Tying in with the French city's designation as European Capital of Culture 2013, MuCEM is one of several civic buildings set to open there this year and will be dedicated to the history and cultures of the Mediterranean region.

Ornamental concrete shrouds the glazed exterior of the museum like a lacy veil, moderating light through to the building's two exhibition floors. Meanwhile, an inclined walkway bridges out from the roof the building to meet Fort Saint-Jean - a seventeenth-century stronghold that will also house museum exhibitions - before continuing on towards the Eglise Saint-Laurent church nearby.

Rudy Ricciotti describes the building as a "vertical casbah", referring to its arrangement on the harbour. "Open to the sea, it draws a horizon where the two shores of the Mediterranean can meet," he says.

Other projects to open in Marseille this year include a polished steel pavilion by Foster + Partners and a contemporary art space on the rooftop of Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse housing block. See more architecture in Marseille.

See more photography by Edmund Sumner on Dezeen, or on his website.

The post MuCEM by Rudy Ricciotti
photographed by Edmund Sumner appeared first on Dezeen.

Architects Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov of SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov designed the building to house the collections of the Tchoban Foundation, which the architect founded in 2009 as an archive of architectural drawings from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Located on the site of a former brewery, the five-storey museum will be the foundation's first address and comprises a stack of overlapping concrete volumes with a glass penthouse positioned on top.

Architectural reliefs cover all three of the yellowish-grey concrete facades and form repetitive patterns. The surfaces are also broken up into groups of gently angled planes, intended to mimic overlapping sheets of paper.

"This artistic touch is supposed to emphasise the function and contents of the exposition in the museum's architectural look," explain the architects.

The ground floor of the building accommodates an entrance hall, shop and library. The collections will be housed on the three middle floors and will only be accessible by appointment, while the the glass penthouse and roof terrace will function as an events space.

The Museum for Architectural Drawing is set to open in June and will present both a permanent drawing collection and loans from international collections.

Architects Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov have worked together on various projects as SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov. Their past collaborations include curating the Russian Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.

See more museums on Dezeen, including the new Design Museum for Barcelona.

Photography is by Patricia Parinejad.

Here's a project description from SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov:

Museum for architectural drawings of the Tchoban Foundation

The Museum for Architectural Drawings is meant for placing and exposing the collections of the Tchoban Foundation founded in 2009 for the purpose of architectural graphics art popularisation as well as for interim exhibitions from different institutions including such famous as Sir John Soane's Museum in London or École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

For the construction of the Museum, the Foundation purchased a small lot on the territory of the former factory complex Pfefferberg, where the art-cluster is formed. Here are already located the famous architecture gallery AEDES, modern art gallery and artists' workshops. The Architectural Graphics Museum that is being constructed will become a logical continuation to the development of the new cultural centre in a district Prenzlauer Berg that is very popular among Berlin residents.

The new Museum building will flank the firewall of the adjacent four-storey residential house. Such neighborhood and the location under the conditions of the current development implied the irregular space-planning arrangement of the Museum. The volume that is compact in terms of design rises up to the mark of the neighboring roof ridge, forming five blocks clearly cut in the building carcass and offset in relation to each other.

The upper block, made of glass, hang over the whole volume of the building in cantilever. The façades of the four lower blocks are made of concrete and its surfaces are covered with relief drawings with architectural motives, repeating on every level and overlapping each other as sheets of paper. This artistic touch is supposed to emphasise the function and contents of the exposition in the Museum's architectural look.

On the first and third floors from the side of Christinenstrasse, the flat surfaces of the massive concrete walls alternate with large glass panes accentuating the building’s main entrance and a recreation room in front of one of the graphic cabinets. On the first floor there will be the entrance hall – library. Two cabinets for drawings exposition and archive are located on the upper floors. The levels are connected by an elevator and stairs.

Address: Christinenstraße 18a, 10119 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Germany
Customer: Tchoban Foundation. Museum for Architectural Drawing

Authors: Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov of SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov, Moscow
Planning and project management: nps tchoban voss GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin
Architects: Philipp Bauer, Nadja Fedorova, Katja Fuks, Ulrike Graefenhain, Dirk Kollendt

Start: 2009 - 2011
Construction: 2011 - 2013

The post Museum for Architectural Drawing
by SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov appeared first on Dezeen.

Constructed in the nineteenth century, the building previously featured a series of outdoor paddocks and a large courtyard, used for storing livestock before the slaughtering process. As part of the renovation, Sol89 has extended the building into these spaces to create kitchens and classrooms.

Like most of the town's architecture, white-painted walls surrounded the perimeter of the slaughterhouse site and now enclose both the new and old sections of the building.

The original pitched roof is clad with traditional clay tiles, but the architects used modern flat ceramics to give a vibrant red to the asymmetric gables that make up the roof of the extension.

"If we observe Medina-Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation moulded by the topography of Medina," explain architects María González and Juanjo López de la Cruz. "The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the moulded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place."

The original arched doorway remains as the entrance to the school and leads in via the old structure. Inside, the architects have replaced the original flooring with exposed concrete that skirts around a set of historic columns in the main hall.

The kitchens are lined with tiles on the floors and walls. High level windows help to bring light in from above, while small glass courtyards are positioned at intervals to provide areas for students to grow vegetables and herbs.

A few slaughterhouses in Spain have been converted to new uses in recent years. Others we've featured include an office and event space in Madrid and a cinema in the same city.

See more architecture projects in Spain, including the restoration of a coastal landscape in Cadaqués.

Photography is by Fernando Alda - see more pictures of this project on his website.

Here's some more information from Sol89

Medina is a historic town in the hills in Cadiz. Its houses are known for their whitewashed walls and their ceramic roofs. The project involves adapting an ancient slaughterhouse, built in the XIX century, into a Professional Cooking School.

The ancient slaughterhouse was composed of a small construction around a courtyard and a high white wall that limits the plot. If you are going to act in the historic city you must adapting, taking shelter, settling in its empty spaces. The density of the architecture of the ancient slaughterhouse, where brick walls, stones and Phoenician columns coexist, contrasts with the empty space inside the plot, limited by the wall. The project proposes catching this space through a new ceramic roof that limits the new construction and consolidates the original building.

If we observe Medina Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation molded by the topography of Medina. The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the molded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place, ceramic roofs and whitewashed walls. Some little courtyards are inserted, working as ventilation shaft, and are cultivated with different culinary plants which are used by the students to cook.

At the original building, ancient floors were replaced by slabs of concrete with wooden formwork that recognise traditional building forms, walls are covered with white and rough lime mortar which seeks material memory of its industrial past, and the existing Phoenician columns, displaced from the disappeared Temple of Hercules, have been consolidated. All of those materials, even the time, built this place.

Architects: María González y Juanjo López de la Cruz. Sol89
Team: George Smudge (architecture student), Jerónimo Arrebola (quantity surveyor), Alejandro Cabanas (structure), Insur JG (building services), Novoarididian SA y Rhodas SL (contractors)

Client: Fundación Forja XXI
Location: C/ Rubiales S/N, Medina Sidonia, Cádiz, Spain
Area: 751 sqm
Completion date: 2011

The post Professional Cooking School in
Ancient Slaughterhouse by Sol89 appeared first on Dezeen.

The seven-storey Museu del Disseny de Barcelona is located on the edge of Plaça de les Glories, next door to Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar office tower. Due to the level changes across the site, the building has part of its volume buried beneath the ground and has public entrances on two of its floors.

MBM Arquitectes divided the form of the building into two halves. The bottom section is a bulky volume with glazed walls and a grass roof, while the upper section is a top-heavy structure clad with pre-weathered aluminium panels on every side.

Set to open in spring 2014, the museum will combine the decorative arts, ceramics, textiles and graphic design collections of four existing museums, which have now closed their doors.

The main exhibition hall will be housed in the lower part of the building, while additional exhibitions will take place in galleries on the museum's upper floors. Other facilities include a large auditorium, a small hall, a public library, education rooms and a bar and cafe.

The area surrounding the museum has been made into a lake, while the grass roof serves as a new public lawn overlooking the water.

The Design Museum in London is also moving to a new home, as British architect John Pawson is developing the former Commonwealth Institute building.

See more recent architecture in Barcelona, including a modular office block by Arata Isozaki and student housing at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

Photography is by Iñigo Bujedo Aguirre.

Here's some more information from DHUB:

The building is the work of MBM Arquitectes, the architecture studio formed by Josep Martorell, Oriol Bohigas and David Mackay, together with Oriol Capdevila and Francesc Gual. The edifice is made up of two parts: one underground (which takes advantage of the slope created by urban development of the plaza) and another which emerges at 14.5 m (at the level of Plaça de les Glòries).

Construction below the height of 14.5m: Most of the surface area of the building is situated below the 14.5m level and is where the more significant installations are housed. They are distributed over two floors and a gallery, and include the main exhibition hall, rooms given over to management and preservation of the DHUB's collections, the main offices, Clot public library, the documentation centre (DHUBdoc) and rooms for research and educational activities, in addition to high-traffic services such as the bar, restaurant and store. Though below ground level, the basement floor receives natural light from a trench which is worked into the different ground levels and which features a huge lake, creating a dialogue with the outside. Lighting is reinforced with six skylights that look out over the public space and can also be used as showcases for the centre's contents and activities.

Construction above the height of 14.5m: This part of the building projects over the width of Carrer d'Àvila and has the shape of a slanted parallelepiped. In accordance with the general urban plan it occupies a minimum footprint, primarily in order not to reduce the space earmarked for public use, but also because the vicissitudes of plans to demolish the elevated road and change the tramline route severely limit the space available. The building cantilevers out towards the plaça, enabling the construction potential to be met while at the same time establishing a display of urban architecture over the motorway. This block will house the venues for long- and short-term temporary exhibitions, as well as a small hall and a large auditorium.

Entrance to both parts or bodies that compose the DHUB headquarters is gained through a single vestibule with two points of access: one in Carrer d'Àvila and another in Plaça de les Glòries. Passage through this part of the building is almost inevitable, as it forms a kind of corridor connecting Plaça de les Glòries, the 22@ technological district and Poblenou.

All of the services situated in the basement area can be reached from this semi-public plaza, as well as those on the upper floors by means of a system of escalators, staircases and lifts. While the different spaces have diverse dimensions and architectural characteristics, overall they form a conceptual whole in which the auditorium stands aloft as a fundamental and crowning feature.

Only two materials are used in the building's exterior, zinc plates and glass, bestowing an industrial feel with metallic accents on the building. The green carpet of the artificial flooring and bright graphics on the pavement are two of the primary components of the outside surfaces. In both cases, the elements employed (natural and manufactured) ensure sustainability and ease of maintenance. The lake, in addition to visually highlighting the work, creates a link between the different levels.

The post DHUB Museu del Disseny de Barcelona
by MBM Arquitectes appeared first on Dezeen.

Conceived by Zhang Lei of AZL architects as a small village community, the Xixi Artist Clubhouse is a cluster of five similar buildings with translucent walls and branch-like arms that stretch out towards one another.

Each building is designed to house artists- and designers-in-residence and contains a mixture of studios and living quarters within a Y-shaped central plan and two Y-shaped arms.

The two-storey central structures are constructed from concrete and feature glazed end walls. Each one contains double-height studio spaces and staircases that lead up to indoor balconies.

The single-storey arms have a steel-framed structure and are clad with translucent polycarbonate panels to bring light into kitchens, bedrooms and smaller studios.

A pathway winds through the site to connect the buildings and a series of small lampposts help residents find their way around after dark.

AZL Architects more recently completed a house with walls that appear to be peeling in a forest near Nanjing, China. See more architecture in China.

Other artists' studios featured on Dezeen include a pointy gallery and studio in Japan and a set of cabin-like studios on an island off the coast of Canada. See more artists' studios on Dezeen.

Photography is by Yao Li.

Here's a little more information from AZL Architects:

Xixi Artist Clubhouse / AZL architects

Located in Xixi wetlands in west of central Hangzhou, the Xixi Artist Clubhouse is organized as a village structure with five building units, 800 m2 each as studio for artists & designers in Hangzhou. Each cluster relies on three Y-shaped volumes, one in six by six and two in three by three meters square frameless openings, creating panoramas view of surrounding wetland landscape in different directions. Contrast to cubic outside geometric volume of building, twisting fiberglass installation redefines internal spaces. Walls, floors, and ceilings are integrated in continues surface, refers to different program.

The six meter tall structure is in concrete, while two smaller sections in steel structure introduce translucent white PC panels as cladding to diffuse direct sunlight. During dark night, one could see a group of beautiful lanterns floating on the water of wild wetland horizon.

Location: Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China
Architect in Charge: Zhang Lei
Project Team: Zhang Lei, Qi wei, Zhong Guanqiu, Zhang Guangwei, Guo Donghai
Collaborator: Architectural Design Institute, ZJIU
Project Area: 4000 sqm
Project year: 2008-2011

The post Xixi Artist Clubhouse
by AZL Architects appeared first on Dezeen.