Ryo Yamada's "Air Garden" installation is a passage, but not in the traditional sense of the word. It's not a passage that connects one point to another, since the walkway does not lead to a tangible destination, but rather a passage that connects an enclosed garden to the vastness of the open sky. The artist believes everyone shares a common desire for the sky, which represents freedom and equality. Read on after the break for more information, images and a video.
The Global Schindler Award is a new competition for students that will explore questions about universal mobility and access amidst rapid globalization and urbanization. In its inaugural year, a real site in Shenzhen – a booming commercial and industrial area adjacent to Hong Kong – has been chosen as the subject of the urban design proposals. Entrants are being asked to re-imagine the city as an inclusive urban environment and will be vying for portions of the $150,000 prize fund.
What will New Orleans look like in one year? Ten years? Fifty years? The Future Ground design competition, hosted by the Van Alen Institute, is looking for multidisciplinary teams help shape the city's future by answering these questions. The competition is specifically looking for teams to "generate flexible design and policy strategies to reuse vacant land in New Orleans, transforming abandoned landscapes into resources for the city."
Construction is well underway for KPF's Lotte World Tower in Seoul, however the mysterious appearance of sinkholes in the surrounding area - as reported by CNN - has brought on a slew of safety concerns. Authorities have been unable to determine the cause of the sinkholes which have appeared in a number of locations around Seoul's Songpa District, although they have ruled out sewerage as a possibility. To learn more about the bizarre phenomenon putting the 123-story tower under scrutiny, click here.
Led by Will Alsop, aLL Design’s funky apartment tower will soon add a whole lot of interest to London’s south bank. The tubular building, which tapers at the bottom and top, will rise above an existing four-storey building on purple stilts and be adorned with corten steel cladding, brightly colored balconies, and irregular rounded windows. Each apartment will include two balconies overlooking the River Thames and the neighboring heliport – bringing about the name “Heliport Heights.” To learn more about the lively design, keep reading after the break.
The only Chilean architects selected by Rem Koolhaas to participate in the Collateral Event “Time Space Existence” at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale were Ortuzar & Gebauer and Simonetti & Stewart. The architecture firms teamed up to showcase two singular projects – a hotel on stilts and an open plan office building – that mark the beginning of renewal in different neighborhoods. The exhibition, which runs until 23 November 2014, looks at how architects influence our daily existence through our understanding of time and space. To learn more about the Chilean team’s contribution to the event, keep reading after the break.
In 2011, the Tribeca-based design duo of James Ramsey and Dan Barasch proposed a radical project to transform an abandoned subterranean trolley terminal in Manhattan's Lower East Side into an underground park filled with natural light and vegetation, eventually proving their design with a full size mock-up of their design for light-capturing fiber-optic tubes. Since then, they haven't had nearly the same level of publicity - but that doesn't mean they aren't still working. This article by The Architects' Newspaper catches up with Ramsey and Barasch as they attempt to make their $50 million project a reality by 2018. Read the full article here.
2013 KOBE Biennale visitors had the opportunity to experience the magic of a kaleidoscope in a whole new way thanks to Saya Miyazaki and Masakazu Shiranes' award-winning installation. The psychedelic polyhedral installation was designed for the Art Container Contest, which challenged participants to create interesting environments within the confines of a single shipping container. As visitors meandered through the installation, they became active participants – rather than passive observers – in the kaleidoscope's constantly changing appearance. For more images and information, continue after the break.
Five of history's most iconic modern houses are re-created as illustrations in this two-minute video created by Matteo Muci. Set to the tune of cleverly timed, light-hearted music, the animation constructs the houses piece-by-piece on playful pastel backgrounds. The five homes featured in the short but sweet video are Le Courbusier's Villa Savoye, Gerrit Rietveld's Rietveld Schröder House, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, Philip Johnson's Glass House and Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.
Japanese firm Kotaro Horiuchi Architecture's "Fusionner 1.0" was on display this past March at the White Gallery Cube in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan. The installation consisted of two horizontal floating membranes stretched across a simple rectilinear room, dividing the space vertically into three sections.
Over the course of nine months, graduate students at the Strelka Institute studied the urban landscape of Moscow and the daily routines of its inhabitants, focusing "on new, little-noticed, and as-yet unresolved contradictions." The main goal of the projects was to come up with solutions that could be applied in practice.
The research projects, collectively entitled "Urban Routines," were presented at the end of this past June at the graduate show. Program director David Erixon said that while the theme might seem naive, "when you start looking at seemingly trivial things in a new way they are not so trivial anymore." For details about the individual research projects - covering Cars, Retail, Dwelling, Offices, and Links - keep reading after the break.
This time-lapse video, entitled "Above LA," is Chris Pritchard's love letter to Los Angeles. Filmed over the course of two years, Pritchard sought out locations to showcase the city in a way people rarely get to see – from above. Some of the views were easy to seek out, while others involved some exploratory hiking and trespassing. He encourages "everyone - lifelong Angelenos, transplants, visitors - to hit the trails, drive the mountain roads, find a reason to get on top of a high-rise. From the basin to the valley, this city offers so many opportunities to rise above and look down. Never stop exploring."
A former treasure in Louisville is now nothing more than a storage facility, while a dilapidated office building in Paris has sat empty for months on end. Both of these cities are taking proactive, but wildly different, measures to help the valuable vacant buildings and lots in their jurisdictions find new life. To learn more about each city's potential solution to this global problem, keep reading after the break.
Did you know Millenium Park in Chicago, Illinois was actually a desolate industrial wasteland until the turn of the century? The 24.5 acre public park, host to a state-of-the-art collection of architecture, landscape design, and art, is now a popular destination for residents and tourists alike -- all thanks to an unprecedented public-private partnership pioneered by former Mayor Richard Daley. To learn more about how Daley made Millenium Park a reality, with the help of famous designers like Frank Gehry, check out the video above.
"For the most part, the way urbanists view black neighborhoods (and other low-income neighborhoods and communities of color) are as problems that need to be fixed. At the heart of what I want to say is what can we as urbanists learn from these neighborhoods?" So asks Sara Zewde, a landscape architecture student at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and this year's Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Olmsted Scholar, in a fascinating profile on Metropolis Magazine. Read more about Zewde and her work here.
Starting September 19th, the ten winners of WorldWide Storefront (WWSf) - an initiative by Storefront for Art and Architecture to create alternative spaces for the expression/exchange of art/architecture - will open across the globe for the next two months. While one winning proposal invites artists to travel the world on commercial freight ships, another will host exhibits and events out of a traveling semi-truck in the United States. For the full list of winners and more information, click here.
Some people hate Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York, while others love it. Despite the Brutalist building's eligibility for landmark status, its current fate is up in the air. Gene Kaufman, a partner at Gwathmey Siegal Kaufman Architects, has offered to buy and repurpose the building. To learn about his proposal, head to the New York Times to by clicking here.
While other cities in the United States are shrinking, the world's largest retirement community - The Villages - is booming. Completely devoid of crime, traffic, pollution, as well as children, the fastest growing metropolitan area in the country raises serious questions about the concentrated demographic's future infrastructural needs. After all, by 2050, the over-60 set is expected to almost triple to 2 billion. To learn more, check out this fascinating article on Bloomberg.
