Photo: Iwan Baan

OMA announced today that construction has been completed on the Central China Television (CCTV) headquarters in Beijing, concluding an eight-year building period that saw numerous setbacks, delays, and even a fire. The project, the firm’s largest to date, was overseen by Rem Koolhaas and former OMA partner Ole Sheeren and designed to represent a “reinvention of the skyscraper”, where the historical clamor for height is altogether ignored in favor of a ‘loop’ model of interconnected activities.

Image: OMA

The 473,000 square-meter complex, which will open later in the year, will house offices, studios, and broadcasting and production rooms that, according to OMA, “combines the entire process of TV-making” into one central, iconic form. The tell legs of the tower lean progressively inwards as they rise in the air, before being connected by a 75-meter wide cantilever.

Photo: Iwan Baan

Commenting on the day’s event, Koolhaas stated that he was “very happy, after years of intense collaboration, that the CCTV building will soon begin to perform its role in the way it is intended.” When the competition was opened for the tower design contemporaneously with that of the World Trade Center, the architect famously directed his team to work to focus on China, citing in his so-called “Bejing Manifesto” the country’s rise as global power and the opportunity to realize an innovative that would “lead the world into a digital future.”

Photo: Philippe Ruault

Photo: Jim Gourley

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Adaptive reuse is a term that summons both excited interest and annoyance. Drop it in any conversation, and you’ll instantly gain the approval of zealous ecological do-gooders or the dreaded eye-roll from the jaded realists, too “informed” to feign optimism and jealous for not being the first to think of, say, repurposing a water tower to make awesome-looking furniture. That’s exactly what Brooklyn-based woodshop Bellboy did with their aptly-named “Water Tower” chair, a comfy undulating lounger made from reclaimed timber sourced from a certified authentic New York City water tower.

With a strikingly simple, almost Pringle-like profile, the chair oozes summer cool. The seat slopes downward toward the back, creating a pocket of space that eases the user into a lulling nap. The back of the chair narrows at the top, a refined touch that offsets the ovoid concavity of the chair base. The project brings to mind another innovative use of the city’s decommissioned water towers, this Greenwhich Village roof garden by GRAFTWORKS.

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The pending “burst” of the Chinese real estate bubble has only begun to slow the seemingly perpetual production and subsequent desertification of new housing properties and projects. Some sixty million apartments are estimated to lay empty within Chinese borders, forming entire “ghost cities” of sprawling geometric configurations, untouched infrastructure, and generic signature buildings stranded in China’s hinterlands. The projects were largely government endeavors, public works meant to boost output, with the matter of their actual use and habitation being almost secondary. So while the ghost cities were not designed and built for immediate vacancy and obsolescence, the possibility (eventuality?) of these vacant high-rise blocs being filled someday seems unlikely and somehow beside the point.

Scientists in New Mexico have drawn up plans for a different kind of ghost town, one that will never be inhabited, but has, instead, been purposefully designed to be empty of human occupants. The billion-dollar city, to be built in Lea County, will function as a vast testing site for new technologies and their integration within a (semi)urban environment. Planners have christened the city the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, which sounds a lot like the Stepford-like towns constructed after the midcentury to test nuclear blasts. Yet, the project is on a wholly different scale than these precedents, with an area of nearly 15 square miles, all gridded with city streets, housing, a church (?), and even a couple of towers. Self-driving cars will patrol the avenues, while parks will be wired with “next-generation” wireless networks. Construction is set to begin on June 30. Ghosts, plan accordingly.

[via DVice]

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The bathroom is an intimate space. It is a room of particularities and pet peeves: does the toothbrush sit in a cup or a stand? How do you hang those hand towels? Where do you keep those tweezers? And those special creams? If there were ever a room that needed customization, this would probably be it. Yet for the site of our most personal daily regimens, it seems surprisingly difficult to find a suitably personal design.

Enter French design duo Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Since 1999, the Bouroullec brothers have added a characteristic whimsy to contemporary furniture design, turning modular objects into playful, individualistic pieces. Their vegetal chairs sprout from the floor like plants with gently curving branches that form a seat and back. Their Aim lamps dangle on vine-like cables, likewise blurring machine-made uniformity with natural disorder. The duo has produced nimble-legged tables and curvilinear shelving systems, but until recently, like many designers and architects, Ronan and Erwan had turned a blind eye to the humble bathroom.

Now, the duo has teamed up with Hansgrohe to introduce the Axor Bouroullec collection, a line of beautifully minimalist bathroom fixtures that can be picked and arranged into countless configurations. With just a few clicks, the Axor Bouroullec Composer allows anyone to design his or her perfect bathroom: choose to compose a wash basin or a bath tub, select a mineral-cast model of choice, and then start adding, subtracting and rearranging accessories with the ease of ordering an iPad. Does the faucet ever get in the way? Simply move it to the side, or better yet, suspend it from a shelf. Faucet handles can likewise abandon symmetry and migrate separately along every axis. Gauge your own vanity by choosing an appropriately sized mirror, then place it wherever you’d like. Various shelves are made available to tend to your individual needs, providing that perfect perch for your hairbrush or a dry space for those Q-tips. And when you’re done with the sink, curate a selection of mixers and shower heads for the perfect bath. Ready to start designing? Find the Axor Bouroullec Composer on the Hansgrohe website.

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Nothing says failure quite as much as a weathered, rusted space frame. Yet, in pristine conditions–see Konrad Wachmann’s colossal, even animistic proto-space frame projects–it possess an aesthetic that rivals all other modes of architectural expression. When taken as a (pictorial) whole, the space frame’s superimposed latticework inevitably becomes collaged, its inherent structural legibility blurred into a moiré of thick and thin lines–a drama teased out from the anonymity of standardized steel members.

A space frame, however, does not a home (usually) make. Domesticity can neither tolerate the intense material volatility of the space frame, nor the hostility it poses towards the calm, passive life. But wait! The plants will take it!

Introducing, the plant space frame from studio kg, a modular planting system comprised of interconnected tetrahedrons that guide and “tame” the course of plant growth from inside your home or office. Called ‘Parramyd‘, the system provides a framework on which to grow ivy and vine-like plants in a domestic environment. The kits come in two sizes, both sets of which can be expanded or made smaller by the addition or removal of the pyramidal modules. Utopia and your garden, back together again.

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The Bubble Building; All photos via DUS Architects Facebook

Commenting on the brevity and precariousness of life, Erasmus likened man to a soap bubble (homo bulla), a vain, delusional creature who exerts much effort and time to erect “walls of bubbles” to insulate its base vulnerabilities with intricate systems of culture and knowledge. The barefaced fact of one’s finitude is, as Sartre facetiously and accurately noted, “a fart in a soap bubble”–to shamelessly exploit the metaphor–the noxious truth of extinction thinly veiled by the seeming vibrancy of the life about to pop.

That’s part of what the “Bubble Building” tries express. Designed by DUS Architects for the ZigZagCity festival in Rotterdam, the pavilion is the world’s most temporary and fragile structure, comprised of 16 shallow hexagonal pools, each of which is filled with a reflective solution, that collectively form 35 square meteres of “soap surface”. Visitors grip handlebar frames at the base of the ponds and pull up to create iridescent globular volumes that appear different from one to the next but which last for all but a moment. The speed with which the form materializes and fades occludes any close reading of the emergent forms, and so the communal, participatory act itself assumes priority of place. At least two people are needed to construct each of the bubble cells, whose size and coverage corresponds to the number of participants cooperating uniformly across space. Continue.

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Where Le Corbusier modeled his new modernity on the ocean liner, Reyner Banham took The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine as the graphic avatar for Archigram’s saccharine (and vulnerably pictorial) brand of  technocracy. Both the  sounds and images were saturated with psychedelic overtures–ecstasy in color–that were at once the anathema of the austere, functionalist modernism that preceded them and an aborted leap into a naive post-political future. Guinness’ new deep sea bar–read that again–traverses the same “ludens-scape” advanced by the cartoon facsimiles of the Beatles and Archigram’s hand-drawn utopias, and,  it should be said, characterized by the latter’s shallow premise that technology is not only inherently good but fun.

And really, how else to describe a submarine-turned-deep sea bar, beyond being a trivial, but sleek machine for fun? Jump Studios have realized the Beatles’ graphic precedent, albeit, in less yellow and more polka dots, with their mobile abyssal taproom, which scales the depths of the Baltic Sea always in search of a good time.

Working with engineer Nicholas Alexander, the architects produced a design that maintained fidelity to stringent marine construction codes, while, nevertheless, achieving a formal and material adventurousness.  Measurements taken from the submarine, based at  the Stockholm Archipelago, dictated the scope of the intervention, which involved the design of a pre-fabricated interior shell constructed of GRP (glass reinforced plastic). The cozy 118 square-feet space is  a continuous wall/floor surface with undulating nooks and ledges for seating and tables. The wall is covered in a blanket of uniform bubble-like rubber disks, which are at points embedded with LED lights or filled in with cup holders ( a must). Needless to say, the Guinness submarine is the first of its kind in the world, and the guest list is limited.

[via Inhabitat]

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Photo: flickr user su–may

UK department store Marks & Spencer (M&S) is starting a “fashion revolution” that goes by the name “schwopping” (shopping + swapping), a kind of rewards program meant to encourage recycling and to frame questions about the ethics and scope of garbage. To illustrate the abundance of material waste that prompted the marketing ploy “ethically-informed”, “ecologically-minded” campaign, the company installed some 10,000 pieces of discarded clothing–the number of garments, M & S claims, that is trashed every 5 minutes in the UK alone–on the facade of an abandoned brewery warehouse in East London. The piece is a visual compendium of secondhands, with near every industry color, form, and graphic, not too mention decade, represented.

Cooperating with Oxfam, the company aims to “change shopping forever” by getting customers to turn in their old clothes that will be recycled and distributed to the impoverished. Over 1,200 so-called “scwhwop drops” have been placed in several M&S locations to collect used garments from customers, who, upon selflessly donating their disused tees and jeans, will receive  a £5 voucher for future purchases. Charity pays, kids!

Photo: flickr user world of good

Photo: flickr user terekhova

[via MyModernMet]

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“Oops, our bad.” That pretty much sums up Ferrari’s response to Chinese officials last Tuesday, after the Italian luxury carmaker damaged a 600-year old wall in Nanjing, erected in the Ming Dynasty as party of the city’s extensive fortifications. During a pointless demonstration involving a special edition Ferrari 458 Italia, worth some six million yuan ($950,000), the stunt driver, ostensibly drunk on adrenaline and fumes, got carried away, spinning donuts over the ancient wall and leaving behind a trail of tire marks over the protected landmark.

Footage of the demo, part of the celebrations commemorating Ferrari’s 20th year in Chinese markets, shows a crane raising the sports car on the wall rampart, where the driver proceeds to spin several times in circles and staining the stone floor with black skid marks in the process. The video cuts to the next morning, when workers try in vain to sweep and scrub the residue off the surface. As the BBC notes, the incident has prompted a windfall of negative comments on Chinese microblogs, with much of the blame placed on city officials, whom, it’s been suggested, charged Ferrari $12,000 for temporary use of the wall.  Local authorities responded by saying that the car company had lacked their approval in the matter, while Ferrari, in turn, faulted a single employee of a local dealership, the event’s co-sponsor, stressing that the latter was nor had never been employed by the company. Though the damages seem reparable, the BBC says “Ferrari” had been recently blocked on Chinese microblogs, perhaps to curtail any criticism of government officials.

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Photos: Reuters

LEGOs function as an analog for architecture, their plastic “bricks” corresponding to their full-scale clay or cement counterparts, the “snap” and “click” that enjoins them mimicking the mortar that adheres entire walls. But rarely do the little toy modules add up to anything remotely close to actual architecture, despite the claims of parents that divine prodigious talents from the vaguely “archetypal” towers and “pomo” houses cobbled together by their would be archi-tykes. Yet, architecture–taking Adolf Loos’s stringent definition–is perhaps an accurate signifier for the 31.9 meter (105 feet) tall LEGO tower constructed in South Korea over the weekend.

The televised build, sponsored by LEGO Korea for the celebration of the toy company’s 80th birthday, was overseen by some 4,000 children who handled over 50,000 bricks over a 5-day period to erect the tower. The child-construction crew consisted of lucky contest winners who had entered a lottery pool to participate in the event, which attracted more than 30,000 visitors, reports China Daily. The plastic skyscraper stands just outside Seoul’s Olympic City complex, foregrounding a drab stadium emblazoned with the Olympic insignia. Last night, visiting premier the Crown Prince of Denmark topped off the “structure” with the record-breaking brick that edged out the previous tallest tower by just 30 centimeters in a race for height that began in 1988, when the first of the Lego architectures was built in London. Since then, 30 different records have been set and broken, so don’t expect Seoul to hold the title for too long.

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