The Bubble Building; All photos via DUS Architects Facebook

Commenting on the brevity and precariousness of life, Erasmus likened man to a soap bubble (homo bulla), a vain, delusional creature who exerts much effort and time to erect “walls of bubbles” to insulate its base vulnerabilities with intricate systems of culture and knowledge. The barefaced fact of one’s finitude is, as Sartre facetiously and accurately noted, “a fart in a soap bubble”–to shamelessly exploit the metaphor–the noxious truth of extinction thinly veiled by the seeming vibrancy of the life about to pop.

That’s part of what the “Bubble Building” tries express. Designed by DUS Architects for the ZigZagCity festival in Rotterdam, the pavilion is the world’s most temporary and fragile structure, comprised of 16 shallow hexagonal pools, each of which is filled with a reflective solution, that collectively form 35 square meteres of “soap surface”. Visitors grip handlebar frames at the base of the ponds and pull up to create iridescent globular volumes that appear different from one to the next but which last for all but a moment. The speed with which the form materializes and fades occludes any close reading of the emergent forms, and so the communal, participatory act itself assumes priority of place. At least two people are needed to construct each of the bubble cells, whose size and coverage corresponds to the number of participants cooperating uniformly across space. Continue.

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Where Le Corbusier modeled his new modernity on the ocean liner, Reyner Banham took The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine as the graphic avatar for Archigram’s saccharine (and vulnerably pictorial) brand of  technocracy. Both the  sounds and images were saturated with psychedelic overtures–ecstasy in color–that were at once the anathema of the austere, functionalist modernism that preceded them and an aborted leap into a naive post-political future. Guinness’ new deep sea bar–read that again–traverses the same “ludens-scape” advanced by the cartoon facsimiles of the Beatles and Archigram’s hand-drawn utopias, and,  it should be said, characterized by the latter’s shallow premise that technology is not only inherently good but fun.

And really, how else to describe a submarine-turned-deep sea bar, beyond being a trivial, but sleek machine for fun? Jump Studios have realized the Beatles’ graphic precedent, albeit, in less yellow and more polka dots, with their mobile abyssal taproom, which scales the depths of the Baltic Sea always in search of a good time.

Working with engineer Nicholas Alexander, the architects produced a design that maintained fidelity to stringent marine construction codes, while, nevertheless, achieving a formal and material adventurousness.  Measurements taken from the submarine, based at  the Stockholm Archipelago, dictated the scope of the intervention, which involved the design of a pre-fabricated interior shell constructed of GRP (glass reinforced plastic). The cozy 118 square-feet space is  a continuous wall/floor surface with undulating nooks and ledges for seating and tables. The wall is covered in a blanket of uniform bubble-like rubber disks, which are at points embedded with LED lights or filled in with cup holders ( a must). Needless to say, the Guinness submarine is the first of its kind in the world, and the guest list is limited.

[via Inhabitat]

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Photo: flickr user su–may

UK department store Marks & Spencer (M&S) is starting a “fashion revolution” that goes by the name “schwopping” (shopping + swapping), a kind of rewards program meant to encourage recycling and to frame questions about the ethics and scope of garbage. To illustrate the abundance of material waste that prompted the marketing ploy “ethically-informed”, “ecologically-minded” campaign, the company installed some 10,000 pieces of discarded clothing–the number of garments, M & S claims, that is trashed every 5 minutes in the UK alone–on the facade of an abandoned brewery warehouse in East London. The piece is a visual compendium of secondhands, with near every industry color, form, and graphic, not too mention decade, represented.

Cooperating with Oxfam, the company aims to “change shopping forever” by getting customers to turn in their old clothes that will be recycled and distributed to the impoverished. Over 1,200 so-called “scwhwop drops” have been placed in several M&S locations to collect used garments from customers, who, upon selflessly donating their disused tees and jeans, will receive  a £5 voucher for future purchases. Charity pays, kids!

Photo: flickr user world of good

Photo: flickr user terekhova

[via MyModernMet]

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“Oops, our bad.” That pretty much sums up Ferrari’s response to Chinese officials last Tuesday, after the Italian luxury carmaker damaged a 600-year old wall in Nanjing, erected in the Ming Dynasty as party of the city’s extensive fortifications. During a pointless demonstration involving a special edition Ferrari 458 Italia, worth some six million yuan ($950,000), the stunt driver, ostensibly drunk on adrenaline and fumes, got carried away, spinning donuts over the ancient wall and leaving behind a trail of tire marks over the protected landmark.

Footage of the demo, part of the celebrations commemorating Ferrari’s 20th year in Chinese markets, shows a crane raising the sports car on the wall rampart, where the driver proceeds to spin several times in circles and staining the stone floor with black skid marks in the process. The video cuts to the next morning, when workers try in vain to sweep and scrub the residue off the surface. As the BBC notes, the incident has prompted a windfall of negative comments on Chinese microblogs, with much of the blame placed on city officials, whom, it’s been suggested, charged Ferrari $12,000 for temporary use of the wall.  Local authorities responded by saying that the car company had lacked their approval in the matter, while Ferrari, in turn, faulted a single employee of a local dealership, the event’s co-sponsor, stressing that the latter was nor had never been employed by the company. Though the damages seem reparable, the BBC says “Ferrari” had been recently blocked on Chinese microblogs, perhaps to curtail any criticism of government officials.

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Photos: Reuters

LEGOs function as an analog for architecture, their plastic “bricks” corresponding to their full-scale clay or cement counterparts, the “snap” and “click” that enjoins them mimicking the mortar that adheres entire walls. But rarely do the little toy modules add up to anything remotely close to actual architecture, despite the claims of parents that divine prodigious talents from the vaguely “archetypal” towers and “pomo” houses cobbled together by their would be archi-tykes. Yet, architecture–taking Adolf Loos’s stringent definition–is perhaps an accurate signifier for the 31.9 meter (105 feet) tall LEGO tower constructed in South Korea over the weekend.

The televised build, sponsored by LEGO Korea for the celebration of the toy company’s 80th birthday, was overseen by some 4,000 children who handled over 50,000 bricks over a 5-day period to erect the tower. The child-construction crew consisted of lucky contest winners who had entered a lottery pool to participate in the event, which attracted more than 30,000 visitors, reports China Daily. The plastic skyscraper stands just outside Seoul’s Olympic City complex, foregrounding a drab stadium emblazoned with the Olympic insignia. Last night, visiting premier the Crown Prince of Denmark topped off the “structure” with the record-breaking brick that edged out the previous tallest tower by just 30 centimeters in a race for height that began in 1988, when the first of the Lego architectures was built in London. Since then, 30 different records have been set and broken, so don’t expect Seoul to hold the title for too long.

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The Great Exhibition of 1851 initiated a series of 19th-century fairs and exhibitions that would for the first time put the worl d on display, and, in doing so, cultivate an unprecedented spatial configuration of extent scale and immateriality wherein, among other things, modern consumer relations were born. Contained within the jewel box of Paxton’s Crystal Palace were rows of pavilions, gardens, and substructures which framed dioramas and displays beholding the cultures of the world. Historical and indigenous architectures alike were reproduced to be consumed as easily as the other exhibited artifacts and artistic objects, appearing as a field of Potemkin-like edifices–”near-architectures”–arrayed within the palace’s interminable glass walls.

Fellow Fellow has a step-by-step guide to recreating a similar collection of would-be structures that rest on your night table. The quick and easy process involves cutting retro photographs of buildings–castles, churches, stone houses (in black-and-white) seem to work best–and wrapping them so as to form a hollow cylinder in which a battery operated tea light or candle-in-glass-jar (anything else would burn the paper) can be set. Cut out the buildings’ tiny windows to make apertures through which the light passes and radiates outward. Assemble entire cityscapes or make your own!

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Odin by Snarkitecture

The reign of the pop-up continues. Fashion houses and brands have proved an endless well that sustains the movement, best characterized by cheap, yet singular (and small) projects that pack a lot of visual punch.

For their new pop-up boutique perfumery, Snarkitecture have designed a ring toss of an installation that  inhabits the tiny retail space of an 11th street storefront. Designed for Odin, the high-end scent maker, the display is comprised of 1,500 white gypsum cement replicas of the company’s signature glass bottle,  a tidy composition consisting of a drum stacked atop a cube. A tidal wave of the castings inhabits the space, flowing from the floor to the ceiling in an undulating form that dissolves in mid-air.

The actual products–the few black bottles sparingly distributed throughout–pop in the austere all-white room, which is backlit to further vanish the project. The sea of ghost bottles map a contemplative space that accentuates, if subverts, the preciousness of the products they’re meant to frame and exhibit. The form’s assertive profile fades into white much like how the character and body of the perfumes reveal themselves before quickly dissipating into the void.

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Dream Downtown Hotel by Handel Architects; All photos courtesy of the architects.

Who doesn’t like portholes? Handel Architect‘s Dream Downtown Hotel is chock full of them. The 184,000 square-foot boutique hotel is dominated by its perforated exterior, a giant tableaux of monumental circular cutouts that’s both sleek and entirely endearing. Located in Chelsea near the Hudson River, the 12-story structure looks like it’s bound for the water, its nautical stainless steel shell, large massing, and angled profile are at odds with the rest of the neighborhood.

Click through for lots of pictures.

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Photo: Tokyo Hotaru Festival

Summer fireworks at the Sumida River has long been a Tokyo event with crowds gathering on the banks of the river for a spectacular light and sound show. The first Tokyo Hotaru festival kicked off last week that gave the tradition a technological twist, recreating the skybound bursts of flame and sparks using 100,000 LED lights that bobbed down the riverside. The LED bulbs, called “prayer stars”, were designed to mimic the light of the hotaru (“fireflies”) believed to have once “gemmed” the Sumida. Manufactured by Panasonic, the lights ran completely on solar power, and nets were set in place to collect them for reuse for future events.

Photo: Tokyo Hotaru Festival

The lights floated by the equally luminous Tokyo Sky Tree, the world’s tallest tower that’s set to open within the end of the month. The festival organizers hope that the “Hotaru” would help catalyze a “renaissance” of the Sumida River, which endeavors to preserve and clean green space adjacent to the water that will foster increased activity in the area.

Photo by flickr user makure

[via CNet]

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America’s “greatest” building–Virginia State Capitol by Thomas Jefferson

PBS/WTTW Chicago have released their top ten list for the buildings that have changed the face of America. The list is part of the build up for a new media production planned for next year that will devote time and exegesis to the history, construction, and influence attributed to each of the canonical structures. PBS has done their homework, but it also isn’t the first time the network has made such a compilation. The list doesn’t offer any surprises–it’s relatively conservative and unimaginative, which is fine as every one of the buildings noted here deserving of the recognition.

The list is confined to domestic projects, institutions, places of commerce, and corporate headquarters; there are no museums or educational structures to be found, and just one edifice of industry.

#2: Trinity Church by H.H. Richardson

Yet there are some structures that are conspicuously missing. Where’s Pruitt-Igoe? Or the Dodger Stadium or the totality of Disneyland, both of which first posited and subsequently popularized the parking lot as a legitimate architectural typology. Surely the identikit structures of the McDonald’s franchise, in both their earlier Googie and later “single family home” iterations, should have been given consideration. Also left out, the U.N. Building, which preceded the Seagram Building and set the tone for the monolithic, glazed Manhattan towers to come. (Note: as has been theorized before, had Le Corbusier won and the tower been garbed with brise-soleil, the city skyline may have turned out quite differently.) No love for Louis Kahn, while the Vanna Venuri house gets thrown into the lot as the token pomo project.

And where are the data centers?

#8: Dulles International Airport by Eero Saarinen; Photo via jfk50

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