Carolina Tamayo | Looking Out Week 9

314 Architecture Studio design this beautiful residential home in Athens, Greece.  It hovers over a pool to give the sense of sailing, which was inspired by the owners passion for yachts.

Link: http://aasarchitecture.com/2013/01/h3-house-by-314-architecture-studio.html

Alyssa Hamilton: Looking Out Week 9

Tautra Monastery.

This building is meant to make cool light pattern on the interior through the wood and give a lightness to the monastery's inside that the outside lacks.

Quresh Tyebji: Looking Out Week 9

This wooden pavilion is another great example of how parametric wood design comes into play. It also shows how flexible and scalable wood can be. Using its simple and unique quality, and with the help of technology, it shows how clean wood can be. The Institute for Computational Design (ICD) and the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) at the University of Stuttgart came together to create this design. They were inspired by the biological principles of a sea urchin’s “plate skeleton morphology.” It’s built with very thin sheets of plywood; in addition, the play with light also brings about a certain ambiance that reflects the biological morphology of the subject.

(http://www.realwowz.net/2013/03/parametric-wood-architecture-germany.html)

How it’s made: (http://super-architects.com/archives/1731)

Candace Ju | Looking Out Week 9

This is a parasite structure made of timber beams. The architects started with the exterior stair and went off the stair to derive the geometry. I like this project as you can see the structure of the timber through the slats of the timber beams, as well as its symbiotic parasitic nature. I also really like the colors and how they play off the existing colors. 

http://inhabitat.com/plasma-studio-builds-parasite-home-on-top-of-a-60s-house-in-italy/plasma-studio-parasite-house-esker-haus-2/?extend=1

Danielle Lehmann: Looking Out Week 9

Here is another tree house installment, this time by Inrednin Gsgruppen. This tree house looks like a giant nest resting on three existing trees in Sweden. It's called the Bird Nest and it's a part of the Swedish Tree Hotel, which actually consists of many different types of tree houses which have several separate bedrooms. This hotel has five rooms inside its cozy branch covered walls. The only way to get up into the hotel is to climb a ladder - the likes of which can be retracted into the nest to complete its nest-like appearance (and to keep out anyone who may be unwanted). The hotel is a cylinder disguised by hundreds of fallen tree branches that were collected for the facade. There are a few windows in the hotel that are more alike to portholes then full blown windows. From the outside one can barely see them, but from inside they give the traveler a very unique perspective on the world that is suddenly underneath them. Myself and the moose in the elevation drawing aren't the only ones intrigued by this hotel because twenty more of these Bird Nest Hotels are to appear over the next two years. 

Liz Dolinar: Looking Out Week 9

This is the Treepod Dining as part of a villa resort on the island of Koh Kood, Thailand, by Olav Bruin and 24H Architecture with Louis Thompson. The wood construction of each "treepod" was built entirely independently from the trees on the island and rest without hardware attachments to the trees. These pods provide a great experience for guests at the resort, who can dine under the canopy and enjoy a great view from above. The wood structures of both the dining pods and the resort rooms give an authentic feel to the island experience and look like a very natural material.