Photos courtesy the artist.

Ah, sweet, sweet summer. It’s a time for barbecues, free concerts, al fresco dining, and pop-up libraries.

Yes, there’s no better time to get your book on than in the summer, especially in Ghent, where Italian artist Massimo Bartolini has planted no fewer than a dozen bookcases on the sloping green of St. Peter’s Abbey. According to The Pop-Up City, the artist deliberately placed his Belgian art festival entry in alignment with the abbey’s vineyard, using space to liken the mind-broadening capacity of books with that of a friendly glass of vino. The green bookshelves mimic the abbey’s rows of grapevines, only sprouting endless public library books instead of grapes. The books are available to be borrowed, exchanged, or purchased until Ghent’s “Track: A Contemporary City Conversation” festival comes to a close in September. Please tell us there will be a pop-up artisanal cheese festival within walking distance.

more

Top prize: ‘H. Ferriss’s Paris Visit’ by Francisco Villeda

The results are in for Reality Cues‘ !!!!!!!!!!! Competition, which asked the internet to show the Librarian just what the “Architecture of OMG” looks like. Contestants were given eight images to modify and manipulate beyond all logic and decency so as to create new virtual architectures of their own. A flood of entries (nearly 100) came pouring in, each one fantastic, phantasmagoric, nihilistic, and slightly demented in its own way. Ultimately, victory would go to Francisco Villeda, whose entry (pictured above) depicted a clone stamp city of ubiquitous infrastructural Tours St. Jacques stretching out into space. For his efforts, he’ll be taking home a Reality Cues’ hacked version of Hasbro’s ‘Operation’ game (entitled “Keep off the Grass!!!”), while the best in each category will be receiving a Lego Cube!!!! with secrets inside.

So what did the jury have to say?  The sheer number and zaniness of the entries drove some to grand pronouncements, with Chris Barley, the Future—Predictor himself, claiming that The !!!!!!!!!!!! competition threw down “the digital gauntlet and reclaims architecture’s position as the mother of all arts.” Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan offered some wise words, calling for a reprieve from an internet design culture “gripped by mediocrity of a single overriding style diktat”. Still, it all proved a bit scary for Juergen Mayer H. (“Spooky”) and more than a little despairing for others. Oh, and consider Archistophanes pwned.

Click through for more.

more

All photos: Manuel Villa/Sergio Gomez

For those who want a home away from home, but on a budget, consider the “Habitable Polyhedron”, a small geometric pod that’s a small private getaway from domestic life. The project was built for clients with young children as a secondary, “doll-house” structure situated adjacent to their suburban home just outside of Bogota. Tucked away in a garden several yards away from the main house, the shed offers a cozy retreat where the family can relax together or separately, with space to take tea, read, draw, or just doze off.

Designed by Colombian architects Manuel Villa and Alberto González Sepúlveda, the structure consists of a wood frame configured into what the pair describe as a “truncated cubic-octahedron”–a series of octagonal panels connected by squares and aggregated in a sphere-like volume. The structure is wrapped in a layer of shingles stained black which lends it the appearance of a large dark orb. The glass facade breaks with the geometric pattern to open up the shrouded interior to the sunlight and landscape of suburban splendor (“sculpted” trees, manicured lawn, pebble “terrain”) that lies beyond. Continue.

more

The Bush House in the City by MMP Architects

This week was a good week in architecture. So, naturally, it was a good week at Architizer. We had a great pool of projects come in from all over, from France to Mexico and two from Spain, which continues to produce a scarily high number of excellent architectural projects. We mulled over the best of the bunch and selected a handful of our favorites from the last 5 days to share with you.

First up is the Bush House in the City, a getaway in every sense of the word. While we’re still trying to figure out what about this sleek, lush retreat qualifies as a bush house or where exactly the city referenced in the name is, all you need to know is in the photos (namely, the money shot above). Click on through for more projects!

more

The greatest fun about superhero/supervillain lairs is that they are typically situated within a natural landscape, marvels of engineering wholly concealed from prying eyes under a veil of trees, stone, and flora. In most cases, the intervention is more wholesale demolition than strategic programming and integration, with the land and its contents being reduced to a thin green carpet draped over the elaborate structures lurking just beneath its surface. Which, of course, just adds to the sinister ambiance.

The “garagenatelier” by Swiss firm Peter Kunz Architektur definitely has something sinister about it. The project, a submerged parking complex/trophy case for the client’s Porsche collection, consists of five concrete apertures embedded into the side of a hill that overlooks a small alpine village. Each of the enclosures is faced with a full-height glazed panel that exposes the vehicles to the exterior and which, when retracted, allow entry to the garage’s interior.

The partially submerged facility is lit mostly by natural sunlight which pours in from the large glass openings, but is also supplemented with fluorescent bars that add to the interior’s clinical aesthetic. The garage can store up to eight vehicles at once, the order and arrangement of which can be changed at any time. At night, each of the featured cars is lit with special mood lighting, the inhabitants of the hamlet below resting peacefully under the glowing auspices of German automotive engineering.

[via Ignant]

more

All photos: Torsten Ottesjö

Sweden’s forever autumnal landscape, with its craggy rock shore, overcast skies, and barren forests, is the picture of existential bleakness. Or at least, the cinematic Sweden of Ingmar Bergman’s films is. Bergman’s nearly monochromatic aesthetic wrung all of the vibrancy out of the Scandinavian countryside, leaving only a monotonous palette of ash and blonde timber and sharp-tooth terrain, seemingly ill-suited for most life. That is, except chickens.

Torsten Ottesjö‘s Hönshus-1 is a sculptural house for hens. Perched above a bed of rock and gnarled logs, the chicken coop overlooks an inlet off of Sweden’s west coast, giving its residents a “sea view” and offering them a cozy retreat from the gray world outside.

The double-curved wooden structure, designed to mimic the feathery embrace of a mother hen, consists of a lattice-like facade with alternating panes of wood and void to bring natural daylight inside. The roof and backside of the house are covered in wooden shingles to prevent rainwater from penetrating the cabin. The entire shed is nimbly balanced on spindly steel legs, not much thicker than twig branches, that whimsically hold the house aloft and distance the sensitive creatures from the harsh realities of the ground. But not their thoughts. (ha!)

more

There would be no Hollywood villain lair without the technological architecture that gives form to it. In this scenario–that is to say, the Bond scenario–the cunning villain retreats away from the surveillance of the city and government agencies into the depths of some far-flung landscape, burrowed away within some daunting (and obvious) geographical feature that offers both privacy and protection, not too mention an always cool office–just what you’d need if you were building a high-tech gizmo to bring about worldwide destruction. The bowels of the lair typically resemble the interior of a factory, albeit a sleek one, with a bevy of pipes and wires on full display, while the whole complex is fronted to the exterior by a soaring, Googie-like facade or some kind of signage meant to exhibit the individualistic flair of the baddie within.

Compelling, then, that the im fels, a volunteer fire station in the Italian Alps, fits this same description. Designed by Bermeister Wolf, the station is embedded into the base of a 300-foot cliff that overlooks tilled land and isn’t nearly as menacing as it initially seems. Continue.

more

Frank Lloyd Wright; Photo: Library of Congress

Someone at Google dropped the ball. Today marks what would have been Frank Lloyd Wright’s 145th birthday, and there’s no honorific doodle to commemorate the event, no cutesy homage to Fallingwater, no “lilypad” columns from the Johnson Wax Headquarters (perfect for the ‘oo’ in ‘google’!) or even a stained glass facsimile. Mies van der Rohe got his due this past March, with the search engine posting a Sketch-up-like drawing of Crown Hall on its homepage, prompting an outpouring of halfhearted tributes to the “architect of the future”. Wright, generally considered to be America’s greatest architect, deserves some love, too. In an attempt to right the slight, we’re listing our top 5 Frank Lloyd Wright posts we’ve covered.

1. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Long Lost Doghouse

FLW’s “Yes, Virginia” moment. It’s safe to say that when then 12-year old Jim Berger scrawled a letter asking the notoriously cantankerous architect to design him a home for his dog Eddie, no one, not Berger’s parents, for whom Wright had designed their house, nor even perhaps the boy himself could have expected a response from Taliesin, let alone a commitment to take on the project. Wright answered Berger with a hesitant yes, saying that “a house for Eddie is an opportunity”, before belatedly sending the boy a folio of drawings some months later. Don’t miss out on the paper correspondence between Wright and Berger, whose elementary cursive on looseleaf is a endearing contrast with the former’s almost mechanistic letterhead.

2. A Good Ol’ Fashioned Tale of Architecture and Suspense: Saving A Pair of Frank Lloyd Wright-Designed Landmarks

Who knew architectural preservation could be so…thrilling? This rescuing of two Wright-related buildings is a knotted tale of intrigue and suspense. Watch out for all the twists and turns!

3. Abandoned Wright Rescued in Detroit

A 1954 Wright house in the Motor City was reclaimed and restored last year, which speaks volumes of Detroit’s fighting spirit and FLW’s undying appeal.

4. Frank Lloyd Wright, Gas Station Innovator?

Explore this (righfully) obscure filling station which could be called the only built fragment of Wright’s theoretical “Broadacre City”.

5. Fallingwater….with Zombies!

Last year’s (inadvertent) birthday tribute to the the great architect, we examine America’s most famous house, Fallingwater, and its cultural dissemination in video games, from Half Life 2 to an 8-bit Minecraft rendition.

Bonus!

The winning entry for Reality Cues‘ Le Cor(nudie)r competition depicted an elvish Wright poking a nude Le Corbusier, whose surprised reaction is undeniably classic.

“Franked” by Emily Fischer

more

Albert Speer & Partner’s stadium designs; All images: Qatar 2022 via Getty Images

Living under Dad is tough, we all know it. Living in the shadow of a famous architecture father, worse. Trying to make it on your own while living with the legacy of Nazi dad and the Third Reich’s chief architect, um…

That’s the story of prominent German architect and urban planner Albert Speer, who shares his name with his notorious father, if also the latter’s visionary faculties. Speer the Younger (now 77) has built a reputation for himself as a sustainable practitioner–the first of the kind in Germany–and a builder of cities, including an “automobile city” near Shanghai for 50,000 inhabitants, a new satellite city near Cairo for 3 million, and, most recently, the $140 billion sports campus Qatar plans to build to host the 2022 World Cup. A recent profile by Der Spiegel finds the architect in Doha, where he presented his firm’s colorful visions for the sustainable sporting city.

Speer’s 120-person strong Frankfurt firm, Albert Speer & Partners, has designed 8 new “self-cooling” stadiums for the tiny oil rich island nation, all with integrated smart and sustainable technologies that helped win over Qataris two years ago when competitions were launched for the design and planning of the World Cup. Presently, the country has only 3 sporting venues, to which will be added Speer’s new carbon-neutral stadiums, plus the event’s premiere pitch, Norman Foster’s Lusail Iconic Stadium. The structures were also designed to be temporary, Speers says, to be “disassembled and removed so they could later be given to poorer countries as smaller sports venues.” Their exuberant formal massings were meant to convey imagery of the local culture, but they end up coming off as trivial, even banal.

But building icons isn’t Speer’s bag, the architect admits. He’s more interested in big problems and the big “solutions” to answer them, citing the foundation of urban systems as a far more fertile and pressing endeavor. His football city will spawn several acres of hotel space, an international airport capable of accommodating 60 million passengers a year, not too mention lasting infrastructural projects, including a 320-kilometer high-speed commuter railways and a 22-kilometer bridge linking Qatar to the region beyond, that will significantly shape the island’s future to come.

It’s perhaps unfair to wince at Speer’s eagerness for large-scale developments, yet his projects has consistently maintained a distance from the political sphere. The architect works where his services are needed, reasoning that “Germans should be able to work in countries with a German embassy.” Given his clients’ exorbitant wealth and their willingness to experiment, the opportunity in Qatar presents a chance for Speer to implement his decades-long research into green technologies at an unprecedented scale.

more

In his essay “Typical Plan”, Rem Koolhaas extends his previous studies of Manhattan’s skyscraper typology from “Delirious, New York”, collecting and displaying the floorplans of various office buildings whose content, according to the architect, was a non-entity. The plans selected by Koolhaas exerted no character or features, but, rather, were intentionally generic and even “therapeutic” when set within the context of architectural history’s preoccupation with the “atypical plan”. The manner in which Koolhaas reproduced the drawings was characteristically polemical, with the architect stripping all of the plan’s secondary systems, leaving only “Dom-ino” like imprints bounded by the buildings’ irregularly-shaped footprints.

Fast forward some years to OMA‘s Milstein Library at Cornell, whose plan cannot be accurately described to be without feature. Yet in Brett Beyer‘s aerial photographs of the building, the design’s more formal qualities are subdued and nearly entirely effaced by the activity that flows through its spaces. Beyer was commissioned to produce an aerial photograph of the 25,000 square-foot studio space, which he accomplished by installing the camera on a boom mounted at 100 different locations. The resultant 250 images were combined in Photoshop, yielding the general outline of the plan, only “filled-in” and set within a white field. Beyer’s Nolli-type configuration is abstract and ordered, but in no way typical, transformed as it is by its messy human occupants. The interactive portrait can be viewed here.

more