Articles by Andreas Luco

Our clients, who are avid hikers and explorers, chose this piece of land in Belgium’s rolling forests to build a vacation home for their extended family use.   Mormont is a quiet village surrounded by hills and valleys, farmland, pastures and countless hiking paths.  One particular hiking path – a convenient 45minute loop – has access from both ends of the extended property.  Our motivation from very early in the design process was to make this home “close the loop” on to their property and have the building act as a culminating moment along the path.

In a seaside condominium, the rectangular and flat lot of 520 sq m is surrounded by conventional two-story houses with attic. Countless windows and openings brought a big privacy issue for this 490 sq m residence. Therefore, the planned program was placed between two windowless and aerial walls, with travertine cladding, supported by columns, and positioned within the legal boundaries of the property. These aerial walls configure the side facades of the building, ensuring the privacy of the internal spaces from the nearest neighbors. The exception is the double-height ceiling that serves the daily dining room. On the opposite side, an open-air courtyard, also with double-height ceiling, protects the more glassed facades and illuminates the main areas of the house. The front and rear facades are enveloped by movable wooden mashrabiya to increase privacy and comfort in high temperatures.

The clients, an elderly couple with decades of memories in Wieringerwerf, approached Atlas with the request to transform their current home into a living environment where they could comfortably age in place. The deep-rooted love for their village prevented them from moving elsewhere. Therefore, it was only natural for them to expand and transform their current residence so that they could carry out all their daily activities on a single level. Located in the rural area north of Amsterdam, Wieringerwerf, the current house had already undergone two extensions in the past, which distorted its original shape. By enlarging the house with yet another

Located in the heart of a sparsely populated urban area in the town of Corbeil-Essonnes, the building, constructed in 1971, is positioned in the center of the plot. This “Pailleron-type” structure – owing to its similarities with the modularconstruction process – is composed of metal posts and beams clad in glazed facadepanels, and an exterior steel assembly supporting fixed horizontal sunshades. The straightforward geometry of a rectangular parallelepiped is determined by theprocess of construction. The regular facades are marked by a horizontal grid signalingthe three levels of the building, and a vertical grid formed by the modules of identicalwindow units. The building consists of a basement housing technical areas and a car park, a groundfloor with a public reception desk in an area of the lobby, and related functions(lunchroom, a caretaker’s apartment), offices and archives, and finally another flooralso containing offices and archives.

The DeHue structure, colloquially pronounced as “dề Huế” in the local dialect, is a wooden house that has been repurposed into a contemporary coffee shop while preserving its traditional Hue architecture. The preservation efforts have maintained the original column, beam, and roof systems of the house. Notable modifications include the installation of a bar in the right corner, the addition of an open roof to allow natural light, and the use of stone cladding on the border columns to create a contrast with the traditional house.

An ambitious commercial project was developed on a narrow plot of land measuring 5.65 metres wide by 34.20 metres long, with an east-west orientation, located in a central but neglected urban area. The challenge included the need to create a building without architectural barriers, but with the risk of flooding in the street during the intense rains characteristic of the coastal climate. The building was required to be economical in its construction, use and maintenance, while maintaining high standards of habitability in terms of thermal comfort, luminosity and acoustic insulation. These fundamental conditions guided the conception of the project.

The aichermagazin is a temporary pavilion made from wood and painted black – a simple cubic structure elevated on slender pillars. Enclosed by a pergola from all sides, it is host to a small exhibition space. The floor and ceiling are constructed as an open grid, allowing the weather to pass through. There is no entrance, no door, no opening hours. It is always open, for everyone – for a certain period of time.