The Croatian/Austrian Design Collaborative Numen/For Use blends architecture and public installation art. The sculpture-like pieces are large in scale and take over whole public spaces while also reinventing them, changing the way in which they can be occupied and changing the experience of the interactions between participants. Numen/For Use has shared with us three of their recent works. Tape, which was actualized in Florence, Italy and Melbourne, Australia; Tuft Pula, a more permanent version of Tape installed in the middle of the former church in Pula; and Net, built in Z33 high spaces. Tape and NET take a material that is ephemeral and non architectural and turn it into one that has architectural capacity. Join us after the break to read more about these projects!
The Envision Energy Headquarters, designed by AECOM, is located in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, China. Envision Energy is the leading Chinese wind turbine manufacturer that emphasizes in research, development, manufacturing, sales and maintenance. The new 3-story 3,000 square meter facility is a mixed use, multi-layered space which includes program of offices, dining facilities, galleries and exhibition spaces, an employee recreation lounge with karaoke room, theater, gym, massage room and game room. The facility supports all employees from skilled laborers to executive directors and encompasses the attitiude of the company, celebrating wind energy as the fastest growing clean alternative energy solution. The architects were asked to design the facility to express this technology.
In this TEDx Talk, Jason Roberts – known as the “The Bike Guy” in his Oak Cliff community outside of Dallas, Texas – gives his audience a how-to guide in improving a community one block at a time as part of a project called “The Better Block“. The project did not start off as an organization with vast goals and strong following; instead it started off with Roberts’ interest and desire to develop his community into one that had a legacy apart from the highways and overpasses that dominate the landscape. Inspired by the rich history and existing street life of European cities with their historic buildings and monuments, plazas, and vistas; Roberts started small and eventually built a foundation and organization that is now nationally recognized and used as a tool to develop cities across the country.
Pratt Manhattan Gallery has unveiled their exhibition “Bright Future: New Designs in Glass” featuring innovative and mesmerizing uses for the centuries-old material. The exhibit, which features furniture, tableware, architectural elements and lighting designs, will be on display until May 5th, 2012. The artists and firms featured here displays a refined use of glass in conjunction with metal, concrete and pigment to evoke its qualities of flexibility and transparency. In conjunction with this exhibit, Pratt will be hosting a free panel discussion: “Glass, Light and Public Space” on April 5th at 6pm in Lecture Hall 213 of Pratt’s Manhattan Campus at 144 West 14th Street, Second Floor.
Read on after the break to see previews of the exhibit and for more on the panel discussion.
Tetra Shed is inspired by the growing need to accommodate the desires of more and more people wanting to establish a home office. The architects at Innovation Imperative designed this garden office as a challenge to the notion that a home office is simply a converted room in one’s house. It is an alternative solution to the “cuboid offices” that have grown in popularity over the last few years. This concept and mock-up will be on display at Grand Designs Live London between May 5th and May 13th.
Read on for more about Tetra-Shed after the break.
Perkins+Will‘s VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre in Vancouver, BC is designed to meet the Living Building Challenge, the most rigorous set of requirements of sustainability. Formally and functionally, it encompasses the goals of environmentally and socially conscious design. The building is an undulating landscape of interior and exterior spaces rising from ground to roof level and providing a vast surface area on which vegetation could grow, thus reoccupying the land on which the building sits with the landscape. The building also features numerous passive and active systems that reuse the site’s renewable resources and the building’s own waste.
More photos after the break, including a video about the project!
‘The Fabergé Big Egg Hunt’, launched on the 21st of February, has provided London, England with 209 giant and stunningly crafted Easter eggs, designed by artists, architects, jewelers and designers. The four presented here were designed by architects Zaha Hadid, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Fourfoursixsix and interior design firm Candy & Candy. The designs are unique, structural and conceptual. Thirty-one among the 200 will be chosen for a live auction on March 20th. The rest can be bid on on-line. The proceeds from the auction will go towards the £2million target for Action for Children, a charity for vulnerable and neglected children, young people and families, and Elephant Family, a charity for the endangered Asian elephant. This Easter egg hunt invites the whole public to participate in finding these eggs throughout the city; the scale of this event is set to break Guinness World Records for the most participants in an Easter egg hunt.
Studio E Architectsfaced a compelling challenge when designing the first phase UC Davis West Village, which opened last October in California’s upper Central Valley. Experiencing moderate winters, warm summers, prevailing winds and moderate rainfall within the heart of former agricultural fields, the new addition to UC Davis was to be a net-zero facility. Serving as the largest of its kind and a model for campus communities and environmentally conscious urbanism. That is sustainable and community oriented. The program required 123 units of student apartments in one, two and three-bedroom configurations, 45,000 square feet of ground level commercial space all of which would emulate the central park space in downtown Davis and become the heart of West Village.
Follow us after the break to see the sustainable solutions that Studio E Architects came up with!
As many of us have already realized, sustainable design contributes to an awareness of environmental patterns and thereby creates communities that are more resilient to the devastating effects of the natural disasters that we have seen across the globe in recent months. Many people have accepted the cause and effect relationship that exists between current practices – those that pollute water and food sources, strip minerals, disturb fault linesand throw off ecosystems – with the rapidly increasing changes in climate. For those that do not, U.S. Green Building Council and the University of Michigan released this report: Green Building and Climate Resilience: Understanding Impacts and Preparing for Changing Conditions, which addresses pre- and post-emergency management situations while stressing a consciousness about the environment and ways in which to design and build communities that are physically and structurally prepared for natural disasters.
Lebbeus Woodsis well known for his conceptual drawings that bring new worlds and spaces into the eyes of their viewers. In four decades, Woods has shared his imagined worlds, expressing ideas about spaces, inhabitation and technology, and outlined alternate futures. Through April 6th, Friedman Benda Gallery will be exhibiting Lebbeus Woods: Early Drawings from the 1980s, many of which have never been displayed before. The gallery is located 515 West 26th Street in New York City. A preview of the exhibit after the break!
Jan Schevers and Heleen Herrenberg met with Peter Märkli in Zürich, Switzerland to discuss his personal perspective on education, research and practice in architecture, considering what the art of building means to society and the individual today. Enjoy the video and join the discussion after the break.
ArchDaily announced in October 2009 that Brazil will be hosting the 2016 Olympic Games, in addition to the 2014 World Cup. Just last August, AECOM was awarded the bid for the design of the 2016 Olympic Park in Rio de Janeiro (watch the video here). As preparations for the administrative business of the games seems to be going smoothly, events on the ground say otherwise. The planned Olympic Park will be located on the current site of a favela with a reported population of 4,000 (New York Times: Simon Romero) , known as Vila Autodromo and Riocinha, and those citizens are not satisfied with the prospects of being relocated under the edict of Imminent Domain to satisfy the Olympic Organizing Committee.
We have already introduced you to the Night Club Hotel: Bubble X (2nd place) and Elevated Night Club (3rd place) winning entries for the Night Club Hotel in Hong Kong by vGH Companyand Urbanplungerrespectfully. We now unveil the first place proposal, submitted by Hong Kong based architecture firm YS Groundwork. Extremely Negative is concerned with distancing itself from the typical design solutions that produce mega-structures and commercial towers. Instead, the team decided to invert the structure creating a void below grade that can be occupied at multiple levels with programs such as an open air disco, a hostel and a monastery.
In this interview by Jan Schevers and Esther Schevers, Stephen Bates of Sergison Bates architects discusses how education is tied to exploration and research. As a professor at TU Munich, each semester offers an opportunity to take on new themes in architecture that allow him to break conventions that come up in practice and are oftentimes associated with the ways in which his students have been taught. More discussion after the break.
The ASM International World Headquarters, originally constructed in 1959, is an architectural composition by two influential designers during the mid-twentieth century: John Terence Kelly, who studied under Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius, and R. Buckminster Fuller, well known for his geodesic domes, environmentally-conscious designs and the dymaxion car. The complex includes the building, dome and garden on the 45-acre site known as Materials Park. The renovation, led by The Chesler Groupand Dimit Architects, brings new life to Kelly’s building. According to Architectural Record, (Snapshot, Laura Raskin), Michael Chesler of The Chesler Group, campaigned to salvage the architectural marvel, giving it a place in the National Register of Historic Places and using tax credits to fund the renovation.
Pictures and details of the renovation after the break.
Located in the small village of Jukkasjärvi in northern Sweden 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, ICEHOTEL may be the epitomy of ephemeral and temporal architecture. The world’s first and largest hotel built out of snow and ice is an inhabitable work of art that takes on a new form each year. The existence of the ICEHOTEL is entirely reliant upon the climate and Torne River, from which the 4000 tonnes of ice are harvested each year between March and April. The architecture is a form of exhibition as well. Each year artists are handpicked to design and build the Art Suites within the ICEHOTEL. The whole process invoved about 100 people and is constructed between November and December.
University of Michigan Taubman College, like many other architecture schools, has a seasonal lecture series. Their Winter 2012 Series, which focuses on construction, is posted and archived on their website. The lecture above was given by Richard K. Norton, an associate professor in the urban and regional planning program at the University of Michigan Taubman College. Faculty coordinator for land use and environmental planning, Dr. Norton holds a Ph.D in city and regional planning and masters degrees in public policy studies and environmental management. He teaches and conducts research within the areas of sustainable development, land and environment planning, and planning law. His multi-faceted breadth of knowledge and experience is valuable to the issues which he addresses in his lecture “Knowing and Valuing both Private and Public: What Role for Public Policy, Design, and Planning in the 21st Century?“, presented on January 9th at Taubman College.
SOL Austin - Solutions Oriented Living – is a model development of a sustainable community that integrates social, economic and ecological components to create a “holistic community”. The project was a result of a partnership between KRDB Architects, Beck-Reit contractors, the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation (GNDC) and the Austin Housing Finance Corporation. The medium density, single-family in-fill project in central east Austin, just three miles from downtown incorporates a significant portion of low-income and affordable housing, sustainable practices and consideration for the kind of future that developments like this can create.
Read on for photos, plans and more information about this project, considered for the AIA 2011 Design Awards in Urban Design.
