February 14, 2013
Nothing says love like…Louis Kahn? Architects are a nerdy bunch, so why wouldn’t they make nerdy Valentine’s Day cards that measure love in famous buildings. Every Singles Awareness Day for the last few years now, Architecture for Humanity releases a collection of bespoke architecture-themed Valentines perfect for that special turtleneck-clad, bespectacled, chain-smoking someone in your life. How else to convey your affections for them than with a sketchy facsimile of Toyo It’s Sendai Mediatheque or Herzog & de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest? Ineffable space = undying love?
Click through for the rest of the cards!
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January 22, 2013
“Paper architecture” is typically derogatory, used to describe the architect who designs much but builds very little. Christina Lihan’s paper sculptures of architectural landmarks and iconic cityscapes is a nice play on the term. Lihan hand carves sheets of watercolor paper to build real, three-dimensional structures that pop from the picture frame (or shadow box in this case). She begins by drawing out the scene in charcoal, using this template as the starting point for her paper works. She constructs the “building” in layers, and usually from the oblique, so as to amplify the 3D effect. Here, miniature skyscrapers and lilliputian basilicas are rendered in great detail, with every spire, column, and mast perfectly in place. Click through for more photos.
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January 21, 2013
A model poses by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao for Vogue China. Photo: Greg Kadel
Fashion designers have long looked to architecture for inspiration (see Givenchy’s latest collection in honor of Gio Ponti). So it makes sense that fashion magazines have scouted the world for the most iconic, majestic, interesting buildings to compliment the clothing in its pages. From model Lisa Fonssagrives hanging off the Eiffel Tower to Coco Rocha racing across the TWA Terminal’s campus in New York’s JFK Airport, here are some of our favorite architecture-fashion shoots. Click through to see our picks!
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January 3, 2013
Spotted on the webs is this remarkable photo of lightning striking the Eiffel Tower. It seems that the image dates from August 2011 and was taken by amateur photographer Bertrand Kulik, who happened to have his camera ready when, well, lightning struck. The last time the stars aligned in such a poetic manner was in 1902—thanks Google Images—when a M.G. Loppe captured the tower, still used then as a radio antenna, getting manhandled by lightning bolts. In Kulik’s picture, a large bolt is entangled in the structure’s iron chassis, while smaller bolts fray off to the sides. You’d think all that electricity would do some damage, but, alas, life is not “The War of the Worlds“.
Photo: Bertrand Kulik/Caters News Agency
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June 22, 2012
Deck Two’s Global City is a towering mural that, as its name suggests, aims to encompass the world, or at least, its architecture. The work, entirely hand drawn and spanning full height studio walls and kitchen cabinets, collects architectural (and infrastructural) landmarks from around the globe and sets them in a vaguely urban configuration. The Eiffel Tower is a stone’s throw away from both Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and the Empire State Building, while the Taj Mahal and the Colosseum occupy prime riverside real estate. In the distance stand a dense group of mostly contemporary Asian skyscrapers, with the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Oriental Pearl Tower to the south (left), the Jin Mao Tower and Tokyo Tower to the north (right). Industrial frigates pass under the Brooklyn and Tower bridges, abutting large winding, high-way bearing infrastructures.
The mural bears some conceptual resemblance to OMA’s “skyscraper city” in the UAE, which similarly amasses a (desert) metropolis entirely composed of the last decade’s worth of skyscraper designs, both unbuilt and built alike, and in so doing, illustrates the fatuous and doomed “race to the top” and the very ugly, even destructive, work it engenders. Deck Two’s city isn’t as pointedly critical, nor is it supposed to be. It’s more a fun formal exercise, something to liven up a depressing office kitchen and offer a visual respite from the backlit laptop screen.
Global City making of from Thomas Dartigues on Vimeo.
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April 2, 2012
The Colosseum
Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa‘s layered snapshots are shizophrenic, to say the least. The photographs, part of a series entitled “The Collective Snapshot”, are comprised of multiple images of several landmarks, ranging from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge to Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal, layered on top of the other and rendered with varying degrees of opacities that constitute a spectral play of shifting horizons, half-structures, and fluctuating streams of pedestrians. Continue.
Taj Mahal
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January 30, 2012
Since taking the interiors market by storm in 2005, Canadian design studio ROLLOUT has been known for the eclectic designs and community-based inspiration behind their custom-printed wallpapers. While many designers have been eager to embrace and faithfully reproduce the minimalist aesthetic, ROLLOUT chose to hail texture, expression, emotion and color as pillars of design that have been unduly silenced since the peak of modernism. Cheering the mantra of “more is definitely more,” ROLLOUT has scoured every corner of the graphic arts, from illustration to photography to pattern the spaces of countless clients with vibrant expressions of art, innovation, individuality and community.
On their trip to IDS Toronto, MoCo Loco spotted one of the latest designs from ROLLOUT, a wallpaper that mirrors and arranges the iconic photograph of the Eiffel Tower during its stages of construction to appear like kaleidoscopic ink blots. Modern in its subject matter, baroque in its detail, and abstract in its full-scale form, the wallpaper tastefully welcomes the city of lights into any room. The design is part of the first collection from a series called Wanderlust, a series inspired by travel and cities. First stop—if you couldn’t guess: Paris.
[Click the image for larger view]
[All images via MoCo Loco]
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December 2, 2011
Just kidding, it probably won’t work. A French consultancy called the Ginger Group has proposed a scheme that would cover the Eiffel Tower in greenery, ostensibly motivated by increasing levels of air pollution in Paris. Not to play the Grinch here, but the inherent wind loads on the structure — combined with the amount of soil needed to nurture such plants (EDIT: one commenter tell us this isn’t an issue!) — might make their plan a tough one to sustain.
The group says they want to convey the city’s newfound commitment to sustainability (stuffy old monument to mechanical ingenuity cramping your new “sustainable” image? Cover it in trees!). The weight of the plants would total around 400 tons. They’d install an irrigation system, and even blanket the greenery in lights so that the Tower could still “sparkle.” Unfortunately, the task of keeping these plants alive can be quite cost and time intensive, depending on the systems used. Indeed, the Ginger Group says the installation alone would cost about $100 million dollars. As many commenters are pointing out, high winds would probably contribute to soil erosion, leading to an Eiffel Tower covered in dead, brown ferns. Then again, green wall technology improves every year. Infographic, after the jump.
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