The Monocle Minute
On Design

From the transformation of a former police station in Antwerp into a clever mixed-use building to a 1970s electric concept car that could inform contemporary EV design, this week’s bulletin is all about how smart design can shape the way we live. To start us off, Nic Monisse looks at what trends in residential design tell us about changing times.

The emergence of a new trend in residential design can tell us a lot about the cultural climate and how that climate is changing. Take, for example, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen from 1926. The Austrian architect created the first factory-line inspired kitchen, with the stove, sink and pantry on a level surface. It gradually helped reframe women’s gendered role in the home by making cooking easier, thereby freeing up leisure time. Or there’s the open-plan concept pioneered by 20th-century architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and Harwell Hamilton Harris, who pushed for a domestic egalitarian ideal by linking lounge, dining and kitchen areas.

While of their time, these interior ideas still dominate residential design. But change might be afoot. It’s becoming more common for open-plan kitchens to have concealed “mess kitchens” behind them where much of the actual cooking takes place. That leaves homeowners freer to entertain guests (who, after all, don’t need to see how their dinner is made). And it’s why the work of Peris + Toral Arquitectes has caught my eye. The Catalonian practice has developed a new housing system, Modulus Matrix (pictured), which won Royal Institute of British Architects International Prize today.

Built in the Barcelona suburb of Cornellà earlier this year, the system is a response to the Spanish city’s Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management’s challenge to rethink apartment living for the 21st century. The modular system of square rooms, based on the dimensions of a Japanese tatami mat (3.6 metres by 3.6 metres), is connected in enfilade – as a series of spaces linked by doorways, not hallways. The gridlike layout, once common in grand baroque European houses, has been resized for modern domestic purposes. The result is a home that promotes easy movement between rooms, with visual separation but no hierarchy between living, eating and sleeping spaces. In short, it takes cues from prevailing open-plan living design but also allows for the mess of life to take place in relative privacy.

What further sets the building apart is that the architects looked beyond how people want to live, to how cities and developers want to build. It was constructed, as the name suggests, in modules, and achieves low CO2 emissions by using a mass timber structure that reduces environmental impact and cuts down on building times, lending itself to the roll-out of similar projects where new housing is needed. It’s an approach that should put this system on the radar of other architects, developers and government-housing agencies. It’s a great model that hints at how we might live and build in the future.

Nic Monisse is Monocle’s design editor. For more news and analysis, subscribe to Monocle today.

When UK-based Universal Design Studio teamed up with Belgium’s Ono Architectuur to refurbish a 1960s-era former police station in Antwerp, the goal was to turn the one-time cop shop into a smart, mixed-use building. For the building’s co-owner, law firm Schoups, the studio has created a site that serves more than just its clients and staff. There’s a street-facing café for Belgian speciality roasters Caffènation and a ground-level event space for public hire. Floors two to eight will become offices, of which the second and eighth floors will be set up as co-working spaces, while the law firm occupies the rest.

The result is a building that hums with activity, with people reading in the library, freelancers in the co-working spaces and the city’s residents sipping coffee downstairs. Credit must go to Schoups’ decision to create an office that invites the broader community inside. “The owners get something back from this mix,” says Paul Gulati, the director of Universal Design Studio. “They get to see the community caring about the building. They also want to attract young talent who will feel that it’s not just an office building but that it’s doing something positive for their city.”
m127.be

For more outstanding office projects, pick up a copy of‘The Monocle Entrepreneurs’, available online and on newsstands now.

With many major museums squeezed for exhibition and display space, it’s common for the bulk of extensive archives and collections to be kept behind closed doors. Enter Powerhouse Castle Hill, the storehouse for Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. The 9,000 sq m space opened earlier this year in the west of the city and just won Australia’s prestigious Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture. While the building was designed for conservation and preservation for more than 500,000 of the museum’s objects, it also fosters a connection with the local community by inviting the public inside.

Designed by Sydney’s Lahznimmo Architects, the shimmering structure is clad in a milled aluminium finish, inspired by the material used to store the archive. It has also been carefully insulated to regulate temperature and humidity. The curated collection dates back to the 1880s and features significant objects related to Indigenous cultures, scientific breakthroughs and Australian cultural movements. Visitors are also able to enjoy Powerhouse’s programme of workshops and talks too.
powerhouse.com.au; lahznimmo.com

Canadian architect Alison Brooks started her career working for Ron Arad before establishing her namesake practice in 1996. Over the course of nearly three decades, the London-based Brooks has completed a wide range of impressive housing projects, from residences to mixed-use buildings. These include the newly finished Cadence in London’s Kings Cross. We caught up with her for Monocle’s November issue.

How do you ensure that your projects meet the needs of both residents and their communities?
I try to respond in a meaningful way to context, which is everything in architecture. It can be physical, cultural or even spiritual. That’s something that I have started to think about more consciously. This comes partly from working in Canada and learning from Indigenous peoples’ worldviews, and tapping into animism – the idea that a higher power animates the material universe with beings that exist in relationships to others. It also comes from spending summers in the Canadian wilderness. When you’re alone out there, you really need to believe that nature is on your side.

How can this outlook relate to architecture more broadly?
In response to the climate crisis, we’re all trying to find ways of practising in a more sustainable and responsible way. But there’s also a crisis of meaning. We can start to address this by recalibrating our relationship with nature and bringing spirituality into our way of thinking. Architects often talk about a sense of place but there’s a spirit of place too.

Given that your focus is on residential architecture, how do you feel when a project is complete and people move in?
It’s like taking your child to their wedding. You kiss them goodbye and off they go to live their life. The building will change and you have to accept that. But if people are using it, that shows that they want to invest in the place.

For more from Brooks, pick up a copy of Monocle’sNovember issue, online or on newsstands now.

Cecilie Manz is among the leaders of a new wave of Danish creatives. The industrial designer is seemingly able to turn her hand to any field: jewellery, lighting, glassware and furniture, as we have seen in her collaborations with brands such as Bang & Olufsen, Holmegaard and Fredericia. Her latest partner is Elvang, a Danish firm that has been making throws, scarves and cushions from responsibly sourced alpaca wool since 2003. Manz worked on Elvang’s Écru range of throws, made from soft Peruvian baby-alpaca wool. These come in the animals’ natural colours of pale beige, off-white and brown, with discrete border stripes.

It’s an understated approach that is typical of Manz. She admits that her minimalist style can seem conservative but it offers an aesthetic longevity to match the wool’s durability. “There is a real quality in something being able to keep our interest over time,” she says. “If things are loud or fashionable, they don’t fit into my universe.” Alpaca wool’s thermoregulatory properties mean that it’s warmer than sheep’s wool when temperatures drop but still light and breathable when the mercury rises. “I’m addicted to quality and that was my starting point,” adds Manz. “The wool is sorted by hand, so there might well be slight variations in colours over time. That’s the charm of working with natural materials.”
ceciliemanz.com; elvangdenmark.com

The sun has not been shining on the European car industry of late. In addition to not selling enough cars in general, Europe’s transition to electric vehicles (EVs) has so far failed to gain traction with customers – a shortcoming that has contributed to Volkswagen recently announcing plans to close several German factories. Instead of wringing their hands about losing market share to Chinese competitors, the continent’s legacy automakers might benefit from a little more ambition when it comes to EV design. Many of today’s battery-powered cars look dull or downright dorky, especially compared to the sprightly ESB Sundancer, a concept car from the 1970s.

With its striking, fighter-jet-style canopy, this bright-red sports car was the star of 1973’s Symposium of Low Pollution Systems Development, a conference sponsored by the US Environmental Protection Agency and held in Michigan. The vehicle could plug into a standard electrical socket and carry two people in its near-horizontal seats. Unfortunately, the annual symposium proved short-lived and the Sundancer never made it into factory production. To help fix its present ills, the car industry would be smart to pick up from where it left off just over 50 years ago.

Published by Phaidon, Concrete Architecture is a striking celebration of one of our most important building materials. While the earliest documented concrete structures date back thousands of years, the material only truly came to the fore in 1824, following the invention of Portland cement – the binder for many of today’s concrete buildings. Its development spurred architects to create structures that seemed, at the time, to have come from alien planets.

In all, Concrete Architecture features buildings from 300 sites, in countries from Georgia to Brazil, via Belgium and the US. The white curves of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília Cathedral, completed in 1970, sit alongside the towering forms of Fernando Menis’s Holy Redeemer Church on Tenerife (2008). The book is a paean to architecture’s most controversial material. In its introduction, Los Angeles-based writers Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin remind readers of the carbon-negative possibilities of concrete, as well as its adaptability.
phaidon.com