Italian architect Ernesto Rogers once famously stated that he wanted to design everything from “a spoon to a city”. Pritzker Prize winning architect Richard Meier has done nearly that with his newly designed wristwatch, which becomes part of the prolific collection of objects designed by the architect. In collaboration with the Markuse Corporation the Meier designed Ana Watch adheres to a modernist vocabulary, focusing on proportion, human scale and the manipulation of a strong geometry. “Working on various designs of objects used in daily life, such as watches, I am conscious of participating in a tradition of architects that worked in a variety of scales such as Joseph Hoffmann and Frank Lloyd Wright. In my case, the theoretical point of departure is consistently related to function and beauty,” said Richard Meier.
We want to know your opinion about architects and product design. For you, what is the importance of the architect’s ideals provided in a compact form? Leave us your answer in the comments below, and among all the registered users who comment, thanks to Markuse and Richard Meier Architects, one of our readers can win this exclusive watch.
You can become a registered user right here, and make sure to share with us your comment by Sunday, September 18th. More information about the Richard Meier designed Ana Watch along with official rules can be found after the break.
Earlier this week one of Europe’s great ethnographic museums, the Museum der Kulturen Basel, reopened its doors. Two years of reconstruction, refurbishment and expansion including a Herzog & de Meuron design for the historical walls was among the updates that it received. Their design is described as a ‘stunning crown for the historical walls: the beautiful rooftop of irregular folds fits harmoniously into the rooftops surrounding the cathedral’.
Director Anna Schmid commented, “Our innovative approach to life’s cultural dimensions makes them more accessible. We want to be a place for new encounters and inspiration.”
Public bookings to spend a night above the Thames in A Room for London, opened today (for nights January to June 2012) more information about a second stage of bookings (for nights July to December 2012) can be found here. The one-bedroom installation perched on the roof of Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall was designed by David Kohn Architects and artist Fiona Banner. The design competition for A Room for London initiated by Living Architecture, and Artangel, in association with Southbank Center attracted 500 architects and artists entries from across the world.
The Kilcreggan Competition ‘A future for rural communities’ intended to produce ideas which could be replicated in other rural areas to help areas keep families and businesses and attract young people to live and work. The small village competition, Kilcreggan is 40 miles outside of Glasgow, recieved 56 entries and chose Konishi Gaffney Architects as the winning design. Focusing on designing a blueprint for the survival and growth of rural communities. Konishi Gaffney Architects’ proposals provided “some particularly innovative and well considered events along a new foreshore promenade, which could form a template for other rural communities to reinvigorate their communities by improving the amenity of their settlements and making them attractive as a destination for others”.
Herreros Arquitectos in collaboration with Daniel Bermudez, were recently awarded the design of the Centro Internacional de Convencions de Bogota. Beating some of the world’s most prestigious architects, Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Rem Koolhaas, Diller & Scofidio, Snøhetta, and Dominique Perrault, the winning design is defined as an urban experience, in which its inhabitants and strangers will come together to share their common interest in knowledge, innovation and the strength of civil society. Aspiring to obtain the Gold-status LEED certificate the new 70,000 sqm Centro Internacional de Convencions de Bogota will be the maximum exponent of Colombia’s ability to apply state-of-the-art technology as well as of the country’s commitment to the environment
Referred to as one of Meier’s best works, the Douglas House hovers over the shores of Lake Michigan placed upon a steep slope over the water almost as if it is floating amongst the trees. The Douglas House was designed for clients Jim and Jean Douglas and was completed in 1973 after a three year construction period (1971-1973). Meier furnished the home with furniture designed by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and himself, and it needed no ornamentation other than the nature it was designed around.
As is typical of Meier buildings, the house is completely white made with reinforced concrete and glass except for two steel pipes that extend from the chimney up to the roof, framing views at the entry level. Taking the natural surroundings into consideration during the construction, the house was positioned to remove as few trees as possible.
Featured in Dwell’s latest edition (out this week!), the full article can be found following the break.
Just announced last night, the INDEX: Award winners for 2011 were unveiled highlighting five categories: Body, Home, Work, Play and Community. The award ceremony was held in the Copenhagen Opera with a diverse audience from 48 countries.
The winners of the awards propose designs that focus on vastly improving the lives of people all over the world. The non-profit Danish design organization received nearly 1,000 nominations from 78 countries, which were narrowed down to 60 finalist designs with the five award winners announced last evening.
Receiving the INDEX: Award HOME Category was Chilean architecture firm ELEMENTAL for their project Monterrey, a revolutionary new model for social housing in Mexico. ELEMENTAL’s social housing design for Mexican citizens, provides residents with the opportunity to construct part of the home themselves. By only building half the house residents, when time, effort and resources permit, personalize the home reflecting the needs and wishes of each individual family.
The Gowanus Canal is one of America’s most polluted waterways, and its location in the New York Harbor made it one of the many places that were effected by flooding as a result of Hurricane Irene. If that isn’t enough to think about, last year the EPA declared the Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site, “As a result of years of discharges, storm water runoff, sewer outflows and industrial pollutants, the Gowanus Canal has become one of the nation’s most extensively contaminated water bodies. Contaminants include PCBs, coal tar wastes, heavy metals and volatile organics. The contamination poses a threat to the nearby residents who use the canal for fishing and recreation.”
Rising Currents, an exhibit that was featured at the MoMA just last year, was a cohesive showcase of five projects tackling the lingering truth that within a few years, the waterfront of the New York harbor will drastically change. We highlighted Zone 0 earlier this week, comprised of ARO and dlandstudio, they specifically took a look at the lower Manhattan landscape, proposing to develop a new soft and hard infrastructure solution paved with a mesh of cast concrete and engineered soil and salt tolerant plants.
Zone 4, or Oyster-Tecture by Kate Orff, dealt directly with the highly polluted Gowanus Canal. We shared with you Orff’s TEDTalk on Oyster-Tecture back in Februrary, and feel like it is a subject worth revisiting. Eastern oysters being her focus, she shares how the oyster can improve water quality as a natural bio filter. Blending urbanism and ecology she proposes an oyster reef for the Gowanus Canal and Governors Island, an accessible idea that can be implemented immediately. A further description about Zone 4 Oyster-Tecture following the break.
On September 1st LEGO® Architecture series will now include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. The 10th addition to the popular series, which also includes Wright’s Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Robie House was one of the first properties to be declared a National Historic Landmark because of its architectural merit. The American Institute of Architects also listed the Chicago home as one of the 10 most significant structures of the 20th century.
Stay tuned to ArchDaily as we are going to have an exclusive surprise about the LEGO® Architecture Robie House just for our readers. More images of LEGO® Architecture’s Robie House, designed by architectural artist Adam Reed Tucker, following the break.
We reported last month that community pressure swayed the owners of Richard Neutra’s Kronish House to temporarily postpone plans to flatten the iconic home. However the looming October demolition date is quickly approaching. With the slogan ‘A Solution may be at Hand’ the Neutra Institute has started a National Fund Raising Campaign in hopes of converting the Kronish House into the Neutra Library.
In the wake of Hurricane Irene it only seemed appropriate to take a second look at Rising Current, an exhibit that was featured at the MoMA just last year. To give you a refresher, the exhibit was a cohesive showcase of five projects tackling the lingering truth that within a few years, the waterfront of the New York harbor will drastically change.
Team Zero, comprised of ARO and dlandstudio, specifically took a look at the lower Manhattan landscape, proposing to develop a new soft and hard infrastructure solution paved with a mesh of cast concrete and engineered soil and salt tolerant plants. This would create greenways that act as absorptive sponges for rainwater. The porous green streets address daily tidal flows and storm surges with 3 interrelated high performance systems (network of parks, wetlands and tidal salt marshes). These systems stop sewage overflow, block higher sea levels and mitigate storm surge.
Rising Current provided an emphasis on how to re-think the city, relevant before, and even more pressing now after the flooding from the hurricane. Let’s hope that the ideas for solutions that were generated from the exhibit can now be considered for implementation. More about Rising Currents and Team Zero’s solution following the break.
For the passing fan or the honorary Jedi that knows ever detail of the series, Star Wars: The Blueprints offers an amazing (in fact never before seen!) opportunity to discover how an entire galaxy was engineered.
Compiling over 200 of the original production, highly detailed architectural drawings created for all six films of the STAR WARS Saga, the book provides an in-depth look into the universe that was painstakingly pieced together down to the most minute detail. Complimenting the blueprints are over 500 photographs (which even highlight the construction process) and illustrations.
Stay tuned as ArchDaily will have an exclusive surprise about Star Wars: The Blueprints in the coming days. Take note that only a total of 5,000 English language collector’s volumes will be printed. For more about this exciting new book follow the break.
The U.S.G.S. recently reported that an earthquake struck the Washington, D.C. area with a preliminary magnitude of 5.8 (later updated to 5.9). Initial reports of damage are minor however the National Cathedral’s central tower sustained some damage. “It looks like three of the pinnacles have broken off the central tower,” spokesman Richard Weinberg said of the tower, the highest point in Washington, D.C.
Update: The Cathedral has sustained some substantial damage due to the earthquake, and experts are currently assessing the structural and aesthetic damage. For a video of the Cathedral damage, or to help join the efforts of preserving the Cathedral click here.
Update: You can also see the effects of the earthquake on a building in Virginia here.
Felt in Philadelphia, North Carolina, Boston, New York City, Martha’s Vineyard, and even Wheeling, West Virginia, the tremor raises questions of the importance of seismic considerations particularly in New York City.
Although earthquakes are not something a typical New Yorker would have cross their mind in comparison to other parts of the world such as Japan (8.9 magnitude in 2011) and Chile (8.8 magnitude in 2010), the overal size and density of NYC puts it at a high risk for extensive damage.
More photographs of the Washington National Cathedral and discussion regarding seismic considerations following the break.
We reported earlier this week that AECOM will be designing the Olympic Park Masterplan for the 2016 Olympics that will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The international competition winning entry’s concept of operation, separate access for athletes and the audience, logistics for the transport system, the viability of implementation and unique access for parking, made it stand out amongst the other submissions.
Which design would you choose for the Royal Alberta Museum? That is the question being posed to Albertans until the end of the day today. Providing citizens with access to view and comment on the four proposals for the new museum the Alberta Infrastructure website, where the submissions can be viewed, even suggests that the public consider the following:
1. Does the design inspire you? Does it inspire you to want to visit, explore and learn more? Do you see it as a gathering space and a place that you would return to again and again? 2. Will the design appeal to Albertans of all ages? Will it engage our young people and students; will they see it as a place they want to visit and feel welcome in? 3. How do you think the design reflects the story of Albertans: our spirit, our culture, our landscape? 4. Does the design reflect who we are now and also provide a glimpse into the future of who we will become?
The comments provided by the public will be considered during the selection process. All four proposals and their descriptions following the break.
The NASDAQ equivalent Shenzhen Stock Exchange by OMA, continues to progress forward nearing completion. The latest photographs of the new building, which poses a strong representation of capitalism in China, highlight the robust exoskeletal grid and the and complexity of construction.
“For millennia, the solid building stands on a solid base; it is an image that has survived modernity. Typically, the base anchors a structure and connects it emphatically to the ground. The essence of the stock market is speculation: it is based on capital, not gravity. In the case of Shenzhen’s almost virtual stock market, the role of symbolism exceeds that of the program – it is a building that has to represent the stock market, more than physically accommodate it. It is not a trading arena with offices, but an office with virtual organs that suggest and illustrate the process of the market.”
- OMA
More construction photographs of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange after the break.
AECOM has just been announced as the winning firm for the international competition held for the master plan design of Rio 2016 Olympic Park. The first international architecture competition held in the country, the English firm is quite experienced in master plan’s for the Olympics as they were responsible for London’s 2012 Olympic Park Master Plan. The jury chose the winning project by AECOM with chief architect Bill Hanway and Brazilian project author Daniel Gusmão, because of its unique concept of operation, separate access for athletes and the audience, logistics for the transport system, the viability of implementation and access for parking. In the legacy that the project will leave to the city, the highlights were environmental preservation and the viability of maintaining and preserving the lagoon.
More about the winning project and the competition along with plans following the break.
The SOM Foundation has announced the 2011 SOM Prize Winner and Runner-up. Brandon Clifford, a recent graduate of the Master of Architecture’s program at Princeton University, was selected as the winner of the prestigious SOM Prize, a $50,000 Research and Travel Fellowship. Clifford will visit multiple countries on four continents in carrying out his research topic, “Volume: Researching Past Methods of Stereotomy.”
SOM, one of the first major modern American architectural firms to promote a corporate face, has continued to be a ‘massive and dynamically creative commercial force’ designing the world’s tallest building Burj Khalifa in Dubai, their commission for a new green district, Green Tech City, in Hanoi, Vietnam, and SOM was selected to design New York City’s (and the State’s) first Net Zero Energy school building, PS 62 located in Staten Island.
In 2009 SOM was recognized for just that when they were included in Fast Company’s annual list of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” ranked (the only AEC company on the ranking), amongst companies such as Google and Apple. And they were also rated (by Fast Company) as number one on its list of the 10 most innovative architecture firms.
In this 30th year of Foundation Awards, the Fellowships continue to offer recent graduates the rare opportunity to travel in connection with carrying out in-depth research, collaborate with other professionals and pursue independent study outside the realm of established patterns. To date, the Foundation has awarded more than $1,000,000 to architecture, design and engineering students who have gone on to distinguish themselves in professional and academic careers. It has been said that,”the SOM Prize is one of the primary tools that our profession has to bridge the gap between the academy and the real world.”
The official press release from SOM following the break.
