From the Zaha Hadid edition of Moleskine’s Inspiration and Process in Architecture Series

Not too long ago, we came across Wendy MacNaughton’s illustrations of how she imagined Leonardo da Vinci’s personal Moleskine notebook would appear, filling the white of the page with an endearingly hurried to-do list to remind the ultimate Renaissance man to “draw Milan” and calculate the measurement of Italy’s courtyards and suburbs. The charmingly haphazard scribbles and sketches reminded us of how the notebook, or the sketchbook, has long been an elemental tool in the creative process, absorbing one’s thoughts, observations, and expressions and becoming an active site for cognitive connections. What better medium, then, is there to capture the elusive concepts of inspiration and process in architecture?

From the BOLLES + WILSON edition

With this in mind, Moleskine began to investigate the relationship between the architect and “the white paper,” with the aim of tracing out the “cognitive geography” of architects such as Zaha Hadid, BOLLES + WILSON, Giancarlo De Carlo and Alberto Kalach. Though designated as monographs, the books in the ‘Inspiration and Process in Architecture’ series ride on their association with Moleskine’s established line of blank notebooks. These books thus map out the process linking an idea to a realized project, leaving the interpretive gaps, spaces and room for free association that would have confronted Zaha Hadid (or Leonardo da Vinci, for that matter, who historian Toby Lester confirmed to have carried around a small notebook hanging from his belt). Moleskine’s special edition clothbound books are a stimulating alternative to the ubiquitous coffee book table and likewise a noteworthy “celebration of the everlasting power of free hand sketching even in the AutoCAD era.”

[All images via Moleskine]

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For those of you still reeling from the Oscars last night (we laughed, we cried), here’s a wonderful video that places four contemporary buildings in Veneto, Italy in the same cinematic splendor as some of the brightest stars to have received that coveted golden statuette. Watch as Tadao Ando’s Factory, Silvia Dainese’s Black Cube, Massimiliano Fuksas‘s Nardini Bull, and Daniel Libeskind’s 9/11 Memorial come to life in this short film, which celebrates each building’s dramatic play with light. Set to scintillating instrumentals, ‘Luce/Light’ guides us through the spaces, allowing us to observe the details and soak in the emotive qualities of each masterful architectural performance.

Luce/Light from Studio-due on Vimeo.

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We’ve written about the LowLine–the subterranean park that would convert an abandoned 60,000 square foot trolley station beneath Delancey Street into an underground oasis–on two separate occasions, back when the project was first announced (and when it acquired its memorable name) and again last November when a New York Times piece catapulted the futuristic proposal and renderings into the national press. Since then the project, designed by architect James Ramsey and PopTech exec Dan Barasch, has steadily made headway, gaining the support of both the Lower East Side community and the city. The LowLine has just launched a Kickstarter drive to fund the fabrication and installation of the park’s “remote skylights,” the duo’s invention without which the idea of an underground park with light and flora would be untenable. The skylights are designed to collect and filter sunlight at street level and funnel it to underground receivers via fiber optic cables that distribute the light wavelengths supporting photosynthesis to the park’s trees, plants, and grass. Ramsey and Barasch need $100,000 to construct the mock-ups which they will use to demonstrate to the MTA, the public, and supporters just how they will work.

The final proposal isn’t due to the MTA for another year. In that time, Ramsey and Barasch will be presenting their developments to local committees, organizations, and institutions as a type of community outreach and information exchange which proved integral to the realization and success of the High Line. The two have also opened up the project to Columbia GSAPP students in a studio taught by Architizer CEO Marc Kushner and architect Jürgen Mayer H. Visit the LowLine Kickstarter page to learn more about the project and how to contribute.

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The 2008 earthquake that devastated China’s Sichuan province has become something of an afterthought in the wake of more recent natural disasters. Four years later, it seems all too easy to forget the emotional ache felt around the world when news outlets linked the collapse of over 7,000 schoolrooms and the deaths of thousands of school children in the area to poor construction and a corrupt building industry. Though such tragedies inevitably fade over time, it is important to remember their lessons, especially as China expects to complete over 65 skyscrapers within the next six years, and has already effectively built a 30-story hotel and furnished it all within a mere 360 hours.

But we turn our attention to positive news from Sichuan’s Deyang district. According to a review in Chinese-Architects, a steadfast campaign to raise money and attract prominent Beijing-based practice TAO Architects has finally culminated in a new elementary school that has just recently opened its doors. Made of concrete, brick, wood and bamboo, the Xiaoquan Elementary School fits within the footprint of its institutional predecessor while conceiving of the school in an entirely different manner, as “a small urban cluster.” Wonderfully clean forms that exude their own materiality are staggered, scattered and connected by open and covered walkways, providing a miniature network of streets, plazas, alleys and courtyards for children to play in. More after the jump.

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Piccolo the tiny CNC-bot from diatom studio on Vimeo.

Yes, machines can draw, and, unsurprisingly, they do so quite well. The problem, as with all nascent material technologies, is the size of these plotters, which renders them impractical and quite expensive, setting you back a few thousand dollars. That is, until now (dun dun dun). Piccolo, the tiny CNC-bot, is the world’s only plotter that can fit in your pocket and, available for only $70, it’s the cheapest one at that. Designed by diatom studio, Piccolo provides an open-source platform for digital fabrication at a small, even bite-size scale. The little bot is made of laser-cut plastic pieces, which are quick and easy to assemble, and is powered by an Arduino board that allows users to tinker with and explore a wealth of drawing possibilities only limited by your programming know-how. For those less fluent in geek, Piccolo has access to Arduino and Processing libraries from which you can learn how to customize your little bot, making it move and draw autonomously or react to environmental conditions. We imagine you using Piccolo to make the world’s smallest canvas art or even synchronizing a micro-army of bots to create larger works. Piccolo’s hand is a bit shaky, but that doesn’t stop it from drawing better than you.

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Like phone booths, water towers are a ubiquitous yet oft-ignored element of New York’s urban fabric, with around 10,000 tanks dispersed throughout the five boroughs and suspended out of sight and out of mind. The water tower has been a part of this landscape for over 100 years, surpassing the phone booth in its traversal of time and its sustained relevance to the city’s infrastructure. And just as Manhattan’s pay phones are being repurposed into miniature guerilla libraries, the dated network of water towers is likewise due for an experimental makeover. Enter the Water Tank Project. For three months in the spring of 2013, graphics by a diverse group of artists ranging from Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner to Thom Yorke, Jay-Z and even local school students will adorn 300 of New York’s elevated water tanks.

The goal of the project, according to the Facebook page, is to use public art to “inspire millions of people to be more responsible with water in their daily lives,” which is admittedly hard to keep in mind with the advent of such things as Horizontal Showers.  Dressed with blown-up pop imagery, these water tanks will emerge from the quotidian backdrop, reminding 8.4 million New Yorkers that the supply of the planet’s lifeblood is far from infinite. Simply gazing before these cylindrical containers is often enough to trigger such a crucial realization, and luckily, they will be highlighted by the creative visions of established and amateur artists alike.

There is currently an open call for design proposals. If you want to show off your artistic flair and add your two cents about water preservation, submit to the Water Tank Project.

[All images courtesy The Water Tank Project]

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All photos: Kengo Kuma and Associates

The ubiquity of the Starbucks brand has yielded an unsurprising aesthetic monotony among their ever-expanding empire of coffee shops. The anatomy of nearly every Starbucks store can be reduced to the same basic elements, from the mood lighting and tacky factory art to the Michael Buble (or Jacques Brel, vintage post-war Franco ephemera are always a sure bet) records blaring over the tinny speaker system. While the level of customization of drink orders is relatively broad, the custom Starbucks shop is essentially an anomaly. In the case of Kengo Kuma‘s new Starbucks cafe in Fukuoka, Japan, that is a good thing. The new store is both ornate and minimal, traditional and modern, continuing the architect’s exploration in the crafts and carpentry heritage of his native land. Continue.

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Global architecture firm Gensler has an impressive portfolio, to say the least, gathering the work of thousands of the world’s leading architects and designers and arranging towering glass and steel megastructures right alongside new university buildings, renovated interiors, and spruced up bars and restaurants. Despite the breadth of its designs, we were still impressed by the firm’s choice to award Pratt interior design student Tina Uznanski with the 2012 Gensler Brinkmann Scholarship. Uznanski secured her prized academic scholarship and internship at Gensler’s London office through her proposal for a renovation of the Clinton Hill Community Library in Brooklyn, New York.

In an official statement seen on Bustler, Gensler hailed Uznanski’s proposal for capturing the spirit of the firm and its will to “partner with…clients to deliver design innovations that transform their organizations.” The flexible program, composed of ‘shifting stacks,’ allows library-goers to immerse themselves in a fantastic variable landscape of books.  But what we found most refreshing was Uznanski’s architectural drawings and the presentation of her ideas, which uses collage to communicate a whimsical return to simpler times, when printed words on a page were the height of information transmission. Continue.

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Back on terra firma, we’ve come across old plans for right here in New York that are nearly as ambitious as building an elevator to space or constructing your own Death Star. As we learned from Gothamist, engineer Norman Sper’s 1934 proposal to dam and fill the Hudson River would have connected Manhattan to New Jersey and added ten square miles of real estate to the city. This valuable land would have ostensibly solved the traffic and housing problems which afflicted the city at the time (and still do) by making way for the extension of the grid westward, creating a series of new avenues, cross-streets, parks, and buildings. The visionary project called for the erection of giant twin dams, with the Upper Dam located just beyond the George Washington Bridge and the Lower Dam extending from Lower Manhattan to Jersey City, rerouting the course of the Hudson and merging it with the East River. The filled-in Hudson riverbed would then have been riddled with an intricate, layered network of subterranean roads, conduits, and subway lines. Yet the project’s $1 billion pricetag effectively barred any serious research or feasibility tests from being carried out.

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Given the current rate of innovation and progress in construction (and design) technologies, we tend to assume that anything can be built. Think up any ridiculous shape or size you’d like for a building, and if there is a rising economy of plutocrats willing to pay for it, a totalitarian state to muscle it past any potential construction hiccups, and plenty of marginalized laborers to be exploited to build it, there’s a good chance it will be realized. Well, you decide you want to go the post-modern route, in particular, millennial OMA, say a perfect sphere, monstrous in size–140km (87 miles) in diameter–and which doubles as the most destructive weapon in the universe, with enough firepower to vaporize entire planets at will? How much would it cost to build this megastructure-to-end-all-megastructures? And, more importantly, how much steel would be required to construct your very own Death Star?

Those are the questions that economics students at Lehigh University wanted answered. Posting their findings on their blog Centives, the students began by estimating the colossal mass of the Death Star and the amount of steel that would go into its construction. Comparing the density of steel in the Death Star to that of a modern warship (“After all, they’re both essentially floating weapons platforms so that seems reasonable”), they calculated that the amount would hover around 1.08×1015 tonnes of steel, the production of which would take 833,315 years to accomplish. At today’s steel prices, the endeavor would cost $852,000,000,000,000,000, or “roughly 13,000 times the world’s GDP.”

Still undeterred? While the iron in the Earth could easily provide the raw material needed for one of the upwards two billion Death Stars the students claim could be assembled from terrestrial resources, the recovery of that material would necessitate extent mining excursions to the planet’s core, something “we would all really rather you didn’t remove.” Then there’s the off-chance that your fellow mortals or even alien species eventually takes notice of what you’re up to and actually tries to stop (or assume control of) the enterprise, in which case you’d have a hard time perpetually fighting them off for 800 millenia.

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