Architecture practice Thomas-McBrien extended a London house, adding a oak-lined reading nook and a utility room hidden behind a secret door along with a kitchen and dining space.
Pale, mortar-washed brick and lightly washed oak joinery were used, said the studio, to create a "calm and relaxing" space.
Called Dollis Hill Avenue, the project occupies a site that slopes down a total of 1.2 metres towards a rear garden.
The extension's design takes advantage of this by stepping down from the main house to create a split-level floor plan.
Running the full width of the existing property, the extension is one and a half floors below the existing ground floor.
A sliding, wood-framed door in the extension opens out onto a terrace formed by a set of wide, white steps that run is entire length.
In addition to the kitchen and dining area, the new extension provides a utility and storage room concealed behind a deep, timber-lined partition.
This room is accessed via a hidden door that blends in with the wooden wall finishes.
This partition doubles as a seating alcove, which wraps around the western end of the room to create a window seat overlooking the garden.
"The insertion of a deep seating alcove in the joinery offers a comfortable, sheltered enclosure – a perfect place to read and relax," said the studio.
The pale white bricks have been left exposed at the two ends of the new space, working with the pale oak joinery and wooden floors to create a "calm and relaxing everyday space."
The front of the home has been opened up to match the warm, muted palette of the extension.
A sliding door opens the living room onto a corridor that leads down a set of steps wooden into the new spaces.
Above, the bedrooms now overlook the new flat-roofed extension, creating a visual continuity from the white-rendered walls of the home down to the garden terrace and steps.
East London-based Thomas-McBrien was founded in 2017 by Barry McBrien, and the studio is currently working on a range of residential projects as well some temporary installations.
London architect Larissa Johnson recently made similar use of built-in wooden fittings for a home in Islington, which centred around a plywood core.
Architects: Thomas-McBrien – Barry McBrien, James Barber and Dominic Walker Main contractor: NWL Structural engineer: Constant SD Building control: Assent Building Control Party wall consultant: Roger Oakley & Co
New York City has introduced a bill that will rank and grade large buildings according to energy efficiency.
The Local Law 95 implemented by the New York Department of Buildings will require structures that are 25,000 square feet (2,322 square metres) and over to report publicly on their data energy and water use.
The protocol, which will come into action early 2020, is intended to encourage buildings to improve their energy efficiency standards. New scores will be produced every year taking into account any amends made to structures.
Buildings to be graded from A to F
Information on the building's energy use will be processed by an online tool created by the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star programme and turned into an "energy efficiency grade", rated from A to F, as reported by the New York Times.
The system will also take into consideration a building's size, type and number of occupants.
Buildings will then be required to post these grades in a clearly visible location, similar to how the city's restaurants are graded regarding cleanliness and code violations.
NYC tightens "energy efficiency" scoring
The rules of Local Law 95 stems from the 2018 city bill Local Law 33, which has since been revised with a stricter scoring system.
If a building score was equal to or greater than 20 but less than 50, then it would be graded a C. However, now the range is from 55 to 70.
Before, a D grade was given to those that scored less than 20, but now if they are less 55. An F, meaning failure, is given if the building owner has not complied in accordance with the rules.
An A grade, however, is now easier to get with the revised bill as the energy emission score is 85 or above rather than 90 or above.
Buildings responsible for 71 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions
Buildings, which are reportedly accountable for 71 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in New York, have become a focal point of the city's efforts to tackle greenhouse gas emissions in the face of the climate-change crisis.
Earlier this year, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled his proposal for the Green New Deal, which called for a ban on glass skyscrapers and fines for energy-guzzling high-rises.
De Blasio's announcement came shortly after the city passed the wider Climate Mobilization Act, comprising a series of bills to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate global warming. The goals include reducing the emissions by 40 per cent by 2030, and 80 per cent by 2050.
The city also launched a Zero Waste initiative, with guidelines encompassing construction waste management, recycling, composting and energy consumption for buildings.
Forms part of wider ambitions to tackle climate crisis
Environmental issues have similarly taken centre stage in the architecture industry across the US. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) stated the climate crisis was a "top priority" among its community and released a five-point plan to drive climate action.
The goals of the AIA have come at odds with US president Donald Trump. Last month, the AIA denounced Trump's decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate change agreement – which commits the world's nations to actions that could reduce global warming.
In 2018 the US organisation also called on its members to sign an open letter to Trump as a means of voicing its opposition to his climate change policies.
“The Rosebud Garden of Girls” by Julia Cameron. Virtual Library title: “Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs” by Julian Cox, Colin Ford, Joanne Lukitsh, and Philippa Wright
Over the last five years, the Los Angeles-based Getty Museum has developed a program to share more than three hundred books in its Virtual Library. Each unabridged volume, drawn from the Getty Publications Archive, has been cleared for copyright issues and is available for free download. Greg Albers, Digital Publications Manager for Getty Publications, shared with Hyperallergic that books in the Virtual Library have been downloaded 398,058 times to date. The initiative is a way to keep compelling and historically important books available even if they have, literally, gone out of print. Topics in the Virtual Library collection range from fine and decorative art genres to features on specific artists. Dive into diverse titles including “Art and Eternity: The Nefertari Wall Paintings Conservation Project 1986 – 1992” and “Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs”—among dozens and dozens of others on the Virtual Library Website. (via Hyperallergic)
“Pilgrim Flask and Cover with Marine Scenes” (circ 1565-1570), Workshop of Orazio Fontana, tin-glazed earthenware. Virtual Library title: “Italian Ceramics: Catalogue of the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection” by Catherine Hess
The body of Tesla's radical Cybertruck is made up of straight-edged facets. Here are some other examples of faceted architecture and design.
Designed by Tesla's chief designer Franz von Holzhausen, the radical pickup truck has a body that resembles a computer wireframe model or a polygon mesh. These are three-dimensional forms made up of flat polygons with straight edges.
The vehicle's exoskeleton is made of stainless steel, which is harder to stamp into shape like the regular steel used to made most car bodies. Instead, the Cybertruck's panels will be folded, leading to its faceted appearance.
Tesla's radical Cybertruck, which was unveiled last month, is covered in faceted surfaces
The resulting crisp, origami-like form is common in architecture, interiors and design. While polyhedrons – solid forms made up of polygonal faces – have featured in architecture since the pyramids, recent advances in computer modelling have allowed ever more complex planar forms to be realised.
Given their association with computer imagery, science fiction and the radar-evading F117 Nighthawk stealth bomber, objects made up of polygons have a futuristic feel to them, which explains the shock at Tesla's decision to use them on their entry into the staid pickup-truck market.
Other architects who have created buildings out of polygons include OMA, whose 121 East 22nd Street apartment tower in New York has faceted corners.
Footwear designer Rem Koolhaas also experimented with angular forms for this pair of 3D-printed shoes
Designers who have experimented with faceted products include Tom Dixon, whose 2013 Y Chair had a back resembling digitised rabbit ears, and footwear designer Rem D Koolhaas of United Nude, whose 3D-printed Ice and Float shoes resemble low-resolution screen images.
The 2013 Prima Installation by Zaha Hadid saw the architect's exploration of facets realised at a smaller scale, and resembled the spiky exploding forms of her early paintings.
Lo Res car by United Nude is a simplification of the classic Lamborghini Countach sports car. The conceptual object is part of a series of experiments that turned familiar objects into low-resolution polyhedrons.
Tesla's electric Cybertruck is billed as a radical redefinition of the car, but in fact draws on old-fashioned ideas of escape, argues Elizabeth Bisley, co-curator of the V&A museum's new exhibition about car design.
The prototype for Elon Musk's Cybertruck was launched in LA just over a week ago at a testosterone-fuelled event in Tesla's design centre. Visitors drove in past the home of the SpaceX project, skirting round Musk's latest rocket to arrive at the main event – a dry-ice- and laser-beam-filled bonanza that seemed to have borrowed its special effects from early 1980s sci-fi. But far from being a radical reimagining of the car, the design is a dystopian throwback to a time when car makers prioritised the individual and the open road ahead of them.
There was nothing (intentionally) camp or fun in this particular brand of nostalgic futurism though. As the Cybertruck drove on stage past shooting flames, audiences were treated to a pick-up seemingly fitted out for the apocalyptic age. Encased in thick, matt, rolled steel, the truck sits high on all-terrain wheels.
Its faceted body can be fully enclosed, with the truck bed (dubbed by Musk as the "vault") lockable under a retractable steel cover. The truck's design is like a mutant vision of 1930s streamlining, one that's taken the principles of aerodynamics and uninterrupted airflow to its most extreme point of enclosed capsule.
Audiences were treated to a pick-up seemingly fitted out for the apocalyptic age.
Musk has talked about the design being inspired in part by Blade Runner, and the Cybertruck's dramatic rendering of a hermetically sealed metal shell owes more than a little to fictional images of spaceships and flying cars. This is made explicit by links between the pick-up and designs produced under Tesla's SpaceX programme. The Cybertruck claims to be made from the same steel that forms the bodies of SpaceX rockets, and Musk has suggested that the truck's design anticipates life on Mars: ready for deployment once he manages to establish his promised colony on the red planet.
One of the Cybertruck's main selling points, as far as Musk and Tesla are concerned, is the incredible strength and resilience of both body and windows. This was demonstrated at the launch by chief designer Franz Von Holzhausen, who came out on stage to hit the car door with a sledgehammer – with no visible effect.
Things got a little more fun when Von Holzhausen threw steel balls at the truck's "armoured" windows. The two windows that he hit both (famously) shattered, causing Tesla shares to immediately drop and Lego to tweet the best reaction that the car has had so far.
In spite of the window break, the Cybertruck has landed with a pretty big bang. Musk claimed that 200,000 orders had been placed within 3 days of the launch and, as with all of his speculative schemes, it's attracted huge amounts of press and media attention. Much of the response to the pick-up has been focused on how radical the design is – the truck has been presented (by both its lovers and its haters) as a boundary-pushing vehicle, one whose prismatic steel form and extreme electric-powered speed and strength pushes towards a new kind of automotive future.
It was this romance of speed that contributed most forcefully to the triumph of petrol over electric engines in the early 20th century.
This is despite the fact that, within both the long and the short history of car design, the Cybertruck represents nothing so much as a highly conservative continuation of the status quo. Since the late 19th-century, when the earliest motorised vehicles began to be produced, the car has been one of the main tools through which artists, designers, writers and filmmakers have envisaged the future.
Within this set of images, which ranges from science fiction to speculative design projects, cars have almost always been pictured in the same way – fast and free-moving. Although early car designers were hugely interested in the possibilities of other forms of motive power, in particular electricity, it was this romance of speed, and of being able to drive off-road into the wilderness, that contributed most forcefully to the triumph of petrol over more infrastructure-reliant electric engines in the early 20th century.
Tesla's Cybertruck may be electric-powered, but it is locked into the exact same myths that have fuelled the petrol car since the 1890s.
Tesla's Cybertruck may be electric-powered, but it is nonetheless locked into the exact same myths that have fuelled the petrol car since the 1890s. The pick-up is designed to be extremely fast and extremely self-sufficient.
Buyers can choose between a one-, two- or three-motor model – increasing their power and speed with each upgrade. Tesla's marketing spiel emphasises the distance that can be covered between battery charges, making the very clear point that driving a Cybertruck will not cut down (in any way) on the age-old promise of the open road.
In the case of the Cybertruck, this freewheeling mobility is taken to an almost rabid extreme. The design of the pick-up, with its bulletproof body and windows, its totally sealed enclosure, and its hyped-up engine power, suggests extremely dystopian driving conditions. Is Musk looking for a market of Californian survivalists? The truck seems the vehicular equivalent of a nuclear bomb shelter – privately-owned and designed for individual survival, in possibly dire conditions, outside of any cogent societal order.
After 130 years of history, the form and function of the car is currently under an increasingly urgent pressure to change. Although the most immediate need is for a move away from the combustion engine and its catastrophic environmental effects, designers, architects and town planners are also increasingly thinking about the social impact of the car.
The promise that everyone will be able to drive their own car is one that surely cannot last the next decades.
Not only do cars result in huge numbers of deaths each year (pedestrian deaths alone have increased dramatically in the US over the past 10 years), cities built for cars are often inhospitable, unhealthy, inequitable environments. The promise that everyone will be able to drive their own car is one that surely cannot last the next decades, and in order for this to change, the car's mythic underpinning in an image of motorised, off-grid adventure must also disappear.
Tesla's Cybertruck is explicitly styled on an old-fashioned image of the future. Alongside Blade Runner, Musk cites design inspiration from the Lotus Esprit car/submarine that starred in the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. Both films imagine the future of the car as a highly individualised and powerful technology.
Rather than offering an alternative to existing designs, Musk pushes these ideas to newly dehumanised heights. Instead of angular steel forms on a tank-like pick-up, what we really need in future car design is a radically new approach to the relationship between technologies of mobility and the environments and societies in which they operate.
