In ’73 Ricardo Bofill bought and turned this abandoned cement factory in Barcelona into an architectural marvel. I love how this building has turned out and how he has successfully partnered urban and natural elements.

Architect: Ricardo Bofill
Program: Architectural offices /archives /model laboratory /exhibition space /Bofill’s-apartment /guest rooms /gardens
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Total floor area: 3,100 square meters and gardens
House area: 500 square meters
Date Completed: 1975

Head over to Yatzer to see more about the project.

Just spent 30 days in Costa Rica, both the Caribbean Cost and the Pacific Coast. Loved the atmosphere the people and water. It’s a shame that it’s a 30 hour trip for me.
I’ve just stumbled over this film made by Ross Mclennan & Marty Schenk. It’s about Memmo Baleeira in Sagres, Portugal. Part of the global network over at www.designhotels.com Makes me so badly wanna go there and surf and hang out with wonderful friends.

In the eastern parts of the national park that surrounds the glacier Vatnajökull on Iceland we find this place, Snæfellsstofa, a visitors auditorium for those who want to experience and enjoy the astonishing nature that surrounds one of Europe’s largest glaciers.

We’ll some of you might already know that we love concrete here at WASF, this is not an exception. The building has a beautiful stretched x-shape and is drawn by Icelandic architect firm Arkís.

So next year, why not plan a trip to Iceland and Vatnajökull, it’s vast 8100 km² stretches over 8% of the land.

Location: Skriðuklaustur, Island
Building: Besökscentrum
Built: 2010
Architects: Arkís

One word…. unreal…

QUOTED…
Mountain West – 2010

Allandale House is an A-frame(s) house for an idiosyncratic connoisseur and her family. Along with its occupants, the Allandale House also provides space for an eccentric collection of artifacts that resist straightforward classification. Wines, rare books, stuffed birds and an elk mount are among the relics on display in this small vacation house.
The house links three horizontal extrusions of “leaning,” or asymmetrical A-frames. The skinny A-frame on the western side contains the library, wine cellar and garage. The wide A-frame in the center of the house is dedicated to two floors of bedrooms and bathrooms. The medium A-frame on the eastern side consists of living, kitchen and dining areas. The house aims to undermine the seeming limitations of a triangular section by augmenting and revealing the extreme proportion in the vertical direction, and utilizing the acutely angled corners meeting the floor as moments for thickened walls, telescopic apertures and built-in storage.

Via. thecubetheory.com

ARCHITECTS: Daniele Claudio Taddei
LOCATION: Brissago, Suiza
CLIENT: Daniel B. Milnor, Stefan Lüttecke, Zürich
PHOTOS: Bruno Helbling

Architects: Mount Fuji Architects Studio
Location: Meguro, Tokyo, Japan
Site area: 177.27 sqm
Building area: 106.33 sqm
Total floor area: 259.72 sqm
Project Year: 2006
Photographs: Ryota Atarashi & Satoshi Asakawa

This is a house to be built in Tokyo, for a movie producer couple.

This architecture is consisted by combining L-shaped blocks of reinforced concrete and sequential frames of box-shaped engineer-wood. We put bedrooms, film archive and galley in solid concrete part for security, and living room in engineer-wood part for openness. As material that consist an open space that is 6m in height, 5.5m in width, 14m in depth, we choose thin engineer-wood (38mmx287mm).

Main theme for this architecture is to bring out a sense of mass and material, which were denied by modern architecture which pursued “white, flat wall” as a style. We intentionally left the wood grain of mold on the surface of concrete, and choose textured stones and irons.

It goes without saying that a house is a relaxing place. A house like a white-cube, surrounded by flat, white walls everywhere, gives a person very abstract image. But that image could only be sensed when we use intellective part of our brain. The problem is that we’re not all-intellective-creature. For the people like this client, who do enough intellectual labor on a daily basis, white-cube would only bring sense of fatigue. The role of architecture, especially the ones for living, is to soothe the sensory side of people, not to stimulate the intellectual side.

Today we found an amazing project by icelander architect Gudmundur Jonsson, a vacation house on Iceland. We don’t like posts where you need to click to see more photos so we’ve given them to you here, hope you like that otherwise please tell us if thats a bad way of showing images.

French photographer Stéphane Chalmeau shared with us this 200 sqm house designed by Saison-Menu Architectes in a narrow site in Lille, France. It features a wooden first floor that merge with the exterior fence, and brown boxes-like volumes on the second floor, creating a wide terrace on top.

Here at WASF we are stunned, the interior and exterior of this house merge together beautifully. All photos are taken by Stéphane Chalmeau