Archivo de la categoría: Uncategorized

What We Liked This Week in Projects

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The Bush House in the City by MMP Architects

This week was a good week in architecture. So, naturally, it was a good week at Architizer. We had a great pool of projects come in from all over, from France to Mexico and two from Spain, which continues to produce a scarily high number of excellent architectural projects. We mulled over the best of the bunch and selected a handful of our favorites from the last 5 days to share with you.

First up is the Bush House in the City, a getaway in every sense of the word. While we’re still trying to figure out what about this sleek, lush retreat qualifies as a bush house or where exactly the city referenced in the name is, all you need to know is in the photos (namely, the money shot above). Click on through for more projects!

Milan 2012 preview: ‘Saya’ chair by Lievore Altherr Molina for Arper (IT)

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'Saya' chair by Lievore Altherr Molina for Arper

The latest collaboration between the Italian furniture brand Arper and Barcelona-based design studio Lievore Altherr Molina resulted in this elegant, four-legged chair called ‘Saya’. Developed in oak and finished in teak and natural stain available in variety of colours such as white, black, ochre and three shades of red, the chair will be officially launched in April at this year’s edition of [...]

Intricately-Patterned Land Art That’s Washed Away by the Tides

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Image: Cater News Agency

Andres Amador has only a few hours to work before the tide sets in. He must wait for a full moon when the waves have fully receded, giving him the space and time to execute his sand etchings. Using just a garden rake, Amador inscribes monumental doodles along the banks of beaches, giant compositions of overlapping lines and vaguely geometric figures which originate from tiny sketches he’s prepared in a notebook beforehand. The largest of his works span areas of 300 X 500 feet and larger, taking several hours and workers to complete; yet despite their size and the great effort dedicated to their realization, the tableaux won’t last through the day. As the shoreline becomes engulfed by the falling sea, they vanish just as fast as they had come. Click through for more images.

Image: Cater News Agency

The San Franciscan native says he uses Google Earth to scout for beaches, sandbars, and coastlines which exhibit the aesthetic properties he looks for in a canvas, namely, a rich context with distinct topographical features that could activate and inform the design to be. Accordingly, the resultant carvings work within the same global format and can only be completely assessed from orbit. Given their massive size, the intricate patterns, which resemble the sinuous lines and the morphological distortions of Roberto Burle Marx’s densely layered garden designs, seem to extend in all directions, sliding under the sea and rocks which bound them to encompass the entirety of the planet’s surface. Amador reinforces this reading when he likens the designs to ripples in water and cracks in mud–similarly infinite and extendable across the globe–only scaled-up, like ancient markings which reveal themselves momentarily before being washed away only to resurface at another time and place.

All images, unless otherwise noted: Barcroft Media

Medellin’s Escalator of “Progress”

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For Marx, the escalator of historical progress inevitably led to communism. From feudalism through capitalism, the destination was fixed and the ascent, continuous; of course, the rupture happened and the rise flattened out. The escalator, both as metaphor and, later, as a technology, was reappropriated by and integrated into the capitalist model of history. This history is not one so much of progress, but one of accumulation, a horizontal field characterized by peaks of self-induced barriers and crises which, following David Harvey, are transcended only by financial innovations–capitalism as the source of and answer to global economic woes and sociopolitical injustices.

A tentative definition of progress does, however, exist in this model – in the form of material improvements of living conditions, precipitated by the development of new technologies and transparent, “democratic” forms of communication and their integration in regions previously lacking in them. The new 1,260 foot-escalator in Comuna 13 of Medellin, Colombia’s second largest city and also one of it’s poorest and most violent urban communities, is representative of these improvements. The escalator replaces a series of stairways climbing the hillside shantytown, significantly cutting the hike time–the equivalent of scaling a 28-story building–from 35 minute to just six. The new public infrastructure cost $6 million and is part of large-scale regeneration project initiated by the neighborhood. As the Daily Mail reports, both city officials and the community are thrilled with the result, as are foreign interests, with studies being undertaken by Rio de Janeiro for use in the city’s favelas.

The escalator, which is broken up into a series of six pieces mounted onto the hillside, is jarring in its appearance, its shiny veneer contrasting with the dilapidated structures around it. It thus explicitly functions as a harbinger of urban renewal, a promise of the town’s imminent recovery and the revitalization of Medellin’s housing and public spaces. Yet it’s also important to treat these kinds of projects carefully, remembering that this is how gentrification and the transmogrification of such communities begins.

Photo: Getty Images

Photo: Getty Images

Manmade Clouds

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“Nimbus II” (2012)

Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde installs miniature clouds in empty gallery spaces. But these are neither digital manipulations nor fluffy Poly-fil sculptures strung from the ceiling. The cloud works are, in fact, real, with Smilde using spoke, moisture, and spot lighting to conjure up his momentary creations. His latest work, Nimbus II repeats the artist’s first experiment (Nimbus, 2010) in which he spun a rain cloud in the center of an immaculate studio gallery, whose blank, polychromatic walls further underpinned the Surrealist imagery.

For Nimbus II, Smilde suspends a new cloud in a vaulted chapel-like space painted all-white and bounded on two sides with tall windows framing an ominous winter light. The cloud, which is backlit, seems to have absorbed all the life out of the room, thus obliterating any notion of whimsy or irony the images may have initially suggested and imparting the scene with an eeriness that is both disturbing and strangely magnetic. Smilde says that his installations, which were developed for the online gallery probe, give form to “physical presence found within transitional space.” In this way, the works exist more fully as ideas committed to photographs, living evidence of the thaumaturgic power of the artist.

“Nimbus” (2010) at the Hotel MariaKapel

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Crops (Gerco de Ruijter) from Michel Banabila on Vimeo.

“Crops” by Gerco de Ruijter is a stop-motion film whose photography is entirely composed of aerial shots of 1000 irrigation circles captured from Google Earth. Each crop circle appears at a different stage of the irrigation cycle and has been formatted so that their immediate geographic context cannot be discerned (though nearly all are found in semiarid environments). Strung together, the circles become imbibed with a a clock-like motion, with the irrigation sprinkler infrastructure acting as the clock arm. Yet this steady meter quickly gives way to a flurry of flashing colors and shadows, leaving nothing but the impressions of what seems like a strange, alien arcanum of signs. The images blend into one another at a rapid frame rate whose acceleration is further accentuated by the score’s tense, rattling glissandi (by Michel Banabila). “Crops” is the starting point for a larger project de Ruijter is planning to release later in the year.

Source images for “Crops”

[via BLDGBLOG]

Playboy, Forerunner of Space Entertainment

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All images: Thomas Tenery/Playboy Enterprises

We return to our regular broadcast of cosmic chimeras, death star budgets, and megastructural follies. The newest venture for Playboy, that respectable publication of investigative journalism, probing interviews, and in-depth profiles, is a return of sorts to its space-crazed heyday, when the nudie-magazine-cum-empire was riding the crest of its popularity and approaching its cultural apogee. Schematic renderings for the Playboy Club space station have been released, and it looks exactly how you imagined–in short, take the ennobled masculinity of “Mad Men” and send it into orbit, with the spectral colors of nebulae and nearby planets replacing the corner office views of Manhattan.

Following Virgin Galactic’s pioneering role in space tourism, Playboy commissioned artist Thomas Tenery along with several reputable futurists and NASA scientists to envision the “ultimate intergalactic entertainment destination.” The paintings, which are published in the March issue of Playboy, imagine a massive toroidal spacecraft whose large outer wheel would spin continuously to create gravity-like conditions within the club’s interiors–themselves designed to be “warm and elegant” rather than adopting the cold, uninviting “Star Wars look.” The megastructure is pocked with angled viewports, which open up the ship’s zero-gravity dance club, casino, hotel suites, and restaurant to the splendors of the universe.

In addition to those attractions, there will be a “human roulette”, an onboard zero-gravity bungee jumping station, and a swanky space bar complete with excessive neon lighting. Floating patrons in the dance club would be served drinks by jetpack-wearing Playboy bunnies, while those in the private “orbital pleasure dome” would be able to indulge their carnal fantasies in the presence of the celestial bodies, with panoramic views to the earth below and star clusters. It’s here where Playboy writers say the Kama Sutra will be “reimagined according to the rules of zero-gravity physics.” We’ll leave the visuals to you.

Click through for the rest of the images.

Gourmet restaurant

Zero-gravity Dance Club

Hotel suites

Gravity Room

[via Space.com]

Help Make the LowLine Happen

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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.