
Cabinet of curiosity
21 December
Designed by Portuguese architect Miguel Marcelino, the intriguingly abstract Museum of Mechanical Music has recently opened in Pinhal Novo, Portugal. Housing the client, Luís Cangueiro’s private collection of over 600 mechanical music boxes dating from the late 1800s until 1930s, the building is a playful riff on its contents, appearing as a mysterious box in itself.
The windowless biscuit-coloured concrete block is a fascinating object, which tricks the eye with its convex façade shaped by two diagonal lines which meet the entrance. A central lobby opens up to three galleries of varying sizes where the music boxes are displayed. Traversing through the antechambers, which connect the galleries, diagonal perspectives are opened up allowing the visitor glimpses into different spaces, playing with the intrigue in a similar way to the exterior form.
Photography: Archive Miguel Marcelino. Writer: Harriet Thorpe

Power play
13 December
City Centre Tower, Manila, is the latest work from Brooklyn-based architecture and design firm CAZA. Completed this month, the playful yet powerful building will be the new Filipino HQ for leading tech companies including Google. Experimenting with an asymmetrically undulating curve, the architects pulled out an convex shape into space through designing an elliptical pattern of concentric circles across the horizontal axes of each floor. In response, they imprinted a corresponding concave, which slowly unrolls into the façade like a ripple, disrupting the vertical emphasis.
Meanwhile, the strong cuboid outline of the block allows the building to maintain the same physical impact as the surrounding architecture. The exterior architecture thus informs the interior, resulting in balconies overflowing with green plants, alternative views and shifting office shapes for the corporate floors, diversifying the professional environment. Located in downtown metro Manila, the 27 storey mixed use building includes commercial retail, dining and corporate office space.
Photography: Frank Callaghan, courtesy of CAZA Architects. Writer: Harriet Thorpe

Raise the roof
16 December
This project – a 2012 competition win by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and Swiss practice Holzer Kobler Architekturen – was designed to unite several uses within a single structure at the Swiss technology institute, EPFL, in Lausanne. ‘Under One Roof’ – officially known as ArtLab – co-houses three spaces: the Montreux Jazz Café; an experimental exhibition laboratory to showcase (mostly) digital technologies; and space for EPFL’s major research projects. In response to the brief, the architects crafted an elegantly curving, narrow, 250m-long wood, glass and steel structure, covered by a traditionally-built slate tile roof. The café sits at the southern tip, overlooking Lake Geneva.
As originally featured in the January 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*214). Writer: Ellie Stathaki

Open-air art
28 November
Architects Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and SO-IL have collaborated on the design of the new Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum Of Art at UC Davis near San Francisco, which opened this November. The striking 50,000 sq ft ‘grand canopy’ made of perforated aluminium triangular beams is the building’s key architectural attraction and a dynamic eave for the experimental institution. Casting patterned shadows across the courtyard below, the canopy will provide a space for open-air exhibitions and interactive events, as well as being a community-orientated area in which the public can gather and relax.
The single-storey gallery is made up of connecting spaces designed for myriad activities, from exhibition displays to interactive workshops. The architects wanted to create ‘smaller volumes and provide an approachable human scale’ within the interior. The new museum and gallery – named after Jan Shrem, founder of Clos Pegase Winery in the Napa Valley and his wife Maria Manetti Shrem, an arts patron – is located near to the Mondavi Center for Performing Arts, and part of UC Davis’ vision for an ‘arts district’ on the south side of the campus.
Photography: Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Writer: Harriet Thorpe

Light fantastic
2 November
Jason Bruges Studio is behind this site specific, dramatic light installation at the nave of York Minster. Aiming to create an architectural piece sculpted out of beams of light, the renowned lighting designer and artist Bruges and his team drew inspiration from the Minster’s stonemasons.
Entitled ‘Light Masonry’, the choreographed lighting experience explores the architecture of the nave, such as its vaults, but also the audience’s relationship with it. Made possible through the use of a bespoke system of computer controlled moving head luminaires, the dynamic show is both immersive and captivating.
The installation was part of the city’s ‘Illuminating York’ festival, which celebrates lighting and invites visitors to discover York through this fascinating medium.
Writer: Ellie Stathaki

School of thought
1 November
Morphosis’ A Alfred Taubman Engineering, Architecture and Life Sciences Complex at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan has opened for classes. The new complex of academic laboratories has been built to connect the three disciplines under one roof and increase collaboration. Inside the complex, an open flex space runs the length of the building providing communal space for inter-disciplinary engagement.
Marking the entrance, an orb sheathed in a black matte-finished carbon fibre composite sits above a pool of water encasing a three-storey stairwell. Light cascades into the orb from circular skylights which reflect patterns from the water below. The unique form was carefully designed in collaboration with architecture and engineering firm Albert Kahn Associates.
Built with the future of the growing campus in mind, the complex has been designed modularly with the ability to be extended in phases and its smooth bridge-like form echoes its purpose as a link between different parts of the campus.
Writer: Harriet Thorpe. Photography: Nic Lehoux