On Monday, we visited Veronika and Sebastian’s rental apartment, with its amazing book-lined staircase. Here’s what the architect said about how he came up with this stylish space-saving solution.
London-based Levitate Architects came up with this ingenious solution to a book storage problem and created a loft-like bedroom nestled under the roof of the top-floor apartment. Here’s what Levitate’s Tim Sloan had to say about the project:
The flat occupies part of the shared top floor of an existing Victorian mansion block. Our proposal extended the flat into the unused loft space above, creating a new bedroom level and increasing the floor area of the flat by approximately one third. We created a ’secret’ staircase, hidden from the main reception room, to access a new loft bedroom lit by roof lights. Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client’s desire for a library to form a ‘library staircase’ in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome. The stair structure was designed as an upside down ’sedan chair’ structure (with Rodrigues Associates, Structural Engineers, London) that carries the whole weight of the stair and books back to the main structural walls of the building. It dangles from the upper floor thereby avoiding any complicated neighbour issues with the floors below.
Running under the river Elbe in Hamburg is a beautiful tunnel like no other. This 1/2 kilometre ‘technical marvel’, known as the ‘old river elbe tunnel’, was built in 1911, sits 24 metres below the river and connects central hamburg with the shipyard island of steinwerder. What makes the tunnel unique are the entry points on each side of the river: rather than just driving straight into the tunnel, vehicles enter a freight elevator which slowly descends to the tunnel below, the tunnel then taking traffic to a similar elevator on the opposite side which lifts them back to ground level.
Below is the recently (2003) extended runway at funchal airport in portugal madeira. the original 1400m runway was notoriously short and, as a result, sometimes dangerous for landing planes. The runway extension won the iabse’s ‘outstanding structures award’ and rightly so: due to an obvious lack of land, engineers have supported the extension on 180 pillars, each 70m high. On the last photo you can see what seems to be a car park that now lives under the end of the runway.
Ever wonder what it would be like to live upside-down, sleep like a vampire or break out of prison? More and more hotels are breaking out of the tradition of cookie-cutter rooms and are moving toward unique one-of-a-kind artist-driven room designs. Here are sixteen such rooms that span the spectrum from clever and kitchy to sexy and surreal. Even though some may look uncomfortable, unusual or downright freakish at least they aren’t among the 7 tiniest hotel rooms in the world.
