This apartment was designed as minimalist as possible without losing in comfort. The furniture and wall structure around the apartment is as minimal as possible but without losing in functionality. Internal partitions were demolished to maximize light penetration and provide open-plan living arrangement. Closets and other storage space is hided behind sliding doors. The integrated plant box positioned above cooking area strikes a line of green vegetation across the space. A small changing room serves the bath-shower wet room and contains a bespoke compact vanity unit. (more…)
Loft Space Planning
Modern loft interior design should create a functional and comfortable floor plan with spaces for relaxation, entertaining, storage, and working. These different loft living areas can then be defined with room dividers, rugs, or furniture. Room division can take the form of sliding or folding screens, frosted glass panels, Japanese shojis, or fabric panels on ceiling tracks. (more…)
Northwestern architects, who used to celebrate cedar as a warm, graceful and regionally appropriate building skin, are increasingly getting the metal urge. Corrugated steel, to be precise, which is turning fashionable for everything from office and retail buildings to brewpubs and gyms. And private residences, as well, although mass-market homebuilders haven’t been brave enough to try it yet.
The good news is that it works. Poetry can reside in ordinary materials, and corrugated steel offers more artistic opportunity than you might expect. It also has the virtues of being tough, maintenance free and virtually 100 percent recyclable. The only disappointment is that Seattle architects aren’t using it as creatively as they could. (more…)
This summer, along with many other movie fans who go to screenings at Toronto’s Cinematheque Ontario, I have been revisiting films by the pioneering Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956). It’s been a rich experience of the movie-maker’s art, but also, as I’ll explain presently, of architecture.
There is much to be moved and delighted by in Mizoguchi’s serenely passionate cinema. Take, for example, his deeply empathetic portrayals of women, whose oppression in modern Japanese culture he understood intimately and thoroughly. Mizoguchi, I think, preferred an older order of things, where knightly codes of honour and discipline governed the relationships among people; his brilliant two-part samurai epic, The 47 Ronin (1941-1942), is perhaps the most refined and serious celebration of such values in film history. (more…)
Over the last decades, designers in India have shown themselves to be a confused lot, if only because they haven’t been to handle international and Indian influences simultaneously.
Where traditional havelis have replaced the low-seating in the baithak with incongruous imported sofas, apartments in cities have attempted to play the ethnic card with ludicrous results.
India’s great tradition in crafts was never intended for urban homes, and though a few designers have been able to carry it off with panache – Romi Chopra, for instance – most times the interface between cultures simply ended up in a mess. (more…)
