Modern Architecture

Hemeroscopium House

The Hemeroscopium House, by Ensamble Studio in Madrid, is a refined combination of heavy infrastructural pieces. The pieces are stacked; the resulting spaces are a house. Most awesome is the pool deck, entirely under what is typically used for highway or parking superstructures: a giant precast beam. The surreal scale of the elements–nothing except the furniture appears people-scale–reminds us of OMA’s work. Yet this is almost post-OMA, in that there is a clear pleasure to living underneath a highway overpass. The deck you walk on is polished and smooth, the pool and furniture are gorgeous, the landscaping mellow. There’s no brutality to this brutalism, only refinement and play. In short a place to live.

Alila Villas Uluwatu Bali by WOHA

 
    The Alila Villas Uluwatu doesn’t match the breezy tropical stereotype one might expect from a Balinese resort. Eschewing Bali’s lush northern locales, WOHA Design of Singapore built the villas in the Uluwatu region on the Southern Bukit Peninsula, a dry and stony savannah region. Following the construction of a nearby international airport and calls from the local government to develop the area for tourism, the peninsula has seen rapid development. Intent on creating a luxury resort without disturbing the local ecology, WOHA and Alila Hotels and Resorts chose a striking site perched on the top of dramatic limestone cliffs overlooking the Indian Ocean.
With 56 one-bedroom hotel villas and 26 three- or four-bedroom residential villas, the Alila complex is built on a gradual slope that allows each unit an unobstructed view of the cliffs and ocean. Nestled against the edge of a steep limestone drop-off, the largest four-bedroom villas support full-time occupation, while the hotel units lay in a sloped cluster higher up the hill. The three-bedroom villa units are scattered on the highest part of the hillside property. The site plan shows a strong rectilinear design, adjusted for natural site contours to create interesting spaces between villas. WOHA’s lead designer Richard Hassell states that they set out to “play with repetition and difference,” so although the villas are all the same, their differing relations to each other create architectural interest.