Minnesota Architecture - What We're Reading

Why Horst W.J. Rittel Matters

Carlo Ratti: Architecture that senses and responds | Video on TED.com

Living Climate Change | Fresh Thinking About Our Future

UMN in HAITI

Is the next generation of architects really ready to build? | Capital New York

MIT Media Lab gets a multiplicitous new logo (video)

Logos can be surprisingly divisive things, so the MIT Media Lab has decided to cheat a little bit with its new identity: it won't have just one logo, it'll have 40,000. You heard / read / imagined that right, the new Media Lab logo will simply be the concept of three intersecting "spotlights," composed of three colors, straight lines, three black squares, and a few blending gradients. There's an algorithm behind it all, which is used to generate a unique logo for every new member of staff, meaning that although trademark claims may be a headache to enforce, originality will continue thriving in the Lab for a long time to come. Hit the source link to learn more or leap past the break for a nice video rundown.

Continue reading MIT Media Lab gets a multiplicitous new logo (video)

MIT Media Lab gets a multiplicitous new logo (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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29 Things that All Young Designers Need to Know

To help you make the shift from design student to design professional easier Doug Bartow, principal of id29, and his colleagues put together this article listing 29 things they think all new designers need to know.

Read the 29 things all designers need to know.

(via idsgn)

modeLab

The Last Architect? « Architects 2Zebras

Architecture Is Tough! Will Architect Barbie Help More Women Become Designers? - Design - GOOD

The American Institute of Architects - IPD: Case Studies 2011 Info Page, Programs & Initiatives

http://www.aia.org/aiaucmp/groups/aia/documents/pdf/aiab087497.pdf

i.materialise: Get your RP on, in titanium

Exciting news from the rapid prototyping world: For those of you put off by the plastic-like consistency of most RP'd parts, the i.materialise shop has just announced the ability to crank out custom titanium parts.

Their process uses Direct Metal Laser Sintering, which...

...has hereto only really been used by high end research organizations and multinationals making tooling, aerospace components, medical tools, surgical implants or for pure research. We're skipping the "trickle down" affect in technology and now making this revolutionary technology available worldwide. Titanium opens jewelry, high end engineering and high tech applications to this growing segment of people that produce online. Titanium is by far the hardest and strongest 3D printing material. It is also extremely accurate and biocompatible. We are very curious to see which of the host of possible applications that are open to designers will be used by them We think that titanium 3D printing is a powerful production technology that really adds to a designer's arsenal.

(more...)

Why Can’t We Walk Straight?

Beautifully animated by Benjamin Arthur.

(via Luc Latulippe)

Pressed Chair by Harry Thaler

Cologne 2011: London designer Harry Thaler‘s Pressed Chair is one of two joint winning projects in this year’s [D3] Contest, an international competition for young designers organised by imm cologne.

The chair is made from a 2.5mm-thick aluminium sheet with a relief pressed into the surface, which provides structural strength once the legs are bent into place.

A stool using the same technique is made in a similar way from three pieces bolted together.

Thaler developed the project while studying at the Royal College of Art in London last year.

His project shares first place with OLA Foldable Table by Swedish studio AKKA – more information to follow soon.

Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs will interview the [D3] Contest winners tomorrow as part of our series of Dezeentalks at [D3] Design Talents in collaboration with imm cologne. The talks are free so come along! More details »

imm cologne takes place 18-23 January 2011. See all our stories about the even in our special category »

See films of all the Dezeentalks at last year’s fair here.

The information below is from Harry Thaler:

Pressed Chair

Pressed Chair is a pressed aluminium chair which has been bent into shape to form a super-light, stackable chair.

For Pressed Chair I wanted to create an elegant and simple chair from a single sheet of 2.5mm aluminium. By pressing structural elements into the 2 dimensional sheet, I was able to make a chair that pushes the limits of minimization and material. The chair, which is light enough to be lifted with only two fingers, is extremely strong without any external structural support. Instead decorative features pressed into the sheet provide the required strength once the chair is bent into shape.

Materials used:
Aluminium sheet 2.5mm, 1 m² for one chair

As part of my aim to minimize everything, I have also created a stool from the areas of scrap surrounding the chair when it is being cut. The stool, unlike the chair, is not made from 1 piece, but three. It is held together by screws.

Landscape Futures Super-Workshop

[Image: ”Retreating Village” by Smout Allen, a mobile settlement for a collapsing landscape].

For the past few months, I have been working behind the scenes here on something that I am finally able to announce: starting tonight, and lasting for the next seven days, I will be helping to lead a Los Angeles-based design "super-workshop" with a spectacular line-up of participants.

Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen & the Bartlett School of Architecture, along with 14 students; David Benjamin of The Living and Columbia University's GSAPP & Studio-X, along with 6 students; and the Arid Lands Institute in Burbank, California, along with 12 students will be here in Los Angeles, participating in a solid week of intensive workshops, discussions, site visits, design challenges, hikes, symposia, dinners, presentations, and crits.

[Images: Sketches by Smout Allen].

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Smout Allen, David Benjamin, and the Arid Lands Institute will be joined in this collaborative, multi-institutional undertaking by:

—David Gissen, California College of the Arts/Author of Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (htcexperiments.org)
—Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons, Center for Land Use Interpretation (clui.org)
—Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic, Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
—Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Smudge Studio/Friends of the Pleistocene (smudgestudio.org/fopnews.wordpress.com)
—Ed Keller, AUM Studio/Parsons, New School for Design (aumstudio.org)
—Liam Young, Architectural Association/Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today (tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com)
—Alex Robinson, Office of Outdoor Research (orscapes.com)
—Emily White and Lisa Little, Layer (layerla.com)
—Nicola Twilley, Edible Geography/GOOD (ediblegeography.com/good.is)
—Christian Chaudhari (cargocollective.com/ccd)
—Tim Maly, Quiet Babylon (quietbabylon.com)

Getting this many people to Los Angeles has also been made possible in part with the generous support of Virgin America.

[Images: From Living Light by The Living].

The super-workshop will be run in close parallel to the themes of a forthcoming exhibition that I am in the process of curating for the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, called Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices, and Architectural Inventions. That exhibition—on display from August 2011 to Spring 2012—has received grants from the Graham Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Needless to say, I am unbelievably excited about the exhibition and will be posting more about it as the year develops.

In brief, both the exhibition and this week's super-workshop will examine how landscapes and our perceptions of them can be radically transformed by architecture, technology, and design. Specifically, participants and exhibitors alike will explore the multitude of ways through which landscapes can be read, cataloged, interpreted, mapped, and understood using specialty equipment, both speculative and real.

A central question of both the exhibition and the super-workshop will be how future tools of landscape investigation—new spatial devices on a variety of scales, from the inhabitable to the portable—can be imagined, designed, and fabricated. These include objects, models, prototypes, graphics, and speculative proposals, ranging from the physical to the digital, from the geological to the conceptual, from the felt to the heard, and from deep-time to the hand-made.

Workshop readings and discussions will include a mix of natural history, materials science, contemporary and historical landscape investigations, and an overview of existing landscape sensing & measurement technologies; we will also examine design projects by Smout Allen, The Living, Shin Egashira, Protocol Architecture, the United States Geological Survey, Caltech Robotics Lab, NASA’s Apollo Project, and more.

[Image: ”A crewman operates an Electrotape, circa late 1960s… a precise electronic surveying device that used microwaves to measure distance… It yielded centimeter accuracy over distances from 100 meters to 40 kilometers, and in all weather conditions, day and night. Two units were needed, one to send the signal and the other to receive it. A brass triangulation station marker is visible directly below the Electrotape.” Courtesy of the USGS].

In the process, the workshop will maintain a strong focus on the built and natural landscapes of Los Angeles, a region prone to forest fires, drought, and flash floods, smog, landslides, and debris flows, climatic extremes, seismic activity, surface oil seepage, and methane clouds. These tacit connections with nature, even in the apparently manufactured terrains of greater Los Angeles, will be scrutinized.

To begin, workshop participants will visit a series of flood-control dams and landslide remediation structures in the San Gabriel Mountains; we will move from there to explore remnant urban oil fields, camouflaged drilling rigs, the La Brea Tar Pits, and other spatial side-effects of the region’s fossil fuel industry; we will study Southern California’s seismological sensing infrastructure; we will visit designers and engineers at the Caltech Robotics Lab; we will walk the streets of a once-thriving neighborhood that collapsed into the sea long ago due to relentless coastal erosion; and we will discuss the city’s troubled history with water diversion schemes—including dry lakes and dust storms—through a sustained look at the role of water in California’s landscapes of agri-business.

Recommended readings and references include but are not limited to:
—Smout Allen, Pamphlet Architecture 28: Augmented Landscapes (Princeton Architectural Press)
—Paul Thomas Anderson (dir.), There Will Be Blood
—Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Vintage)
—Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades — Chapter 3 (MIT Press)
—Shin Egashira and David Greene, Alternative Guide to the Isle of Portland (Architectural Association)
—William L. Fox, Making Time: Essays on the Nature of Los Angeles (Shoemaker & Hoard)
—David Gissen, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (Princeton Architectural Press)
—InfraNet Lab/Lateral Office, Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism (Princeton Architectural Press)
—cj Lim, Devices: A Manual of Architectural + Spatial Machines (Architectural Press)
—John McPhee, Assembling California (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
—John McPhee, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains” in The Control of Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
—Michael Novacek, Time Traveler: In Search of Dinosaurs and Ancient Mammals from Montana to Mongolia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — Chapters 1 and 10
—Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry: Water, The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century (Beacon) — Chapters 1, 3, 6, 24, 27, 28, 30
—Roman Polanski (dir.), Chinatown
—Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (Penguin)
—Kim Stringfellow, Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905–2005 (Center for American Places)
—Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert, Land Arts of the American West (University of Texas Press)
—David Ulin, The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith (Penguin)

Needless to say, I suspect some fantastic student work, conversations, and more will come out of the next seven days, and I will do my best to keep track of it all here on the blog. But if things fall quiet for a few days here, now you'll know why.

Finally, stay tuned for information about a public event here in Los Angeles this coming weekend, bringing many of these participants together.

[Images: (top) “A helicopter makes access easy in southern Utah, circa early 1960s.” (bottom) “Scribing roads on a topographic map.” Courtesy of the USGS].

So thanks again to Virgin America for their generous support, and, of course, to all our participants. More information coming soon.

Reserve Power: Paper 2010, The Inkgadget Review

Over the past two weeks we've been incorporating a lightweight flexible technology into our workflow. Usually, of course, just about everything we write is routed through a processor, operating system and application and immediately reflected on an LCD using some multitasking user interface. However, we have been seeking a way to organize to-do lists on a separate display so that they are not lost in the course of a day's work or taking up undue screen real estate. As it happens, we were invited to an exclusive press event extolling the latest version of paper.

Paper is a thin, foldable substance that can accommodate a wide array of styli to produce words and graphics. The catch is that, much like printer cartridges, these styli must be refilled with ink or replaced. But there is a wide ecosystem of these devices that are broadly available.

The developers of paper have really put a lot of forethought into a wide array of uses. The tool has almost no learning curve and data entry is so simple that young children will have no problems mastering its basics. Paper yields high contrast when used with the appropriate ink and consumes no power. And, simply put, there is no display on the market that can fold as flexibly as paper, allowing us to slip a small sheet imperceptibly into a shirt pocket or wallet.

Continue reading Reserve Power: Paper 2010, The Inkgadget Review

Reserve Power: Paper 2010, The Inkgadget Review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Researchers Developing Coral-Like Living Skin for Buildings

Researchers at the University of Greenwich in the UK are developing a carbon negative building material that would not only help fight climate change but protect the structures it is built upon. The material is made from protocells — super simple cells that have only the basic elements of life, yet are able to grow and multiply — that will capture carbon in their membranes and grow over time to create a hard, coral-like armor around or under buildings.

Read the rest of Researchers Developing Coral-Like Living Skin for Buildingshttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/ohttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=better_feedptions-general.php?page=better_feed

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", carbon negative architecture, carbon negative materials, carbon neutral design, coral buildings, green architecture, living buildings, Living Walls, university of greenwich

Plastic Film Bends in Sun to Passively Ventilate Homes

Inhabitat recently posted a story about a new photosensitive material that bends in sunlight. An alternative film, called c))motion, is already in production but has a slightly different application. In short, the film is a plastic laminate that acts like a bimetallic strip, bending when heated or placed in the sun. The innovative film is inexpensive, similar to the material used in potato chip bags, and can be used to passively ventilate attics or operate a window shade inside a double pane window.

Critical Condition

[Image: "The New Establishment" by Peter Kelly, courtesy of Blueprint].

There’s an interesting and provocative article in the most recent issue of Blueprint called “The New Establishment,” by Peter Kelly. In it, Kelly takes issue with the lack of formal criticism in architecture blogging today, writing that “one tends not to find rigorous criticism of significant new buildings” on sites such as Strange Harvest, things magazine, and BLDGBLOG.

Instead, he suggests, a “like-minded” community of writers has arisen, one “that prefers speculative musing and celebrates increasingly niche interests.” He adds, with not a small shade of foreboding, that, “as blogs become a more important part of the establishment, a more realistic and rigorous approach to architectural criticism online is urgently needed.” After all, “As traditional publishing media and institutions become less influential, one wonders where architects can go to find informed, intelligent criticism of their work.”

These are absolutely valid points. I agree wholeheartedly that a more vigorous critique of the built environment is needed, as it will always be; I’ve said this before, in fact, and I have not changed my mind since then. Infrastructure, the growth of police power in urban space, pedestrianization and mass transit schemes, improved access to cultural institutions, the politics of military landscapes, healthy housing projects, aging and the city—all of these topics need more coverage and broader public discussion. Kelly is right to suggest as much.

[Image: "The New Establishment" by Peter Kelly, courtesy of Blueprint].

But what I find deeply confusing about Kelly’s article is that, rather than read websites or blogs which do, in fact, offer “criticism of significant new buildings,” as he puts it, Kelly specifically and only focuses on websites that claim to do nothing of the sort (with perhaps one exception: Kieran Long’s Bad British Architecture).

As such, Kelly's article feels a bit like listening to someone who’s just spent two weeks looking around the classical music section only to come out complaining that he couldn’t find any death metal. Well, no shit: you were in the wrong section, and it's your mistake not ours.

In fact, it is illogical to assume that, because this site in particular is more likely to post about topics like weaponized climate modification, Greek mythology, strange infestations, narrative film, haunted house novels, paleontology, and so on, rather than about a new suite of renderings released by Rem Koolhaas, or a new museum in outer Rome, that I am therefore uninterested in seeing buildings and their architects held accountable to rigorous standards of design. As it happens, I am very interested in that; I just don’t tend to write those pieces myself.

To draw an analogy, Kelly seems to be assuming that, because someone plays guitar, they must be willfully obstructing the careers of people who instead play saxophone. Kelly, in this context, plays saxophone; he wants a bigger audience for people who play saxophone; so he writes an article not critiquing other people who play saxophone but deliberately selecting a group of guitar players so that he can make the obvious point that they don’t play sax—and this is what passes for serious architectural criticism? No wonder its audience has evaporated.

What amazes me about these sorts of critiques of blogging—and they are becoming more and more common and predictable today, now that interest in academic architectural discourse has faded (if there was ever interest in it) in favor of other, more energetic, unapologetically interdisciplinary writing styles—is that these critics are actually complaining about the lack of something they themselves purport to do.

Put another way, writers like Kelly are complaining about the unacknowledged side-effects of their own inadequacy as architecture critics. If they had actually known what they were doing in the first place, then people would never have lost interest in “rigorous criticism of significant new buildings.”

That is, speaking directly to Peter Kelly, if you want to see a more vigorous critique of real buildings, then, by all means, go ahead and show us how it’s done. Make it popular again. Find an audience for that type of writing and cultivate it. Convincingly demonstrate the power of the genre you so openly wish to celebrate.

But for Kelly to complain that BLDGBLOG doesn’t tour Alice Tully Hall, for instance, and offer constructive feedback for the architects is like complaining that Point Break doesn’t have anything to say about the design of the High Line, or that The Hobbit lacks exegetical interludes about the theories of Walter Benjamin—but neither of those things are about that, and they’re not without value because of it. They are, we might say, valued otherwise: performing an altogether different cultural function than the one whose absence Kelly mourns.

In fact, it’s a serious methodological flaw for critics like Kelly to read only the blogs that aren’t about building criticism—he cites BLDGBLOG, Pruned, Tim Maly's Quiet Babylon, and so on—in order to make the point that today's blogosphere is lacking in building criticism. Talk about shooting your own skeet. It’s not only lazy, it’s tautological and it betrays a total lack of commitment to original research.

To use another musical analogy, it’s like listening to smooth jazz for six years and then complaining that not one of those songs had vocals by Dave Mustaine—well, you were listening to the wrong kind of music.

[Image: "The New Establishment" by Peter Kelly, courtesy of Blueprint].

Pointing out that BLDGBLOG doesn’t offer traditionally recognizable formal criticism of the built environment misses the fact that the modus operandi of this blog is all but precisely not to do that. Indeed, this blog is and always has been very consciously about architecture and landscape in a representationally broad sense: exploring how spatial environments appear in film, literature, mythology, games, dreams, and comics, and to write about the otherwise radically under-reported side-effects of buildings and cities, from freak local weather systems and invasive species to psychiatric disorders and rodents. In fact, I would say that BLDGBLOG has never claimed to be a place “where architects can go to find informed, intelligent criticism of their work.” I don’t want to do that; that is not my goal as an architecture writer. But that doesn't mean—nor does it in any way imply—that I don't want to see other writers successfully demonstrate how that sort of criticism is done.

Again, to address writers and critics such as Kelly: you all have had so long to prove your point about the value of serious architectural research. You claim absolute, if not unique, critical priority for a style of architecture writing that you yourselves fail to produce in any convincing manner, and you've failed to find any real audience for the very thing you are hoping to promote. Even now, you have blogs, zines, pamphlets, international magazines, Ph.D. funding, radio shows, whole university departments, conferences, and teaching opportunities at your disposal. You can make documentaries for the BBC. Your words and ideas should speak for themselves.

With that in mind, how exactly is your failure to find an audience—indeed, even to find more writers like yourselves willing to write this stuff, surely a damning absence if there ever was one—the fault of a loose group of bloggers who prefer “speculative musing" and "increasingly niche interests”? What exactly are you saying here—that we are Katy Perry to your Shostakovich? Is that a universally negative thing?

To use a wildly overblown historical metaphor, it's a bit like seeing a lost group of battle-shocked British troops suffering from amnesia as they wander down the streets of Philadelphia in the summer of 1778, asking, in all seriousness, why there isn’t more British influence on display. But one of the reasons we came here in the first place was to get away from people like you.

[Image: "The New Establishment" by Peter Kelly, courtesy of Blueprint].

In any case, having said all that, I want to reiterate that I actually agree with the underlying premise of Peter Kelly’s article: that we need more direct and engaged criticism of the built environment. This is true, and Kelly is right. We need more Christopher Hawthornes and fewer Nicolai Ouroussoffs. We need more Matthew Coolidges and fewer Philip Jodidios. We need the next J.G. Ballard.

But until architecture critics can find a way to make formal building criticism interesting, entertaining, emotional, funny, adventurous, sexy, or thrilling, it—and its popular appeal—will languish. If people like Kelly can’t bring it upon themselves to reinvigorate their chosen discipline, then it’s not the fault of Sam Jacob or Alex Trevi if they fail. We’re back to the saxophone/guitar thing: what you need to do, Peter Kelly, is learn to play your saxophone so well that everyone else stops liking guitar; you can’t just complain about successful guitar players. Or, in market-speak: put us guitar players out of business by offering the world better music. If you can do something amazing, then I want to hear it, too.

Consider this an open appeal, then, to all architecture critics unnecessarily scared of blogs: produce the texts you want us to read & study. Find writers working in the genre you’re actually talking about and constructively team up with them to promote good and rigorous criticism. Use multiple media. Cast your net wide. Don't assume that to entertain is to lose critical insight. Remember that sometimes the most "significant new buildings" in public life today are not museums and concert halls, but film sets and game environments.

Indeed, Alex McDowell is a more influential architect than David Chipperfield, which means covering McDowell's work is not just fringe speculation. Grand Theft Auto generates more conversations about crime and the city than the writings of Adolf Loos, which means discussing GTA is not just self-indulgent musing.

After all, there is absolutely no reason in the world why we can’t have blogs that “celebrate increasingly niche interests” alongside blogs that offer “rigorous criticism of significant new buildings”—in fact, there is no reason in the world why a single blog couldn’t simultaneously perform both functions. It would be a dream to read.

Imagine a world, then, where critics like Peter Kelly actually step up and demonstrate how to do the things they so enjoy pointing out as lacking in others. If they could succeed at this—and find an audience, and push an agenda, and gather influence, and raise the stakes of what it means to be an architecture blogger—then we would all, as writers and readers and builders, be stronger because of it.

And, if they don’t succeed—if they can't pull it off—then they should do better than to pin the blame on others.

IDEO's Future of the Book

Today IDEO released a five-minute video exploring the future of digital books. Their illustrated concepts highlight some interesting opportunity areas in the publishing industry through three distinct reading experiences:

Nelson reinforces books as critical thinking tools, providing multiple perspectives, references, and current conversations on a single subject. The layers of information beyond the book itself provide greater context and encourages a deeper dive into the book throughout history and into the future.

Coupland addresses the challenge to stay on top of the thinking and writing in our world and professional field that so many of us feel. Readers can easily keep up with "must-reads" by following what colleagues are reading and interact with them through "book clubs" and other social layers (discussions, suggestions, lists, purchases) to help each other share and learn.

Alice explores new ways for users to interact and affect written narratives by introducing non-linear and game mechanics to reading. By introducing the reader's active participation, this concept "blurs the lines between reality and fiction." Certain interactions allow the reader to transcend traditional media by utilizing geographic location, communication with characters, and user contribution to storyline and plot.

The Future of the Book from IDEO on Vimeo.

(more...)

‘The Process Is Really Just Iterate, Iterate, Iterate’

Speaking of UI designers, Lukas Mathis has a nice interview with Chris Clark.

★

New Air Conditioning System Yields "90 Percent" Energy Savings

Air conditioning accounts for 14 percent of America's home electricity use, and most of that electricity comes from coal. Can we keep our home climates comfortable without screwing up the global climate?

We're making progress. A team of engineers at NREL recently developed a potentially revolutionary new air conditioning system. Unlike standard air conditioners, which compress a circulating liquid refrigerant such as Freon, this new system draws warm air through a cooling unit that contains a water-absorbing dessicants compound that cools the air by evaporation. The payoff? It uses up to 90 percent less energy.

How long until this new system shows up in homes? Two to three years, apparently. But the principal program manager on the project says they've already "gotten calls from a lot of major players out there."

Image: NREL/Pat Corkery

3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution

New technology is giving rise to never-before-possible businesses that are selling products like iPhone cases, doorknobs, perfume bottles and architectural models.

St Laurentius / C18 Architekten

Architects: C18 Architekten
Location: Rottenburg‐Hailfingen, Germany
Client: Kath. Kirchengemeinde St. Laurentius
Project Area: 340 sqm
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Brigida Gonzalez

The town centre of Hailfingen is characterised by simple, rural building structures. The situation “behind the church” features attractive open spaces.

Our thoughts to shaping the structure are defined by analogies to the townscape of Hailfingen.

section

By architectonic interventions like the solid construction of the buildings volume and the size of openings in walls, habitual perception patterns are challenged and indicate the special use of the new parish hall in the village context.

A steep roof with double plain tile covering and plastered walls establish references to rural and traditional building. Few large scale windows with trim moulding allow views in and out.

The interior surfaces are smooth and without joints. They stand in contrast to the outer form of the structure. In the foyer the buildings volume can be grasped. The gallery on the upper floor brings an alleyway to mind from which three chambers can be accessed.

St Laurentius / C18 Architekten originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 30 Aug 2010.

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Beginning an Architecture Library

As the long days of summer are sadly coming to an end, architecture students across the world will be heading back to their universities and preparing for their next studio projects. While the upcoming semester will allow students to master the latest digital modeling programs and perfect their physical modeling skills, the value of reading architectural books (whether they be reference, theory, etc.) should not be overlooked. We found a few lists of books that are categorized as “the essentials” for any architecture student. For instance, Amazon.com’s list includes: Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture, 2nd Edition, Norman Potter’s What is a Designer: Things, Places, Messages and Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essay on Architecture. ArchiNinja’s list includes Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, 10×10 by Editors of Phaidon Press and A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) by the Center for Environmental Structure Series. And, About.com Architecture’s reference list includes Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, Willem Van Vliet’s The Encyclopedia of Housing and James P. Cramer’s Almanac of Architecture & Design 2005, Sixth Edition (Almanac of Architecture and Design).

Which books have you found most helpful in your student or professional career? Share with us the books that are vital pieces of your architecture library.

Beginning an Architecture Library originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 16 Aug 2010.

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amid.cero9 at venice architecture biennale 2010

'cherry tree blossom' by amid.cero9 in jerte valley, spain
all images courtesy amid.cero9

exhibiting at this year's venice architecture biennale, 'cherry tree blossom' by madrid-based
architectural office amid.cero9 (cristina díaz moreno and efrén garcía grinda) is a structure
set in the middle of the jerte valley in spain. the site is unique for its single-species cherry
orchards that transform the landscape every year.

the lightweight roof of 'cherry tree blossom' is composed of fabric and a three-dimensional
structural system made of slender interwoven steel. the resulting form is an organic
'modern chapel' with bevelled openings punctured throughout the surface. light enters
the shelter in streams, creating a cave-like experience for its inhabitants.

rendering

in jerte valley

in context

model study

inside of model

detail

efrén garcía grinda and cristina díaz moreno of amid.cero9 working on the model

site plan

exploded axo

roof plan

floor plan

cristina díaz moreno and efrén garcía grinda of amid.cero9

MIT SENSEable City Lab's "Copenhagen Wheel" takes top US prize in Dyson Awards

At press time their website had not yet been updated with this news, but the 2010 James Dyson Award has announced their US National Winner, along with the US Shortlist.

Top prize goes to MIT's SENSEable City Lab for their Copenhagen Wheel design, a sort of smart wheel that attaches to existing bicycles and transforms them into "hybrid electric-bikes with regeneration and real-time sensing capabilities."

Its sleek red hub not only contains a motor, batteries and an internal gear system - helping cyclists overcome hilly terrains and long distances - but also includes environmental and location sensors that provide data for cycling-related mobile applications. Cyclists can use this data to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve their exercise goals or to create new connections with other cyclists. Through sharing their data with friends or their city, they are also contributing to a larger pool of information from which the whole community can benefit.

Check out the full Shortlist here.

(more...)

Arthur Bodolec's "living" furniture

Paris-based Arthur Bodolec's Jack chairs are "furniture that comes alive." It's a bit difficult to convey the coolness with still photos, so check out the vid below (which starts slow, action starts around 1:00):

The Astonishing Jack by Arthur Bodolec ! from Arthur Bodolec on Vimeo.

You can see Bodolec's full book on Coroflot.

(more...)

Dolni Dobrouc Sport Hall / Alexandr Skalický Architekt

Architect: Alexandr Skalický Architekt
Location: Dolni Dobrouc, Czech Republic
Client: Municipality Dolni Dobrouc
Engineering: AS2000, ASSPRO
Buget: EUR 1,250,000
Project Year: 2007-2008
Construction Year: 2008-2009
Photographs: Ester Havlova

plan 01

As the construction of the sports hall was financed by a small village with a limited budget, the structure of the hall is very simple and undemanding. Its architectural design uses simple expressional means. Besides the position of the grey panels on the façade and the colour design of the interior, the basic idea is a “numeral” motif where individual numbers are interconnected with sports symbols.

The colourfulness of the hall is also given by the layout of the interior. Separate units such as sportsmen’s locker rooms, corridors, muscle-conditioning gym are of different colours than the spaces intended for the spectators. As the decoration of the interior (floors, walls and ceilings) is also very simple, the hall resembles an austere spatial unit-built structure.

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