Global Design New York University: SPOTLIGHT: HHF Architects

Friday, April 4, 2014

SPOTLIGHT: HHF Architects | VETROPACK

HHF Architects was founded in 2003 by Tilo Herlach, Simon Hartmann and Simon Frommenwiler. Their design projects range from urbanism and public structures to master planning and large-scale construction., geographically spanning across parts of Europe and Asia. HHF approaches architecture with innovative concepts and sustainable urban practices, viewing a space as a connected and functioning organism.

Vetropack is an Urban Study done in Bulach, Switzerland of late 2013. It is a collaborative project featuring Topotek1, Schnetzer Puskas Ingenieure, Amstein+Walthert and Intep Integrale Planung (to name a few). HHF entered the space trying to "create a sustainable urban environment that provides a comprehensive pedestrian network and reduces energy requirements in order to transform a former industrial site into a vibrant neighborhood."

To improve the area, they introduced active outdoor spaces to create proximity between the residential buildings and positively alter the complexion of the landscape. HHF also reconfigured the urban topology, organizing the various programs so that they "formed individual clusters that harmonize with their surroundings such as locating the senior housing and the medical center adjacent to the train station, and the more active public programs closer to the highway."

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HHF is one of the masterly design firms featured in our forthcoming BOOK!

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http://www.hhf.ch/hhf/studio/profile.html || http://www.hhf.ch/hhf/projects/projects/100-vetropack.html#

"Vetropack." HHF Architects. Projects. Overview. HHF Architects, 2013. Web. 05 Feb. 2014.

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."