Opus Hong Kong; Photos: Frank Gehry/Swire Properties

Hong Kong can now claim a Frank Gehry of its own, joining the ranks of Los Angeles and New York, Prague and Bilbao–cosmopolitan cities privileged with a billowing bauble with which to launch a minor tourism or luxury apartment campaign.  The Opus Hong Kong, a 12-story residential tower and the architect’s first in Asia, has recently been completed. Click through for more images.

Opus Hong Kong

The view from the Peak.

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Zaha Hadid Architects Brand Film from JamesDesigns on Vimeo.

Like Coca-Cola, the Olympics, and Real Madrid, Zaha Hadid Architects is very much a globalizing brand. Currently at the height of their powers, with projects totaling 940 sprinkled throughout some 44 countries. ZHA is a well-engineered machine whose constituent parts, as this video attests, are given considerable thought. Seemingly small, yet important details such as the website’s font and thumbnail tiling are tediously crafted, while bespoke color schemes are standardized across all platforms. It’s all part of a concerted effort to totalize the firm’s creative output and, by doing so, packaging it for distribution, exchange, and, ultimately, sale. You’ll find, for example, the same parametric ephemera on the company’s letterhead and business cards as on shopping bags, ostensibly obtained from the ZHA giftshop (kidding?). Rather embarrassingly, however, is that this kind of care does not extend to the project briefs themselves, which read like coded, quasi-mystical texts deciphered by Google Translate (with bewildering results, naturally), populated as they are with the latest buzzwords and infused with liberal doses of polysyllabic terminology. But that’s beside the point. Who really cares about Schumacher’s florid conceptualizing when there are icons to be built.

Aww, the ZHA family.

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The spiral staircase has long functioned as shorthand for “modernist” design, to be inserted in any and all contexts both “traditional” and “contemporary”, with the expressed desire of imparting an effortless plasticity into situations where there is none. But such aesthetic redemption comes at a price, itself usually connoting further expenditures (e.g. an apartment renovation) that few young adults, let alone young architects, can afford or their small abodes can accommodate (no second floor).

While not necessarily cheap–the price is “by request”–the Elementstair offers a modular and portable spiral staircase that can move and even couch surf with you. Designed by Floris Schoonderbeek, whose says he was inspired by the tectonics of waterslides, the Elemntstair makes the case for the staircase as a piece of furniture–and not architecture, necessarily. Constructed from interchangeable polyester modules, the stairs can thus be used for domestic purposes, as a bookshelf or even pantry, or as Gizmodo feebly suggests, as a lookout point. It also comes in several thousands of RAL colors–convenient, since we’ll be needing one in cyan.

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It’s always great to see practicing architects inspired by student work. Case in point: the team at Studio Gang Architects took some cues from the internetz this week, staging their very own in-office competition to design—you guessed it—LOLCATs. With a 10-minute time limit, the contestants used only images of Studio Gang architecture and Studio Gang cats to churn out a series of ‘Archi-cats’ that riff on the firm’s very own designs and renderings. They even found a much simpler and more adorable solution to rid Chicago’s waterways of invasive Asian carp. Check out the rest of these kitty collages here. Happy Friday!

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The Pentax K-01 Yellow

We’ve been fawning over the Marc Newson-designed Pentax K-01 ever since it arrived in the mail, and for good reason. The compact camera is a thing of beauty; sheathed in an irresistibly textured yellow skin, this handheld machine pops with minimalist features modeled into bold, simple shapes. Its thin, interchangeable lens comes with a magnetic lens cap comparable to a slightly flattened Junior Mint, as described by a coworker.

You can do no wrong in taking this camera with you to snap gorgeous photos of architecture. But with the –nth arrival of spring in New York, we could think of no better way to break out our new toy than with a trip to our favorite architecture-themed food truck: Coolhaus.

Coolhaus has been churning out building-sized ice cream sandwiches in Los Angeles, New York, Austin and Miami for some time now, and we couldn’t resist when we found out they were parked a mere five blocks away from the Architizer HQ. As described on the website, Coolhaus is a triple entendre, a play on Bauhaus, Koolhaas, and the oddly architectural make-up of an ice cream sandwich, described as “a cookie roof and floor slab with ice cream walls.” With camera in tow, we fought through the lunch hour crowds in Midtown to get our hands on one of these tasty prefab confections. Our “cool house” of choice? A hulking one-story scoop of I.M. Pei-nut Butter thrown between slabs of chocolate-chocolate chip cookie. Needless to say, we always knew we had good taste.

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All images: Jimenez Lai/Bureau Spectacular

Architect/artist/cartoonist Jimenez Lai proudly proclaims in his bio that he has “lived and worked in a desert shelter at Taliesin and resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam.” In talks, he is wont to mention that he is living, literally, “with the aftermath of a work he created”–that being the “Briefcase House“, something of a portable room or a hypertrophied cubby hole situated in the middle of the Bureau Spectacular studio offices (of which Lai is head) and where he has called home for the past 3 years. This summer he will add another name to his growing list of wacky homes, with plans to temporarily inhabit one of his so-called “super-furnitures” (see his “White Elephant”) in the Architecture Foundation storefront as part of a performance art/architectural installation for the London Festival of Architecture 2012.

The third in the series, the Hefner/Beuys House literalizes the cartoon frame and the narrative devices (bubble thoughts, line abstraction, color coding) it inheres so as to affect the experience of “walking through a comic book.” The structure is pocked with inhabitable spaces of shapes and sizes in which Lai will live, sleep, and explore. The “house” has also been designed with both a public “front” facing the street and a “back” that is only visible to gallery visitors, a dialectical play of exposure and non-exposure, stage and environment, Hugh Hefner and Joseph Beuys that will dictate and provoke Lai’s action, movement, and general behavior in the space(s).

Unfortunately, Lai is lacking the sufficient funds to ensure the project’s realization. What’s a “creative” to do in such circumstances? Take to Kickstarter, of course! Lai and Bureau Spectacular have launched a campaign to raise the $20,000 needed to continue their Super Furniture line. But their Kickstarter is unique in what and how they reward backers of the project: pledging one’s support could get you a copy of Lai’s forthcoming architectural comic book “Citizens of No Place” ($50), an original drawing ($150) or painting ($1,000), or even your own custom Super Furniture designed by Lai himself ($10,000, not including budget). If you’re unfamiliar with Lai’s fanciful and funny graphic work or his clever built work, rectify the situation now.

[via Archinect]

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Rear Window Timelapse from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.

By most accounts, Alfred Hitchock’s 1954 classic Rear Window is as perfectly constructed a  film as any the medium has ever produced. It is a “purely cinematic film”, as Hitchcock later described it, whose obvious spatial handicaps both exploited and negated one of the camera’s preeminent virtues, its effortless ability to navigate between the proximal and distal. The plot is well-known: world-weary photographer, wheelchair-bound Jeff (Jimmy Stewart…you’ve seen this movie, right?) is confined to recuperative leave in his Greenwich Village apartment with only (or mostly)  a panorama of the encompassing tenement complex beyond as his company. But as Jean-Luc Godard commented, one never recalls the particulars of any of Hitchcock’s narratives, but, rather, only the shots that framed them. In the case of Rear Window, however, neither specific scenes nor shots prove more memorable than the architecture and spatial configuration of the famed courtyard set. These have been analysed to the point of exhaustion, with the chief exegetic points  being well familiar to any casual student of cinema, but never have they been seen before like this video timelapse.

Meticulously assembled by Jeff Desom, using just After Effects and Photoshop, the video condenses Hitchcock’s masterwork into 3 breathtaking minutes in which the entirety of the film’s events–sans the dramatic, personal scenes between the protagonists–play out before Jeff’s gaze. Desom’s collage is completely comprised of footage from the film, with the iconic window panorama being neatly tailored and augmented with various photographic effects (tilt-shift, stabilization, “rain”) so as to achieve verisimilitude with the original and to re-create the environmental changes that propel the narrative along. “Since everything was filmed from pretty much the same angle,” Desom writes, “I was able to match them into a single panoramic view of the entire backyard without any greater distortions.” The video is part of an expanded visual installation entitled “Rear Window Loop“.

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After several beleaguered months of protestations, Frank Gehry’s plans for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. will be preserved and allowed to proceed to further design and construction stages. The high-profile project became entangled in a political debate that pitted the Eisenhower family against the memorial commission and the world’s foremost celebrity architect. Several classicist architects and associations, including Leon Krier and the National Civic Art Society, threw their support behind the Eisenhower heirs, who considered Gehry’s memorial inappropriate and an affront to the traditional neo-Hellenic temples which comprise the most visible (and loved) memorial architecture which dots the nation’s capital.

In its present iteration, Gehry’s $112 million memorial will feature parks and sycamore groves framed 80-foot tall columns supporting metal-woven tapestries depicting scenes of Eisenhower’s boyhood in Abilene, Kansas. The tapestries could easily be perceived as crass billboards, the family argued, emblazoned with content that ignored Eisenhower’s military and presidential achievements. Accepting these and other points of critique, Gehry had revised his scheme several times, rearranging the site plan to open up views to the Capitol Building–a point of contention among the engaged parties who feared that such panoramas would be obscured by the towering columns.Yet, little more of the proposal was actually changed, with its form and proportions virtually left intact against the family’s stated objections, which reached their most incendiary in tone at a March 20 congressional hearing when Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of the late president, denounced Gehry’s memorial as following in the aesthetic lineage of not only “Marx, Engels and Lenin,” but also Ho Chi Minh and even Nazi death camps.

Frank Gehry’s design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial,  facing east down Independence Avenue; Photo: Eisenhower Memorial Commission, via

Despite the uproar, however, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission remained firmly allied with Gehry, whose design they praised as “exciting, creative and inspiring”. In a statement announcing the decision to move forward with the memorial plans, the board reasserted that the Gehry design “captures the life and the spirit, and commemorates the historic achievements, of Dwight Eisenhower.”

[via BDonline, The Washington Post]

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Progressive Field just got a little more progressive. Perched on the southeast corner of the Cleveland stadium is a newcomer to the local sports scene: an 18-foot wide wind turbine shaped like an oversized piece of fusilli pasta.

The turbine’s corkscrew shape, engineered by Dr. Majid Rashidi at Cleveland State University, keeps the structure compact and cost-effective by channeling passing winds around a central core to power four small fans. The 3,000-pound structure will generate approximately 40,000 kilowatt-hours per year, according to Treehugger. If you’re not sure what that means, that’s enough energy to power four homes, a seemingly insignificant feat for a stadium that saps enough energy to run thousands of homes.

But sustaining the Cleveland megastructure is not the name of the game here. The turbine, which was installed this past Wednesday, is revolutionary for its petite size, which was engineered specifically to retrofit existing urban structures. Unlike its majestic pinwheel predecessors, the helix design can generate a significant amount of energy within an urban environment, where wind speeds are often too volatile to make traditional turbines effective. Though comparatively trivial in impact, the new turbine serves largely to broadcast the need for renewable energy, as well as the potential of this new technology to cut costs and generate jobs. Illuminated with colored LED lights, the turbine will be a salient statement alongside the 42 solar panels installed in the stadium back in 2007 and the ballpark’s expanded recycling program that now boasts savings of $50,000 each year.

The push towards a more environmentally-conscious stadium resonates with the message of a recent op-ed in the New York Times, in which Eran Ben-Joseph called for the redefinition of the parking lot: “We need to redefine what we mean by ‘parking lot’ to include something that not only allows a driver to park his car, but also offers a variety of other public uses, mitigates its effect on the environment, and gives greater consideration to aesthetics and architectural context.” Sports stadiums are perhaps an even more acute case of wasteful, single-use architecture (not to mention their accompanying parking lots, which are deserted more often than not). By exploring these tangential initiatives, the sports stadium can evolve into a pivotal urban institution that contributes to the city in more than one way.

[All photos © Corbin-Hillman Communications, via Treehugger]

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Generally speaking, architects are notorious for a bewildering list of shortcomings. One of our favorite complaints involves the exasperating, browser-crashing websites that represent these alleged forerunners of design. But perhaps the more pertinent shortfall of the industry is the inability of many architects to articulate their ideas in writing. This was a topic taken up by Knute Berger, a columnist for Crosscut and a Seattle native who had some pointed remarks about the recent proposals for the redesign of Seattle’s waterfront.

The op-ed—entitled ‘Why don’t architects speak English?’—criticizes the plans, all of which were submitted for the The Howard S. Wright Design Ideas Competition for Public Space. The most notable of the finalists, a project by PRAUD called the Seattle Jelly Bean, proposes a zeppelin-like float that would hover over the waterfront and control the local climate below it. Berger was not amused.

“There’s a whole lot of visioning, revisioning, and re-revisioning going on,” he says. Interestingly, Berger blames the very devices used by architects to woo the public—the farfetched, computer-generated rendering: “Architects are now fond of using computer images that often turn schemes into abstractions that fail to give any feel for what’s going to be on the ground. There are often too many cubes, domes, blocks, trapezoids, and lozenges…And creative shapes often get lost in translation.” Aside from being too abstract, the designs mask their illegibility with “happy images of computer-generated Seattleites, frolicking in new waterfront public spaces…the sky is too blue, the vegetation isn’t right…and what are people doing when it rains, or during the work day?”

And this is when Berger begins to pick apart the text supporting the designs, block-quoting entire paragraphs from the proposals and adding acerbic commentary like a teacher reading a blatantly apathetic final paper, itching to cover it in red ink. The roundabout phrasing, the strings of buzz words (catalyzing, dematerializing, creating dialogues, etc.), are met with Berger’s unending supply of rhetorical questions.

True, architects have a tendency to pepper their sentences with theoretical jargon, but that’s just one aspect of the problem. The written “gobbledygook,” or “academia-infested code,” that architects often use to explain their designs are reflective of a larger issue that Berger touches upon earlier in his article: “the waterfront re-do suffers from goals that are far too general to mean much, and details that are far too small or undetermined to give us lay people specifics.” In other words, many proposals today fail to express an idea that can be scaled up to the big picture and back down to the small details. Instead, the ideas hover safely in the realm of the abstract, unable to truly engage with site and context, which is the real challenge of architecture. How can that be fixed? To start, Berger has a suggestion for a better Seattle Jelly Bean: a giant floating coffee bean.

[All images courtesy the architects]

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