Articles by Daniel Tapia

Cherry Hospital addresses the challenge of designing a behavioral health facility that provides psychiatric patients with dignity in a space that is both safe and therapeutic. It is set in the heart of the rural coastal plains of Eastern North Carolina. Treatment at the hospital focuses on mental health therapy that enables patients to recognize and cope with the routine of daily life—for these patients, mimicking common daily activities like commuting to work or visiting a park can be a significant challenge. The design of Cherry Hospital addresses this by accentuating transitions between programmatic components through the use of material, scale, daylight, and modulation of spatial conditions.

La Diana is the exercise of linking visually, volumetrically and functionally two independent and alienated entities: a commercial space on the ground floor and an apartment on the first floor. The architectural strategy was based on drilling the existing slab to create a large enough opening that would activate the relationship in section between the two floors, and in which the stairs are placed. This stairway is fragmented into two parts to offer a more human scale on the ground floor thanks to a 2,20 m high metal platform that acts as an intermediate landing and simultaneously segments the living area and the kitchen.

The house is designed around wood boxes placed alongside the slope of the construction plot. They serve as a structure for the living place but also for the surroundings, allowing views on distant landscapes.
From their installation and capacity, the boxes integrates all the housing functions and allows a large modularity of the spaces thanks to modular dividing walls.

The Willem II-shopping arcade is a new public space which connects the inner city of Tilburg with De Spoorzone, a transformation area to the north. CIVIC Architects and Bright produced a design which unites architecture, public spaces, heritage and room for circulation. The Willem II-shopping arcade is a major public connection under the railway track running through a former NS Dutch Railways workshop complex.

On the site for care and education Sint-Lievenspoort in Ghent a neo-gothic cloister becomes refurbished, restaured and expanded as a new school for children with conditions concerning hearing, speech and autism. The monumental complex becomes an element in a new clear pattern of circulation throughout the site.

The ŠTAJNHAUS has not been a project, the ŠTAJNHAUS has been a process. This house with a Renaissance core stands right at the foot of the chateau hill, in the former Jewish quarter of Mikulov (a. k. a. Nikolsburg). Throughout its existence, it has suffered a great many scars, it has gone through tens of reconstructions and operations. All of this have altered the house beyond recognition. Yet it has maintained its almost medieval picturesqueness.

For their own house, partners Vivian Lee and Robert Edmonds had the peculiar luxury of extraordinary insight into San Francisco’s permitting process, 24/7 access to each other for discussions of ideal rebar and the best window frames, and the particular freedom that comes from being experienced architects finally doing their own— dream—house.

Countryside or city? This question was asked on several occasions during the protracted and changeable planning history of the new sports and leisure pool in Potsdam. And even when a citizen’s opinion poll finally swung the pendulum towards the central location at the foot of the Brauhausberg hill even though, previously, a location “on virgin land” had been preferred, the dominant urban design motif for this location remained ambivalent.

The architects have been involved with previous projects on this tree-rich property, and were commissioned to design a small contemporary house to compliment the existing collection of buildings – spatially organised around a modern interpretation of the Cape Werf.

“The city is like a great house and the house in its turn a small city.” – Leon Battista Alberti
The Mangwon Dong Project was an attempt to search for solutions about problems estrange of communities with urban space in Seoul through three principles such as high density, mixed-use and vertical extension remodeling.