loft living at funkylofts.com

Amidst the urban jungle, Architect Ghiora Aharoni turned two rooms, 550-square-feet, into a comfortable living-dining space in his West Village apartment. Notice above, Aharoni exposed the living area’s brick walls before painting them white and installed a new cherry floor. The kitchen cabinets were designed, like the bookcases in the living room, to float above the floor to maximize the floor area to create a sense of spaciousness. A home theatre screen rolls down from the ceiling at the edge of the kitchen to double as a room divider and a projection surface. The bathroom’s sliding door and circular shower-curtain rod are space saving devices as well as the long & very narrow stainless-steel sink.

Although Aharoni works on much larger and luxurious projects in Manhattan, his apartment transformation forced him to respond to what was there instead of what he could design. He said,  ”I learned to listen to a space”.

Designed by internationally renowned architects of Ateliers Jean Nouveau, www.jeannouvel.com, the Guthrie Theatre is a 285,000 square foot complex which rises boldly on its riverfront site. The circular form of its thrust theatre echoes the adjacent grain silos, its size in harmony with the volume of nearby flour mills, its metal sheeting evoking the industrial and agrarian buildings of Minneapolis’ past. Three vertical LED signs on top of the Guthrie reflect the vintage signage in the area, and a cantilevered “endless bridge” extending the equivalent of 12 stories toward the Mississippi provides spectacular views of the historic river valley. For more information go to the NY Times Theater Review.
Here are a few words from Ateliers Jean Nouvel describing one of their masterpieces, the Icelandic National Concert & Conferance Centre/hotel in Reykjavik.

Here we have an invented landscape, totally modern, new, artificial, that marries with the familiar silhouette of Iceland’s mountains, borrows its natural materials, rocks and stones, basalt and red lava, moss and lichens in a sort of feigned mimicry. Feigned, because mixed with these natural materials are materials from human industry: glass in various states and colors; bright satin aluminum for cladding the little buildings of the hotel whose forms echo of the domestic fabric of the city nearby. This friction between nature and artifice continues beneath the hill: the meandering public spaces serving the different program functions are treated as a sort of luminous cavern made of undulating walls of wood stripping and supple, gently sloping floors. The functional elements are designed with the preciousness they require. Set like gemstones in their somewhat rough and unpolished gangue, they appear all the more comfortable and refined.

Hljodaklettur is a landscape-object that openly displays its contrasts and contradictions. Serious and relaxed; familiar and strange; mysterious and open; simple and sophisticated. Opaque, luminous, modest, aristocratic, it seeks to intrigue. Like its name: Hljodaklettur.