Student’s centers are those comfortable hang-out spots at universities that combine studying with social life during your years of college.

Coventry’s new student center ‘the hub’ (sited at the center of the university campus) designed by Hawkins\Brown Architects is one of the best.

For many students at university, this is their first experience of living away from home. Coventry University in the UK tries to make that a little less of a sudden adjustment to the cruel world with a new student center that exudes cosiness, intimacy and security.

Covering an area of 91,000 square feet and able to comfortably accommodate 1,000 students at the same time, the new student center really gives the feeling of a home away from home in what could be a large and impersonal setting for the 10,000 students enrolled at the university.

The colorful spot provides for students’ key needs for wellness and wellbeing by providing a place to visit during the day for social and informal learning needs while creating a safe environment during the evening for entertainment.

The colors chosen have an effect. The combination – yellow, black and grey – has a hip hi-tech quality that lends an organized air to a clean and modern public space, while also being warm and inviting.

The principle cladding material—a unitized flush glazed curtain walling system—wraps around the building like a taut skin or hard shell.

On the roof, a roof terrace has been created that provides the healing peace of green space in the heart of in the city’s historic quarter famed for the post-war Coventry Cathedral, with views across extensive areas of the sedum roof.

Via Urban Peek

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A Cozy New Student Center at Coventry University

Imagine you have just walked through this lively and bold shot of color. How do you feel? Invigorated? Like you have just stepped forth into a whole new part of your life, where things are going to be much better? More optimistic?

This doorway is almost Art.

That sensation created is appropriate for this kind of building, because this is the exit for the Centro de Salud, a health care clinic. Hopefully you should feel better when you come out than when you went in.

Designed by MACA estudio de arquitectura, this Centro de Salud is situated in Porreres, in Spain’s brilliant sunbelt island of Mallorca.

The building is a sleepy white cube shaped building woken intermittently by shots of bold taxicab yellow. It is sited in the center of a deep lot.

Within, all is efficient and familiar.

Even the long and tiresome wait.

But the entrance and exit offer a powerful psychological boost to the health care within.

Where clients enter with their health problems – on the shaded side – is as anonymous as any other white block shaped building, but somehow more so, creating a surrealistic and faintly ominous air. Can I be cured?

On the opposite side, the exit side facing the sun; ventilation grilles minimize the blazing Mallorcan heat – to reduce the air conditioning requirements of the clinic within.

But the key feature is the exit.

As departing clients exit out into the sunshine, the sun reflecting up inside the taxicab yellow exit provides a boost of optimism.

Via Arkinetia

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The Clever Psychology of a Health Center in Mallorca

This amazing open-air bedroom could only be in the tropics. Full length windows slide all the way back to make sleeping completely open to the air.

The contemporary treehouse in Nigeria is audacious in its embrace of completely open air architecture throughout, with a roof that hovers above the structure itself. So, what does hold the roof up?

The amusing idea of the house is that the roof canopy is supported by the “tree trunks” like the top of a tree — and is entirely unsupported by walls.

In fact, some the interior spaces do have glass clerestory windows, but their generous proportions, and the fact that they continue around the entire house, gives the impression that the open balcony continues throughout.

Both wood and metal are used sparingly, to define a structure that refers to a canopy of trees above.

The kitchen is spacious, but spartan, at the far end of the upper floor which spans from the open balcony at the front, continues through the open stairways to the lower floor, the living space and art gallery, and ends here at the kitchen at the back.

On the middle floor suspended underneath are the bedroom and bathroom, still close to the adjacent jungle.

These afford the opportunity for a bath luxuriating in the open air, yet in complete privacy.

On the ground floor is just the garage, and a cool sliver of a lap pool. The exterior is clad in blue slate tiles and a chalky white limestone cools the feet as you enter the water. Above can be seen the bedroom and bathroom.

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This Jungle Treehouse Apes Trees

A revolutionary modular housing invention from Mima Architects could change the way we buy houses. The approachable appeal of clean universal design is just one aspect of the genius of their invention; the MIMA House.

Their beautiful prefab – inspired by the traditional Japanese house, the perfect paradigm for lightness, flexibility, comfort and pleasing lines – is very easily re arranged, in any way that you want, to change the layout.

The exterior window panels can be interspersed with solid panels, in any combination.

The restrained order of Japanese standardized building components appealed to MIMA architects. Based on the modular Japanese Tatami mat, Japanese construction is informed by a deeply rooted culture, confirmed over the centuries, that can easily adapt to new requirements.

Mima have come up with something revolutionary. Finally, a house you can practically put together yourself in an afternoon or two. Really. The MIMA House is modular (see the grooves in the floor?) Walls just snap in. Then the rest is about the details. You can paint the walls yourself. If you are looking for some painting tips check out the vancouver painting guys.

Extraordinarily, the quality of the component parts is superb. Mima was determined to create a flexible, light and cheap yet high quality product, that could be put together quickly.

MIMA starts from the clean sophisticated design and bright open spaces of the IKEA-like sensibility of sensible democratic frugality.

The exterior shape, a simple square, cannot be changed. But the complete flexibility of the internal walls and windows mean that the house can be customized to work in any site.

The idea was to try and launch a house which could cost as little as a mid-range car.

It’s not much bigger than a car either. At just 36 square meters, the dwelling is pretty compact.

But as a result, the MIMA House is a starter home that will not have you in hock to the bank for the rest of your life.

Via Dezeen

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You Just Snap Together the MIMA House

How to design a luxurious and large vacation home – that only gets use for a few months each year? It needs to be securely locked up when not in use.

The architect, Jose Kos, makes use of one of the most industrial of solutions to zip it up when not in use – the roll up industry-sized garage door. Several huge rollup doors completely seal up the home like a gigantic warehouse.

Sited near the city of Rio de Janeiro, the house sits on a hillside sculpted into flat lawns so the family’s children can play games.

It is a perfect white cube, at 10 meters by 10 meters by 10 meters, perfectly proportioned.

When the house is in use, there is no hint of the stark rollup garage doors.

It is simply a large and elegant architectural home set on a generous rolling flat lawn designed for the games of children.

The transitional space shaded by a concrete pergola expands the dwelling spaces through the huge windows out to a sheltered two story porch area.

Interior fittings are unadorned industrial steel to match the fold up doors.

Similarly, the windows are framed in commercial window casements.

With the three rollup doors up, there is no hint of a garage-like space within. But this entire space is enclosed when they are closed up.

The interiors all are aligned facing the best view, towards the rising sun, making it easy to close up the house till next year.

The entrance is marked by a bright green retaining wall, which links an existing rock to the upper site limit, celebrating the entry, while while separating the house from the rainy winds and the neighbors’ views.

For ten months, between visits, the vacation home is closed up securely.

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White Cube Vacation Home Zips Closed When Not in Use

Curved houses can be at risk of being just a little hokey. But here is one from Sarasota, Florida, that carries it off. There is nothing hobbit-like about this confidently executed structure.

From TOTeMS, this guest-house is sited overlooking a wide river and it offsets a bold, modern curved roof with squared-up structure at the ground level.

There is an element of the “rockabye cradle in the tree tops” here in this mezzanine bedroom, open to the living room behind the bed. What a superb bedroom!

Like an upended boat, the bed appears to be surrounded by water. But the sleeping room is high and dry, way up high in the treetops.

The view of the trees is intimate, up close.

The living room below, on the ground floor, shares the mezzanine bedroom’s view over the river. To get the big curved roof, glue-lam beams were used.

This floor offers a treetop deck as another way to meld with the surrounding.

The bathroom and kitchen are in the forested end at the back of the structure, leaving living and sleeping for the front and the  river view.

So how does this avoid the hippie look of curved houses? I think it is because the house is confidently executed. It is as if the architect is saying, –yes; we humans are part of nature. We embrace curves and randomness like nature.

But we are also sentient beings; it is part of our logical nature to create the linear, straight lines of most architecture. It is natural for us to inhabit both worlds; the natural and the man made.

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Curved-Roof Guest House Avoids the Hobbit Look

Marwan Al-Sayed Architects designed this interesting, stark and forbidding-looking concrete house in Paradise Valley, Arizona that looks as harsh and uncompromising as the desert landscape that it inhabits.

The house is conceived as an archaic thick mass casting, say the architects. The concrete mass cools the house while cutting off views to the non-descript suburban houses that surround it.

Integral white cast concrete walls create a modern update: a new classic, Mediterranean wall.

The colors reflect the subtle colors of the native planting used throughout. The palette is restricted to a monotone – reflecting the subtle grays, silvers and green casts of the desert landscape.

The architects used a reversed living plan that makes sense in the hot dry desert climate of Arizona. Bedrooms and bathrooms are underneath, on the ground level, and are semi sunken into the earth, affording privacy, shade and immediacy to the desert floor which surrounds it – rooms stay cool and intimate.

Cool light blooms deep down into the private interior spaces via deep stairwells lit by skylights above. Thick 20″ walls insulate and cool the house naturally.

Then on the upper floor above the bedrooms, the upper level affords the spectacular views of the surrounding topography, as well as participates in the constant light show of vast sky, clouds and colors that so typifies the urban desert experience.

A large shaded outdoor living room, that is cooled by concrete above and below is open to the natural desert foliage.

For the landscape, only indigenous desert vegetation is used so the demand for water is minimal. The plants are low water use plants.

An anonymous blank wall faces the neighboring houses affording complete privacy for the residents.

Almost like a sand dune baking in the hot sun, the house has an eerie sense of vastness and peace that comes from the use of the earth-derived materials, just concrete and glass, both essentially dry; one from sand, one from rocks.

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Desert Concrete is Forever

Here is a brutally chic house for the super modern and urbane, set in Ramat Gan, Israel. A clean-cut white box allows a mere few precise fronds of permitted vegetation to sprout.

“The house constitutes a pure and immaculate bubble which invites those using the spaces into a world of design values that are radically different from those of the surrounding, chaotic, urban world, ” say the architects,  Pitsou Kedem.

“The façade facing the street is remarkable in its restraint and the desire to create an exact and restrained show”, according to the architects.

Within the huge sterile box shape, long, horizontal lines have been cut through the white walls, as if to create an artificial manmade version of the dappled shade of trees. 

‘The polished form, the perfection shown in every detail and the fusion of the different materials, the monastic language, meticulously styled with great care’ says Dezeen.

The vast citified white spaces it encloses offer the solitude and clarity of absolute silence and scrupulous perfection.

“The grooved and perforated envelope constitutes a type of polished and minimalistic object which brings out the monastic and minimized language.” The repetitive and rhythmic language of staircases are a feature not a bug.

To make up for the silence of the vast structure, the clackety clack of heels on the steel staircases set throughout the vast open structure tap out an urgent and forthright message of business and efficiency.

This is an interesting, vast, open, clean cut and meditative house for young people prepared to do a lot of walking forth, in an uncompromising gallery-like setting that borders on the officious.

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A Modern Living Structure From Urban Israel

The formal rules of proportions that governed classical symmetrical architecture are rarely seen in architecture today, but in his Jigsaw House, David Jameson Architect uses masses and forms in a modern asymmetrical version of this kind of approach to architecture.

The house is a complete retrofit of a single story suburban house located on a busy corner site, in Betheseda, Maryland.

But what is really interesting about the Jigsaw House the way it chops into the sky. Large cutouts of sky are framed in such a way that the windows offer refreshingly infinite views, affording large spaces without interruption, even in a suburban neighborhood.

Even the clerestory windows assist in bringing the presence of the sky into the house, raising the ceiling with a full four-square sliver of sky view.

“Fundamental to the conception of the house is the notion of reflectivity” say the architects, “rendering unclear the boundaries between inside and outside. Light and space are modulated by meshing ribbons of wall and glass that form a tessellation of solid and void”.

“Jigsaw introverts itself in a continuous spatial flow around an open-air courtyard carved from the home’s remains”, says the architect. “A matrix of spaces is linked by movement through them as storey’s merge and spaces relate to each other as they rise and fall in a series of interlocked puzzle-like volumes”.

“Particularity rather than repetition is employed giving a unique three-dimensional framework to each space where plan and section respond to program simultaneously”.

Where the sky is not used to draw the eye up to a long view, the windows are placed so that privacy is maximized on the corner section in a suburban section.

The conditioning of these internal and external walls is identical. Planes of stucco exterior walls transform into plaster interior walls while passing through glass, which has the effect of merging the exterior and interior.

Images: Paul Warchol Photography

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Jigsaw House Admits Ribbons of Sky Views

Like an abstract idea superimposed on the landscape, our consciousness, alone among the universe – as far as we know! – is fundamentally different from the insensate natural world. This recognition is the foundation of much religious art from many cultures.

In these stunning photos from Mine Dalemans and Kristof Vrancken from Architecture Lab, we see – or more accurately – don’t see – an extraordinary, almost completely see-through church, that represents that peculiar relationship.

If we were flying over it, maybe in a balloon, it would seem like a normally solid structure. But it is actually constructed entirely of spaces created by layering rusted steel strips, laid flat and separated by spacers to create the “air holes” that you see through.

Up close, the ones that are at eye level look slimmer. As you look up, the ones further up occupy more space.

The project in Belgium is a collaboration between young Belgian architects Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh - Gijs Van Vaerenbergh.

It is actually not a serious design for a church but an artwork. ‘Reading between the Lines’ is part of an ambitious longterm art in public space project called Z-OUT, that will take form over the next five years in various locations within the Flemish region of Limburg in Belgium.

The idea expressed is that churches are emptying out of their congregations in modern times, and the “emptyness” of the church represents that idea.

But by bringing the world into the church – if it were an actual church, not Art - the architects express an appropriate idea.  The ability to see the world through the lens of the church would represent the idea that how we live in this world is important to the religious and spiritual life.

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See-Through Church Brings This world In