This week Bjarke Ingels discussed how to revolutionise the housing sector

This week on Dezeen, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels spoke about his housing startup Nabr and how it plans to address "systemic" failures of housing.

According to Ingels, who is the founder of architecture studio BIG and co-founder of Nabr, the "consumer-first housing company" wants to fundamentally transform the housing industry.

Nabr will do so by designing mass-timber blocks using modular construction, which will feature customisable apartments plugged into a cross-laminated structural timber frame.

"This is basically an attempt to apply design, not just to the final product, but to the entire process that delivers our homes," Ingels told Dezeen in an exclusive interview.

Thomas Heatherwick unveils 1,000 Trees shopping centre in Shanghai

In other architecture news, British designer Thomas Heatherwick's studio unveiled 1,000 Trees in Shanghai, its latest project to open to the public. The shopping centre is covered in over 1,000 trees and 250,000 plants and was designed to resemble a mountain clad in greenery.

In an interview with Dezeen, Heatherwick explained that the design was "driven by making something that we hope is engaging people."

"I think the 100,000 people a day are proof that we all need places that trigger a response," he said.

However, in an opinion piece written for Dezeen, architect Philip Oldfield argued that the carbon costs of creating 1,000 Trees outweigh the environmental benefit.

House in The Girl Before designed to feel both like a sanctuary and "a fortress or prison"

This week, we also peeked inside the house in BBC television series The Girl Before, speaking to production designer Jon Henson about how he created a house that acts "like a fourth character" in the four-part series.

Henson referenced Japanese architecture when designing the house and was drawn in particular to Gosize's F Residence in the Japanese prefecture of Hygo, which was featured on Dezeen in 2019.

Architects should try to "leave the city more beautiful than when we entered" says Richard Rogers

In celebration of architect Richard Rogers, who passed away in December, we republished a series of interviews that Dezeen filmed with Rogers in 2013. In the six movies, Rogers discusses his work, starting with an interview in which he speaks of architects' responsibilities to society.

Other films look at Rogers' design for the Centre Pompidou, the backlash to the Lloyds building in London, how the design of the Leadenhall building was informed by views of St Paul's Cathedral and Rogers' hopes for his legacy.

Peelsphere is a leather-alternative biomaterial made from fruit waste and algae

In design news this week, designer Youyang Song showcased Peelsphere, a biodegradable plant-based material made from fruit peels and algae that was designed as an alternative to leather. The waterproof material can be used to create accessories or bags.

Nottingham furniture designer Mac Collins was named the winner of the inaugural Ralph Saltzman Prize for emerging designers, a new award presented by the Design Museum that aims to "champion new talent and nurture the development of a vibrant design sector".

Salone del Mobile expected to move to 7-12 June due to Covid-19 concerns

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to affect architecture and design events, we revealed that Salone del Mobile, the world's biggest and most important furniture fair, is set to announce that it will be held in June instead of April this year according to multiple sources.

Our guide to the twenty-five best design weeks and festivals for 2022 is an up-to-date overview of when design events will take place this year.

Sou Fujimoto Architects designs walkable rooftop for rural Japanese university

Among the most popular projects this week were a university with a walkable roof designed by Sou Fujimoto, a theatre with a multi-faceted red auditorium, and a Tehran office building wrapped in a brick-clad "second skin."

This week's lookbooks focused on kitchen extensions that make spacious additions to homes and interiors featuring verdant indoor trees.

This week on Dezeen is our regular roundup of the week's top news stories. Subscribe to our newsletters to be sure you don't miss anything.

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Triangular embeds PR House on a forested hillside in Chile

A series of concrete retaining walls help support an irregularly shaped holiday home in southern Chile that was designed by architecture firm Triangular.

The PR House is located in Cunco, a city in Chile's Cautín Province. Designed for a family from Santiago, the vacation home sits on a wooded hillside that looks toward Colico Lake.

Above: Triangular nestled the residence within a Chilean forest. Top image: PR House has an irregular V-shape

The main challenges for Triangular, a Santiago-based firm, were building a home on a steep slope and capturing views of the lake.

The team ended up creating a two-storey, 240-square-metre house that is roughly V-shaped in plan. The home is oriented in a way that provides the most extensive views of the water.

The building cantilevers over the grassy landscape towards the water

The home is set amongst a series of concrete retaining walls that enable the building to rest on the hillside. The walls intervene as little as possible in the terrain, and their graphite colour helps them merge with the site, the architects said.

Materials were chosen for their durability and ability to blend with the natural context.

The walls were placed to intervene as little as possible in the terrain

Facades are clad in high-performance wood that has been chemically modified through a process called acetylation.

"This kind of cladding, provided by the company Leaf with 50 years of warranty, is perfect for the rainy climate of Cunco," the team said.

Large glass windows allow the living space to extend outdoors

The home is topped with a pre-painted, metal-clad roof with no gutters. The contours of the roof enable the shedding of rainwater – an ideal solution in areas where leaves might otherwise clog rainwater pipes.

The exterior also has several terraces with pine decking and metal railings.

Read:

Iragüen Viñuela Arquitectos completes Chilean ski cabin atop reused foundations

Within the dwelling, there is a separation between public and private spaces.

"This clear zoning is due to the need for ample family gathering spaces and, simultaneously, places of tranquility, with total independence from each other," the studio said.

The kitchen, dining and living room are on the lower floor

The layout also enables adaptability of use and meets different thermal requirements during the year, the team added.

The lower level encompasses a kitchen, dining area and living room, while the upper floor holds a master suite and several additional bedrooms.

The floor is covered in porcelain tiles

Interior finishes include knot-free pine that was provided by a local wood manufacturer.

Porcelain tiles clad a metal-and-wood floor. A seven-centimetre, concrete floor slab – about half the thickness of a regular slab – minimises vibrations and accommodates heating ducts.

Pine terraces run around both floors of the house

Large stretches of glass offer a strong connection with the landscape, as do outdoor terraces on both levels. On the lower level, a covered patio features a built-in grill.

Other Chilean houses include an amoeba-shaped, coastal dwelling by Gubbins Polidura Arquitectos and Más Arquitectos, and a wood-clad ski cabin by Iragüen Viñuela Arquitectos that was built atop the foundation of an uncompleted home.

The photography is by Nicolás Sanchez.

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Project credits:

Architecture firm: Triangular
Lead architects: Tomás Swett Amenábar, Alejandro Armstrong Ramos

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Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill dies aged 82

Ricardo Bofill, the Spanish architect behind the Walden 7 apartment building in Catalonia, has passed away at the age of 82.

The news of Bofill's death today was announced by his studio Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA), which shared three old portraits of the architect on its Instagram.

Bofill founded studio RBTA in 1963. Its best-known projects include Walden 7 and the brightly coloured La Muralla Roja housing estate in Manzanera.

Top image: Ricardo Bofill has passed away at the age of 82. Above: he was the architect behind Walden 7. Photo is by Till F. Teenck via Wikimedia Commons

Other key projects from Bofill's six-decade-long career include the Les Espaces d'Abraxas housing complex near Paris and, in Spain, the Castell de Kafka and La Fábrica – a repurposed cement factory containing the RBTA headquarters and Bofill's family home.

More recently, his studio completed the sail-shaped W Barcelona Hotel in Spain and Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco.

Bofill also designed the colourful La Muralla Roja. Photo is by Sebastian Weiss

Bofill was born in 1939 in Barcelona. He completed his architectural training at the Geneva University of Art and Design in Switzerland before founding his studio aged 23.

Much of the studio's early work is celebrated for its unusual and monumental aesthetic, which has led it to be used as a stage for Hollywood films and video games. In the last decade, Les Espaces d'Abraxas featured in the dystopian movie The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, while La Muralla Roja informed the design of the Monument Valley game.

Les Espaces d'Abraxas was among the studio's early works. Photo is by Mikeshaheen1 via Wikimedia Commons.

Bofill received a number of awards for his work, including the Ciudad de Barcelona Prize of Architecture for La Fábrica and The Israelí Building Center's Life Time Achievement Award.

He was also an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the Association of German Architects.

The portrait of Bofill is by Xuan_95 via Shutterstock.

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Kengo Kuma tucks Japanese student hub under wooden bleachers

A sloped roof lined with wooden bleachers and plants conceals the student hub that Japanese studio Kengo Kuma and Associates has created for the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Named the Hisao & Hiroko Taki Plaza, the building sits partially below ground and is intended to emulate a landform or river delta "that spills into the campus" of the Japanese university.

Kengo Kuma and Associates has designed a student hub for Tokyo Tech

Kengo Kuma and Associates designed the building to support student interaction, incorporating spaces for co-learning, workshops and support services.

Positioned at the main entrance to the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), the studio hopes that it will become a campus landmark.

The building is partly submerged underground

"This building stands near the main gate of Tokyo Tech and is a new landmark of the campus," explained the architect in charge Toshiki Meijo.

"The idea was to make the building look like a landform in order to harmonise it with the slopes scattered around the campus and the surrounding buildings," Meijo told Dezeen.

The roof is covered in bleachers that double as steps

Inside, the Hisao & Hiroko Taki Plaza contains three storeys above ground and two below.

However, the bulk of the building is positioned underground, disguised by the wooden bleachers that cascade over it. The other parts of the building that are visible above ground are kept minimal with a glazed or white-painted finish.

A second external staircase is mirrored inside

Kengo Kuma and Associates' decision to submerge most of the building below ground was to retain views of the campus' clock tower.

"The clock tower is the oldest building in Tokyo Tech and is a true symbol of the campus," Meijo explained. "The visibility of this clock tower is defined as important in the campus masterplan."

The staircase helps blur the boundary between inside and out

Access is provided by a staircase that descends one side of the building, and a second that forms part of the roof and leads up to a small terrace on the building's first floor.

The inaccessible parts of the roof are cordoned off and lined with plants. According to the studio, these plants match the greenery outside of the adjacent building called Library Hill.

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COBE's extension to Danish Red Cross headquarters has "urban living room" on its roof

Kengo Kuma & Associates has accentuated the stepped form of the building internally by inserting three staggered floors of workspace beneath the rising pitch of the roof.

The external staircase that descends into the building is also mirrored inside, helping to blur the boundary between interior and exterior landscape.

A pared-back material palette features inside

Hisao & Hiroko Taki Plaza's small upper levels are designed as an open and continuous space that "flows ambiguously without clear spatial divisions", according to the studio.

This is helped with the material palette of pared-back white furnishings and wood-lined floors that runs throughout.

There are three levels of workspaces above ground

Kengo Kuma and Associates was founded in 1990 by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. The studio also recently completed mountain-shaped toilets for hiking trail overlooking Mount Fuji and is designing a contemporary entrance to gothic cathedral in Angers.

Hisao & Hiroko Taki Plaza is the latest in a string of underground buildings recently featured on Dezeen, with other examples including a subterranean art gallery in China by Foster + Partners and an "invisible villa" in Norway by CF Møller Architects.

The photography is courtesy of Kengo Kuma and Associates.

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"I would like to think that my ethics may continue" says Richard Rogers

In the penultimate video from a series that we filmed in 2013 with Richard Rogers, the late British architect reflects on his career and legacy.

Rogers, who passed away on 18 December aged 88 was one of the world's best-known architects, best known for his pioneering high-tech architecture.

Among his most recognisable work is the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he designed with Italian architect Renzo Piano and the Lloyd's building in London.

For the video series, the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner spoke to Dezeen from the Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners studio in west London.

In this interview, filmed in 2013 to coincide with a retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Rogers argues that shifts in societal attitudes over the past 50 years have changed the course of the profession.

He also reflected on his personal career highlights which include creating a collaborative architecture studio.

Read on for a transcript of the interview below:

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"I'm proud of the fact that I've been able and been fortunate to work with lots of fantastic colleagues. Right now, I've changed the name of the firm so that it's Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners because, at 80, you can see an end will be coming.

"But I would like to think that my ethics – going back to the Royal Academy exhibition and the ethos of it – may continue. We have a constitution where the partners gave up their ownership. We only do certain types of work and that has created a certain team spirit.

"So I'm proud of all those things and I'm proud about the fact that I have been able to live at a time when I've been able to make use of my abilities.

It's very exciting, it's very dynamic – something which was impossible before

"On one side, Britain has now very good architects, very good modern architects. And you could argue there's no nation that has better.

"The Pritzker Prize, which is sort of sometimes talked about as the Nobel Prize of architecture, there's probably more architects who've got more Pritzker per population in England than anywhere else. Maybe Japan would be the competitor. So the architecture is there.

"Political interest has never been much and every now and then you get a bit of a flare. And I certainly have tried to work on it.

"I work in the House of Lords and I usually participate when there are things about the built environment. And in one way it is better. I mean, if you go to the City of London it is pretty good.

"I was coming out the other day from the Design Museum on the other side of Tower Bridge and I thought I was in New York with all these towers and lights on.

"Now I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it's very exciting, it's very dynamic – something which was impossible before.

Read:

Architects and creatives remember "superstar" architect Richard Rogers

"In my generation, every architect that left school went to work for a school department, hospital department, housing department, local county council, education establishments and so on. I don't believe one can say it's better or worse.

"Really, I'm going to say, 90 per cent of the students that I knew who left with me, they went to work, that would be natural. In other words, the idea was that you would build for the future.

We just had a horrible war and there was this very strong feeling, not by one party, by the way, possibly more than one party, about the welfare state. The state could be enriched by the way that we played out our abilities, our responsibilities.

It is much more an Age of Greed

"This has gone and it is much more an age of greed, especially in the sense of when we're wrestling with the economic crisis of the last years. It is very much about dog eat dog and the acceptance that it doesn't matter what you earn, you have no duty to society.

"And I think it's reflected in some of the things we do, I often point to Finland, where the teachers get the same money as surgeons. Of course, therefore, teachers are recognised in their important role.

"We [the British] don't. That goes throughout everything, it has nothing to do about architecture. That's about society.

"But it is a very exciting time and now we're looking at an international world and we weren't doing it 50 years ago.

"When I started doing architecture, Paris was pretty international, in the sense of going across the channel. Now, you know, we're fortunate we can make use of a much wider network of communication, and therefore change and adapt to that to that network.

"I wouldn't say that things are uglier, but we have to be very wary of protecting the public domain."

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