Articles by Hadir Al Koshta

Kunshan Huaqiao, a key area in the Yangtze River Delta, has quickly transformed into a modern district with a global outlook. The client aims to establish a standout architectural feature, the Sky Castle Kindergarten, to showcase the area’s openness and diversity while enriching spaces for children’s learning and play. Inspired by the expansive sky, our design features “cloud” shapes that create a unique “Sky Castle” for kids, providing a sense of shelter from the surrounding high-rises and potential future developments.

The core concept of the design was to create a house that embraces the Mediterranean lifestyle, where indoor and outdoor living areas are equally important, and to celebrate the richness of the light and the playfulness of the shadows under the strong sun. The design elements follow very clean shapes and volumes while at the same time, the attention to detail and material textures provide a powerful but calm overall atmosphere. The building itself forms an L-shaped layout while the outdoor pool terrace completes the outline of a full rectangle. The street-facing facades appear solid and enclosed, in direct contrast to the inner ones which are fully glazed. The exterior openings are recessed and covered with sliding panels of shading louvers. The vertical texture of the fluted stone and the louver’s verticality and tonality not only add richness to the tactility of the façade but also create a uniform and calm surface. The two internal atria provide natural light and relaxing visual focal points while programmatically acting as buffers between the various spaces of the otherwise open-flow layout.

Garden stair house is an extension to a 1960th vacation home on the south coast of Sweden. The house is situated alongside a garden stair that continues into the house becoming an amphitheater for socializing, watching movies, or playing video games. Doing an extension in a quite complex terrain we decided to continue the expression of the existing building in materials and colors and let the local adaptions and shifts in heights become our main design opportunities.

This project is set within a classic Victorian terrace home, located in the heart of Brackenbury Village, Hammersmith, and Fulham. The design focuses on creating a thoughtful ground-floor extension that seamlessly blends contemporary architectural elements with the historic character of the original home. A key aspect of the project is the strategic introduction of roof lights, carefully positioned to allow an abundance of natural light to flood the newly extended space. This not only enhances the sense of openness but also creates an inviting and airy atmosphere that transforms the overall feel of the home. The interaction between light and space becomes one of the defining features of the design.

Built in the late 1980s, the Gruyère rest area was designed in the spirit of post-modernism, reconfiguring vernacular materials and architectural elements to form a complex of several buildings, including the public toilets building, which is the subject of this conversion. The existing building has a masonry base, mainly made with reinforced concrete, with a facing of local river pebbles visible from the outside. A glued-laminated timber frame forms a 2-slope roof. This triangular volume is laterally offset, creating a covered square in front of the entrance to the toilet blocks. To support the loads, four oblique beams are extended to the ground, providing impressive views of Lac de Gruyère and the Fribourg Pre-Alps.

The original forest pools were built in 1967 in an idyllic forest clearing high above Lucerne. In the meantime, defects in the gradually remodeled and expanded facility became increasingly noticeable. Especially the pools needed to be repaired and the outdated pool technology had to be replaced.

Meander shapes void spaces within an urban block and maximizes views and sunlight for 115 apartments. The 180-meter-long building, varying in height from two to seven floors, traverses its rectangular site like a musical score. Located in Helsinki’s cultural district Taka-Töölö along Taivallahti Bay, the site is bordered by the Taivallahti Barracks of apartments and offices. Rising in section towards the sea horizon, Meander introduces openness to the historic barracks.

The two Sankt Göres townhouses in Düsseldorf Kaiserswerth are the first new Nidus buildings: unadorned but deliberately quoting architectural history, built monolithically and reduced to the essentials with natural materials. The two townhouses „Sankt Göres” are located in the north of Dusseldorf in Germany. Slightly set back, they only cast a spell over the viewer at a second glance.