Peter Zumthor completes Devon countryside villa “in the tradition of Andrea Palladio”
Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has completed his Secular Retreat – a Living Architecture holiday home designed to celebrate the landscape like the villas of his hero, Andrea Palladio. The house, which has been more than 10 years in the making, is Zumthor’s first permanent building in the UK. It is located on a hilltop in South Devon, England, where it commands an impressive view of the surrounding countryside.
Zumthor designed the house to be built from concrete rammed by hand – a technique that gives stripes to the walls, both inside and out. The thickness of this material is revealed by the large, deep window openings, designed to take full advantage of the setting.
Heatherwick Studio’s Coal Drops Yard in London’s King’s Cross was unveiled today ahead of the new shopping districts public opening on Friday, October 26. The studio reinvented two heritage rail buildings from the 1850s as a new shopping district while opening up the site to the public for the first time. The design extends the inner gabled roofs of Victorian coal drops to link the two viaducts together around shopping and public space
El Capricho, built in Comillas in the northern region of Cantabria in Spain in 1885, is one of Antoni Gaudí’s youth early works and is contemporary to the recently restored Vicens House in Barcelona. El Capricho is a small and beautiful hidden gem surrounded by a very unique landscape, one of Gaudí’s few buildings built outside Catalonia and that, like all the works of the Catalan architect, displays a great richness of detail and symbolism .
Surely one of the most surprising elements of El Capricho is the constant presence of ceramic tiles representing sunflowers, a plant impossible to find in the rainy region of Cantabria and that is placed on the facade to literally take the sun to the building, a house which is also oriented as a perfect solar compass following sunrise and sunset path to coincide with the domestic activities that take place into this home. The name of the building, El Capricho, evokes the freedom of style of the musical composition but also speaks of the Quijano’s desire to erect a building with such an extravagant look for the time in a place like Comillas –‘capricho’ is actually Spanish for’ whim’–.
Anonymous asked: ok so after going down a Arthur Erickson rabbit-hole, I'm curious; His firm is generally considered a Modernist one, correct? Their work included the Macmillan Bloedel building, and I've heard that described as Brutalist... is there any notable north american westcoast Brutalist works?
Yes,
Arthur Erickson is probably best described as a contextual Modernist with a preference for concrete (I will publish a post on his career later today).
Yes, here are some notable examples of West Coast Brutalist architecture:
