July 11, 2011
The Hydro-electric Power Station in Kempten Germany by Becker Architekten.
If you visit the sleepy town of Kempten in Southern Germany, you’ll be charmed by its quaint, winding streets, dependably European squares and courts, and traditional (i.e., fabricated) German architecture. But you’d also become bored pretty quickly – that is, till you come across the city’s new hydro-electric power plant.
Completed in November of last year, the Hydro-electric Power Station replaces a mid-century plant and is capable of supporting approximately 3000 households with 10.5 million kilowatt-hours of power per year. The new plant is a far cry from typical industrial architecture: formally radical and spatially engaging, it looks like the product of a collaboration between a sculptor and an engineer.
Click on through for more!
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July 11, 2011
Cat’s out of the bag: BMW Guggenheim Lab‘s schmancy new website launched today with more info on the top-secret globe-spanning collaboration launching in August. As of August 3, a pop-up pavilion by Japanese architects Atelier Bow-Wow will be open to the public on an undeveloped lot on Houston Street at 2nd Avenue.
“Lightweight and compact, with a structural skeleton built of carbon fiber, the mobile structure” will be in New York until October 16, then moving on to Berlin in 2012, and Asia at some point as well.
Read all about it after the jump:
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July 8, 2011
This is a:
(A) soccer field
(B) cow pasture
(C) nuclear bunker
(D) water reservoir for the city of Basel, Switzerland
Those Swiss! Architecture geniuses, all. Click through to see more.
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July 8, 2011
As you know, each Friday we list the most trafficked project posts from the Architizer database for your viewing pleasure. So what are Architizer readers — and Facebook fans and Twitter followers — are clicking on this week?
For this first sweltering week in July, we see an interesting selection, including the first placing for a conceptual project. We’ve also got a dramatically cantilevered office building and three houses flung worldwide.
Without further ado, see this week’s top five:
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July 8, 2011
Earlier this year we explained what seismic isolators are, and now a Japanese architect has put them center stage in a new Osaka prefecture home. The mechanisms, which decouple the house from the ground movements happening during an earthquake, are usually buried underneath the ground level. Not so in the Television House, which is raised up on the usually hidden isolation units, making them clearly visible from the street.
Click through to see how these advanced structural mechanisms are put on display.
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July 8, 2011
Atlantis, NASA’s final space shuttle mission, launches today in Florida. It will return to Earth at the Kennedy Space Center on July 20. [via CNET]
In a timely bit of architecture reporting, Christopher Hawthorne pays a visit to the Cy Twombly Gallery at Houston’s Menil Collection, designed in 1995 by Renzo Piano using sketches from Twombly himself. [via LA Times]
A new bicycle-sharing system called Sobi (invented by a New York-based urban planner!) uses GPS and a mobile phone app for locating and reserving bicycles. [via Gizmag]
NYC home team Rogers Marvel Architects won the design competition to revamp President’s Park in Washington, DC, beating out Hood Design Studio (California), Michael Van Valkenburg (Brooklyn), Reed Hildebrand Associates and SASAKI (both of Massachusetts). [via A/N Blog]
A Polish architect is designing the narrowest house in the world, at a mere 60 inches wide. Even more surprising! He has a client to live in the completed home. [via BD Online]
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July 7, 2011
In the vein of The Hairpin’s obsession with stock photography, we decided to see what enlightening canned imagery we could lay our grubby hands on by searching “architect.” Lo and behold, there are a ton of blueprints as props. Guess Shutterstock has realized that the reality (zombielike fixation on PC screen, 21 windows open in Adobe Creative Suite, crumbs and nicotine stains dotting fingertips) isn’t quite so glam or approachable.
Somewhere out there, Architect Barbie’s getting the last giggle:
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July 7, 2011
“A Railroad Artifact, 30th Street, May 2000″ Photo by Joel Sternfeld, from Walking the High Line (2002). Via The Atlantic.
In its series ‘How Genius Works,’ The Atlantic interviews James Corner in relation to his firm’s design for the High Line park. While we’ve read (and reported on) a lot of High Line news, it’s fascinating to dive into the brain of Corner, known for his visionary and intellectual interpretation of landscape architecture.
Of the park’s plotting, he explains, “This sequence of movement is choreographed to illustrate different panoramas in an ambulatory way,” so that visitors create individual panoramas through motion.
Read on for more James Corner Field Operations diagrams and thinky explanations of New York’s favorite new park.
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July 6, 2011
Photo: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters.
That is a lot of buzzwords for one title. Let’s parse! Three weeks ago at two architecturally-stunning locations in Paris (Notre Dame, above, and the Louvre courtyard), 10,000 people attended an al fresco dinner that wasn’t advertised beforehand and left no trace after.
The New York Times covered the affair, and tells us that the moveable feast (official title: Dîner en Blanc) is heading stateside later this summer.
Guess the secret’s out?
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July 6, 2011
London’s Design Museum has been plotting a move since 2009, and it’s finally happening thanks to a cash infusion from Sir Terence Conran (design lover extraordinaire). The new digs are in a 1962 Modernist building rehabbed by OMA. [via Unbeige]
Nicolai Ourossoff’s been combing China’s recent starchitecture for his last articles for the New York Times. He quite fancies Zaha Hadid’s new opera house in Guangzhou. [via The New York Times]
Speaking of: arts correspondent Michael Kimmelman has been selected as the new architectural critic for the Times, following several profiles of luminary architects like Oscar Niemeyer, Peter Zumthor and Shigeru Ban for the Times Magazine. Kimmelman will begin his term in the fall. [via Chicago Tribune]
The Daniel Libeskind tower planned for LA is dead — well, almost. The project has lost its 1,32 acre site, which will go on sale for $17 million. [via Curbed LA]
Japanese designers Nosigner have created “the moon”, an sculpted LED lamp that is a perfect replica of the moon. The object was based off of 3D data retrieved from the lunar orbiter spacecraft Kaguya. No details have been released about its sale. [via Co. Design]
The nominations are piling up for the 2011 Carbuncle Cup, the competition that awards the world’s ugliest buildings completed within the last 12 months. Building Design is accepting submissions, which you can add to their Flickr page. Jean Nouvel better watch his back. [via BDOnline]
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