Developer Phillip Bay asked Shigeru Ban to design a prototype house that could be built cheaply using local materials and would be suitable for the tropical climate. The house was to form a template for the construction of 100 replacement homes in Kirinda.

"This was not going to be a traditional disaster relief effort where we go in and make homes really fast and leave," said Bay. "I wanted to treat this like a development project."

Ban's design comprises a single-storey structure with walls made from compressed earth blocks and a pitched roof made from locally sourced teak and coconut wood.

Each house has two bedrooms, a hall and a sheltered courtyard, which residents can use as a dining room, social space or simply as a place to repair fishing nets.

Adaptable wooden screens divide the rooms, to suit a Muslim lifestyle. "This is the first time I've worked for the Muslim societies," said Ban, "so before I built the houses I had a community meeting to find out what has to be carefully done depending on the generation, for example, we had to separate the man's space and woman's space."

Ban also designed furniture for the residence, using wood from the rubber trees that are common to the region.

The Post-Tsunami Housing was completed in 2007 but was recently named as one of 20 projects on the shortlist for the Aga Khan Award 2013. Other projects on the shortlist include an Islamic cemetery in Austria and a reconstructed refugee camp in Lebanon. Five or six finalists will be revealed later this year and will compete to win the $1 million prize.

Shigeru Ban has also worked on a number of other disaster-relief projects. He devised apartment blocks made from shipping containers for victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 and was one of several high-profile architects involved in the Make It Right housing project in New Orleans. See more architecture by Shigeru Ban.

Photography is by Dominic Samsoni.

Here's a project description from the Aga Khan Award organisers:

Post-Tsunami Housing

This project provides 100 houses in a Muslim fishing village, in the region of Tissamaharama, on the southeast coast of Sri Lanka, following the destruction caused by the 2004 tsunami. Shigeru Ban's aim was to adapt the houses to their climate, to use local labour and materials to bring profit to the region, and to respond to the villagers' own requirements through direct consultation. For example, kitchens and bathrooms are included within each house, as requested by the villagers, but a central covered area separates them from the living accommodation, as stipulated by the government. The covered area also provides an entertainment space from which women can retreat to maintain privacy. Local rubber-tree wood was used for partitions and fittings, and compressed earth blocks for walls.

Location: Kirinda, Sri Lanka (Asia)
Architect: Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo, Japan
Client: Philip Bay
Completed: 2007
Design: 2005
Site size: 71 m2 for each house - Total site area: 3'195 m²

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by Shigeru Ban appeared first on Dezeen.

Israeli architect Moshe Safdie has designed a skyscraper for Sri Lanka comprising one tower slumped against another.

The residential towers will be located in the centre of capital city Colombo and will overlook the large Beira Lake and the ocean beyond.

Shops will occupy the ground floor of the 69-storey building, while apartments with balcony gardens will be located in the levels above.

See our earlier story about a shell-like performing arts centre that the firm completed in Kansas City last year.

See more stories about skyscrapers »

Here's the full press release:

Architect Moshe Safdie Selected to Design Tallest Residential Building In Colombo

Project is Safdie’s First in Sri Lanka

Safdie Architects announced that the firm has been selected to design a new mixed-use development in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The project will be the first for Moshe Safdie in Sri Lanka, and is slated to be the tallest residential building in Colombo when it is completed.

The 69-storey mixed-use development is in the city center and will face Beira Lake, with pedestrian accessible retail outlets at the ground level. The design includes expansive family and community space amenities such as community gardens, shared outdoor spaces within the upper levels of the building, and individual roof gardens or terraces for every residence, a hallmark of Safdie’s design philosophy to provide access to outdoor spaces in high density urban housing.

The Colombo project draws on Safdie’s groundbreaking Habitat ’67 in Montreal. Since that time, Safdie Architects has continued to explore and build projects incorporating fractal-geometry surface patterns, dramatic stepping of the structure that results in a network of gardens open to the sky, and streets that interconnect and bridge community gardens in the air.

Colombo’s building form consists of two tower blocks, with one block leaning into the other vertical tower, which supports it. The overall form tapers towards the sky, so that even though it is quite a large building, it maintains a delicacy on the skyline. The structure is highly rationalized, affording cross-ventilation and multiple exposures in every residential unit. The towers are oriented to the movement of the sun and to maximize air flow in the tropical climate, as well as take advantage of 270-degree views of Beira Lake and the Indian Ocean.

At the ground level, an arcade of retail outlets on the west side facing Beira Lake sets the standard for future lakefront development along the planned pedestrian promenade. Restaurants on a mezzanine level overlook the promenade onto the Lake.

Pradeep Sureka, Director of Indocean Developers (Pvt) Ltd., whose company will build the towers, said “We are pleased to be working with Moshe Safdie on this project. It was of paramount importance to us that that architect we chose be an iconic, global figure with a list of commendable projects in his/her portfolio. We had no hesitation in deciding on Moshe Safdie. In particular, Safdie’s design for Marina Bay Sands integrated resort has become an immediately recognizable symbol of Singapore, and we are confident that he will do justice to the beautiful Beira Lake site.”

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by Moshe Safdie appeared first on Dezeen.

Japanese architect Tadao Ando has completed a concrete house on the edge of a cliff in southern Sri Lanka, writes Yuki Sumner.

Designed for a married couple, the three-storey house incorporates a glazed study for the husband and an artist’s studio for his wife.

Light floods into this ground floor studio though a two storey-high window, which is divided into four by a large steel cross.

A staircase wraps around this room and leads up to a first floor mezzanine.

The glazed study is located on the first floor and is accessed via a zig-zagging staircase, which ascends from the 20 metre-long living room.

Outdoor terraces also step between the ground and first floors, while an infinity pool projects over the living room roof.

Furniture throughout the house is monochrome, including a teak and cardboard table designed by Shigeru Ban.

Tadao Ando also recently completed a misty water feature in London - see our earlier story here.

Photography is by Edmund Sumner.

The text below was written by Yuki Sumner:

The House in Sri Lanka, or so called by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando who designed it, is set against a paradise on earth.

White sandy beaches, dotted with coconut palm trees and huts draped with leaves from these trees, weave in and out of cliffs in Mirissa, located at the southern tip of Sri Lanka. Crocodiles and water snakes splash in its rivers, black monkeys, wild elephants and even leopards roam freely on its land. Local fishermen languorously wait for fish to swim towards them on wooden sticks firmly wedged into the sand along the edge of the sea.

The name of the house is perhaps enough to suggest its majestic presence: clad in exposed concrete, the house perches on top of a cliff, as if it were indeed a leopard whose claws edge towards the Indian Ocean.

The house was a gift from a husband to a wife. Sri Lanka has been the Belgian couple's home for the past 30 years. The inscription on a slab of stone placed outside the house gate at the end of a meandering private road is almost too romantic for me. It says: “To Saskia.”

Pierre Pringiers is an industrialist who has successfully built up a regional tire-manufacturing firm into a global business that now supplies over 40% of the industrial tires worldwide. He wanted his wife, Saskia, an established artist, to have her own studio.

Pierre tells me: “One day I asked her if she were to choose her favourite architect in the world, who would it be? She said Tadao Ando.” The iconic images of Ando’s Church of Light, built in 1989, had made a deep impression on the artist.

With this house, Ando has evidently taken a slightly different approach from his previous work, which tended to be introspective, with only small gaps for light to seep in.

Here, the architect abandons the house to the elements of nature. Saskia, who finds inspirations for her artwork in “the sky and the sea of this tropical island,” wanted to see nothing but the sky and the sea from the house. Ando says he “aimed to create an airy architecture like many of the native houses.”

The architect has parcelled the house, which threatens to take off, into four different sections. One box contains the reception, kitchen, master bedroom and Pierre’s “mediation room,” while the one parallel to it contains four guest bedrooms, each one complete with a sea view and an en-suite. Another box, containing the elongated living room almost 20 meters long, dynamically slices through these two parcels of concrete at an angle. The window at the end of this box can be made to roll down and dematerialise into the ocean below.

The interstitial spaces, or what we call ‘ma’ in Japan, created by the criss-crossing lines, are cleverly filled in. A grand stairway from the entrance patio gently unfolds onto a large airy loggia, the sprawling of which is accentuated by an infinity pool jutting out at an angle in one corner. The pool sits atop the living room, which means that it is as long and expansive as the room below it. There is the feeling that the parcels in this house have been left open.

And indeed, the panorama from this open loggia spans nearly 360 degrees, over the Indian Ocean to the front and over the jungle at the back. Solid square columns of concrete hold up the horizontal rooftop, which is also made of concrete, while a mixture of timber and stone floors subtly divide the area into smaller, more manageable sections.

From this loggia, we can see Geoffery Bawa’s Jayawardene House in the distance. It was the last project that the singularly most revered architect of Sri Lanka had worked on. You begin to understand then that this house is Ando’s nod to Regional Modernism, the likes of which was embraced by Bawa.

Where should the focus of a house with no apparent end be? Pierre’s study is snugly fitted right in the centre of the house, created inside the interstitial space on the ground floor. It is a room made of glass, playfully reached via the living room through a zigzagging ramp, which wraps around the triangle void created by a well of intersecting angles.

Hundreds of miles away from Japan, we can still witness the perfect detailing Ando is known for. Never mind the fact that the architect had actually never set his foot on site; every nook and corner of the house is still cleverly accounted for. The near-invisible room is not, however, the anchor of the house, even if it is placed at the centre of the house. The tour of this sprawling house ends with Saskia’s studio, the raison d'être of the house. The studio is purposefully set apart from the rest of the house.

A circuitous route from the upper level down to the lower level of the studio, complete with a floating steel bridge at the middle of the room, adds to its heightened religious feel. Saskia’s studio has a resonance with Ando’s Church of Light, except that it is set in reverse. Unlike the living room, the large window at the end stays put and is fitted with a steel framework that forms a large cross.

Here, the cross is made not with light but with shadow. Furnishing in the room, as in the rest of the house, is monochrome, complimenting Saskia’s paintings, as well as Ando’s play of light and shadow. Top Mouton, the design company based in Belgium responsible for the interior fit out of the house, knew not to bother with soft furnishing in Ando’s house.

Jacob Pringiers, one of the couple’s grown children, has some of his collection scattered around the house. Shigeru Ban, another Japanese architect who ended up designing a house for the client’s other son nearby as the result of Ban’s meeting with the industrialist on a tsunami relief project, has custom-made the couple’s dining room’s table with a teak top and cardboard legs, all painted suitably in black.

Saskia’s artworks are hung on the wall. The artist paints directly onto unstretched canvases, which are then stored rolled up like the Japanese emaki. Interestingly, the sky and the sea of Sri Lanka are always painted in dark grey in her work.

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The darkness comes perhaps from the artist’s own acknowledgement that paradise is not what it seems. In 2004, the work on the house had to be temporary halted after the area was badly hit by the tsunami.

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Her husband immediately put an effective rehabilitation programme together, drafting, for example, the Belgium army to set up the emergency housing for the locals who lost homes. In the end, he was able to raise enough funds to build 700 permanent houses, as well as a new community centre and a Buddhist temple, a new village, in fact, tucked away in the hills, away from the threatening sea.

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David Robson, who recently published the monograph of Geoffery Bawa, writes that Regional Modernism “rejects the banalities of mass consumerism but welcomes the positive achievements of globalization, while seeking to support and revalidate local cultures.” The House in Sri Lanka similarly stands at the juncture where regional and global forces meet.

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Its success comes from a collaboration of people from all over the world. Two Japanese specialists, Kiyoshi Aoki and Yukio Tanaka, flew out from Japan to oversee the entire process of casting concrete, which required the position of every plughole to be exact. Such skills, heretofore unknown in Sri Lanka, have now been passed onto the local engineers and builders.

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PWA Architects, the local architectural firm, played a vital role as a mediator, relaying messages to and fro Japan. The project architect Hidehiro Yano from TAAA made many trips to Sri Lanka to check on the progress and be the eye of Ando.

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Although it was Pierre and Saskia who approached Ando, it was apparently Ando who made the final decision to work with them. It took Ando nearly three weeks to reply yes to their request, and only after insisting that the client write an essay about who they were and what they liked about the architect’s work.

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Ando has always insisted that as an architect, he is merely designing a box, that it is the client who puts the soul into it. In Pierre and Saskia, then, the ex-boxer-com-visionary architect has finally met his match. The result of the match is a tour-de-force of concrete, as uncompromising and defiant as the humanistic idealism that is behind it.

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photographed by Edmund Sumner appeared first on Dezeen.