Ecca collection

Middelfart Savings Bank

Middelfart Savings Bank is an important and influential institution to the townspeople of Middelfart, a small sea port on the central Danish island of Funen. Perhaps not surprisingly then the organisation had ambitious aspirations for its new head office.

Images courtesy of Adam Mõrk

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AV College

Look at one side of the AV College Helsinki and you appear to be studying a pixellated image of ... well, you can’t tell what, and that is a deliberate strategy on the part of the architects. Ark-House Architects, also based in Helsinki, used six different off-the-shelf colours of prepainted metal to create an almost entirely windowless facade that makes reference to the digital techniques that are happening inside this college, dedicated to audiovisual education. The practice’s Pentti Kareoja says that they considered putting in a definite image, such as a face, but decided to leave it abstract – a wise decision. ‘Now people can find their own images,’ said Kareoja.

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Crown Metropol Hotel

Dark aluminium fins on the facade of the Crown Metropol Hotel in Melbourne, Australia play a vital but subtle role in giving a sense of excitement to a building that has to fit in a complex environment and also help define that environment. The sinuous 28-storey hotel is one of three on the city’s relatively new Crown Entertainment Complex. Sitting to one side of the complex, and linking to the entertainment facility and also to a congress centre, on one side it overlooks a relatively rundown area of small industry, ripe for regeneration.

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