- Toyota Woven City
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Toyota Motor Corporation joined hands in 2020 to create a carbon-neutral smart city with an innovative multi-modal mobility system in Susono, Japan.
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Lieu de vie is a multifunctional public facility on the new university campus of Paris-Saclay, France. This low-cost building is designed to encourage interactions of diverse communities living near one another, but rarely meeting.
Studio Muoto has packed, within a compact architectural form, a diversity of programmes such as indoor and outdoor sports facilities, a restaurant, a cafeteria and assorted communal areas.
At the urban scale, these are connected to a pedestrian square, street terraces and park zones, for people who are walking, bicycling or driving.
The campus is conceived as an urban shelf, serving students, teachers, researchers and employees from different schools and companies, day and night. It functions as a meeting point by co-locating amenities that appeal to many user groups.
The architecture is derived from vertical stacking of programmes and the appearance of slabs as shelves, which is accentuated by the transparency of the envelope.
Internally, the building is configured with a flexible spatial organisation. It has spaces that are linked to one another.
The structure, for instance, features expansive use of aluminium sliding doors. A large staircase, at the heart of the building, allows users to explore it volumetrically. This promotes movement between floors and offers visual links and social spaces between levels.
Movement through the building — outside to inside, linking back to outside — is compared to a Klein bottle, wherein the difference between interior and exterior are intentionally dissolved.
The compactness of the building minimises its footprint. The form strategy reduces the need for materials and other resources typically associated with buildings.
The design draws inspiration from industrial structures like billboards, scaffolding, and bridges. The logic here is to foster cost and performative efficiency whilst projecting an aesthetic that accentuates the minimalism of structure and materiality.
Glass and concrete delineate the form. Concrete beams are prefabricated to reduce construction time and cost. This combined palette ensures a low-maintenance and high durability.
Reversed slab, the placement of insulation material above the concrete floor, enables the building to achieve high levels of thermal performance, albeit without heavy cladding. This keeps the slab and structure visible from the outside, emphasising the ‘shelves’ analogy.
To minimise the need for energy-consuming systems, only functional spaces are heated, excluding transitional and technical rooms. In the summer, natural ventilation is facilitated by sliding doors, while large textile shades provide sun protection.
The synergistic approach to materiality, space and structure transforms this otherwise modest building into a distinctive landmark. It exemplifies a core tenet of sustainability: the integration of economic, social, and environmental needs.
Studio Muoto won the Silver prize in the 2014 Holcim Awards for the Europe region for this project. It also won the 2017 Building Better Recognition Holcim Awards in Europe.
Read more about this project on Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction website.
Post sponsored by the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction
A Novel project is innovative in one or two ways, say, material use, passive design, community engagement, etc. Performance, here, might be discussed in quantitative or qualitative ways.
There are no performance metrics for this project.
Architects
Studio Muoto
Team members
Thomas Wessel-Cessieux
Gilles Delalex
Yves Moreau
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