Articles by Jonathan Alarcón

‘People die and they are not happy’ – architecture can’t change that. A place of rest, a space for silence: that is something it still manages to provide, despite the fact that not even stones are as heavy as they were in more solid epochs with a firmer belief in the eternal, as in Saqqara, as in Giza, for example.

The prison is an uncomfortable institution and its architecture is often subjugated to technocratic criteria. This servility forces the prison out of the sociocultural realm where it belongs, thus erasing it from public discourse. The invisibility of the penitentiary as an institution demonstrates an unresolved contradiction underlying contemporary society. We intend to explore this contradiction through architecture. A prison must respond to the demand for discipline (confinement) and liberty (reinsertion) at the same time. Within this complex framework, architecture can make use of its ability to synthetically articulate problems that seem contradictory to become an active agent in resolving the paradox of the contemporary penitentiary. Based on our experience with the Mas d’Enric penitentiary, we claim the prison as an object of critical design and we reclaim architecture’s role in multiplying possibilities as opposed to limiting them.

The hut was developed in design- and building workshops with students from the University of Technology in Trondheim following an international seminar about the future of eco-tourism in the Western Ghats region in India. The main aim was to find solutions that would benefit the local population specifically and the environment of the region in general.

From the very start it was clear that the landscape around the villa should be preserved as much as possible. A basement was created for the house and the ground floor is semi-positioned in the slope of the hill. The first floor towers above the partially glazed ground floor and the undulating dune landscape. Both the northerly and southerly facades of the first floor are largely made of glass, while the easterly and westerly facades have a more closed character. The closed facade areas on the first floor are made of coloured, sustainable timber.

For this project, a church-building had to be designed and built for 400 people, including a chapel which would cater for about 100 people to use it on a daily basis. A parish center also included offices, multipurpose rooms, classrooms for catechesis, two houses for priests and a guest room.

For this project, a moulding form coins the shape of space. According to this positive form, every space in the building alongside its scenery is being created as the negative counterpart to it. Moulding forms are usually being filled with liquid metal in order to shape a certain kind of part or product.

This is a house for a young couple and their child, located in Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture. Matsudo City has a background that has developed as a residential area on the outskirts of Tokyo from the 1960s. This house was planned the rebuilding of the house, which was built at that time. I seemed to have been asked to build a house as a new symbol in this place by a young family with the hope of the future.

This OYO story takes you to Wijgmaal, where a single-family house is conceived as a place without boundaries. Due to the use of a steel structure, you will experience the plan as open. The garden is the living room, the small lake, the bathroom. The kitchen you’ll find next door. OYO chose for a minimalistic approach, omitting fancy details. There is no need for ornament.

The clients’ desire was to live in a timber house. However, the challenging geology, the exceptional hillside location and the existing environment prompted us to design a solid construction in which the hard shell of the concrete facade encases and protects the soft core of the timber house. The prefabricated timber frame cassettes were erected, sealed and insulated on site and clad with single skin concrete. The timber construction stands as ‘a house in a house’. In combination with the concrete shell, it was possible to optimise its load bearing dimensions as it does not have to resist any shear forces.