La Calera chapel – Bolivia

Via Architecture Lab

” The chapel in La Calera has a basic geometry that tries to alter the territory as little as possible. It uses the natural features of the environment, the wind and the light, to create an essential harmony. The chapel is designed to open to the outside to allow worshipers to gather in mass, this architectural design appeases both small private groups and large public functions, in a country full of contrasts, making this transformation a symbolic within itself.

The relation between a still and a mobile volume represents “the passage between two worlds, between the known and the unknown, the light and the darkness. As the door opens, a mystery is revealed, and has a dynamic and psychological value, not only showing us a landscape, but inviting us to pass trough it.

This change of focus, scale and perspective, transforms the component of the chapel; the space for the altar turns into the space for the choir, the main nave transforms into the lateral nave and the tabernacle becomes part of the landscape. To make all aforementioned things possible, the placement of the building was scrupulously studied.

Hypergreen

Via flozot 

Architect Jacques Ferrier has designed this concept building as an answer to the recent rise in green-conscious citizens. Hypergreen is 250 meters tall, has 60 floors, geothermal heat pumps, photovoltaic panels,  wind turbines, earth cooling tubes, vegetated sky lobbies, a roof garden and a  rainwater recovery system are all encompassed with the innovative exoskeleton made of a new pre-pressed concrete. The concrete “lattice” allows floor-plates to be nearly pillar free which means walls and every second floor to be very flexible.