Designers: Want to have your task featured? Showcase your work by publishing tasks to Architizer and register for our inspiring newsletters. If I had a dollar for each project described as” framing the landscape,” “capturing views”or”bringing the outdoors in,”I ‘d most likely be rich enough to purchase among these buildings. (Well, perhaps not in this economy). But to be fair, an excellent view is hard to withstand. Architects, clients and architecture authors alike enjoy talking about what can be seen through the glass: the mountains beyond, the city skyline, the forest canopy. The story is often told from the perspective of the person standing within, watching out.
This collection turns around and looks the other method.
Weishan Chongzheng Academy Book Shop of Librairie Avant-Garde
By Trace Architecture Office, Dali, China
Jury Winner, 13th Annual A+A wards, Commercial Remodellings and Additions
Housed within a 500-year-old academy in Weishan Ancient Town, this bookstore was developed as a cultural destination that reconnects a historical site with contemporary urban life. Rather than dealing with the academy as a closed monument, the style introduces brand-new reading areas, exhibition areas and gathering places that encourage everyday usage. Long book galleries thread through the yards, developing thoroughly framed views that shift in between historic structures, fully grown trees and collections of books.
Its most unforgettable gesture appears at the eastern edge of the site, where a mainly glazed addition faces the street. Unlike the inward-looking academy, this new volume acts as a show and tell window, offering passersby a direct glance into the book shop’s interior. Books, events and daily activity become part of the streetscape, turning curiosity into an invite to step inside.
Açucena Home
By TETRO ARQUITETURA, Nova Lima, Brazil
Popular Option Winner, Private House (M 2000– 4000 sq feet), 11th Annual A+A wards
Casa Açucena was shaped by a basic facility: maintain the site as completely as possible. Rather than clearing vegetation or reshaping the steep terrain, your home inhabits the spaces in between existing trees and rises above the forest flooring on slim columns. This technique enables the landscape to continue below the building while providing homeowners a daily perspective generally scheduled for the canopy itself.
Large expanses of glass play a main function in that experience. Living areas, bedrooms and flow spaces remain aesthetically linked to the surrounding forest, with views extending through trunks, foliage and openings in the treetops. From outdoors, illuminated interiors become noticeable between the trees, offering fleeting glimpses of life within.
Rosy Mound Retreat
By Lucid Architecture, Grand Haven, Michigan
Created as a response to strict dune defense regulations, Rosy Mound Retreat reassesses how a home can preserve a relationship with the shoreline when it can no longer sit near the water. Forced further inland than the home it replaced, the job raises its primary home to recover views of Lake Michigan while limiting its impact on the sensitive landscape. The floor plan stays deliberately compact, developing a modest retreat focused on outdoor living and connection to the website.
Glass plays a crucial role in maintaining that connection. A suspended living room volume opens views through the home toward the lake, protecting sightlines that would otherwise be lost. Large glazed openings draw the altering conditions of the shoreline into the interior, while during the night the elevated living spaces end up being noticeable from outside, appearing to hover gently above the dunes.
Los Pacheco
By Taller Ezequiel Aguilar Martínez, Puebla, México
Behind the thick stone walls of this centuries-old manor house, a series of contemporary homes unfolds through courtyards, double-height spaces and unexpected shafts of light. The job transforms a shabby historic home in Puebla’s UNESCO-listed center into seven apartment or condos, while carefully bring back original arches, bays and architectural features that had been concealed gradually. Rather than dealing with preservation as a constraint, the design uses the existing structure to generate distinct home with differing layouts and spatial experiences.
Because brand-new openings were mostly forbidden, light enters from above through skylights and vertical voids that connect several levels. From the courtyards, passersby and homeowners capture looks of flow, brightened interiors and day-to-day activity, creating moments of visual connection within a structure that otherwise appears remarkably personal from the street.
Alta North
By Prospect Studio, Alta, Wyoming
Big locations of glass specify the experience of Alta North House, a household retreat positioned at the edge of the Caribou-Targhee National Park. Inspired in part by the landscape-focused collages of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Resor Home, the job is arranged around a central living space where the surrounding surroundings ends up being an active part of daily life. Private spaces branch off from this core, including a main suite ignoring neighboring wetlands and a visitor wing created for gathering after long days outdoors.
The primary living location is framed by opposing drape walls that open broad views across the site, creating the feeling of populating a cleaning within the landscape. From outside, these transparent façades reveal glimpses of day-to-day activity, while the solid concrete volumes that flank the area supply contrast and frame the house’s connection to the mountains beyond.
Ziin Beijing Store
By Atelier tao+c, Beijing, China
< img src="https://blog.architizer.com/wp-content/uploads/168224231930422_Ziin_store_Wen_Studio-scaled.jpg" alt=""width="1708" height="2560"/ > A furnishings showroom may appear like an obvious location to put products on screen, however this project turns the entire structure into a carefully staged seeing experience. Produced within a former textile storage facility, the design inserts two turned square frameworks into the existing industrial shell, establishing a brand-new spatial order while maintaining the character of the original brick structure. Visitors move through a series of spaces specified by these intersecting volumes, with moving point of views exposing furnishings, architecture and individuals from unanticipated angles.
Openness plays a central role because experience. A polycarbonate-clad volume acts as a radiant outer layer, providing partial views into the interior and developing a sense of interest from the exterior. Glass, open circulation routes and the spaces between old and brand-new structures allow activity to remain visible throughout the building, turning daily usage into part of the exhibition itself.
The Stone Pavilions
By DODESIGN, Chongqing, China
< img src="https://blog.architizer.com/wp-content/uploads/174581280782502%E5%82%8D%E6%99%9A%E7%9A%84%E7%9F%B3%E9%98%B6__%E5%AD%98%E5%9C%A8%E6%91%84%E5%BD%B1Arch-Exist.jpg" alt ="" width="2000" height="1334"/ > A possibility encounter with a granite stone ended up being the starting point for The Wandering Stones, a small architectural intervention designed to deepen visitors’ experience of a mountain valley in Chongqing. Positioned among streams, dense vegetation and rocky cliffs, the job includes a lookout structure and a small pavilion, both carefully placed to motivate observation of the surrounding landscape. Movement through the website is choreographed as a steady ascent, with altering perspectives exposing various elements of the valley.
Openness plays an important role in maintaining this connection to nature. Underneath a series of stacked stone-like slabs, frameless glass walls confine interior areas while preserving uninterrupted views throughout the forest and water. From outside, reflections and transparency soften the difference between architecture and landscape, developing minutes where visitors capture peeks of people, scenery and structure layered together within a single frame.
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