Articles by Daniel Tapia

With a quick glance at this Dutch house, it will not immediately stand out. Most of the houses in the Netherlands are made in brickwork and a lot of them are orange. Taking a closer look you will discover her special characteristics. The floating carport, asymmetrical layout, and the specific brickwork details ensure that this modest and sober home is everything but standard. Villa Alders is situated in a new residential development in the beautiful Dutch village Waalre.

An immersive installation that invites audiences to explore the interplay of sunlight and shadows cast through a series of architectural perforations, drawing inspiration from the Mashrabiya. The concept, developed by design duo Carlos Gris and Rimsha Kidwai of design studio Tinkah, was developed alongside wood manufacturers Finsa for Dubai Design Week 2019. The intention was to offer visitors a moment of solace from the sun in the long transition from the car park and into the show.

Ripple Pavilion is the annual outdoor pavilion project at Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea.  Thousands of pixels – acrylic tubes with mechanical joints – span across a waving canopy while scattering light and color in constantly changing expression.  It is an interactive installation where people’s movements transform the appearance of the pavilion at different moments in time.  The overall effect of the pavilion begins from a small contact with a tube, which swings other pixels in the vicinity to create rippling phenomenon.  Then the physical movement translates into refracted colors transforming the whole installation into a moving iridescent field.

Logistics of a working family typically requires all (family members) to stay tethered to their homes for longer periods than each would prefer individually. This can become a phycological drag when all your time at school, work and home is spend indoors, as had been the case for a New Orleans Architect and his family. They reached a point where many families decide to move to the suburbs, exchanging great public parks and amenities for a back yard. Rather than moving far away, they decided to make a bold change by build a new house that flipped the script on indoor home life on a small urban lot. There was no way to afford the ongoing cost of a single-family home in the city, so a duplex with a rentable unit was baked into the concept early on.

This commission reached us in the form of a contest. The main concept of the project has remained unchanged since then. We proposed a house contained within two slabs whose relationship is radical: 42m long x 3m high. Two housing units within the same plant are separated by a courtyard whose main function is to generate warm wind currents.

The project for this property intended for a family had a very specific program right from the start. The house boasts an unobstructed open-plan area to house the communal rooms, facing east and allowing maximum window space. The bathrooms face west with minimum apertures. The kitchen/dining section opens out completely into the garden and pool, transforming itself into a well-ventilated porch area for summer use. 

“Whether you in music and us in architecture, everybody is interested in structure.
For me, structure is the creator of light. When I start working on a structural pattern, it demands one column after the other, so a rhythm comes alive and it looks like this: lack of light – light – lack of light – light – lack of light – light. (…). The architecture makes us believe we are in a world inside other world (…)”
Louis Kahn, in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui

Hara house is located in the agricultural village in Nagaoka city, Niigata prefecture. Giving consideration to the functions onsite, such as parents’ house, storage areas, and private rooms; most functions that are required in a fully self-reliant house were already present on site. Our design direction was to create a building that revitalizes the structures already present on site and have the potential to adapt to new functions as the need or mood arises. We started our design by conceptualizing a small building as an ‘incomplete’ remote extension of the main house. The building is not fully self-sufficient and thus draws from its setting and relies on the surrounding buildings to fully function and even engages the village to create a thriving community.

The new buildings are located on an island in a very beautiful part of Stockholm’s southern archipelago. The island is connected to the mainland so you can reach it by car and still have the luxury of feeling like you are farthest in the outermost sea band. Below the high cliffs on a sloping meadow, the buildings are located along the edge of the beach.