OMA > Maggie’s Centre Glasgow

 

 

Source: OMA

Photographer: Iwan Baan

The aim of a Maggie’s Centre is to provide an environment of practical and emotional support for people with cancer, their families and friends. Since the opening of the first Maggie’s Centre in Edinburgh in 1996, the Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres foundation has grown substantially, commissioning and developing a series of innovative buildings designed by world class architects. While contemporary architecture has a reputation, deservedly or not, for being at times cold or alienating, the goal of each Maggie’s Centre – whether in Glasgow, London, or Hong Kong – is to provide a space where people feel at home and cared for, a space that is warm, receptive, and welcoming.

Maggie’s Centres rely on the fundamental precept, often overlooked, that exceptional architecture and innovative spaces can make people feel better – thereby kindling the curiosity and imagination fundamental to feeling alive. Grand in their ambitions, but designed on a small scale, Maggie’s Centres provide a welcome respite from typical institutional hospital architecture. Their spaces are more than merely functional; they serve as a haven for those receiving treatment. In creating a place to connect and learn from others who are going through similar experiences, Maggie’s Centres help patients to develop their sense of confidence and resourcefulness.

In 2007, Maggie’s Centre approached OMA to design a new centre on the grounds of Gartnavel hospital in Glasgow, close to the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre. OMA designed a single-level building in the form of a ring of interlocking rooms surrounding an internal landscaped courtyard. Seemingly haphazardly arranged, the building is actually a careful composition of spaces responding to the needs of a Maggie’s Centre and providing a refuge for those coping with cancer.

Instead of a series of isolated rooms, the building is designed as a sequence of interconnected L-shaped figures in plan that create clearly distinguished areas – an arrangement that minimises the need for corridors and hallways and allows the rooms to flow. The plan has been organized for the spaces to feel casual, almost carefree, allowing one to feel at ease and at home, part of an empathetic community of people. At the same time the design also provides spaces for more personal moments – either in the intimate setting of the counselling rooms, or in smaller nooks and private spaces.

Located in a natural setting, like a pavilion in the woods, the building is both introverted and extroverted: each space has a relationship either to the internal courtyard or to the surrounding woodland and greenery, while certain moments provide views of Glasgow beyond. With a flat roof and floor levels that respond to the natural topography, the rooms vary in height, with the more intimate areas programmed for private uses such as counselling, and more open and spacious zones for communal use. More than any other space, the internal courtyard provides a place of sanctuary and respite.

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Peter Celsing > Kulturhuset. 1974

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Designed and built by Peter Celsing, the Kulturhuset is located on Sergels Torg in Stockholm, one of the busiest squares in the Swedish capital. This complex was conceived as a “cultural oasis” in the new business and commercial center. In this area of the city, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, the old structure and architecture of Stockholm, and partly even the topography, was almost completely replaced. The building which opened in 1974 is considered the most famous work of Peter Celsing, apart from his sacral buildings.

Towards the Sergels Torg, the facade is mainly made of glass, so that the building opens up to the public and gives the culture the desired presence to the square. In contrast, the backside of this elongated structure is completely closed. The exposed concrete structure is one of the most striking features of this building. On the lower floor there is an open library, on the upper floors there are rooms for exhibitions. Originally, the Moderna Museet was intended to occupy large parts of the building, however, the museum withdrew from these plans in 1969.

The building complex consists of two main components, with the aforementioned concrete and glass building complemented by the theater, which rises above a simple, square floor plan. The facades of the theater are made of stainless steel panels, which also emphasize the horizontal. The main façade of the square is in dialogue with Edvin Ohrstrom’s vertically rising steel-and-glass sculpture Kristallvertikalaccent ‘, which is located on the square about 10 meters below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fala Atelier > Very Tiny Palazzo

Font: fala atelier
Photography: Ivo Tavares

A tiny palace in a narrow garden. The luxuriant environment suggested an ambivalent approach to the architectural object. At human height, the palace is transparent, but its crown is proud, adorned with precious stones, and spanning across the perimeter walls.

The interior is utterly simple while equally rich, partially sunken to emphasise the presence of the surrounding greenery. Thus, in a Loos-like manner, two representative areas are defined by the different floors, with different degrees of intimacy. The only walls are the longitudinal sides of the space, in continuity with the perimeters of the garden. The bathroom and storage room are hidden behind a unitary cabinet of lacquered wood, whose scale deliberately sits somewhere between architecture and furniture. A palace shouldn’t be too simple after all.

Location: Porto, Portugal
Dates: 2018-21
Status: Private commission, built
Project Team: Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja, Lera Samovich, Ana Lima, Rute Reixoto, Paulo Sousa
Landscape Architect: Oh land
Surface Area: 40 m2
Client: Private
Construction: Jst Lda

 

 

 

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Boltshauser Architekten > Kiln Tower for the Brickworks Museum

Source: Boltshauser Architekten AG
based on the design by the students Regina Pötzinger and Robert Gentner

Photography: Kuster Frey

The brickworks in Cham, that is run today by the Brickworks Museum, is the only intact surviving handmade brickworks in German-speaking Switzerland. The listed ensemble consists of a timber brick-drying shed, a kiln, that may no longer be operated, the biotope of the historical clay pit, a residential building with gardens, and a museum building which replaces a burned-down barn. In 2017 students of the guest professorship at the TU Munich worked on the task of designing a new kiln tower on the site. The semester project by Sophia Brellenthin and Moritz Penker formed the basis of this project. The prestressed earth-and-timber structure is based directly on the mock-up carried out at the Sitterwerk (see pp. xx–xx) and is the world’s first prestressed earth building. The tower is made up of earth elements manufactured at a summer school at the ETH Zurich in 2019 on the grounds of the former cement plant in Brunnen. Supervised by Lehmag AG, around thirty students from the ETH Zurich, the TU Munich, and other universities in the country and abroad gained hands-on experience in rammed earth construction.

The building material of the kiln tower presents clay in its unfired form and demonstrates a contemporary development of the archaic method of building with rammed earth. The new tower allows visitors to survey the site from atop the roughly eight-meter-high viewing platform and enables the staff to fire bricks again with the new kiln. In addition, a space will be created for displaying other museum exhibits.

The exhibition room with the adjoining kiln has a solid, stiffening timber ceiling. Its character is defined by the presence of earth and the monumentality of the concluding kiln wall. Thanks to the light slits created by the open joints, in front of which the prestressing elements run, visitors can experience the whole solidity of the earth walls, that contrasts with the delicacy of the tension bars. Simple steel frames can be attached to these to hold exhibition panels or exhibits. A steel spiral staircase provides access to the viewing platform on the roof.

Today, building with rammed earth elements is an established practice in Switzerland. However, the joints between blocks, whose size depends on conditions of transportation and assembly, are usually time-consumingly hand-filled afterwards, thus eliminating the traces of building with prefabricated elements. In Cham, these traces are the theme of an experimental architecture which seeks to increase the efficiency of the building process and stability by means of structural innovations.

The first of these innovations is the aforementioned prestressing. To strengthen the system against earthquake loads, the rammed earth walls are prestressed. The earth, that can only withstand compressive loads, and the tensile steel are perfectly matched. That prestressed hybrid structures have the potential for use in multi-story rammed earth buildings was already demonstrated by the mock-up at the Sitterwerk near St. Gallen. Here it was possible to dispel any reservations regarding continuous creep of the building material. Indeed, experience with historical buildings suggests that the stability and hardness of the material even increase under pressure and over time.
Unlike the prototype at the Sitterwerk, the tension bars of the kiln tower are installed on both sides in front of the wall. This increases the expressiveness of the prestressing and also facilitates access to the clamping chucks. A timber truss connected to the roof beams to form a rigid plate ensures that the tensile force is introduced evenly into the wall elements. At the bottom, the tension bars are anchored directly in the prefabricated concrete base protecting the earth against splashing water on the outside.

The second innovation is the integration of the timber base plates into the wall structure. Each element has its own plate on which it was rammed. As the earth is still relatively soft when the formwork is stripped, this facilitates transportation. Two grooves on the bottom serve as guides for the straps. A weather drip is installed on the plate on site to protect the earth from erosion and illustrate the joining principle. Horizontal layers and corners of trass lime are rammed into the earth as additional erosion barrier.

The requirement of completely dismantling the tower after ten years was an opportunity to explore the potential of earth with regard to recycling. The prestressing system, installed separately, is easy to detach so that the elements can be simply removed. In view of the work involved, it would make sense to recycle whole blocks of earth. This is facilitated by the open joints and the integrated base plates and indeed by the modular autonomy of the blocks, that is demonstrated, among other things, by the reinforced corners. The building material itself is also part of the recycling system, with construction waste recycled as a component of the earth mixture.

The scientific monitoring of the experimental project helps to devise new possibilities for using this building material which we have so far only begun to investigate. More than sixty million tons of earth and clay are excavated in Switzerland every year, most of which goes unused as an infill material for gravel pits.1 Finding new ways to use this unexploited resource would be an important contribution to substituting energy-intensive building materials such as concrete and bricks. Compared with conventional building methods, this would enable embodied energy savings of up to forty percent in a new-build.

 

 

Uses : Viewing tower, store-room, kiln

Client: Verein Ofenturm Ziegelei-Museum, Cham

Team:
Boltshauser Architekten AG,
students from TU Munich and ETH Zurich,

Earth construction: LEHMAG AG, Brunnen, in collaboration with students from various universities

Earth brick masonry: Terrabloc SA, Genf

Earth material: Ziegelei Schumacher AG, Gisiken

Structural engineer: SEFORB Sarl, Uster, Jörg Habenberger

Gross floor area: 60 m2

Building volume: 480 m3

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