The mayor also signed a bill to exempt rooftop greenhouses from being counted toward buildings’ height and floor area measurements. The greenhouses will join structures like roof tanks, air-conditioning equipment and chimneys as apparatus that are not factored into buildings’ official totals, easing limitations on the construction of such structures.

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This is great news!  You can bet we’ll be taking advantage of this new legislation.

— TC

Wall House by Frohn & Rojas (FAR) using a series of “laminated walls” that form a house.  The outer layer of tent-canopy wrapped over layers of decreasingly permeable walls I find useful as reference for how we could have more insulated structures within a looser outer layer.  

From their website:

WALL HOUSE , Santiago de Chile (2004-2006)
Suburban residence. As opposed to the general notion that our living environments can be properly described and designed “in plan”, this project is a design investigation into how the qualitative aspects of the wall, as a complex membrane, structure our social interactions and climatic relationships and enable specific ecologies to develop. The project breaks down the “traditional” walls of a house into a series of four delaminated layers ( concrete cave, stacked shelving, milky shell, soft skin ) in between which the different spaces of the house slip. From the inside out the layers build upon one another, both materially and geometrically, blurring the boundary between the interior and the exterior and creating, through the specificity of the different materials used (many of which are not common in architectural applications), a series of qualitatively distinct environments.  The building’s most  standout feature, an energy screen typically used in greenhouse construction, constitutes the outermost layer, creating not only a diffused lighting and comfortably climatized zone inside but also, through its folding and sometimes- reflective/sometimes-translucent surface, contributes to the diamond-cut appearance of the structure.