July 15, 2011
Der Spiegel Online has a nice gallery of images from Slovenian photographer Roman Bezjak, who traveled through Eastern Europe for five years recording the Socialist architecture of the post-War era. Bezjak bucks saccharine Ostalgie from a cooly neutral vantage point. Plattenbau enthusiasts, buckle up.
July 13, 2011
The Big Dig by Topotek1, at the Xi’an International Horticultural Expo. All Photos: Geng Wang
You were seven, it was summer, and you were bored to tears. Somehow you got the idea in your head that you could dig a tunnel to China. You grab a spade or shovel (of hard plastic) and begin to dig. You’re determined, and nothing—not the limitations of your physical strength, hunger, networks of piping, dangerous levels of air pressure, lack of oxygen, the earth’s molten core, or, if you managed to get past all that, the fact that you’d end up in the middle of the Indian Ocean and should have started in Argentina—will keep you from digging. But after 30 minutes, but what seems like hours, night fall or dinner time precludes the conclusion of your journey.
July 12, 2011
PAS House, Francois Perrin / Air Architecture, Malibu, California. Video from etnies on Vimeo.
You know those people who “don’t take their work home with them?” World champion skateboarder and founder of Etnies, Pierre Andre Senizergues, isn’t one of those people. He’ll be able to skate “every surface” of his new Malibu home (still in beta – these images show a prototype). According to its designers, the home is “ultimate dream for generations of skateboarders,” who have suffered for years at the hands of anti-skateboarding parents, policemen, and park-bench-sitters. Click through for the images.
July 12, 2011
Eric Fischer is the prescient data artist behind several well-circulated recent visualization, like Locals and Tourists and the 2010 Race and Ethnicity dot maps. Infosthetics posted Fischer’s latest project early this morning, a geo-located Twitter/Flicker mashup that compares each program’s density of use across the globe. See Something or Say Something plots orange dots to represent Flickr use, while blue show Tweets. US-specific and Global versions of the maps are after the break.
July 11, 2011
Briefly noted: “My artistic career began at the age of 10, designing unreal cities, with all their streets (and their street names), their buildings, their topography, their bus and subway lines,” says artist and visualizer Victor Enrich, explaining his architectural fictions.
July 7, 2011
“Architecture of Air,” an installation by Junya Ishigami, at the Curve at Barbican Art Gallery
Nothingness is not a new concept to art. Duchamp, art’s premiere showman, bottled “50cc of Paris Air” in a common, albeit, sculptural glass flask. Yves Klein subverted common economic praxis through works such as “The Void” and “Ritual rules for the transfer of areas of immaterial pictorial sensibility” which delivered the paying client with nothing tangible. John Cage famously composed his one of his landmark pieces 4’33, a three-movement composition in which orchestra performers are instructed not to play a single note on their instruments. But what of an architecture of nothingness?
Sure, Klein developed what was perhaps the first immaterial architecture, designing climatological architectures of air and fire. But they remained unrealized. Miesian terminology may have favored “transparency,” but the architecture remains very much a structural presence, acting more as a frame. Now, at the Barbican in London, Junya Ishigami debuts his “Architecture of Air,” an imperceptibly, minimally material assemblage of columns and threads.
July 7, 2011
A series of images from photographer Joachim Schmid documents contextual urbanism at work: Schmid, in a helicopter above some of Brazil’s most populous cities, captured images of ad hoc football fields created on disused or vacant lots. O Campo demonstrates the old adage that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Alternatively: “Make it work.”
Says Schmid, “the desire for playing the game has clearly surpassed and ignored the limitations of natural topography and FIFA’s laws.”
[via Deconcrete]
July 1, 2011
Totem De/Dos by Brut Deluxe Arquitectura is the first of three sign posts to be installed in industrial parks around Madrid. The architects sought to establish an iconic model—a signpost at the urban scale—that would immediately register place and direction for confused visitors to the decentralized industrial park.
The Totem’s metal frame is cladded with milky-colored 40 mm thick cellular polycarbonate plates, under which LEDs relay graphic information and directions. The prototype is all cantilever, with two wings jutting out in opposite directions. It cuts a striking profile that instantly recalls the aesthetics of the Constructivist projects and the irony of the OMA-school. We think it particularly owes more than a little bit to the following projects:
June 30, 2011
Following in the footsteps of the Big Dig House (a home built from materials discarded from the Big Dig construction site) and Teddy Cruz (who uses the refuse from San Diego construction sites to build in Tijuana), Raum Labor Berlin has completed the Big Crunch, a building made entirely from discarded materials.
June 27, 2011
While American developers may no longer have the capital to chase New Urbanist dreams, India, and other fast-developing economic heavyweights, do. The Atlantic reports this week on Lavasa, a New Urbanist complex of five “villages” under construction in an otherwise-undeveloped parcel of land, 130 miles from Mumbai. Lavasa (an HOK project) will be an enclave of privilege for its 300,000 inhabitants, safe from the perpetual problems of the city-bound slums.
For a number of obvious (and some not so obvious) reasons, it’s the source of much debate in an industry in limbo between optimism and realism, excess and conservation, boom and recession.
