CCTV Headquarters. Photo © Iwan Baan

By Karen Wong
Karen Wong is the Deputy Director at the New Museum and an Architizer A+ Awards juror. In an on-going series, she profiles the latest and most interesting architects, designers, and thought leaders to join the A+ jury. See her previous post on United Nude’s Rem D. Koolhaas here.

I met Rory McGowan, an engineer and director of Arup China and Ireland, at the 2012 Architecture Biennale in Venice. I had just watched the premiere of Against All Odds, a documentary on the architect and former OMA partner Ole Scheeren. In the film Ole spoke at length about OMA’s design and construction of the China Central Television (CCTV) building in Beijing, but I was astonished that he failed to mention the project’s other principal designer, Rem Koolhaas.

As I was telling Rory this, he asked, in his lilting Irish accent, “Did he talk about Arup?”
“No,” I said.
“Ah—that building wouldn’t have happened without us!”  

In 2002, OMA was invited to participate in two legacy competitions, the World Trade Center Design and the headquarters of Chinese media monolith CCTV. Rem believes China is the future, and Rory cites that half the world’s built-environment stock exists in the country. The long-time collaborators abandoned the Big Apple to focus their attention on the “center of the world.” After winning with their “let’s reinvent the skyscraper” entry, Rory moved his family to Beijing and has spent most of the last decade overseeing one of the largest building teams Arup has ever assembled. He quips that it wasn’t until CCTV popped up in an episode of The Simpsons that his two young sons applauded their dad’s profession. Read more!

more

In order to celebrate its 125^th anniversary, the Pratt Institute will unveil a collection of 125 iconic works by its alumni and faculty. The exhibition, opening in November, will feature works from every one of Pratt’s departments including fine arts, architecture, industrial design, photography, illustration, and many others. The 125 chosen works will be revealed on October 15^th at a gala, but in the meantime, all the work being considered for the exhibition is on view at the school’s Icons Gallery. Take a look at our slideshow to see our favorites!

more

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]

more

Bishan Park, 2012; All photos: Atelier Dreiseitl

In his seminal essay “Singapore Songlines”, a serious study of the country’s hyper-urbanization colored by the architect-writer’s patented mix of poetic insight and ridiculous hyperbole, Rem Koolhaas writes that Singaporeans, like the Dutch, “fabricated their country,” attributing the city-state’s unprecedented and near-perpetual transformation to the physical, monumental “work [done] on the body of the island itself.” A microcosm of this work can be seen in the just-completed $60 million rehaul of Bishan Park, one of Singapore’s most popular parks, which has been re-designed as a diverse natural ecosystem. To revert the park back to the island’s virginal state, planners had the herculean task of restoring nearly 3 kilometers of the Kallang River, previously interrupted and channeled down concrete drainage, and integrating the recovered waterway back into the landscape. Read on.

more

As a Queens commuter, I am one of many New Yorkers who consider my weekend plans royally botched by the construction-related shutdowns on the 7 train. But sometimes all it takes to shrug it off (if just for a moment) are photos of what is actually going on beneath our feet as we mumble and grumble or, in my case, blog about New York’s public transportation woes. Spotted on Gothamist this morning were snapshots of Manhattan’s bedrock, bored through by the tunnel that will eventually extend the 7 line to the island’s oft-neglected West Side. Click to see more.

more

Yesterday we learned that the Japanese have a proverbial ace up their sleeve in the planet-wide race for the tallest megastructure: plans for a 22,370-mile high space elevator made of a material 20 times stronger than steel, to be complete by 2050. What, pray tell, might this look like? These far-out renderings from Obayashi Corp. can give you an idea. Is that a capsule hotel up there?

more

Trailer from Marc Webb on Vimeo.

Enrico Dini wants to print houses in the Italian countryside and moon bases for the European Spaces Agency. He wants to solidify a desert sand dune and supply the spires and columns to complete the Sagrada Família. But what he wants even more is to legitimize and standardize 3D printing as a building technology–a massive endeavor which has consumed his life. That’s the story behind “The Man Who Prints Houses“, a new documentary that “delves into the troubled mind of a genius intent on changing the world forever.” Dini, a former roboticist-turned-engineer and designer, has made his name with his developments in 3D printing, work best encapsulated by his great invention, D-Shape–the largest printer in the world which Dini built from scratch. Aside from its daunting size, the most important innovation behind D-Shape lies in its printing technique, which alternately spreads and stacks layers of sand and binding materials to make instant sandstone that Dini says is more durable than concrete and does not require steel reinforcements.

Innovation, however, comes at a price. Dini’s personal life has been uprooted by the gambles he has taken on his business. A series of investments meant to see the project through disappeared when the crash beckoned in 2008, forcing Dini to rebuild his entire enterprise. He would become divorced and left estranged from his son in the process. All the more reason, then, to make sure he realized his life’s work. Towards that end, Dini has worked with architects like Norman Foster, administrators, and contractors to develop prototypes and carry out test trials that has produced, among other things, the world’s largest printed structure (below). As for the Sagrada Família, he still has some time to make his case.

more

The infinite void that is the screen of your iPad just became that much more fascinating: renowned Japanese photographer Hoichi Nishiyama has just released a photographic essay that journeys deep underground into Japan’s tunnels, and these breathtaking feats of engineering are available to explore as a special photography book available for iPads.

Click to see more.

more

The monumental strain modernists divined in the seemingly ponderous infrastructures at the beginning of the last century would inform the design of Depression/wartime-era public works, which married the efficiencies of engineering with a highly keen sensibility for spectacle and drama. The aesthetic would become exhausted to a great degree by late modernists and even moreso by the high-tech architects like Foster, Rogers, and the whole gang who favored structural legibility (i.e. stylization) over necessity and spawned the flashy ilk of corporate architecture that rules our cities today. All these tendencies are evident in the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany, Volkswagen’s production facilities park-cum-theme park that offers tourists an aestheticized industrial experience. Continue.

more

Photo via Wired

Late last week, Iran celebrated its acquisition of a CIA-operated stealth drone that crashed in its territory. Photos and videos were released, showing a slick bat-shaped aircraft, grounded and jarringly out of place in a gymnasium-like setting in Tehran, its white, streamlined shell teeming with intelligence-revealing and reverse engineering possibilities. Moreover, the prized specimen was shown elevated on a podium, photographed against a colorful banner that reads “Death to America, Death to Israel, Death to England,” and in case those fighting words weren’t enough, another banner strung along the bottom of the podium reads, “America can’t do a damn thing,” reports Newsweek.

Photo via Newsweek

True, President Obama has already sent out a preliminary “can I have my drone back, please?” request, which was met with an expected negative response. Does this mean America really can’t do a damn thing? According to Wired, America has already done quite a few things, all of which rest in the drone’s design. Though Iran will probably enlist a fleet of scientists and engineers from equally curious sometime Iranian-allies China and Russia—both of whom have been known to routinely copy military hardware—aircraft designers in the U.S. are still quite hopeful that the drone dissection will reveal little more beyond the geometry of its seemingly Eero Saarinen-inspired, radar-evading airframe. Key components such as the alloys and non-metal composites in the undetectable exhaust ducting may be simple to identify but highly difficult to reproduce, reflecting decades of cutting-edge research. And the radar sensors, if in tact in the crashed drone, require foreign software to read—software that includes classified anti-tamper measures.

Simply put, the drone will require a great deal of work to reveal its inner workings, much more than a simple pry. It is, after all, an object crafted to embody the height of concealment and obscuration in an age when information is perhaps too readily available.

more