Building of the week: The Pole House, Australia

Perched high above the Southern Ocean on Australia’s famous Great Ocean Road, the Pole House by F2 Architecture is a great example of the power of architecture, made possible by the spectacular location combined with the unique experience that a work of architecture can bring to such a unique expanse of coastline.

The house sits atop a concrete platform supported by a 13m high pylon built into the steep hillside. Accessible only by a narrow concrete bridge, the visitor is delivered to an entrance which is recessed into the metal clad walls that face the hillside.

As soon as you step on to the bridge you know you are in for something special. Once inside, a curved timber clad wall directs the visitor to the living area with its spectacular 180 degree view of the Southern Ocean.

Full height glass walls can be slid back to open the living area to the panoramic ocean view, sun and sea breeze. Frameless glass balustrades at the perimeter of the elevated platform provide safety and wind protection without obstructing the view. A fireplace is suspended from the ceiling in the corner of the living area to provide warmth and ambience on cold winter days or in the evening.

n contrast to the scale of the landscape, the house is very modest in proportion, the ideal weekender. More akin to a luxurious suite than family accommodation it contains a spacious living and dining area, bedroom and bathroom in an open plan arrangement. The kitchen, bed, robe and storage are built into the flanking walls to maximise the sense of space and provide flexibility. The bathroom is concealed in a timber clad drum which is centrally located to provide separation between the bedroom and living areas. The drum is not full height to allow the pyramidal roof form to float above the living areas.

The deceptively simple square plan of this house underpins the dramatic experience it delivers. The two walls facing the hillside are solid providing complete privacy and a sense of detachment from the land, the only connection being the narrow entry bridge. The two walls facing the ocean are glass. The result is a living area perched high above the landscape, referencing only the vastness of the ocean, the horizon and the distant land forms.

Building of the Week: Sanbao Art Museum, China.

Sanbao Art Museum is located in Sanbao village, a scenic place not far from the Central City of Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital of China. In the past decade, porcelain artists were attracted here to build their own studios. Thus a nascent, dynamic, porcelain-centric hub is thriving and magnetizing even more talents to migrate here what comes along is their great passions and dreams in inheriting the tradition of porcelain art. Most of the industries here are porcelain related, causing a highly competitive environment where it will take great ingenuity and endless efforts to be the best.

Porcelain and the Maker

There are artists, art, and places to exhibit art in Sanbao Village. The relationship between the artists and their creation is sort of romantic, like the feelings of first love between boys and girls, indirect probing, exploring, negotiating and subtle maneuvering. And the transformation in the pottery kilns is like the process of developing films, it is full of uncertainties, even though photographers projected their best imaginations onto the films before they pressed the shutter, the final results might be surprising or disappointing after the dark room. However, it was the risks and uncertainties that require every photographer to think through every detail before they press the shutter. Porcelain making is similar, it requires a lot of experience and brain power, there are always trials and errors, exploration, negotiation between the maker and his/her creation, it’s not exaggerated to say the relationship is quite romantic.

Therefore, the role of the art museum is to build an interactive space to encourage reciprocal communication between visitors and the space, both emotionally and behaviourally.

Spaces are created with a sense of mystery to trigger diverse sensation or psychological stimulation of visitors. In a wild imagination, architecture can act like A.I. robots to silently communicate with its visitors by its spaces.

Natural and artificial
Naturally, flowing creeks are sprawling through this narrow valley, streams chant every fine porcelain for thousands of years.

Artificially, the museum is a huge contrast to the natural scenes like a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a huge artificial creation was burying in the natural background for years. The surface is full of moss and soil, its outline, however, is still obvious in the mountain.

Exhibited Items and Mirrored Selves
The museum is a visually linear shape, 150 meters long, but the visiting flow is actually nonlinear, visitors will have multiple choices to go. The purpose is to boost serendipity between people and spaces. Architecture can create the atmosphere with which visitors will have personal connections, once built, exhibited items will no longer be important, they will act like mirrors, visitors will be reviewing themselves through these items, and true arts are the medium to help ourselves to see the true version of ourselves, sometimes clear, others vague, sometimes real, others fake.

During the experience of the labyrinth tour, visitors can see themselves clearer and enjoy the atmosphere. For those who do not gamble, the casino becomes the perfect place to reflect on their own.

Impression and imagination
Walls, the most important part at shaping exhibition space and atmosphere, are made of rammed earth to offer a poetic feeling.

The main passage is a long transparent space, 100 meters, around it are rammed-earth walls, 4 meters high, grow from earth. Experiences vary when visitors walk through different areas, visitors will be attracted by the outstretched eaves after the woods area. The sound from the creeks will relax visitors a bit, and what lies ahead lead visitors further into the cryptic but joyful world.

Multiple choices are provided in the museum, visitors can go up and down, feel the delight stream or peaceful pond, enjoy the exhibition or relax in the corner. Different choices bring various experiences, which is an enriched relationship between porcelain designers and their creation. Every tour will be a story between visitors and the architecture, mixed of discovery, expectation, waiting, anxiety, disappointment and joy.

New and Old
Major materials used in Sanbao Art Museum, such as rammed earth, titanium zinc panels and travertine, will be eroded by time. This process of erosion is like the fermentation of wine, time gives its unique flavour.

In addition, Sanbao village naturally produces unique soil, slightly red in colour, so the continuous loam walls were built with local clay, it delivers certain familiarity and tension. All the joints were made in 1:1 samples in advance, and all the experimenting samples eventually assembled in a new landscape building.

About DL Atelier
Under the direction of principal designer Yang Liu, who is combining more than 10 years of design practice in various firms, the DL atelier is designing a diversity of spaces from 2012 based in Beijing and cities of east China.

DL atelier is the recent winner of the American Architecture Price (cultural architecture category), for the project Sanbaopeng Art Museum. Other projects of DL atelier were also selected as the winner of Architizer A+ Awards 2017 in categories of hotel, cultural and art.

Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Nouvel

The first official photographs of the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre Abu Dhabi have been released, ahead of the museum’s public opening this weekend.

A dome spans 180 metres over the huge new art museum, which officially opens to the public on 11 November 2017.

As the first outpost of the Musée du Louvre outside France, Louvre Abu Dhabi stands on the waterfront of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, a man-made island on the coast of the United Arab Emirates capital.

The building forms part of the Saadiyat Cultural District, where it will be joined by the Foster + Partner-designed Zayed National Museum and a new Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry, although work has yet to begin on that.

Almost 8,000 metal stars overlap to form the geometric pattern of the dome. It filters sunlight to create is described as “a rain of light”, throwing flecks of illumination on the white blocks and promenades that forms the building’s interior.

“It is a project founded on a major symbol of Arab architecture: the dome. But here, with its evident shift from tradition, the dome is a modern proposal,” said French architect Jean Nouvel.

“A double dome 180 metres in diameter, offering horizontal, perfectly radiating geometry, a randomly perforated woven material, providing shade punctuated by bursts of sun,” he explained.

“The dome gleams in the Abu Dhabi sunshine. At night, this protected landscape is an oasis of light under a starry dome.”

The semi-outdoor spaces below the dome are used to display specially commissioned installations, while the museum’s permanent collection and temporary shows are housed within white cubic blocks, to create a “museum city”.

A well as 6,400 square metres of gallery space – comprising 23 galleries for the museum’s permanent collection, a temporary exhibition space and the Children’s Museum – the Louvre Abu Dhabi also includes a 270-seat auditorium, restaurant, shop and cafe.

Plans were first unveiled for the museum back in in 2007, when an intergovernmental agreement between Abu Dhabi and France was formed.

Its completion comes five years after the Musée du Louvre opened its first outpost – a gallery in French town Lens designed by Japanese studio SANAA and New York office Imrey Culbert.

Building works drew to a close earlier this summer and first glimpses of the building’s completed exterior have been trickling through on social media since August.

The museum’s own collection of 600 artworks – ranging from pieces by Piet Mondrian, Edouard Manet and Pablo Picasso, to Cy Twombly and Ai Weiwei – will be exhibited alongside 300 pieces loaned from French cultural institutions, to present a chronological display dating from prehistory to present day.