School in Lisbon by ARX Portugal features rooftop playground

Redbridge School in Lisbon by ARX Portugal is formed of two wood-framed buildings clad with metal, one featuring a playground on its roof.

Located at two ends of a dense site, the new structures sit either side of a pre-existing building.

"The building site was small and quite peculiar in shape – two opposite fronts of a city block, connected by a narrow strip surrounding an existing villa at the centre of the plot," said ARX Portugal.

"These constraints set the grounds for a conceptual path of two opposite building typologies unified by a common structural system and building materials – the north is part of the city while the south is engaged with the garden."

The larger building to the north houses the main programme of the school, with a canteen at ground floor level and classrooms above.

On the top floor, a large, multifunctional space serves as an events space, gymnasium and an indoor playground.

Large windows provide views of the city below and dormer window-style vents circulate fresh air.

The northern elevation faces directly onto the street with a run of windows for the classrooms on each level, the brown metal-clad upper storeys sitting atop a pale stone-clad base that curves around the street corner.

Facing southwards, the building overlooks a thin, planted strip between the school and the villa.

A glazed cut through the eastern gable end creates an irregularly-shaped lightwell and entrance area, aligning with the internal corridors to draw in natural light.

At the southern end of the site, a smaller pavilion building houses kindergarten classrooms and a small teacher's space.

Its distinctive web-shaped plan curves inwards to accommodate the site's many existing trees.

The lower level of this pavilion has been left glazed, opening the classrooms onto a green, landscaped area with stepped stone seating.

Above, the upper storey is clad in the same brown metal at the main building.

On the roof, wooden decking provides an additional play area as well as skylights that illuminate the spaces below.

Both buildings are unified by their wooden structures, with chunky columns and roof beams left exposed on the interiors.

"Wood was selected at an early stage as the main structural and internal finishing materials due to the inherent message of its sustainable impact on nature, its warm atmosphere and the speed of construction," said the studio.

"We had one year to think of and build this school," said the practice.

Lisbon-based ARX Portugal was founded by Nuno and José Mateus in 1991.

Previous projects include a beachside civic centre on Costa Nova, and a concrete market building in the town of Abrantes.

Photography is by FG + SG – Fotografia de Arquitectura

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Project credits:

Client: Redbridge School
Architect: ARX Portugal
Architecture team: 
Nuno Mateus
, José Mateus

Collaborators: Ana Sofia Amador, André Pires, Raquel Serralheiro, Marcelo Cardia
Foundations, structures and installations: SAFRE, Estudos e Projectos de Engenharia
Landscape architecture: Traços na Paisagem
Construction: Alves Ribeiro

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Recycled plastic turned into face shields and hands-free door handles to fight coronavirus

Recycling initiative Precious Plastic's open-source machines are being used to recycle plastic and turn it into face shields, respirator masks and hands-free door handles to fight coronavirus.

Designers and makers that use the Precious Plastic machines are repurposing them to make items needed by local health care workers.

Groups in Germany, Spain, Greece, Austria and Switzerland are using the open-source machines, which shred and remould old plastic, to make face shields, masks for ventilators and handles that allow the user to open a door without touching it.

Recycled plastic is being turned into visors. Photo by Plasticpreneur

Precious Plastic La Safor and Precious Plastic Gran Canaria have been making and sharing designs for visors that sit on the forehead and hold plastic shields over the wearer's face.

"A Precious Plastic workspace in Gran Canaria was requested to provide over 3,000 face visors for the government, hospitals and private sector," said Precious Plastics member Rory Dickens.

Their injection moulding machines can manufacture personal protective equipment (PPE) 75 times faster than a 3D printer explained Dickens, who co-founded UK nonprofit Recycle Rebuild.

Face shields protect the wearer and their mask. Photo by Plasticpreneur

In Germany, the Kunststoffschmiede plastic recycling workshop is using its machines to make 20,000 visors for the Dresden area. Plasticpreneur in Austria, which makes machines for the project, has also gone into mass production.

These face shields protect the wearer from infectious droplets spattering on them and help keep their face masks dry. Medical-grade N95 or FFP2 masks must be replaced if they get wet, but are in short supply all over the world.

Plastic can be used to make replacement ventilator masks. Photo by Precious Plastics Gran Canaria

The Gran Canaria workshop is also prototyping face masks for ventilator machines for use in intensive care units.

"No official body has approved our designs for medical use at this time, however, several hospitals around the world – including those in Spain – are currently using them," said Dickens.

Kunststoffschmiede is making 20,000 face shields for the Dresden area

Greek company Alumoulds, which make moulds for Precious Plastic machines, is working with Precious Plastic Leman in Switzerland to make hands-free door handles.

The coronavirus can live on surfaces for days, and people can catch it by touching a door handle and then touching their mouth or eyes. Opening doors without hands helps prevent the spread of infection.

According to Dickens, thePrecious Plastic workspaces are being very careful about hygiene when making the PPE.

"To make the items the plastic is heated to over 200 degrees Celsius which sterilises the plastic and it has previously been cleaned," he explained.

Injection moulding is much faster than 3D-printing. Photo by Kunststoffschmiede

"The workspaces follow strict guidelines on how to maintain a clean working environment suitable for making the masks and storing them to avoid contamination," he added.

"The injected items also benefit from not being porous like 3D printed counterparts, ensuring bacteria and viruses can't hide inside the plastic."

Hospitals have a dire shortage of personal protective equipment. Photo by Precious Plastic La Safor

Hospitals treating coronavirus patients need this emergency PPE to keep their staff safe, as medical workers are particularly vulnerable to being seriously infected.

Infection control guidelines mean PPE must be disposed of after use, Dickens said Precious Plastic could offer a way to recycle any discarded plastic.

Hands-free door handles help stop the spread of Covid-19. Photo by Alumoulds

"Covid-19 has been proven to last up to nine days on the surface of plastic items," he said.

"However, as long as the items can be disinfected, I see no reason why they would need to be incinerated, and instead could be cleaned, shredded and recycled into one of Precious Plastics other opensource products."

Precious Plastic shares the designs for its machines open source. Photo by Precious Plastic La Safor

Founded in 2014 by Dave Jakkens, Precious Plastic shares designs for its machines as open source, so anyone can design and build a recycling system.

Shredder machines take sorted plastic waste and turn it back into useable flakes of plastic. Separate machines, including an injection moulder, an extruder or a rotation moulder, turn the flakes back into useful objects.

Face shields help keep medical workers safe. Photo by Precious Plastic La Safor

Other design teams responding to the PPE shortage include MIT in the US, where researchers have invented a flat-pack face shield that can be assembled from a single piece of plastic.

In China, 3D printer company Creality 3D has designed and donated thousands of buckles that hold a face mask in place without hurting the wearer's ears.

Images are courtesy of Precious Plastic.

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Stacked Chevron, Multi-Colored Stripes, and Ornamental Motifs Detail Frances Priest’s Meticulous Ceramics

“Gathering Places Collage” (2015). All images © Frances Priest and by Shannon Tofts, shared with permission

Based in Edinburgh, artist Frances Priest merges stripes, chevron, and asanoha designs into impeccably complex motifs. Generally utilizing bold color palettes, Priest’s hand-built vases and bowls begin with sketches on paper before being transferred to test slabs of clay. The artist says she treats “the surface much like a sheet of paper,” as she inscribes each vessel using scalpels, patterns, and aluminum stamps.

The entirety of the piece is enveloped in the surface design so the works appear to wrapped in, or constructed out of pattern. I think it is a real treat to pick up an object and find that the base has been treated with the same care as the rest of the work, it makes the form complete and also allows for the group works to be re-arranged into different compositions.

Much of her intricate work is derived from The Grammar of Ornament by British architect Owen Jones, which her father gifted her as a child. The classic text focuses on ornamental design spanning multiple regions and periods. “I can distinctly remember spending hours as a child tracing the designs with my fingers, leafing from page to page and absorbing the visual languages on display,” Priest said in a statement. Her most recent vases from her Grammar of Ornament series directly reference the marble and tile mosaics found in the book’s Byzantine section, the artist tells Colossal.

Priest, though, doesn’t limit herself to representing only singular styles or eras. Her ongoing Gathering Places project serves as a collection “extracted from my sketchbook and collaged together into my own new designs—parquet, tiles, parasols, and swags. I use the title gathering places for all the half-sphere vessel forms because they are just that, places to gather together collections of decorative motifs,” she says. For example, “Architekten” is based on stark angles in buildings by the architecture firm Saurebruch Hutton, in addition to the natural foliage she discovered in illustrations of Vienna’s Villa Primavesi.

If you head to Instagram, you’ll find more of Priest’s elaborate ceramics, in addition to a coloring book she created that’s free to download.

“Gathering Places Collage” (2015)

“Chevron/Stripe/Asanoha” (2019)

“Gathering Places Architekten” (2014)

“Parquet & Yellow Dots” (2013)

Left: “Grammar of Ornament – Byzantine No. 3 Polychrome” (2020). Right: “Grammar of Ornament – Byzantine No. 3 Monochrome” (2020)

“Chevron/Stripe/Asanoha” (2019)

“Chevron/Stripe/Asanoha” (2019)

 

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Birdseye Design integrates Bank Barn house into Vermont hillside

Weathered cedar covers this Vermont house, which local studio Birdseye Design built into a grassy slope to take cues from nearby barns.

Called Bank Barn, the three-storey home is located Green Mountains of Vermont on a steeply sloping meadow surrounded by 27 acres (11 hectares) of land.

The wood-clad house is designed to take cues from bank barns, which are built into hills and accessible at two different levels.

Outdoor wooden steps run alongside the residence and access the front door on the middle floor level.

"Grade transitions are a feature of bank barns and the main entry path accentuates the topography," said build-design studio Birdseye Design.

A concrete foundation embeds the house on a flat portion of the hill and projects outwards to form barrier walls on the east and west sides.

Acting like bookends, the concrete encloses a driveway and garage on the one side, and a patio with a firepit further from the dwelling on the opposite.

"The flat grade at the upper bench proved to be the ideal site, a natural promenade to the view with an opportunity to embed the house into the landscape with an eastern slope at the arrival point," the studio added.

An open-plan kitchen, living room, dining area and office are located on the middle level. Almost the entire floor is enclosed with glass walls to offer expansive views of outside.

Steel beams and cross-bracing are left exposed and painted white, matching the stark interiors of white walls and grey floors. A free-standing steel staircase is also painted white and has a glass railing.

The bottom floor is mostly concealed by the sloped terrain, aside from a garage door at the front that is clad in wood. A green roof covers a portion of this lower volume as it extends slightly outwards from the two floors above.

Three bedrooms with en suites and a laundry room are on the top storey. Designed to be more private, this floor has smaller windows with deep jambs to frame the pastoral views.

Bank Barn is complete with a number of environmentally friendly design elements. Geothermal wells provide heating and cooling via water-to-water and water-to-air systems, and a triple-glazed curtainwall bolsters the insulation to reduce heat flow during Vermont's freezing winter months.

According to Birdseye Design, the home is designed to produce as much energy as it consumes on-site. "The project was designed to be a net-zero residence pending a future 18-kilowatt solar array," it said.

Birdseye Design was founded in 1984 and is led by Jim Converse and John Seibert.

In addition to this home, the Vermont practice has built other houses in the northeastern US state, including a black house with broad eaves, a white dwelling called Two Shed and a wood-clad residence called Woodshed.

Photography is by Jim Westphalen.

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Project credits:

Landscape architect: Wagner Hodgson Landscape Architecture
Environmental design: Atelier Ten
Builder: Birdseye

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Nike designs personal protective equipment for Oregon hospitals

Nike has created face shields and lenses for air-purifying respirators with materials from the sportswear brand's footwear and clothing to help protect against Covid-19.

Working with health professionals at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), a public university with two hospitals in Portland, Nike designed the personal protective equipment (PPE) for doctors, nurses and other frontline medical workers.

The products include a face shield and a lense for a powered, air-purifying respirator (PAPR), which are used to safeguard medical workers in contaminated areas.

Nike, which is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, manufactured them from materials usually used for apparel collections or sneakers to help with shortages caused by the coronavirus.

The production makes use of the brand's capabilities for custom extrusion of the polyurethane film, which was refined for the airbag in the sole of its Air shoes.

Called thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), the rubbery, plastic material is used to form the veil of the face shield and the lenses of the PAPR. The latter is made in segments that are welded in order to properly fit the PAPR.

Nike's face shield is modelled on a design that OSHU was already using, and features a foam-like band that is repurposed collar padding and clothing cords to tighten the mask. The shield's three parts are designed to come together in nine stages.

The PPE design was lead by the brand's innovation teams and manufacturing groups at its Air Manufacturing Innovation (Air MI) facilities in Oregon and Missouri. The facilities are continuing to adapt to suit the production of the PPE and follow government protocol.

Nike made its first shipment of the PAPR lenses and full-face shields to OHSU on Friday 3 April. It intends to continue to distribute devices to other areas in Oregon, including hospitals and healthcare companies Providence, Legacy Health Systems and Kaiser Permanente.

"OHSU's mission is to support the health and well-being of all Oregonians, and we can't do that without adequate supplies of personal protective equipment," said OHSU president Danny Jacobs.

"Nike's generous response to the Covid-19 crisis helps to instill an added layer of confidence and support for healthcare workers, that we can safely carry out the jobs we were born to do."

The PPE forms part of a series of efforts from the sports brand to offer help amid the health crisis. Nike also created an advert to promote staying at home and social distancing with a simple message that reads: "Play inside, play for the world".

Nike follows a number in the design industry that have pivoted its manufacturing capabilities to make face shields. Architecture studio Foster + Partners has created a laser-cut face shield that can be disassembled, sanitised and reused, while MIT has developed a one-piece Covid-19 face shield.

Leading fashion brands Prada, COS and Louis Vuitton are also manufacturing surgical face masks in response to the shortage caused by Covid-19.

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