The last decade has seen the explosion of building (and demolition) in Asia and the Middle East, with city blocks, districts, and even historic sites  rendered “blank canvases“–Zaha Hadid’s own term–and offered to corporate developers and Western architects to fashion them how they see fit. The resultant stream of bespoke icons seem as aloof and disconnected from their urban (and rural) contexts as their architects are from the societies that must put up with their creations. Which begs the question: How aware are these architects of the labor forces, along the conditions which both sustain and govern them, that build their willfully expressive structures, labor-intensive as they are? Can it be argued that the architect’s creative powers is sustained by the availability of cheap labor performed by seasonal workers?

These are the questions that will presented at tonight’s panel discussion “Who Builds Your Architecture?” at The New School. Organized by the Vera List Center in collaboration with Kadambari Baxi (Barnard College), Mabel O. Wilson (Columbia University GSAPP) and curator and writer Beth Stryker, the discussion will engage architecture’s culpability in the exploitation of workers and their misrepresentation. In evaluating current architectural production, the panelists will explore how buildings “may transform society not just through their physical forms but through the ways in which they are constructed and used.”

“Who Builds Your Architecture?” will be held at the Theresa Lang Community and Student Center at The New School, starting at 6:30.

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A recent episode of the “Simpsons” featured starchitect Rem Koolhaas building a Lego scale-model of OMA’s CCTV tower before an audience of “elite-educated” tykes, those bright, young, and coddled descendants of Salinger’s Glass children, only here updated with the neoliberal vision and cross-disciplinary skills to ensure their inheritance of the earth. Behind Rem’s diminutive entourage, kids dine on a vegan buffet, while a small audience in the background gathers around for the latest 2-minute “Junior” Ted Talk, their rapt attention giving way to a collective “ahhh” before the speaker (a youthful Bjarke Ingels?) wraps up and the next wunderkind unpacks his powerpoint. Meanwhile, Rem seems pretty zen about it all, eyes closed while piecing together the rhomboid geometry of his tower.

Koolhaas’s wordless cameo follows the Simpson’s previous forays into architectural (and aesthetic) critique/ trolling, most famously 2005′s “The Seven-Beer Stretch” in which Frank Gehry is lampooned as a purveyor of “crumpled paper” sculptures, the result of a 10-second design process that costs the client millions of dollars. Gehry’s work would resurface in a 2009 episode featuring “Maggie Roark“, the baby Simpson-turned-architectural prodigy whose Randian genius must overcome the powers of mediocrity embodied by her nemesis Elsworth Toohey, who fashions the Disney Opera House out of colored blocks only to have Toohey promptly sledgehammer its expressive curves back into platonic rectitude. Koolhaas is let off pretty easily, though KIDZONE ELITE seems the perfect context for the architect’s puerile propensity for easy shock and willfully gauche provocations.

[via Archinect]

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Living Room: Housing Works Builds Housing. Photo: Alan Chin.

Last weekend (April 26-28), Gavin Browning and Karen Kubey curated Living Room: Housing Works Builds Housing, at the Metropolitan Pavilion. The installation was a powerful addition to Housing Works’ 2012 Design on a Dime Benefit and two-day public sale, with all proceeds going towards the soon-to-open 874 Jefferson Avenue Residence Project.

Et plus, after the jump.

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The freedom promised by the scrollable world of Google Earth, like most everything else, has its limits. A satellite’s gaze is anything but objective; on the contrary, its biases are frequent and pronounced, as Mishka Henner’s “Dutch Landscapes” makes clear. When Google launched its free satellite-imagery service in 2005, governments scrambled to censor protected regions and domains considered too sensitive for public consumption. Naturally, reasons of national defense were stated, and the sanctioned landscapes were hidden under a cloak of visual tricks that included distortions of every kind, from pixelations and blurring to cloning and burning. Interestingly enough, the filters differed from country to country just as the objects of censorship varied from military bases and nuclear facilities to royal palaces and cultural centers.

“Landscapes” collects the bizarre instances of cartographic dissonance inflicted by the Dutch government over their virtual lands. As Henner notes, the number of censored sites within the small country of the Netherlands is surprising, as is the technique used by officials to disguise them. Tracts of land deemed vulnerable to attack or misappropriation are transformed into large tapestries of multi-colored polygons, archipelagos of abstraction floating in swaths of open fields, dense forests, and clusters of urban development.

Henner contextualizes these hybrid landscapes as the digital extension of the country’s historical (and agricultural) growth and expansion. Just as the Dutch have repeatedly engineered the soil of their native land to sustain and protect its future against the combined destructive  forces of natural disasters and industry, so the hybridization of “Google-Netherlands” grafts vague geometries onto public satellite imagery to safeguard the land from the imagined threat of  terrorism.

Click through for more.

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You’ve heard the news. You’ve seen the renderings. Now, it’s time to formally meet Wendy.

This year’s winner of the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, Wendy is an innovative project that engages the current ecological problems at hand which face the field of architecture and beyond, while refusing to let these same pressures get her down. Designed by Architizer sister company Hollwich-Kushner (HWKN), Wendy is an unapologetically formal scheme that presents an optimistic solution out of the ennui in which architecture presently is entrenched.

The architects designed a seven-bay network of scaffolding that forms a giant porous box to encase Wendy, a bright blue cluster of spikes and folds made from fabric specially treated with smog-eating, air-cleansing titania nanoparticles. The exuberant “starburst” shape may seem arbitrary, but is actually based on radically simple, yet rational premise: increase the fabric surface area and increase the quality of air in the neighborhood–in this case, the equivalent of removing 260 cars off the highway. Wendy’s dramatically shifting, yet iconic profile is, thus, a result of the performance optimization of every one of the design’s elements. Where the multi-faceted spikes may cascade, fold, and zig-zag to maximize surface coverage, they also reveal spatial opportunities to create climatic (shade) and programmatic (seating, misting areas, a DJ booth) zones. Some of the spikes will even be armed with water cannons, that will splash and cool visitors all summer long.

MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design Barry Bergdoll says Wendy will be ”aesthetically unforgettable”, adding that, once built, it will look “amazing from the No. 7 train.” Beyond the project’s shock value, Bergdoll has noted how Wendy was born out of “months of sustained research” that yielded a prescient scheme that points towards “new directions for architecture in terms of material research, ecological responses, and recyclability.”

There are ways that you, too, can be involved in the Wendy project. Friends and graphic designers 2×4, Bruce Mau, and Pentagram have designed tote bags and t-shirts to the cause, each of which is emblazoned with striking graphics of Wendy and coated with the same titania nanoparticles that will clean the P.S. 1 courtyard this summer. The products, which are non-toxic, are available here and will be coming soon to all MoMA design stores. Buy some for you and your friends to jumpstart the nanoparticle revolution!

You can also volunteer your time and manpower to help build Wendy. More details, including volunteer schedules, can be found here. Construction will conclude by mid-June, when Summer Warm Up begins. For more on Wendy, including updates and photos, follow her on Facebook and Twitter. Wendy will be at MoMA PS1 from June 28 to September 8, 2012. See you there!

Click through for a better look at the merchandise!

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Last week, we featured artist Baptise Debombourg‘s arsenal of fictional architectural typologies, each of which was shaped by the unique form of a different firearm. Debombourg’s newest work, entitled “Aerial”, floods the crypt of a former Benedictine monastery with waves of compacted glass that engulf the space’s columns and floor in a vitreous “pool”. The piece, which is installed at Brauweiler Abbey in Germany and took some 420 hours to complete, was made by gluing 2 tons of shattered laminated glass and layered in successive sheets to form a mosaic that mimics the sea’s frothing waves.

The installation is divided in three segments or waves, each one corresponding to the windows on the western wall.  Light is funneled down the inverse of the chutes and is scattered along the sculpture’s deceptively flat, even folds. Since the surface of the avalanche is more fractal than flat, however, each of its nooks and cracked edges picks up and reflects the falling light in a different way.

[All photos courtesy of the artist]

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This past January, after 23 years of construction, Kazakhstan opened the world’s ‘youngest’ subway system to much acclaim, its mix of erstwhile period decor and high-tech gadgetry provoking much internet chatter. While that subway favored opulent surface treatments and smooth vaulted spaces, Stockholm’s underground transit (the Tunnelbana) opts for a more “textured” environment, with rock-hewn arches and ceilings that remind the commuter that they are descending into the depths of the earth.

These “cave stations”–located on the red and blue lines–are part of the metro’s 90-plus stations embellished with art, which are collected in a vast corridor of what is called the world’s longest art gallery. Frescoes, sculptures, and installations are applied or embedded directly onto the bedrock, itself stained with a palette of bright and garish colors that present a totalizing context in which the individual works are inserted. Continue.

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Historian Peter Blake referred to the furniture projects of modern architects–the “master builders” as well as their noble subjects–as excellent “guinea pigs” on which to test the same functional, aesthetic, and technical concepts that would inform the design of a building (a chair-to-skyscraper in Blake’s example), only “without going to any great [fiscal] expense.” Blake’s keen pragmatism outlines a heuristic practice of architecture, in which inchoate spatial thinking and sensitivity are honed through all manner of engagement or experimentation with the material world and from which can be extrapolated the concentrated “interaction” of these diverse, but very real factors. Where the modernists’ bent steel chairs and modular tables would prove analogical models to their innovative architectural systems, Atelier Takagi’s Range Life series reverses this relationship, literally condensing architecture into functional pieces of furniture.

The first in the series of “architecture-bites” features an extensive palette of materials, from Corian surfaces and blackened steel trusses to an American ash “floor” balanced on miniature I-beams. A small concrete column  holds up the glass tabletop, while simultaneously forming the flow of the “interior” space, in which books, knickknacks, and other objects can be stored. According to Atelier Takagi, the miniature structures are “monumental when viewed from a child’s vantage point and fond memories of playing under coffee tables.”

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The Cutty Sark in Greenwich; All photos: Grimshaw Architects

Britain’s heritage of ‘greatness’ is tied to the seas, a long bittersweet relationship that yielded an illustrious, but now-discontinued history of conquest and expansion. Not much of grand Britannia remains, and national pride can be chalked up to the odd ritualistic commemorative celebrations of any cultural residue deemed worthy enough of remembrance–disasters included (see this month’s fevered centennial programs for the Titanic’s sinking). Those material vestiges that have managed to survive the centuries are, thus, of national import, to be meticulously preserved and displayed. The £50 million restoration of the 143-year-old Cutty Sark–the world’s only remaining tea clipper–is one such example, a living, if fragile, remnant of British seafaring supremacy.

Following a fire in 2007, which left the frigate’s rigging damaged, but not beyond repair, it was decided to rehaul the structure and cooper shell of the Cutty Shark and erect a museum to its glory. The project in Greenwich was overseen by London-based architects Grimshaw, who devised a glass plinth on which to set the ship. Continue.

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Spotted this afternoon on NPR’s tumblr, the Slauerhoffbrug or ‘flying’ drawbridge, an automated bascule bridge in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden, is part infrastructure, part Transformer. Built in 2000 to more speedily accommodate the intermix of road and water traffic, the drawbridge is equipped with a structural arm powered by hydraulic cylinders that whisks a 15mX15m square of asphalt road up into the air to allow cargo boats to pass underneath. Once they have passed, the tract of motorway is quickly replaced and set flush with the rest of the bridge, at which point stalled cars may proceed crossing.

Set to operate once an hour, the Slauerhoffbrug offers a unique, even fanciful engineering solution with affinities for the modular structural frames favored by the ’60s-era ‘Zoom’ architecture and the High-Tech aesthetics hugely popular around the millennium. Painted yellow and blue to evoke the colors of Leeuwarden’s municipal flag, the image of the raised road deck recalls a flying kite, a quaint picture in which the hyper-machine has been thoroughly integrated into the surrounding greenscape.

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