More than anything, the owners of a new transforming house in Poland wanted constant, direct access to sunlight. They commissioned the local firm KWK Promes to realize their unusual vision, and the result is definitely one of a kind.

“Quadrant House” sits on a grassy suburban plot surrounded by trees. The name comes from both the word referring to the quarters of a circle and a historical instrument used to determine the angle of the sun’s elevation in astronomy. Even without a moving element, the house stands out from its neighbors with its stacked white volumes, blind facades facing the street.

But of course, the star of the show is definitely that kinetic terrace. When it’s flat up against the side of the house, it almost doubles the living space. Moving silently and automatically, the volume swings out a full 90 degrees, allowing more or less sunlight to reach the indoor living room as desired. Sliding glass panels make it possible to open this entire section of the home to the outdoors.

“Clients wanted most simple, sunny and relaxing house, somehow reacting to the movement of the Sun. They also liked our Safe House, its changeability and mechanisms that create relations with the surroundings. The starting point was a regular shape unbuilt site, located in the suburbs among the average single-family housing. We placed a rectangular solid on it, corresponding to the wishes of investors in terms of the functional program.”

“Then we turned the part belonging to the ground floor to get as much privacy as possible from the side of the road. In the ‘cut’ space was located a living room, roofed floor and open to the garden – a similar solution can be found in Living Garden House, where the night zone is on the floor and the day zone becomes part of the garden – the boundaries between architecture and the landscape are blurred.”

Though they hoped for a flat roof, local code requires a gabled shape. The architects found a compromise by angling the gable toward the street-facing facade so that its back edge tapers down toward the yard, giving it a flat appearance from that angle, at least.

And if you’re wondering whether it might actually be dangerous to have a section of your home automatically changing positions according to the movement of the sun across the sky, don’t worry – the architects thought of that. Sensors make sure nothing is in the way of the movable volume, stopping the motion when obstacles are present.

A whole new smart city is set to begin construction west of Moscow, Russia, and Zaha Hadid Architects has been selected to help design it. The firm’s proposal is a phased development prioritizing residential interactions with each other, nature and new technologies, creating “a diverse ecology” of spaces for living, working, education and leisure. The Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoke masterplan aims to be a global benchmark for smart, sustainable cities, incorporating smart tech to increase quality of life.

Zaha Hadid Architects worked with Russia-based TPO Pride Architects to realize a segment of the overall project (alongside fellow winners Nikken Sekkei, UNK Project, Archea Associate and ABD Architects.) Developed in response to a rapidly growing population population in Moscow, the new city will feature 4 million square meters (more than 43 million square feet) of new buildings spread over 1,137 acres.

Much of that land will be dedicated to parks and forests along the Moscow River, and the city will have a 74-acre lake at its center. It’s expected to house 66,500 residents and include everything you’d expect to find in a modern metropolis: hospitals, schools, offices and shopping districts. A metro line will link it to Moscow.

In terms of design, Zaha Hadid Architects’ renderings are certainly standouts with their signature organic shapes and looping ribbons stretching from the rooflines down to the ground.

From the Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye development website:

“The Zaha Hadid Architects team, in a consortium with CPU Pride, proposed a global project idea: a town whose mission is to develop creativity and entrepreneurship. The team proposed to define the ‘cores’ of the area by building additional objects of public infrastructure, such as art residences (cultural core), a laboratory of urban solutions (intellectual core), year-round public spaces (spatial core), and also proposed a number of iconic objects on the central square with the firm’s trademark style—bionic and parametric architecture. The concept’s slogan is ‘satellite town’. Members of the jury noted that it was the first time they were seeing a concept from this firm, in which everything starts from people, rather than a concept dedicated to ‘pure architecture.’”

“Working with specialist teams in Russia and Europe, we developed a people-centric design for a smart interconnected city that brings people together not only through innovative technology but also through organizing the public realm; building a community that integrates the natural aspects of the site with principles of openness and inclusivity in high quality architecture suited for the 21st century,” says Christos Passas, Project Director at Zaha Hadid Architects.

Looking a bit like an architectural Transformer in the middle of taking on a new form, this Highland Park home by the firm Urban Operations takes a highly structured, geometric approach to occupying a hillside. There are no organic forms or curves following the contours of the land; rather, the house seems to exist in tension with the topography that surrounds it, as if it’s ready to fold into a different shape altogether in the event of a landslide or earthquake.

The 2,400-square-foot house features three volumes that step from the top of the hill to its base. Stuccoed white planes seem to fold, expand, retract and crack open to reveal peeks at a dark gray volume underneath, creating an illusion of potential movement. Angled cutaways reveal rooftop decks, terraces, stairwells and entranceways.

The architects dug into the hillside at 4752 East Baltimore Street to partially embed the new house, giving it an anchor. They based the roof deck on villas designed by Le Corbusier, giving the residents views of Griffith Park in the foreground and the San Gabriel Mountains in the background.

“The design marries strategic hillside engineering with a series of stepped programmatic volumes, which are then sliced and folded at various code-generated orientations in order to produce a unified holistic design,” they explain.

The three-bedroom, 3-bath house is now up for sale by Urban Operations architect John Southern for $1.3 million.

“The exquisite hillside modern places you in prime Highland Park with sweeping views and effortless urban access. Stepping gracefully up sloping topography, the spacious home presents a dramatic profile designed around the concepts of open flow and seamless integration with the outdoors. Custom wood and tile craftwork are abundant; the kitchen is outfitted with a center island, waterfall quartz countertops and a pro-grade appliance suite. Strategically located light-wells flood the home with sunlight. Second-level bedrooms access decks and an at-grade patio which transitions into a yard landscaped with native species”

Floating staircases always make a big impact, but rarely do they actually look like they’re just wisps of clouds spiraling through a living space. Prior to renovation, the three floors of this home weren’t connected by a single staircase, leading the basement walkout level to feel distanced from the first and second floors. KOS Architects and Atelier Zerebecky wanted to give the villa a sense of liberating weightlessness, a space that feels fresh and light amid the noisy clamor of urban China.

The staircase itself is strikingly sculptural within a central vaulted space, with all of the home’s main rooms connected to it: the living room, entertaining spaces, kitchen, gym, theater and bedrooms. A gradient of opaque white on the glass railings gives it its signature atmospheric look. The balustrade hides the structural steel so the stairs can appear to float on air.

The client wanted something grand and ostentatious without being gaudy, the architects explain.

“Our first gesture was to create a unified space as the backbone of the home – a large double-height vaulted ceiling creates a sense of grandeur without resorting to the extravagance of Loius XIV décor and gold leaf ornament, something so prevalent in the high end residential market of suburban China. Our doubly curved vault maximizes the ceiling height beneath a suburban pitched roof architecture while creating a smooth venetian plastered volume that exhibits the play of natural light. This space houses the ceremonial entrance, the formal living area, fireplace and a new glass staircase.”

The rest of the home feels equally light and airy, including a pink child’s bedroom with its own slide. More photos are available at the Atelier Zerebecky website.

Photos by Highlite Images Taipei

When artificial structures mimic the contours of topographic maps, which are almost sculptural in their own right, they become an extension of the land itself. The lines on the map that indicate changes in elevation, following the curves of dips and projections, easily transform into flat abstracted planes delineating the floors of a building or the levels of a stepped landscape design. Some of these built environments follow the existing shapes of the land beneath them and others create new ones altogether, reimagining the geography of the setting.

This concept model for an art gallery on UC Berkeley’s campus doubles as a bridge spanning Strawberry Creek. The design engages with the topography of the site allowing visitors to either cross or easily access the creek.#conceptmodel #architecture #ucberkeley #strawberrycreek pic.twitter.com/h1KqblfJap

— Jacoby Architects (@JacobyArch) November 17, 2017

Architects often start with 3D visual models of the terrain of a building site, which may be abstracted into layers of flat wood or foam. These artificial landscapes make it easier to envision how the new structure will fit into its surroundings, and it’s easy to see how they could have an influence on the design of the buildings themselves.

Some topographical architecture is made to blend in, presenting itself almost as if it grew naturally out of the hills that surround it. Krakow University student Adrian Kasperski designed a new natural park venue for the Island of Fogo after its previous one was destroyed by molten lava just a year after its opening, and he used the topography of the land as a guide to avoid similar catastrophes in the future and help camouflage the low-rise facility. It presents itself as a “slight cut in the caldera” with elongated plaza frames that dip down to follow the slopes.

In the Guangxi province of China, the new Suiseki Hall by Zhanghua Architects is as fluid as the body of water beside it, suggesting the shape of hills, yet there are no hills nearby. The architects actually wanted to represent a balance between the flat land and the craggy mountains, taking inspiration from the pattern of stone as it erodes beneath fast-flowing water.

Zaha Hadid Architects’ predilection for flowing organic shapes and parametric modeling naturally lends itself to topographical compositions, like the Beko Masterplan in Belgrade. Paying tribute to the region’s modernist traditions, this proposal embeds a new community into the surrounding mountains. Intriguingly, the flowing volumes seem to have been plucked and stretched right out of the more conventional building beside them, each of their floors like a rocky stratification.

In other cases, dramatic peaks project out of the ground like shards of stone, conjuring a mountain-like sense of solidity. Graphic structures like the Festival Hall in Era by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects take the shapes of natural landscape features and turn them into oversized inhabitable sculptures. The Festival Hall “developed from the topographical conditions, placing it in an adequate relationship with the existing Passionsspielhaus,” the architects explain. It works to achieve a harmony between itself and the existing historical building beside it as well as the mountains in the distance.

Projects like BC Prestige by 4M Architecture aim to create mountains where there are none, yet their silhouettes aren’t exactly natural, almost seeming like someone took a topographic map and sliced out some of the higher elevations, plopping them down elsewhere. Similarly, the Topographic House by MiAS Arquitectes is like an artificial crag overlooking the sea.

“Rising Over the Traces of History,” a design for a new governmental historic and cultural complex in Kaliningrad by ONZ Architects and Ercan Coban Architects, literally turns this concept upside-down. Its building is flat on top and along the sides, but its underbelly is curved to complement the hills and valleys of the land underneath it.

Named for the dramatic Dolomite mountain range in which it’s set, the Dolomitenblick holiday apartment building abstracts the steep slopes, making each shift in elevation into its own level. A diagonal cut offering entrance to the building slices its facade in half, almost as if the “rock” of the structure has been shaped by falling water. “Besides its functional meaning, this incision becomes the main defining element of the building” from the cut at either side a strip unfolds that forms the balustrade of a generous covered balcony and ends into the surrounding topography. Following the steep natural hillside with each floor the strips and the facade jump back,” says Plasma Studio.

Plasma is well known for “drawing landscapes into buildings,” taking natural shapes and stretching them into more geometric-looking volumes that remain organic nonetheless. This tendency is especially pronounced in projects like its Ggantija World Heritage Park proposal, the dynamic Esker Haus with its slatted timber facade mimicking a “stratified geological formation,” the similar Strata Hotel in Italy “developed as a free-flowing topography” and the Flowing Gardens project developed for the Beijing Olympics, which almost seems to recreate the look of a topographic map when viewed from above. Plasma notes that one of its main strategies is to seamlessly integrate architecture, landscape and urbanism.

Of course, it’s only natural that topographical design trickles down to landscape architecture as well. Designed with stormwater management in mind, the San Martín de la Mar Square in Cantabria, Spain by the appropriately named Zigzag Arquitectura looks like a topographic map come to life with its series of terraced platforms. The square integrates permeable paving and strips of grass to navigate a steep change in slope and make the overlook at the top more accessible to all.

Kengo Kuma’s Naturescape, a topographical landscape of stone and water created for the Urban Stories exhibition of contemporary living in Milan, interprets traditional Zen gardens in a delightfully graphic way. The layers of stone follow curves around the room, creating pathways, clusters of bamboo and pools of water.
http://www.zigzagarquitectura.com/