The house’s owner, Ruth Hiller, a fine arts painter and corrective exercise specialist, purchased a 1950's single storey home located in Winter Park, Colorado.

All photographs courtesy of Bill Timmerman

Ruth, a single woman, approached Michael P. Johnson with the challenge to remodel this poorly designed building in a manner within a minimalist design ethic.

Manassas Park, Virginia, is a small, independent city surrounded by the affluent northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Incorporated in 1975, the city cobbled together a series of pre-manufactured mobile buildings to create its first generation of school facilities from scratch.

Ten years ago, the city began rebuilding all of its public schools—an enormous challenge in a city with an extremely low tax base.

The new Manassas Park Elementary School and Pre-Kindergarten (MPES) are the fourth and fifth new schools, and they join the earlier Cougar Elementary School to complete the city's elementary campus.

The campus sits tightly surrounded by tract housing, private forest, and the historic landmark Camp Carondelet—forested winter quarters of the Confederacy's Louisiana Brigade between the first and second Manassas campaigns.

The project is part of our series featuring the AIA's 2010 COTE Top Ten Green Projects.

One of winners AIA's 2010 Housing Awards, this California house seems crafted with a special attention to details as the different material cleverly interact, enriching the visual impact of the well proportioned volumes.


As detailed by the Architects, the house scales an uphill lot, with views to the west. Concrete walls run parallel along the side lot lines, forming the sidewalls of the house and continuing beyond to contain a protected garden. Sloping roof planes hover above, and are contained between the longitudinal concrete walls.

Photographs:
© Ethan Kaplan Photography
© Joe Fletcher Photography

Call it ‘Atelier’ or just an enclosure; the project is intriguing to say the least. A restrained budget, a simplified construction method, a creative idea and the Space was created, stripped to its bare necessities, yet powerful in its statement. The architects became the builder, and in the process produced an innovative adaptable enclosure.

We enjoyed the way Mount Fuji recalls the process that they went through. As they explain; the client wished to build an atelier that can also be utilized as a gallery and display the ceramic art that he produced as a hobby.


“Automobile is our rival to beat” they explained. With mere 1.5 million Yen (11,000 € / $16,000) that the client had originally saved to purchase a Toyota Corolla as total budget, they started our project.

All images by Mount Fuji Architects Studio

355 Eleventh is a LEED-NC Gold adaptive reuse of a historic (and previously derelict) turn-of-the-century industrial building. The building's original timber frame structure was retained and seismically upgraded. Both a new exterior envelope and new interior were provided to serve the building's current role as a multi-tenant workspace. The building has recently been selected as one of the AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects.

A-cero Architecture describes the design of this house as “The maximum expression of minimalism”. The house is situated in the upscale neighbourhood of “La Finca” in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid), within an exclusive housing development, an area with wide green spaces, lakes and spectaculars houses, and most if them actually designed by A-cero.