Category: Contemporary & Conceptual

Project Overview

The brief calls for a surf club that is extraverted, social, and open to the public: a building where the line between interior and exterior is deliberately blurred, where the beach comes inside and the music reaches the water. This is architecture for pleasure, and it takes that brief as seriously as any civic commission. The building must work at multiple speeds — the slow time of a morning coffee watching the dawn surf, and the fast time of a Saturday evening when the DJ is playing and the terrace is full.

Design Philosophy

The building is conceived as a threshold: a covered zone between land and sea, between the city behind and the beach in front, between public life and the private ritual of the surf. It is not a wall that separates these conditions but a device that mediates between them — a building you pass through rather than arrive at.

The formal strategy is a deep covered deck elevated above the beach on slender steel columns, with the full programme of the club — bar, kitchen, changing rooms, surf hire, DJ booth, and administration — arranged along its inland edge, leaving the entire seaward face open to the sea breeze, the sound of the waves, and the view of the surf. The deck is the primary public space: 50 m long and 10 m deep, it accommodates standing crowds, cafe tables, sunbeds, and dancing simultaneously.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Hot-dip galvanized steel frame throughout, designed for a coastal salt-spray environment. Primary columns are circular hollow sections (219 mm diameter) at 5 m centres, driven directly into the beach at low tide. The deck structure is a steel grillage of I-beams at 1.5 m centres, topped with iroko hardwood decking (25 mm boards with 5 mm open joints for drainage and sand clearance).

Roof: A folded steel plate roof (3 mm corten, pre-weathered) shelters the inland zone while leaving the seaward third of the deck open to the sky. The fold of the roof creates a high clerestory on the inland face that illuminates the interior of the service zone with indirect north light, while the low edge of the roof at the seaward side frames the horizon in a wide panoramic slot.

Enclosure: The service zone (bar, kitchen, changing rooms) is enclosed in a skin of perforated corten steel panels that allow air circulation while providing privacy for the changing facilities. Openings in the corten skin are generous where the programme demands visibility (bar frontage, surf hire window) and minimal where it demands privacy (showers, toilets).

Sound: The DJ booth is positioned at the east end of the deck, elevated 600 mm above deck level on a low platform, with direct sightlines the full length of the building. A distributed speaker system of weatherproof marine-grade drivers is integrated into the roof structure, providing even sound coverage across the deck without the need for large speaker stacks that would interrupt the view.

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

The plan is linear: 50 m along the beach frontage, 14 m deep (10 m deck + 4 m service zone). Reading from west to east: surf hire and equipment store (ground level, beneath the deck) → main changing rooms and showers → kitchen and servery → bar with full-length counter facing the deck → DJ booth and event space at the east end. The administration office and first aid room are on a mezzanine above the kitchen, accessible by an external steel stair.

A second stair at the west end of the deck descends to the beach, wide enough for people carrying boards and wetsuits. The underside of the deck (between the columns) is a sheltered zone used for board racks, outdoor showers, and informal seating in wet weather — a continuation of the building’s programme into the beach itself.

The section reveals the key spatial relationship: the high ceiling of the deck (5.4 m clear) contrasted with the compressed service zone (2.7 m), the transition between them marked by the fold of the corten roof. The deck is 1.2 m above beach level, accessed by three wide steps along its full seaward edge — steps that double as informal seating for watching the surf.

Project Overview

This is speculative urbanism at its most ambitious: a vision for a capitol city — not the renovation of an existing one, but the conception of a new one from first principles. The project asks what it would mean to design a seat of government and culture today with the same conviction, formal ambition, and civic seriousness that drove the great capital cities of history — Haussmann’s Paris, L’Enfant’s Washington, Lutyens’ New Delhi. It is a question that cuts to the heart of what we believe architecture can and should do in a democratic society.

Design Philosophy

The vision rejects the twin failures of contemporary civic design: the timid historicism that produces facsimiles of past grandeur, and the corporate modernism that produces civic buildings indistinguishable from office parks. Instead, it draws on both the formal traditions of the great capitol cities and the spatial innovations of contemporary urbanism to produce something genuinely new.

The central organizing device is the grand axis — a device as old as the avenue de l’Opéra and as contemporary as the Champs-Élysées re-imagined as a pedestrian boulevard. The axis is not merely ceremonial; it is the spine of a mixed-use city that integrates government, culture, commerce, and residence in a continuous urban fabric. The capitol building itself sits at one end of the axis, not as a terminus but as a hinge between the formal city and the natural landscape beyond.

Technical Specifications

Urban Structure: The city is organized on a modified Baroque grid, with a primary axis 60 m wide (carriageway, cycle paths, and planted median) flanked by secondary streets at 30 m width. City blocks are 120 m × 80 m, large enough for interior courtyards but small enough for pedestrian permeability.

Building Heights: A strict height control limits all buildings except designated civic monuments to 30 m (approximately 8 storeys). This creates a consistent urban cornice line across the city, broken only by the domes, spires, and towers of major public buildings, which can rise to 80–120 m.

Capitol Building: The central government building is a massive civic structure occupying an entire city block (120 m × 120 m) on a raised podium. Its architecture combines a stone base (granite and travertine), a mid-section of expressed concrete structure and glass, and a crown of oxidized copper that reads from across the city as a luminous green beacon. The building is entered through a colonnade of 20 m-high stone columns that encircles the podium on all four sides.

Public Realm: The design allocates 40% of the city’s surface area to public space: boulevards, parks, piazzas, and arcaded streets. No building is more than 100 m from a significant public open space.

Blueprint & Urban Plan Notes

The master plan drawing shows the primary axis running north–south for 3 km from the capitol to a great public park at the southern edge of the city. Along its length, six major civic buildings — the national library, the supreme court, the national theatre, the museum of history, the gallery of contemporary art, and the central market hall — are set on axis or flanking the boulevard in symmetrical pairs.

The residential quarters occupy the city blocks to the east and west of the civic axis, organized as perimeter blocks with active ground-floor uses and private or semi-public courtyards above. The street network within the residential quarters is deliberately irregular, creating a contrast between the formal civic spine and the more human-scaled grain of daily urban life.

Project Overview

The brief is precise and challenging in equal measure: a complete dwelling within a footprint of 12 feet by 30 feet (approximately 3.65 m × 9.15 m), organized around a curved plan geometry. The constraint of the footprint is not unusual for urban infill or rural micro-housing; what is unusual here is the decision to work with curves in a context where straight lines and right angles dominate. The result is a spatial experience that feels expansive despite its compact dimensions.

Design Philosophy

The curve is not ornamental. It is deployed strategically to resolve three problems simultaneously. First, it eliminates the dead corners that are the enemy of small-plan efficiency: a curved wall has no corners to accumulate clutter or interrupt the flow of space. Second, the curve creates directionality within the long, narrow plan — as you move through the house from entry to the far end, the curving walls subtly guide you, creating a sense of journey and discovery that a straight corridor cannot. Third, the curves allow each zone of the plan to have a distinct character — expansive where the curve opens outward, intimate where it closes inward — without the need for walls or doors to separate them.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Light-gauge steel framing throughout, curved to the plan geometry using CNC-cut steel studs with pre-bent flanges. The curved walls are sheathed in double-layered gypsum board, wet-bent to the required radius. The floor structure is a steel joist system spanning the 12-foot width, seated on a continuous perimeter foundation beam.

Exterior: The exterior expression of the curved plan is a continuous shell of pre-finished fibre cement panels, applied to a thermally broken metal subframe. The panels are cut to follow the plan curves, creating a smooth, seamless exterior surface. The roofline follows a simple gable form, providing volume for a loft or storage level above the main floor.

Dimensions: 12 ft (3.66 m) wide × 30 ft (9.14 m) long. Main floor approximately 33 m²; loft level (partial) approximately 12 m²; total habitable area approximately 45 m².

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

Entry at the short end of the plan opens into a combined living and dining space. The south wall curves outward here, maximizing the perceived width of the room and creating a south-facing bay for seating or a small dining table. Moving deeper into the plan, a kitchen occupies the mid-section, with curved cabinetry that mirrors the wall geometry. A bathroom is tucked into the narrowest point of the plan, where the north wall curves inward to create a sheltered recess.

The far end of the plan is the bedroom: a private zone separated from the kitchen by a curved sliding screen rather than a fixed partition. The bedroom benefits from windows on both the end wall and the long east elevation, giving it a cross-ventilated, corner-room quality despite being entirely within the linear envelope.

The loft above is accessed by a ship’s-ladder stair tucked against the north wall between the kitchen and bathroom. It provides 12 m² of sleeping or storage space under the gable, with a small fixed window at the ridge for light and ventilation.

Project Overview

The L-shaped plan is one of architecture’s most versatile and underexplored spatial moves. At its best, the L creates two things simultaneously: a sheltered outdoor room in the interior angle, protected from wind and open to the sky; and a building form that can navigate a sloping site without the awkward compromises of a rectangular box placed on changing ground. This project places an L-shaped house on a south-facing slope, using the form to its full advantage.

Design Philosophy

The two arms of the L are treated as distinct but related buildings. The longer arm, running east–west along the contours, contains the social spaces of the house — living room, dining room, kitchen — with a continuous south-facing glazed wall that captures the full panorama of the slope below. The shorter arm, perpendicular to the first and stepping down with the hillside, contains the bedrooms and service spaces. The junction of the two arms is the entry threshold: a compressed, sheltered point from which the full spatial sequence of the house opens out.

The interior angle of the L faces south and slightly west, creating a sheltered terrace that is the primary outdoor living space. It is protected from the north and east winds by the body of the building itself, and it receives sun from mid-morning to evening. A low stone retaining wall at its southern edge defines the terrace from the slope below, and a shallow water feature in the angle of the L marks the meeting point of the two volumes.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Reinforced concrete retaining walls at the uphill edges of both arms, with timber post-and-beam construction for the downhill elevations. The contrast between the solid, heavy uphill wall and the light, glazed downhill facade is the primary spatial and tectonic idea of the house.

Facade: Uphill (north/east) elevations: board-formed concrete, minimally glazed, functioning as a retaining and thermal mass wall. Downhill (south/west) elevations: full-height glazing in a timber curtain wall system, with deep overhanging eaves to control solar gain.

Roofing: Low mono-pitch roof on each arm, draining outward to the south and west. Green roof on the bedroom wing, planted with low sedum and grasses that blend with the natural vegetation of the slope.

Floor Area: Social wing approximately 110 m²; bedroom wing approximately 95 m²; total approximately 205 m² plus 40 m² of covered terrace.

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

The plan is single-storey throughout but occupies three distinct levels as it steps down the hillside. The entry level contains the social wing (kitchen, dining, living) at the highest point of the site, with direct access to the terrace. Two steps down: the master bedroom suite, occupying the upper end of the bedroom wing, with its own terrace facing south. A further three steps down: two additional bedrooms, a bathroom, and a utility room at the lowest level of the house, where a secondary entrance connects to the driveway and parking area below.

The section is the key drawing for this project. It reveals the stepped relationship between floor levels, the changing ceiling heights (from 3.2 m in the living room to 2.4 m in the bedrooms), and the way the retaining walls tie the building to the hillside. The structural engineer’s drawings show the concrete retaining walls acting simultaneously as foundations, thermal mass, and retaining structures for the soil behind them.

Project Overview

This project is a direct application of Kenneth Frampton’s theory of Critical Regionalism — the idea that contemporary architecture must resist the placeless universalism of late capitalism by anchoring itself in the particularities of topography, climate, light, and tectonic tradition. The building is an apartment block: a typology that has, in its worst manifestations, become the emblem of architectural indifference. This project insists that the apartment block can be otherwise — that density and specificity are not in conflict.

Design Philosophy

Frampton identifies several strategies through which Critical Regionalism operates: the use of topography to anchor the building; the mediation of natural light as a primary design element; the tactile and haptic quality of materials; and the use of local building tradition as a resource rather than a costume. This project engages all four. The building is set into its site rather than placed upon it; its orientation and section are calibrated to the specific sun path and prevailing winds of its location; its surfaces reward close inspection — textured brick, board-formed concrete, and hand-laid tile; and its structural logic derives from a regional tradition of load-bearing masonry.

The result is a building that could not have been built anywhere else. That is the measure of its success.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Cross-laminated timber (CLT) floor plates spanning between load-bearing brick shear walls. The CLT is left exposed on the soffit in all apartments, providing a warm, textured ceiling surface and eliminating the need for a suspended ceiling system. The brick shear walls are expressed on the exterior as the primary organizational element of the façade.

Facade: Handmade brick, laid in a Flemish bond pattern with slightly recessed joints to emphasize the texture of the individual units. Brick colour varies subtly across the facade, from warm ochre at the base to a cooler buff at the upper levels, responding to the way natural light changes with height. Balconies are formed as cantilevered CLT slabs with no visible steel supports, maintaining the purity of the brick facade.

Windows: Deep-set timber-framed windows with external timber shutters. The depth of the reveal — minimum 300 mm — creates strong shadow lines that give the facade its three-dimensional quality and provide solar shading without mechanical systems.

Building Height: Six storeys over ground-floor commercial, total height approximately 22 m. Gross floor area approximately 3,600 m² across 28 apartments (mix of 1, 2, and 3 bedroom units).

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

The plan is a double-loaded corridor type, with apartments on both sides of a central access corridor. The corridor is not treated as a residual space — it is generously wide (2.4 m), naturally lit by end windows at each level, and lined with communal niches that encourage incidental social interaction. Every apartment has a dual aspect: windows on both the street side and the courtyard side ensure cross-ventilation and prevent any unit from being entirely inward-facing.

The ground floor is set back from the street line to create a covered arcade that protects the commercial frontages from sun and rain. The arcade columns are load-bearing brick piers that continue the structural logic of the upper floors to the ground. A central vehicular and pedestrian passage through the building connects the street to the communal courtyard at the rear.

The courtyard is the social heart of the scheme: 18 m × 12 m, south-facing, with shared garden space, cycle storage, and a communal laundry and workshop at ground level. Section drawings show the courtyard receiving sunlight to the ground level for at least four hours per day throughout the year — a minimum standard that fundamentally shapes the section of the building.