Today we travel to Andalusia to show you the architecture of Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas, a professional outside the media publicity with a strong production, minimalist, conceptual and extremely attached to his hometown of Granada.

Jiménez Torrecillas (1962) is passionate about their land and their customs: “I live in the world, but every night I sleep in Granada,” he said.

Project works as a professor in the School of Architecture of Granada, but travels frequently at universities around the world provided a visiting lecturer.

Since his first built work, the Centro José Guerrero (Granada, 1991-2000), this discreet design and shows us her exceptional ability to keep the leitmotiv of every project from start to finish. This first work, awarded to the Best Intervention in Historical, reveals his mastery of Andalusia in the best way to rehabilitate an old building located in the center of a city with much history as is Granada. This work demonstrates the ability to recognize Jiménez Torrecillas always the historical value of their interventions and interpreting these values in a respectful and contemporary.

Proof of this is also its exemplary action in the High Albaicín Nazari wall (Granada, 2002), winner of numerous national and international awards. In this project the Granada wisely used natural stone and enhances their chances with a series of porous walls that allow light to pass through smoothly. As can be seen in the images in this article the author returns delicately tracing and volume of the wall and a reconstruction that moves away from historical mimicry with subtlety and humility.

With the restoration of the “Tower of Homage in Huesca” (Granada, 2008), the architect also manages to combine past and present in a perfect combination. This work was the retrieval of an ancient tower formerly used as military observation point. To do this, Torres set up its intervention on the remains of the building with the aim of transforming the old building in a new location from which to watch the fabulous views from the town of Granada. Thus, the author recovers the previous function of the tower, but gives new conditions that convert the building into a public urban piece and interesting to visit.

Torres Jimenez’s creations also expressed their longevity and successful aging, since it does not deform over the years. In fact, the discretion of their interventions are usually evergreen materials that nature is often part of the constructions of the architect.

But the history of Granada is beyond rehabilitation and interventions in historic building. Jiménez Torrecillas is a complete and versatile professional with projects as varied as the original showroom for the fashion minimalist Dal Bat or “House Escudero” in Benidorm that we show below.

Architecture of sculptural beauty, quiet and conceptual based on the order and clarity.

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Ma Yansong is the founder of MAD, is a native of Beijing and received his Master of Architecture from Yale University in 2002. Before founding MAD in 2004, Ma Yansong worked as project designer with Zaha Hadid Architects in London and Eisenman Architect in New York.

MAD is an architectural design studio dedicated to creating innovative projects. Combines sophisticated design philosophy with advanced technology in the exploration of contemporary architecture, landscape design and urban planning.

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The Villa is set designer houses, a draft GmbH and the studio of Daniel Libeskind. The Villa is a German prefabricated house is built with the finest raw materials, a sculptural home that meets the highest standards of design, development and sustainability. The Villa Series are unique in where they are seen, providing maximum insulation and durability, innovative technology and meeting the highest standards for energy savings worldwide. La Villa, which can be shipped and assembled anywhere, including a solar thermal system and a sauna in the basement.

According to the sellers of La Villa, is available as a limited edition of 30 homes around the world and comes with regional exclusivity. It’s the future owner who strongly on the location, but whether an urban setting, a beautiful coast or a mountain landscape, the Villa will become one with their environment and ultimately, a focal point in itself.

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Loft San Marino is located in an intermediate context that combines two adjacent residential areas of Caracas that have municipal services that enable features such as mix of programmatic involvement pedestrian built building block from the housing supply . The building housing implements 9 cells that provide space benefits of a traditional single family home (patios, gardens, balconies and terraces) to the condominium model. Set in a plot of 710 m2 where once stood a single house in recent years had an advanced state of deterioration, this intervention was an act of urban renewal.

Experimental housing unit Loft San Marino is a building designed as a hybrid of metal and concrete structure. The construction system was conceived from the use of convertible components that provide the ability to expand or contract the program connecting interior and exterior of the building and making a body perfectly permeable. It was designed entirely digitally warping, twisting and layering alternately a modular grid of editable poly. Morphology consists of a cross-band system that generates green areas, no disposed below the other.

Each terrace has its individuality, privacy and autonomy, distancing themselves from the others by a mezzanine. We used modeling techniques and digital dissection allowed to make a taxonomic analysis of the building. By means of structural calculation software and forces applied from the deformation of the slabs resulting minima were located on the joist struts lattice potential.

This strategy succeeded in reducing the number of docking points and gets a free peripheral edge of structural impediments. Similarly decreased the number of foundations and what infrastructure optimized in terms of investment made it possible to propose a new housing alternative.

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The Broadcasting Place is a mixed-use development near the center of the city of Leeds. Conceived as a partnership between public and private, for the group Downing and Leeds Metropolitan University, which delivers approximately 10,200 m2 of new offices and teaching spaces along with 240 student residences in an iconic building of 23 floors. A new Baptist Church completes the package at its northern end.

The buildings are designed as solid forms of a landscape that is drawn on the rich heritage of the Yorkshire Geological and sculpture. The lower buildings reach a height of three contiguous block of flats, adjacent to the buildings of five floors. Tallest buildings ranging from 8 floors to six floors before reaching the highest point in complex with 23 floors. The strong roof surface was reflected in the mass of buildings that have a triangular shaped corners and projections sculptures. Through these solid forms, the windows were designed as the flow of water cascading over a rock formation. This design seeks to be reinforced by the choice of cor-ten steel as a solid material, sculptural and temporal, built as a front generated by a display of rain.

The development overcomes the challenges of a complicated field with a master plan that considers a highway in the city throughout the land while allowing for future growth. This location is key in Leeds and a major new public space linking urban areas to form a significant landscape element.

A key success of the complex is the innovative approach for the design of each lift. We develop our own software to generate a rigorous computational analysis of each section of the building facades. The result is a varied appearance for all, optimizing daylight and reduces solar penetration.

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The headquarters of the Department of Health Basque ruled was designed by architectural firm coll Barreu. The structure was completed in 2008, is one of the most outstanding examples of progressive architecture in Europe.

The building, located in Bilbao, is described as a very effective mechanism for the integration of urban vitality in the interior of the building in a city that is perceived as a multi-directional motion vectors. The facade is also a double skin that responds to the needs of energy saving, allowing the removal of traditional air conditioning systems and false ceilings, heat insulating, reducing noise and letting in natural light.

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The four-story structure was not constructed at this site in 1900 for no reason. The Buffalo Lounge Co., for which the building was erected, chose this precise location because of the geography of the Hydraulics at the intersection of several rail lines, including the Erie and New York Central. The Buffalo Lounge Co. was directly linked to both lines via a rail bed that once existed behind the building.

The wholesale furniture company, which sold wares in bulk from catalogue to dealer only, was part of a network of rail-connected, large-scale manufacturers that made the Hydraulics an impressive center of industry at the turn of the century. At this site the firm built lounges, couches, adjustable end divans, bed lounges, wardrobes, and bed couches to be shipped by rail to dealers across the United States.

The unique position of the building at one of the country’s largest rail intersections equally benefited the Craver-Dickinson Seed Co., which occupied the building around 1933 and sold seeds worldwide from this location for decades. Today, the building does not serve its original purpose as a traditional manufactory linked by rail, and the building’s adaptability and durable construction have assured its new lease on life. Owned by investor Chris Jacobs of 567 Exchange Street LLC, the building now houses several creative industries tenants, including, as it happens, a few very cool businesses that sell furniture.

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Mayor Byron Brown today unveiled an effort to overhaul Buffalo’s antiquated zoning code, an initiative that may prove particularly relevant to future development efforts in the Hydraulics. Brian Reilly, the Mayor’s Commissioner of Economic Development, announced the City’s plans in an editorial in today’s Buffalo News.

Buffalo’s zoning ordinance was last updated in 1951, the year Harry Truman declared an official end to the wars with Japan and Germany, Judie Garland was singing in concerts at New York’s Palace Theatre, the UNIVAC 1 was first manufactured by Remington Rand, and the television show I Love Lucy debuted on CBS. The year Buffalo’s zoning code was written is one in which the American cultural ethos favored a future destined for cars, highways, and suburban expansion, and where the future no longer had room for the tightly-knit, walkable character of traditional neighborhoods.

Take Seneca Street (above), as an example. It’s a place that historically has housed a mix of many uses – theaters, photography studios, canvas manufacturers, diners, carriage factories, residential apartments, print shops, saloons, candy stores… you name it. It’s also a street whose building forms traditionally followed a few simple rules of design: buildings front the sidewalk, ground floors are permeable, parking is placed at the sides, the rear, or on the street. Instead of reinforcing historic streetscapes, the 1951 zoning code, if implemented as written, essentially calls for the following physical vision for Seneca Street:

Most of the Hydraulics is governed by a blanket M1 (Light Manufacturing) zoning category, which, as it happens, addresses specific permitted uses such as coal trestles, livery stables, and “carnival, circus or similar transient amusement enterprises.” The regulations are clearly a throwback to a bygone era. Meanwhile, the M1 designation does not sufficiently address important issues of urban design that are critical in strengthening the walkability and street life of a neighborhood, or of struggling, traditionally mixed-use districts like Seneca Street.
If development were to follow the existing zoning code accurately, Seneca Street over time would adopt the appearance of a low-value, suburban industrial park with austere buildings set back behind deep parking lots (like the example above), an outcome that is completely permissible and encouraged under M1. Existing development trajectories in the neighborhood, however, anticipate a better outcome. The Hydraulics, and much of Buffalo, is slated for planned development that aims to resurrect walkable neighborhoods, but is not yet assisted by a code that strengthens walkability. Mayor Brown is out to change that.

Instead of the uninspired future the 1951 zoning code currently calls for in the Hydraulics, imagine something like the vision crafted for a similar industrial district in Peoria, Illinois, following a new form-based code adopted in the neighborhood:

The mayor is now taking the extraordinary step of setting Buffalo on a path to 21st century urban development that embraces mixed uses, walkability, and quality urban design. A simple, intuitive form-based code, the mayor’s economic development commissioner now argues, would demystify land use regulation, thereby helping attract new investment and empowering the community to codify an achievable vision for future development. It’s good news for the Hydraulics, and it’s good news for all of Buffalo.

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This week, the highlight is the fence pier of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building, built in 1904 and demolished in 1950, with the exception of this one lone artifact. The fence pier, on Swan Street, is all that remains of Wright’s masterpiece, what was considered by architecture critic Henry-Russel Hitchcock to be “the most important building ever demolished in the 20th century.”

The pier was an obscure piece of urban archaeology until local Larkin buffs, among them Jerry Puma, succeeded in 2003 in seeing the pier restored to some semblance of its original state. Prior to the restoration, the few Wright experts in the know were chipping away at the pier to get their own souvenir of the Wright icon. The fence pier, not actually a pier of the building, but a pier of the fence that surrounded it, was perhaps a tangible enough connection to the complex to merit, in their minds, such incremental acts of destruction.

Here’s a ponderous thought for our readers: Why was this fragment spared? When everything else was smashed and pummeled, why was this left behind? One wonders… did the demolition contractors step back, after destroying a world-significant artwork, and seeing that all that was left was part of a fence, decide to keep this solitary remnant for future generations to rediscover? Is this the only evidence of their sense of guilt?

Or are these questions too charitable? Is the real story that the contractors simply ran out of money after expending far more than they ever imagined to demolish what was meant to last for centuries, and said “the hell with it” when the job was nearly finished?

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The joint conceptual and design element of the handball hall and the Zamet Centre are ‘ribbons’ stretching in a north-south direction, simultaneously functioning as an architectural design element of the objects and as a zoning element which forms a public square and a link between the north – park-school and the south – the street. One third of the hall’s volume is built into the terrain, and the building with its public and service facilities has been completely integrated into the terrain, i.e. it creates it with its ‘ribbons’.

The public space on the roof is not only a feature of the building in the business part of the centre, but the roof of the hall is also used as a kind of an extension of the park situated to the north of the hall. The hall has been designed for major international sports competitions, in compliance with state-of-the-art world sports standards. The design of the hall has been conceived as a very flexible space.

The auditorium has been designed as a system with telescopic stands, which open and adapt to the kind of competition and the number of spectators; at major competitions 2100 spectators have seating places by opening all the stands. The architecture of public facilities, the shopping centre, the library and the local authority stands out in the topography of the terrain, connecting the square in front of the hall and in front of the school and tries to integrate into the overall existing context of western Zamet.

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