigh (built in 1956), also a friend of Philip Johnson. Our aim was to inherit the spirit of its beautiful glass architecture, or in other words, the spirit of New Canaan. © Scott Francis The existing building was a symmetric glass box of Palladian villa architecture, standing solitarily in a forest. We built a new house to make this glass box orthogonal and formed an L-shaped terrain, as an attempt to create a kind of &ldqu... More

Inspired by Philip Johnson's Glass House, the building was born from the ruins of a rustic house on the Biellese hills Conceived with a minimal-naturalist approach, Teca House is a contemporary building born from a professional friendship between Federico Delrosso, Milanese architect and designer of Biellese origins, and the client, Alberto Savio, textile entrepreneur of the area.   The project, which consists of the recovery of a small rustic building in a splendid setting of the hills of Biella, is based on a compositional inversion intervention, which leads to the outside, dematerializing it, a small pre-existing rustic volume giving life to a new function in the area. From the "roots" of an agricultural past, now in disuse, sign... More

This is a metamorphosis. Of a place described as uninhabitable, simply because it was uninhabited, but inhabited by a landscape. And it is this very landscape with its own horizon that dictates each intervention. The obvious place to start was to open the site. Open it to the view, to light and air. Open it to space, to the scale of the surrounding land.The transformation is achieved through demolition. Gradually, the walls restricting the space are pulled down and the space is unshackled. All that remains is to maintain and use a regular and well-organised structure. Supported and covered, it is to be completed by blending interior and exterior elements.   This villa is mimetic! The parallel line of the raised railing unites with... More

A marriage of poetry, building science, and memories of a siteConstruction has completed on a 3,600 sq.ft. contemporary home in Sheffield, Massachusetts, designed by Vincent Appel / Of Possible and built by Kent Hicks Construction. The home is a marriage of spatial poetry and building science. The timeless craft of traditional New England construction is met with the most advanced building science principles and technologies resulting in a contemporary expression of rural American architecture that will last for generations. Rory Gardiner The site on which the client grew up as child in a colonial home rebuilt by their parents is located fifteen minutes south of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The original two story home on the prope... More

The recently opened Le Central food hallreunites 25 local gastronomic icons, and has become a must-see in the creative and diverse city of Montreal. Heirloom pizzeria fits perfectly into this gourmet mix with its Neapolitan pizzas and natural wines.   Heirloom is a welcoming space with its rounded corners and warm textures. From the vantage point behind the white oak bar, one can appreciate the action around the imposing Italian Malagutti oven covered with a penny round red mosaic tile.A huge light-box menu recalls the banners once sitting in the vanishing red light district of Montreal and is a beacon for pizza lovers. This rounded light-box steps down to a steel framed glass wall,givingvolume and depth to the kiosk. A long steel sh... More

The house is a fusion of the traditional stone clad city house that can be found throughout the Gold Coast of Chicago with an open contemporary glass house set in a landscape.  It is located in a century old urban neighborhood.  The site is a rare through-lot which is twice as deep as the typical city lot; allowing for an expansive private yard.  The program is arranged so that the formal spaces front the street and the family living and bedrooms open to the landscaped yard with pool.  The house is based on a designprocess that arranged the internal program and then carves away pieces then wraps them in a minimal palette of metal, stone and stucco materials. Dave Burk This creates a layered and overlapping composit... More

Inspired by Philip Johnson's Glass House and the Ben Rose House from the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pavilion A is a tribute to modern architecture. Welcoming a four-season swimming pool, this glass pavilion was designed as a veritable oasis in the heart of a garden. During the long Quebec winters, the space allows to breaststrokes in the swimming pool, relax in the spa, read under a tropical plant, or do yoga while contemplating the snowy nature. In summer, the pavilion opens onto a long wooden terrace thanks to the large picture windows on one of the facades. Adrien Williams Adrien Williams Located outside the glass pavilion, the metal structure gives the roof the impression of floating. The black exterior structure contras... More

The renovation project of an apartment in the historic center of Milan, located on the seventh floor with simultaneous expansion on the roof terrace, has placed us in front of the now increasingly recurring theme of "building on the built". The design choice consists in the realization of a volume, almost entirely in glass and polished steel, set back from the façade wire for its vertical components and instead re-aligned to the horizontal ones. This volumetric decomposition allows, from a perceptual point of view, to relegate the new glazed façade on the background plane and to make the horizontal brise-soleil protagonist; "glass shards" with different orientations and lengths, allows to fragment the physicality of the artifa... More