If you go to Vienna, probably you will spot a dazzling penthouse by Delugan Meissl has boldly inserted itself between traditional rooftops of the city’s Wieden district like a recently landed alien intruder.

The penthouse is really wierd. It was designed by Elke Meissl and her partner/ husband, Roman Delugan, as a penthouse addition for their family, but it feels more like a prosthetic device that has attached itself temporarily and will move to a new destination as soon as it gets what it wants.

his Alien sense of glomming is particularly evident in a cantilevered section that sticks out the back of the penthouse and looms above the building’s courtyard. It connects to the home’s main stairwell and contains the entry foyer. From there the apartment unfolds not in a conventional hierarchy of rooms but rather in a sequence of vectors that rush in and out toward the surrounding roofscapes of Vienna’s Wieden district, combining a sense of perpetual motion and vertigo.

Converging lines of sheer glass, sloping floors, and ceiling planes create the impression of multiple perspectives and vanishing points. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls enhance the illusion of total transparency. There are no interior walls except for those around the bedrooms. Most of the furniture is built-in and plays its part in the spatial continuum. Ramps lead up to the living zone, while the kitchen sits on a central plateau, which the architects refer to as their “culinary cockpit.”

A long white bar stretches down the center of the apartment and serves as both kitchen counter and visual continuity for the exterior. In the “relaxation zone,” a broad, pillow-laden platform—a kind of updated conversation pit—appears to be suspended between planes of glass.

The penthouse was always intended as a daring move, one calculated to challenge the existing codes and counteract Vienna’s museumlike character. Within the city’s arcane building code, there are provisions for rooftop/attic expansions, but they are exacting: a mansard-style silhouette with a 45-degree slope.

The building faces Platz am Mittersteig, a small triangular plaza created by the odd intersection of several streets. The architects’ own office is located above the plaza directly across from their penthouse. Along this street elevation, House Ray 1 presents a dizzying array of extruded and folded lateral barriers, with metallic surfaces that appear to be scooping air and light for internal consumption. One is reminded of air-intake systems and jetways. (It’s no coincidence that while working out the intricate interfaces of their own penthouse, the architects were designing an extension to the Vienna International Airport and a proposal for the Italian Space Agency.)

The outer skin of the roof is made from Alucobond, a thin manufactured panel of coated aluminum. From inside the home, these panels act as blinders, allowing a degree of privacy within the all-glass apartment, while at the same time blocking or directing attention toward the enviable panoramic views. You can stand in the middle of the penthouse and see all the way to the snow-capped mountains, St. Stephen’s Cathedral at the heart of the old city, and even the brash new high-rises of Donau City.

This is a spectacular house with a small beauty shop on the first floor, a space for a family of four: the young couple running the shop, their 3 year-old girl, and their newborn. The site, surrounded by neighboring houses in 3 directions, is in a quiet residential area. Most houses in the area have only 2 stories and one is able to see the mountains far away.

The structure of the house is quirky and its gable-house-shape with a continuous exterior space from the 1st to the 3rd floor under a large inclined roof.  5 large openings in the inclined roof bring sufficient natural light and air, as well as scenery, into the building.

The windows, as “voids,” lacking sashes, have a totally different scale from the windows of the neighboring houses. That’s why there is a wondrous scale around the area as if the model had been enlarged. When you’re walking in a forest in the mountains, you feel as though you’re being gently embraced though you’re not actually inside anything.

There is, I think, an interior-like sense of place, a state that is wholly distinct from urban spaces or open skies. Or else, from amongst a thicket, finding a view of the city at the foot of the mountain, or the blue sky streaming through the leaves and so one encounters many such “exteriors” along the way.

Can we create a place for such experiences in a crowded residential area? One encounters “outside” at various points as you walk upstairs since the semi-exterior spaces are connected and gently covered with a large luminous roof. Location: Okazaki, Japan.

Perpetually on the lookout for new ways to live, sleep, create and work, Mathieu Lehanneur turns the advertising agency JWT into a “digital plant station”, a new reflection from the designer about contemporary working styles and the necessary invented depictions of them when applied to the professional world of communications.

Hot on the heels of the office conceived for David Edwards, founder of the Le Laboratoire (Paris) and areas for teenagers and children at the Centre Pompidou, he has once again designed an area dedicated to creative production larger than 1000m2.

An interior architecture produced in collaboration with the architect Ana Moussinet where the objects are as much brainstorming aids as three dimensional logos assigned to sum up the spirit of this French JWT subsidiary specialising in digital media. First symbolic move: to reverse the usual dynamic of authority by placing the two chairmen and the director of JWT on the ground floor, as close as possible to the hub of the agency, separated from the reception simply by tall wadded doors!

The second meaningful gesture, the agency’s specific digital sensibility is entirely embodied by the meeting room, transformed into a creative cavern with walls totally produced from paper fibres, “It has literally sucked up and recycled the available paper in the agency, an archaic and useless support that JWT France eventually envisages totally eliminating.’

Providing excellent soundproofing, usually used for thermal insulating in organic buildings, the final execution sublimates the irregular exterior surface, a shell whose spray projected neo-archaism contrasts with the milky and luminous purity of the internal shell: pure James Bond genius where the most unobtrusive rock hides Dr No’s ultra technical trace.

Close-by, another mineral projection changes agency coffee breaks, this time from the sky and much higher, a black tar meteorite now serves as a bar. A strange and visually magnetic object, a small piece of interstellar virginity, this anti-design mass welcomes visitors for an onward journey towards creative horizons to be built. A place for fruit, objects or simply for leaning on or putting down coffee cups.

The lobby navigates alternatively between geometrical and unruly lines like these megabit landscapes in the form of seating, immediately counter-balanced by an effusion of plants, cascading from the ceiling that will prompt music when gently brushed against, inaugurating the plant mixing!

A plant juke box developed with the artist group Scenocosme and whose play-list is updated by the creative members of the agency.

Linking digital rigour and the plant boom, between technology and the very human enthusiasm which transpires in each intervention of the building with the omnipresence of the Andrea air filter, a small harmless piece of equipment whose decorative plant becomes a resource dedicated to the lungs of the collaborators: probably the agency with the purest air in Paris!

This home for an actress and musician carefully slots between buildings and site-lines, and wraps built-in furniture into every available surface. Both plan and Planning constraints generated a complex series of intertwining spaces, enlivened by light and interconnectivity. The massing was generated from the view-lines along the High Street below, tucked carefully out of sight to achieve planning permission for a new storey with front outdoor space hidden within the row of listed buildings. A crystalline valley skylight hangs above, flooding the void with light.

Staggered floor sections carefully borrow space from below. The V-shape in section repeats in plan to ease a tidy outdoor terrace between new and old façades, the doors from hall and bedroom folding neatly together.

Spaces from adjacent rooms are borrowed and traded, with each room offering a panoply of different views and directions. Mirrors double and quadruple the extent of views and entice optical exploration, while maximum continuity between the surfaces of the built-in furniture provides a sense of further elongation, and interest.

The house assembles around the central open stair, its timber strands growing upwards towards the light and unleashing delicate tendrils to frame each step, a single thin metallic line dancing across their lines to offer the lightest of additional support to the hands that seek it.

Upstairs a desk and shelving unit in the study, wrapping around to welcome the unfolding sheaves of floorplank that conceal a bed within the floor-depth. The low table/cupboard nestled at the window flows out to form a long courtyard storage bench, which slips back inside as a bathroom counter, carved with a sunken bath.

The house is thus unified by a single curl of complex in-built furniture, bridging inside and out. The rear window angles carefully back above its sloping brick parapet, offering great starry views from the pillow. Its fixed glazing folds at the stairwell to form an opening frame, a complex rhomboid perfectly slotted into the available space. The courtyard opposite protects privacy yet offers generous views of sky and city (from bath or bench, table or toilet), and tantalising views into the intricacy of this urban jewel. Location: United Kingdom

This is a beautiful loft located in Greenwich Village in Manhattan showcasing the interaction between a gallery and living space. The main walls in the loft flow through the space, and together with articulated ceilings create hybrid conditions in which exhibition areas merge into living areas.

Over the years, the pair regularly visited possible sites for this new house in the suburbs of Hartford. Then, in a phone call to Amsterdam in the early spring of 2007 the collector announced he had bought a loft space in Manhattan. The architect finally received his commission: not for a house, but for a home for the collector and his art and books.

The design of the loft in downtown Manhattan mediates between art gallery and living space. Gently flowing curved walls were introduced to virtually divide the main space into proportionally balanced spaces. This created zones of comfortable proportions for domestic use, while simultaneously generating a large amount of wall space for the display of art. A floating exhibition wall blends into library shelves on one side and into a display case on the other side.

The loft aims to merge life and art by facilitating these daily interactions, and by making clearer his own unusual way of seeing. Whereas the walls form a calm and controlled backdrop for the works of art, the ceiling is more articulated in its expression of this transition. The opaque part of the ceiling consists of subtly arched elements that give a notion of an limitless ceiling which disguises the real height of the space.

The third element that the architect has added to this mix is the appreciation of the city which is expressed in the ‘framing of the views’. The former windows in the South wall have been replaced by full floor to ceiling glass panes that frame and extend compelling views, over a full glass balcony, toward downtown Manhattan.

As a last element a Douglas fir floor with 1½ feet wide planks covers the entire loft. The subtle, even-toned floor unifies the space and allows furniture and art to be positioned as floating elements in changeable constellations.

Welcome to the eye-popping penthouse apartment of the designer Mischa Woeste, the creator of the Smeilinener label, and her husband, Eghard Woeste, an architect, that much more remarkable. “I’m a child of the ’80s,” Mrs. Woeste said. “I grew up with intense colors. It’s really important for me to work with colors. They inspire me.”

Mrs. Woeste, 32, was wearing rhinestone-covered sandals and cradling her newborn son in the kitchen, which has fuchsia plexiglass cabinet doors; a wall painted half lavender and half gray; and a floor partly covered with white, gray and turquoise geometric tiles, with the rest parquet. Adjacent to the kitchen was a sunken bathtub, which could be closed off by a curtain covered with colorful Mexican embroidery.

“I can put my daughter into the bath and prepare dinner at the same time,” Mrs. Woeste said. It was the birth of their daughter four years ago that made the couple decide to move out of their old one-bedroom apartment in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood and look for more space.

The layout of the apartment feels like a doughnut, with a circular flow to all of the rooms except the master bedroom, which is in the middle and can be closed off from the rest of the apartment with sliding doors.

Mr. Woeste and Ms. Fingerle say they are deeply influenced by modern dance. “We apply the concept of choreography to a space in order to create architecture that brings people into focus,” Mr. Woeste said.

The process of designing the interiors was ”very difficult”, said the couple. And I had a lot to say about the colors.”But one might think that it was the children who made some of the design decisions: almost all the rooms are a different color, one more electric than the next.

The bathroom is covered almost entirely with phosphorescent rose Bisazza mosaic tiles. In their daughter’s room, the walls and ceiling are painted turquoise and the floor is covered with matching wall-to-wall carpeting. Next door is an office that is a Shrek green.

There are many other whimsical child-friendly details. Off the kitchen, fuchsia stairs lead up to a wooden roof deck that features a garden bed and secret sandbox. In a corner, between the couple’s bedroom and their daughter’s bedroom is what Mrs. Woeste describes as the “freak- out corner,” a triangular-shaped space with a padded floor and a brightly patterned curtain that has glow-in-the-dark drawings that reveal themselves when the shades are drawn.

Diane Pascal and Thomas Richie escape from Chicago in a retreat with low-profile getaway in Hennepin, Illinois, a town where agriculture and ecology are still a part of the locals’ common knowledge. Richie, a freelance advertising creative director, and Pascal, the development officer for an organiza-tion serving homeless people, maintain a sense of humor about their city-slickerdom.

Their X House is filled with the trappings of a modern metropolitan existence—a red retro kitchen clock, a Fireorb in the living room, concrete bedroom floors. Inside and out, though, the home manages to disappear into the rural landscape, thanks to considered treatment of the building’s proportions.

The home is situated on 14 acres of Midwestern prairie and woodland, where the ambient noise sounds like a new-age relaxation CD: chirping birds, light wind, buzzing insects, and a babbling creek.

The walls of the house spread out to create panoramic views of woodlands to the south and prairie to the north, like a pair of frameless landscape paintings. Knotty pine, chosen for its graphic quality, covers the room from floor to ceiling, with the orientation of the slats modeled on the property’s topographic lines. It lends the space the feeling of a roomy sauna, though substantial airflow keeps it cool.

The master bedroom and bathroom sit on one side of the house, while a guest wing, which comprises a bedroom and bathroom, plus a small office/living area, occupies the other. These zones are radically different from the main room, resembling modern urban apartments.

The kitchen is open, simple, and small. It’s mostly functional, with a few clever touches, such as an extra-tall stainless steel backsplash and a random polka-dot arrangement of compact fluorescent lamp bulbs on the ceiling.

The couple, who admit little prior knowledge of country living, are learning as they go. A Putnam County High School teacher brings kids from FFA (an agricultural education organization founded as Future Farmers of America) to get some hands-on science education by maintaining 1.5 acres that have been restored into a natural prairie habitat. They worked with a forester to develop a land management plan for 12 acres of forest, placing it under the Federal Conservation Reserve Program.

The couple knows that increased foot traffic would benefit local business, they nevertheless hope that other city dwellers will be slow to discover the town they treasure as their own little secret.

Nives Widauer, a visual artist, has an apartment in one of the safest buildings in Vienna — a police station. “I don’t have to lock the doors,” Ms. Widauer, 45, said. However the building, a pale brick 19th-century mansion with tall windows, has a troubled history.

In World War II, it was seized from its Jewish owners by the Nazis. When the house was returned to the rightful owners after the war, they no longer wanted to live in Austria. The house remains in the family — the current owners are the granddaughter and grandson of the couple who left Europe — but the building is leased by the state. One apartment (Ms. Widauer’s) is set aside as a residence; the rest is rented to the police department.

After years of changing the decor and function of the 2,700-square-foot apartment’s eight rooms, Ms. Widauer decided it was time to give the space a real face-lift. Enlisting the help of fellow artists and friends to keep the costs down, she spent about five months refinishing the original herringbone wood floors, renovating the bathroom and kitchen, and replacing old insulation and pipes.

The floors are not perfect now, but you cannot imagine how they looked. Ms. Widauer gave an architect several pieces of her artwork in exchange for creating the steel-framed, insulated door that closes off the living room from the dining area, which is in a glass-walled conservatory and gets very cold during the winter.

Sometimes people ask her what it’s like living with the police, Ms. Widauer said. She tells them it has been anything but difficult: she has a good relationship with the officers, though she doesn’t see them often.

FORGET about rules. In her apartment and art studio, Karin Sander, a Berlin-based conceptual artist, decided to blend them instead. “Even a bedroom can double as a studio,” said Ms. Sander, 53. “I wanted each area to be able to be a work space as well as something else.” Her new space had a long story. In 2000, Ms. Sander was part of a group of 15 artists and architects who chipped in to buy a complex of buildings, where the Prussian army had once manufactured its uniforms, in the Moabit neighborhood of this city.

Ms. Sander’s share was two levels of a three-story building — one on the ground floor and the other on the third floor — with a combined space of about 5,800 square feet, which she bought for 486,000 euros.

Initially she lived and worked on the ground floor and left the top floor empty while she decided what to do with them. After couple of years she came up with the notion of adding two stories above the top floor. However due to mot only lack of money but lack of time, the construction was postponed in a time: her career had taken off, and her work was being shown at galleries around the world, including the D’Amelio Terras gallery in Manhattan and the Museum of Modern Art.

In 2008, Ms. Sander was ready to expand. She hired Sauerbruch Hutton, an architecture firm with offices in the adjoining building, to design her space, as the architects were planning an upward expansion of their own. They created a design that added two stories to the interconnected buildings, bringing them back to their pre-World War II height (the top two floors of both buildings had been severely damaged during the war and subsequently removed).

The color palette of the new space is muted, with materials like sanded concrete, terrazzo and Douglas fir; the only bright color comes from the modern furniture by Konstantin Grcic in the living area. Off the dining area, a door swivels open to reveal a pair of identical spaces that are guest rooms, meditation rooms or offices — or all three, she said.

Upstairs, the master bedroom opens onto a terrace with an outdoor shower. In the bathroom are two more showers; Ms. Sander has six scattered throughout the apartment. “You never know where you might need one,” she said.

The studio itself is divided into two spaces with 18-foot ceilings. In the smaller one, a ladder leads up to a tiny windowed perch; in the larger, another ladder goes to a library loft. The space feels more like a gallery than a studio, it was pointed out to Ms. Sander.

“My way of living and working changes constantly,” she said, noting that she has already used the studio to show her work and that of other artists. It has also been a performance space for an artist whose medium is yoga and a site for a conference on climate change.

The Hub are timeshare offices for social entrepreneurs, which conduct the most varied projects that seek to “change the world.” When they saw the garage, they got a strong impression; it was intact, untouched since the 40′s, this space was a bubble in the most silted area of Madrid-Centre.

The whole idea was the implementation of energy-saving criteria, economic sustainability and recycling processes that the company pose the challenge of the times we live in, explore a new way to refurbish the buildings of the twentieth.

They isolate only the cover, add a floor heating system under large planks of wood, warm in winter and cool in summer, if they don’t paint the walls, lined only with recycled wool felt in meeting rooms , to letting their patina expression, their old labels, the defects .. The information about this incredible urban working space is limited. Anyway enjoy the lovely idea…..

Hub Madrid currently hosts numerous events and has become a major focus of cultural and social activity in the neighbourhood.