Photo via Phillyburbs

When Richard Meier sent three glass skyscrapers shooting into the sky in New York’s West Village, the Pritzker-winning architect probably did not imagine that of all his work, these residential towers would be the first to inspire a play. To be more specific, Meier’s famously transparent modernist adaptations were seen by writer Jon Marans as the perfect setting and spatial analogy for marriage. Marans stumbled across the buildings on Perry Street and found inspiration for his play “A Raw Space,” but not after disguising himself as a wealthy potential buyer in order to explore Meier’s interiors. As he told Phillyburbs, “They’re raw space apartments, so they’re just concrete with 360 degrees of floor-to-ceiling windows.” He described the apartment as a “giant fish bowl,” pointing to the double edge of owning one of Meier’s “floating kingdoms” while also living life in curtainless open exposure. More after the break.

Photo: Scott Norsworthy

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Restoration work is by nature a glum affair. Not only does the work usually disrupt the visual and aesthetic continuity of the building(s) it obstructs, but it also warps the public space before it. Don’t you remember your first trip to, say, Paris, storing up your anticipation for weeks on end prior to that long Atlantic crossing, Hollywood films playing in your head and Jacques Brel ringing in your ears, only to find the Notre Dame blemished by an unseemly graphic tarp that grossly mimicked the now-hidden facade? Paris would never be the same again (not that that’s a bad thing).

Not the case with 2012 Architecten‘s temporary facade at the Stadskantoor, Rotterdam’s central administrative office. The architects were asked to design a public artwork that would span the expanse of the building facade while repairs were made and a secondary building we constructed nearby. They responded with a “vertical garden” comprised of stacked potted plants nested within window frames. The plants were arranged into naive arboreal forms, which were nurtured by collected rainwater. Aside from the garden, the architects also installed two basketball courts and street furniture to flesh out the new public square. The whimsical design, which was completed last spring, was commended by city officials as an example of how the municipality will orient urban change to come.

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We all know that after a long day of work and too much time spent seething with anger during rush hour, the first and also the last thing you want to do is muster the energy to rinse and lather yourself in the shower. Well, consider your life changed. The engineers and the magicians of all things water at Dornbracht have introduced a horizontal shower unit onto the market, which was unveiled just a few weeks ago at a trade show in Basel, Switzerland. Using what Dornbracht calls the ‘Ambiance Tuning Technique,’ the Horizontal Shower allows hygiene-seekers to experience a customized sampling of various water temperatures and pressures, all while lying sedentary on a luscious stone slab. Gizmodo described it as “an inverted version of the Bellagio’s fountain.” I say, if MTV Cribs were still a show, this shower would become the next fridge full of Cristal.

[Images via Gizmodo]

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Text by Daphne Matziaraki. All images (c) Gregory Hurcomb, unless otherwise noted.

The red stoned building at 138 Peiraios Street is one of the most successful contemporary buildings in Athens, Greece. Located in the neighborhood of Rouf, and designed by Maria Kokkinou and Andreas Kourkoulas Architects, it houses a branch of the 80-year-old Benaki Museum. Rouf is undergoing a “regeneration” that will be familiar to any city-dweller. Grandiose nightclubs and tacky restaurants have colonized this once industrial, working-class neighborhood. The Benaki stands in opposition to the influx of neo-bourgeoisie culture, offering the public access to Greek art ranging from pre-history to the present. Small galleries, artsy restaurants and bars, furniture boutiques, and architectural and art studios have settled into the streets behind it, gravitating towards this center of culture. Read on.

Image (c) Erieta Attali.

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Developers in Azerbaijan are planning to build a kilometer-high tower that would, obviously, be the world’s tallest. As News.az reports, Haji Ibrahim Nehramli, president of the Avesta Group of Companies, promises that the Azerbaijan Tower, as the project is being called, would rise 1,050 meters with 189 floors to dwarf both the Burj Khalifa (by 220 meters or 722 feet) and the Kingdom Tower currently planned for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (by 50 meters or 164 feet). That’s not all. The Avesta Group will be planting their tower on an artificial island in the Caspian Sea, at the foot of virginal beaches and crystalline waters .

The Azerbaijan Tower will be the crowning centerpiece of the Khazar Islands, a $100 billion city of 41 artificial islands that will spread 2,000 hectares over the Caspian. The buoyant metropolis is being planned for 1 million residents, who will be housed in endless rows of high-rises ranging for 25 to 60 stories in height with access to over 150 schools, 50 hospitals and daycare centers, plus numerous parks, shopping malls, cultural centers, university campuses, and even a Formula 1 racetrack. The city will be equipped with a robust network of “innovative” bridges and infrastructure that will link outlying islands to the urban core, while a large municipal airport will provide access to and from the radiant city.

To briefly focus on the tower itself–much could be said on the vacuity of the entire project–the admittedly comical form altogether shuns the slim, shard-like profiles that characterize the current crop of Brobdingnagian skyscraper design. Instead, it curiously alludes both to the platonic massings of Constructivist projects (via corporate High-Tech of ’80s and ’90s) and various paper arcologies of the last quarter of the past century, from the Metabolists to the Sims. Construction on the Azerbaijan Tower is set to break ground in 2015 and will continue onto completion in 2018-2019 at a cost of $2 billion. And like all of the city’s other structures, the tower has been designed to withstand up to a 9.0 magnitude quake. The Khazar Islands are scheduled to be ready by 2022. Click through for more images!

Sim Arcologies

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A slide from Woods’ introductory lecture in ARCHITECTONICS,  First Year Studio at The Cooper Union.

Recently, we have been dwelling quite a bit on the ills of architecture school and the unspoken practices of the profession itself, much of which has painted a grim picture of a field that has often hinged itself on its distinct and determined enlightenment. Whether in response to the recent surge of doubt or not, admired architect, artist and avid blogger Lebbeus Woods recently released a two-part expose on why he became an architect. Woods’ intimate prose is a love letter to the arts; absent are the 71-year-old architect’s musings on buildings and bridges or ruminations on masterpieces of engineering and design. Instead, the seed that germinated the architect’s inclination to call himself an architect sprung from a youthful fascination with engravings, frescoes, oil paintings, and the artistic conception of divinity, salvation and light.

Woods recalls spending his childhood painting and also, significantly, leafing through images of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in Life Magazine and staring in awe at Gustave Doré’s 19th century engravings of Dante’s Inferno. He began to contemplate lightness and darkness and the “inexhaustible source of affecting ideas” that emerged from Western faith and its accompanying explosion of artistic renderings. As he writes in Part 1, his ideas and early fascinations have crystallized in retrospect: “[T]he arts have not been merely ornamental, but central to people’s struggle to ‘find themselves’ in a world without clarity, or certainty, of meaning. The very different worlds of Dante and Michelangelo testify equally to this condition, and led me slowly, inevitably towards architecture.” Read on.

Gustave Doré‘s illustrations date from the latter 19th Century of the Roman poet Virgil leading Dante to the Inferno. As Woods explained, above the opening to the Inferno is inscribed “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”

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HWKN, the office of Marc Kushner and Matthias Hollwich (two of Architizer’s four founders!), has won the final round of MoMA PS1’s Young Architects’ Program. They’re the 13^th winners of the program, which honors a young practice by inviting them to design and build an outdoor installation in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. The installations engage and cool the crowds of New Yorkers who flock to PS1 every summer for the center’s popular concert series, Summer Warm Up.

The winning design proposes a massive network of scaffolding on the site, supporting thousands of yards of a high-tech fabric treated with Titania nanoparticles. This stretchy blue fabric is the first of its kind: it “scrubs” air of pollution, using a technology developed by British designer Helen Storey and scientist Tony Ryan (a video about the duo’s company, Catalytic Clothing, follows below). HKWN’s proposal – which they name “Wendy” — is based on a simple equation: increase the amount of fabric on site and increase the air quality in the surrounding neighborhood. With that single-minded goal as a guide, the young office maximized every element of the design to increase the fabric’s surface area, giving Wendy her sure-to-be-iconic “starburst” shape. Programmatic zones sprout from her spindly blue arms – there are water cannons, an elevated DJ nook, as well as wading and misting zones. The office estimates that Wendy’s good deeds will be equivalent to removing 260 cars from the road.

The New York Times quotes MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design (and jury member) Barry Bergdoll, who says that Wendy is “pro-active, it’s not apologetic… It’s going to be amazing from the No. 7 train!”

We all have to wait a few more months for Wendy’s debut (sometime in June), but having seen the animation HWKN presented to the MoMA/PS1 jury this morning, it’s going to be worth it. Here’s to the many carbon-positive dance parties to come!

(Fe) Catalytic Clothing from Protein® on Vimeo.

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Edible Geography author Nicola Twilley is no stranger to ‘smellscapes.’ In her blog, she has often discussed the olfactory aspects of the built environment and “the importance of smellmarks in urban placemaking” (new buzz words). But she probably didn’t see this one coming: as Europe is feeling its first winter frost of the season, some bus riders in the UK will be warming up to a multi-sensory, protruding fiberglass potato sculpture that heats up and releases a precisely engineered baked potato aroma upon the push of a button. The $2.2m marketing campaign strives to “arouse consumers’ senses and demonstrate, quite literally, just how delicious new McCain Ready Baked Jackets really are.” According to advertiser JCDecaux, the aroma took three months of research and development at a scent lab. Is this a mark of progress towards designing what Twilley called “intentional olfactory architecture?” If this is a push forward, let’s also work on improving culinary standards and get some bus shelters to teach us how to bake potatoes.

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That’s Le Corbusier painting (violating?) the walls of Eileen Gray’s then pristine, all-white villa E. 1027. In the nude, because why not?

Reality Cues, your source of delicious and nutritional architectural pop imagery, wants you to take nude Corbu or “Le Cornudier” and insert his supple body into the most provocative situations you can think of. Really, they want you to go crazy. According to the Reality Cues Librarian, ”the agenda of the Cor(nudie)r Collage Competition is to unite the architecture community in order to propagate and disseminate alluring content that will infiltrate the channels of image streaming with a new species of architectural image. Or these people are just out of their minds.”

The jury will be comprised of Ana Miljacki & Lee Moreau of Project, Daniel Arsham & Alex Mustonen of Snarkitecture, Christopher Barley & Troy Thierren of Th—ey, and Shelly & Leo Johnson of Lil’Architectures. The top three collages will take home some very special prizes. Please email your submissions to the Reality Cues Librarian in JPEG or GIF formats along with a title and your name, which will be posted along with the image on Reality Cues. All submission are due by February 29, 2012. Need some inspiration? See some of Reality Cues’ brilliant examples below.

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Yesterday we saw how architecture could extend beyond its service to man to serve man’s best friend, as evidenced in Frank Lloyd Wright’s sophisticated doghouse for Eddie, a 4-year-old black Labrador. After all, why can’t our domesticated friends enjoy the fruits of good design? The same can be said for the rising population of domesticated chickens, one of the more recent species to join the urban migration. As more hens are shacking up in our cities, more designer chicken coops are entering the market, aiming to makeover our feathered friends from country bumpkins into city slickers. The latest to catch our eye comes from Portland-based architecture firm Wright Design Office (no relation to Frank, I presume), and it offers a modern dwelling made of recycled cedar and metal or fiberglass roof panels. The roof of the structure can even double as a coop-top garden.

[All photos courtesy the architects]

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