Gold inflatable house for Mars designed by Hugh Broughton Architects and Pearce+

Hugh Broughton Architects and Pearce+ are creating Martian House, an inflatable building in Bristol, England, that will explore what an extraterrestrial house for life on Mars could look like.

The house,  a collaboration with local artists as part of the ongoing art project Building a Martian House, is set over two levels, with the lower level designed to be built below the ground of the red planet.

The upper level will be made from a gold inflatable formwork, which is being developed by specialists Inflate.

Top and above: the Martian House will go on display in Bristol

On Mars it would be filled with regolith – Martian soil and rock – to reduce "cosmic and galactic radiation" although the team will have to settle for more terrestrial materials in Bristol.

"Inflate are still developing the designs, but it will likely be a ripstop nylon fabric with a gold coating externally," architects Hugh Broughton and Owen Pearce told Dezeen.

"The gold is important for dissipating heat into the thinner atmosphere on Mars. For future use on Mars, a new polymer might need to be developed that is light enough to be transported to the red planet."

"The regolith within is set using biological solidification – the regolith becomes bonded using microbes and forms essentially Martian concrete. The inflatable formwork remains as a seal and final surface."

One of the house's two levels will be below ground

Although it will be displayed above ground, Martian House's lower level will be designed to be fully buried to maximise protection, and would likely be made of reused rocket components.

"On Mars, it would occupy one of the maze of lava tubes which run beneath the Martian surface," the architects explained.

"The life support systems would be reused from spacecraft manufactured on Earth to ensure quality control."

Inside, the architects envisioned the house would feature a hydroponic living room filled with decorative plants that could feed into a circular wastewater system that is currently being developed with Hydrock.

Artists Ella Good and Nicki Kent conceived of the project

Hugo Broughton Architects is used to creating designs for challenging environments, as it has previously worked on projects including a research station in Antarctica, and both it and Pearce+ have experience of designing for space.

"Whether working on these extraterrestrial projects or in the polar regions, there are are many similarities in approach," said the designers.

"We need to make ergonomic space in the least volume possible; minimise the impact on the environment through the application of technology to reduce waste, energy consumption and water demand; protect the crew from the hostile external environment, whether that's wind-driven ice or solar radiation, and consider the well-being of the crew, isolated from home for many months, even years, at a time," they added.

Martian House, which will be installed in Bristol for five months in 2022, was conceived by local artists Ella Good and Nicki Kent.

They have brought together experts, including scientists and engineers, as well as the general public to create new visions for life on Earth and on Mars.

IKEA also looked at living conditions on Mars when it redesigned the living pod on the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, US, while BIG is working with NASA to develop 3D-printed buildings for the moon.

Martian House will be on show outside the M Shed museum in Bristol from April 2022 to August 2022. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Project credits:

Architects: Hugh Broughton Architects and Pearce+
Artists: Ella Good and Nicki Kent
Science advisors: Dr Lucy Berthoud, Dr Robert Myhill, Professor James Norman, University of Bristol
Museum partner: M Shed
Structural engineer: Buro Happold
M&E engineer: Hydrock
Quantity surveyor: MDA Consulting
Inflatable specialists: Inflate and Airclad
Visualisations: Hugh Broughton Architects and Pearce+
Funding: The Edward Marshall Trust

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Concrete colonnade links educational facilities at Boys and Girls Club in Mexico

A sweeping colonnade and stepped plazas animate the concrete Boys and Girls Club that Centro de Colaboración Arquitectónica has built for children living in south-central Mexico.

The 3,400-square-metre complex is an after-school club for young people between the ages of six and 18 years who are living in unsafe or low-income neighbourhoods in Tecámac and Ecatepec.

It comprises three buildings that host a mix of recreational and educational facilities, linked by a corridor of 24 arches that Centro de Colaboración Arquitectónica (CCA) said is modelled on human vertebrae.

A colonnade is the centrepiece of the Boys and Girls Club in Mexico

"This is a space that provides extracurricular educational, artistic, and recreational activities that promote positive values and community integration," the studio explained.

"The three buildings are linked by a long corridor that represents the idea of education as the backbone of the development of society – its 24 arches represent each of the human vertebrae."

The campus is made from concrete donated to the scheme

CCA's Boys and Girls Club was completed in 2019 and is one of 10 similar campuses in Mexico that are initiated by the Boys & Girls Club of America.

The organisation exists to provide children and young people living in poor or unsafe areas with healthy and safe spaces to play, create and learn before and after school.

"CCA was commissioned by the Boys and Girls Club to build the tenth campus in Mexico, the largest to date, striking a careful balance by designing a building that communicated the association's values with a playful and attractive architecture," the studio told Dezeen.

There are a total of 24 arches in the corridor

The campus' design evolved from a manual by the Boys & Girls Club of America, which outlines the minimum spaces required to host the organisation's educational programmes.

CCA then adapted this into a group of buildings that could be built from concrete, as the material had been donated by a benefactor of the organisation specifically for the scheme.

The corridor links the buildings with outdoor play areas

The studio's design comprises an educational building, a two-storey arts centre, and sports hall, all linked by the arched colonnade.

Its sports hall is the most notable building on the campus, capped by a distinctive saw-tooth roof allows daylight down into a large, adaptable hall inside.

One of the stepped areas incorporates a zigzagging ramp

The campus' classrooms are contained in the single-storey educational building, alongside computers areas, a kitchen and a library.

These rooms are ventilated and lit by a courtyard at the centre of the building, which CCA designed to negate the need for windows – making the classrooms private and distraction-free.

The educational building has an internal courtyard

The final building on the Boys and Girls Club campus is the two-story arts centre, which contains space for exhibitions, an auditorium, a dance studio and a dojo.

Here, there is also a room exclusively for teenagers to relax and attend educational workshops and training sessions tailored to their age group.

A sports hall is topped by a saw-tooth roof

Wrapping around the Boys and Girls Club are several outdoor plazas, as well as basketball courts, soccer pitches, and gardens.

The plazas offer meeting spaces for visitors and have also been sculpted to the topography to ensure circulation between the buildings is efficient – with one incorporating a zigzagging ramp.

"It was meant to be a meeting point, a space created to generate encounters between individuals, enable them to interact openly and freely in a way that continually enriches their own experiences and enhances that of others," explained the studio.

The sports hall is used for a mix of physical activities

CCA an architecture studio based in Mexico City that was founded by Bernardo Quinzaños and Ignacio Urquiza in 2008.

Other projects by the studio include a house in Hidalgo with concrete walls, planted patios and pools, alongside a business school on a lush site near Aguascalientes.

Photography is by Onnis Luque, Arturo Arrieta and Jaime Navarro.

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Project credits:

Architect: Centro de Colaboración Arquitectónica (CCA)
Design team: Mauricio Garcia-Noriega, Tania Coronado, Ana Laura Ochoa, Sebastian Gnaedig
Client: Boys and Girls Club
Constructor: Grupo PC - CARSO
Other specialists: DECSA, BVG

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Wohnregal is a prefabricated concrete live-work apartment block in Berlin

Architecture studio FAR has built a six-storey housing block in Berlin from precast concrete slabs.

Named Wohnregal, the warehouse-style block was constructed form prefabricated concrete elements, with pillars and beams that support slabs to create the potential for wide-open rooms.

Sliding glass doors cover two facades

The individual stories have no structural walls inside and span 13 metres from the facade to facade. Occupants can insert their own drywalls into the spaces to divide them according to their lifestyles.

A type of precast concrete beams called TT-beams were used for the construction.

Stainless steel mesh screens the external stairs

Two curtain walls on Wohnregal's east and west facade are formed by floor-to-ceiling glass doors, turning the sheltered spaces into covered balconies and walkways.

The sliding glass doors can be opened in summer to naturally ventilate the building.

Outdoor staircases covered with stainless steel mesh zigzag up the side of the building, turning a functional element into a visual part of the block's facade.

Prefabricated concrete elements took just six weeks to assemble

The decision to use prefabricated materials was motivated by Berlin's increasingly expensive house prices and a desire to change preconceptions about prefabricated design as too prescriptive

"The ambition was to bridge two apparently contradictory challenges the housing market in Berlin is facing," said FAR.

"Industrial prefabrication offers the benefits of serial construction techniques, including cost-savings and shorter construction timelines, and thus addresses the rising construction costs for housing," added the studio.

"Countering preconceptions that serial construction automatically implies a standardization of the inhabitable unit itself, Wohnregal offers a wide range of different live/work atelier layouts for an ever-broadening bandwidth of urban lifestyles."

Units have their own corner balconies

Wohnregal was built with just six weeks of onsite assembly and construction costs averaged at €1,500 (£1,350) per square metre.

Aside from two mechanical cores, there are no restraints on the layouts of the floors, each of which are divided into the different apartment and workshop sizes.

There are no structural internal walls

Units vary from 35 to 110 square metres, facing east or west or, for some of the larger ones, both. Sunrises and sunsets are visible from the corner balconies of each unit.

"Prefabrication in housing has been a century-long story of optimization, and has had a continuous up and down of promises stated and promises broken," said FAR.

"Wohnregal re-appropriates the DNA of the prefabricated warehouse, which has taken the approach of optimization to its absolute limits while exploiting that very economy. It also reinterprets its structural openness to introduce a discourse that has been strangely absent in the focus on prefabrication: the complexity and variety of inhabitation."

FAR hopes the project demonstrates prefabrication's customisable qualities

FAR, short for Frohn and Rojas, was founded in 2004 by Marc Frohn and Mario Rojas Toledo and is based in Berlin.

Wohnregal has been shortlisted for Dezeen Awards 2020 in the housing projects category, along with projects such as an apartment block for "slash youths" in China and a co-housing project in France.

Photography is by David von Becker.

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Project credits:

Architect: FAR
Design team: Marc Frohn, Mario Rojas Toledo, Max Koch, Ulrike vandenBerghe, Lisa Behringer, Ruth Meigen, Martin Gjoleka, Felix Schöllhorn, Pan Hu, Julius Grün, Erik Tsurumaki, Katharina Wiedwald
Client: Private
Structural engineering: IB Paasche
Electrical engineering: Zwerg
Mechanical engineering: Joco
Fire protection: Ingenieurbüro für Brandschutz, Ingolf Kühn
Energy planner: Gerdes Hubert Ingenieurbüro

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Supublic's 1N9 Modern Cleaner tablets cut down on plastic waste

Seoul-based brand Supublic has developed a series of more sustainable cleaning supplies that save on single-use plastic by replacing liquid products with dissolvable tablets.

Supublic's 1N9 Modern Cleaner project has been shortlisted for this year's Dezeen awards in the sustainable design category.

1N9 Modern Cleaner is a refillable cleaning product system

The studio developed a series of tablets made with a concentration of non-toxic cleaning agents that users can dissolve in water to create 430 millilitres of solution. The name 1N9 is an appreciation of the ratio of 10 per cent detergent to 90 per cent water.

After making the initial purchase of three reusable bottles, consumers can order refill tablets in packs.

Cleaning products come in the form of concentrated tablets that dissolve in water

1N9 Modern Cleaner tablets can then be mixed with water in the same containers, saving them from buying more single-use plastic bottles in the future when the product runs out.

The tablets come in three different versions – the blue tablet is a multi-purpose cleaner, while the yellow is designed for the bathroom and the orange for the kitchen.

These each come with their own colour-coded and labelled 1N9 Modern Cleaner bottle, which is also recyclable, to enable to user to see what bottle to put which tablet in when it comes to refilling them.

Each colour also features different natural ingredients and scents, with the blue containing orange and lavender, the yellow including coconut and mint, and the orange containing lemon and thyme.

The tablets come in three versions suited to different rooms in the house

Supublic's founders began the 1N9 Modern Cleaner project after realising the number of chemicals, such as sodium lauryl sulfate and triclosan, are in standard cleaning products.

These chemicals – alongside the one billion cleaning bottles that are thrown out each year – can be harmful to the environment, so the brand developed a natural sanitising solution as an alternative.

"We want to do better. That means asking ourselves, every day, how we can improve," said Supublic.

"Whether it's mindlessly tossing out an empty cleaning bottle or glossing over the ingredients list, small daily actions can shape the future of our planet," added the brand.

"By uncovering how we can be better to ourselves and to the earth, we are one step closer to a healthier and plastic-free world."

The cleaning tablets have been made using natural ingredients

Another project shortlisted for Dezeen Awards 2020, is Spruce's refillable cleaning product system. The pastel-hued bottles made from aluminium can be purchased once and reused endlessly using dehydrated refills.

Also shortlisted for Dezeen Awards 2020 is the Bio Iridescent Sequin by Elissa Brunato, which is made from cellulose extracted from trees as an eco-friendly alternative to plastic sequins.

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Recycled drink cans decorate exterior of Daily Paper's first US store

Over 13,000 flattened aluminium cans decorate the facade of Dutch fashion label Daily Paper's inaugural shop in the US, which has opened in Manhattan, New York.

The two-storey Daily Paper store spans 1,140 square feet (106 square metres) and occupies a prominent corner building in Manhattan's Lower Eastside.

The Daily Paper store occupies a corner plot in Manhattan's Lower East Side

Up until now, the brand has exclusively been based out of Amsterdam, where its founders – childhood friends Hussein Suleiman, Abderrahmane Trabsini, and Jefferson Osei – grew up in the Oud-West neighbourhood.

All three founders are of African descent, with Suleiman's family hailing from Somalia, Trabsini's from Morocco and Osei's from Ghana.

Flattened drink cans decorate the outside of the building

This has come to heavily inform the look of the store, where Heather Faulding of studio 4plus Design has subtly incorporated references to both Dutch and African culture.

The store building had been boarded up and was almost at a point beyond repair, but it has now been fully restored to feature a more ornately-shaped roof that emulates the form those seen on traditional Dutch townhouses.

A floor mosaic features on the store's ground level

Decorating the facade are thousands of recycled white, green and black drinks cans provided by Arizona Iced Tea, which appear to have been squashed.

"In order to create this effect, we estimate a total of between 13,500 and 14,000 recycled cans were used – all manually cut, compressed, glued and screwed on panels," co-founder Osei explained in an Instagram post.

The cans are then arranged in an intricate lattice pattern that's meant to recall traditional East and South African beadwork.

Surrounding walls are painted white to create a museum-like feel

Upon entering the store, customers are greeted by a huge, circular floor mosaic that denotes the label's name and logo.

Drawing on African cosmology, the mosaic is fitted with small lights that chart the star constellation visible in Amsterdam skies the day that Daily Paper was officially established – 1 April 2012.

The surrounding ground floor has been made to look like a museum, with bright-white surfaces and tall glass cabinets that display accessories.

Quirky decor details include a series of Daily Paper-branded bean bag chairs and a map-like wall mural composed of rolled-up pieces of the New York Times newspaper.

There is also a wall mural and bean bags on the ground floor

A flight of stairs with vivid artwork incorporated on its risers leads up the store's first floor, where there is a relaxed coffee bar and lounge. A portion of the flooring is made from glass so that customers can glimpse people milling around on the shop floor below.

There's also space to hang out on the building's rooftop.

Artwork appears on the staircase that leads to the store's first floor

Daily Paper started life as a lifestyle blog before evolving into the fashion brand it is today, producing Afrofuturism-inspired clothing collections that take cues from different facets of Suleiman, Trabsini and Osei's African heritage.

It isn't the only fashion label that has recently launched its first store in the US – earlier this month Belgian brand Dries Van Noten opened the doors to a store in Los Angeles, the interior of which is filled with work from artists across the world.

Photography is by Alec Kugler.

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