The first talk to accompany the 20 Houses: A New Residential Landscape exhibition will focus on designs that integrate house and landscape. Be it floating in water, half-buried in earth or united with the landscape through virtual means, these houses will look at the relation of retreat houses and nature and instigate a conversation about boundaries, sustainability and design harmony within an existing natural landscape.
FourFourSixSix, UK
FourFourSixSix may be a young practice - conceived just in 2006 - but it is already a very successful and international one. With offices in London and Bangkok, founding partners Daniel Welham and Tim Ridd roam the globe working on their projects, ranging from an eco-luxe resort in Thailand to a penthouse refurbishment and extension in Covent Garden, London. Both graduates of The Bartlett school of Architecture, UCL, Welham and Ridd seek to create "innovative, unique and pragmatic architecture". Aiming to avoid a 'house style', the architects work with a site-specific approach that employs a variety of typologies and allows the practice to undertake a diverse range of worldwide commissions.
Hurst Song Architekten, Switzerland
Set up by Suzanne Song and Alex Hurst in 2008, Hurst Song Architects are based in Zürich. After studying - and meeting - at the graduate programme at New York's Columbia University, the partners went on to work in a couple of high profile practices in the city (Asymptote and Gluckmann Mayner Architects), before heading to Switzerland to strike out on their own. Their work fuses the boldly modelled forms of new century modernism with a love of material, surface and simplicity. "Architecture can be understood as an attempt to bridge the past and the future,' they say.
pasel.künzel architects, The Netherlands
Led by the principle that "there is no urbanism without detail, and no
detail without urbanism" and that everything in-between is
architecture, Dutch architects Ralf Pasel and Frederik Kuenzel
established pasel.künzel architects in Rotterdam in 2004. "As
architects, we consequently feel compelled to work on all levels of
scale, from urban planning down to the minute details of material
junctions", they say. The award-winning firm - they have already
scooped a prize at the 2008 International Bauhaus Awards - has projects
in the Netherlands, Germany and Chile, while both principles are
visiting professors at the Academy of Architecture Rotterdam.
Image: Courtesy FourFourSixSix