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Amazing Building Mapping – Vimeo Festival from Dan Ilic on Vimeo.
Monthly Archive for October, 2010
Congratulations to Marie Frier, Anna Marie Fisker and Poul Henning Kirkegaard the winner’s of the International Award for Excellence in the area of design principles and practices with their paper Prefab-Interiority: Design Principles for a Sensuous Prefab Practice.
Abstract:
Despite the global, and still increasing, need for cost effective homes, the envisioned potential of technically utilizing prefab processes as a means of meeting this need has remained a challenging matter. Especially sensuous spatial qualities are often lost within the technical, economic, and practical realm of prefabrication, leaving the produced houses as monotonous box-like constructions rather than inhabitable homes. But what are the sensuous qualities actually spatially defining a home, and how to formulate design principles for developing and revealing these qualities within prefab practice?
It is our hypothesis that the inhabitant’s experience of home is dependent on sensuous impressions of interiority, spatial detailing at the threshold of furniture, such as an embracing window seat. However, within the practical realm of prefabrication, the revelation of such sensuous spatial qualities is significantly dependent on our constructive ability to economically and production-technically join building elements. Consequently this paper explores the potential for developing interiority as a theory and design principle for transforming constructive challenges within prefab practice into sensuous spatial qualities in the future prefab home. In this matter the paper presents a specific case study, a practice-oriented research project concerning the development of a novel prefab building system and housing series, done in cooperation with the Danish prefab housing manufacturer Boel Living A/S. As a research result the paper suggests a positioning of interiority as a theory and design principle for developing a sensuous prefab practice.
From George Russel at Pop Matters…
For most of us artificial light is known only by its absence. At night walk down any street in any town in the industrialized world and your shadow will blink off and on as it follows you, intermittently illuminated by ubiquitous street lamps.The generation of Americans that can remember a time without artificial light, those living in rural areas during the first half of the 20th century, before power lines reached them, are quickly dying off. My grandparents were of that generation – a rancher and a farmer that were each born by the light of a kerosene lamp.
Today, artificial light is a constant companion. Darkness implies a situation to be remedied, if only by the dim light of a television or computer screen. However, our relationship with it has also blinded us to its effects. For most of us, the charges on a monthly electric bill serve as the only reminder that there is any cost at all to flipping a light switch. Brilliant, The Evolution of Artificial Light, shows how artificial light and its twin invention, electricity, have in one way or another shaped everything that we have become. More…
From Tom
Cheapy, tacky, ordinary.
Some of the adjectives used by Gap customers to describe its now-axed logo. After less than one week, it has been consigned to the graveyard inhabited by rejected arrows, squiggles and inadvertently offensive corporate emblems.
The clean font, with a small blue square overlapping the “P”, prompted such an outcry that the US clothing firm initially enlisted the help of the public in rethinking the design.
But within days it announced, early on Tuesday morning, it was returning to the solid blue box and “GAP” written in a capitalised serif font, a look introduced 20 years ago.
British customers won’t have noticed because the change had yet to be implemented in the UK.
But Gap isn’t the first company to learn that messing with one’s visual identity is a risky business. So what did it do wrong, and what other logo makeovers have come under fire? More…
Congratulations to all of the Award finalists:
- D.S. Dalafave - Computational Design of Anti-Cancer Molecules: Designing Molecular Mimetics to Hinder Cancer Cell Pro-Survival Mechanisms Using Computer Science, Engineering, Biophysics, and Biochemistry
- David Goss – Grotesque by Design: Borderline Aesthetic in Design Discourse (will be published in an upcoming issue)
- Amy Johnson and Rukmini Ravikumar - Learn by Looking: Exercises in Resensitizing the Design Student
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Chee Weng Khong, Chui Yin Wong and Stanley Richardson – Icon Designs on Public Payphones in Malaysia
- Takayuki Kumazawa and Mieko Saito – Trials of a “Local Planning Hub” with an e-Portfolio to Achieve a Competent Public Design
- Michael McGlynn – Environmental Design and Architectural Expression: Towards an Inclusive Approach to Architectural Form Generation
- Nadia V. Volchansky Nieves and Catherine Anderson – Transcending Global, Cultural and Disciplinary Boundaries: The Evolving Role of Interior Design
- Leslie J. Waguespack, David J. Yates and William T. Schiano –
Translating Architectural Design Quality from the Physical Domain to Information Systems
From Yanko Design…
Designer Rob Maslin would like us all to think of the following phrase while looking at his project (in this post) and while going about creating industrial designs for the rest of our conscious lives: There is no such thing as sustainable product, only the by-products of a sustainable system. To be sustainable, first we must establish a close-loop system and the carrying capacity, then the system must be managed and not over- or under-consumed.” Thusly Maslin presents an aquaponic project by the name of “Free Lunch.” It’s an office-based fishtank with a loop of production and two sources of food.
Salad for the humans as well as fish, if the fish start to overpopulate of course. While the fish are alive, they create waste in the form of ammonia which is turned into nitrite, then nitrates by bacteria in the water. The nitrates are filtered through the plant bed above, the plants cleaning the water for the fish to live in, creating a lovely little circle of life, a closed-loop system with two food crops. More…
From Dezeen…
MAXXI Museum in Rome by Zaha Hadid Architects wins the RIBA Stirling Prize 2010
MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome by Zaha Hadid Architects has won the coveted £20,000 RIBA Stirling Prize 2010, in association with The Architects Journal and Benchmark.
The presentation of the UK’s premier architectural award took place at a special awards ceremony this evening (Saturday 2 October) at The Roundhouse in London, and was televised live on BBC Two’s The Culture Show at 6.30pm.
Commenting on MAXXI, the judges said:
‘MAXXI is described as a building for the staging of art, and whilst provocative at many levels, this project shows a calmness that belies the complexities of its form and organisation. The nature of the project means everything has to be over-specified – throughout the design process the architects had no idea what the series of rooms would be used to hang, so walls which will bear a ton of rusting steel might be graced by miniatures. More…
From Dezeen…
Here are six videos about the shortlisted designs including the bookmaker’s favourite, the MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome (above) by Zaha Hadid Architects from the RIBA Stirling Prize 2010 shortlist.
MAXXI, National Museum of XXI Century Arts
Rome, ItalyArchitect: Zaha Hadid Architects
Client: Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities,
Fondazione MAXXI and Ministry of
Infrastructure and TransportThis is a museum of paths and routes, as a series of flexible spaces where the curators invent new ways to hang and place the works of 21st Century art that have been collected since inception of the project – and the century. The permeable plaza recreates routes and connections, but also forces you to consider the new context that is created to engage with the activities within.
MAXXI is a building for the staging of art, and whilst provocative at many levels, it shows a maturity and calmness that belies the complexities of its form and organisation. Yet for all its structural pyrotechnics, it is rationally organised as five main suites. The whole is bravely day lit with a sinuous roof of controllable skylights, louvres and beams, whilst conforming to the strict climate control requirements of modern galleries; the skylights orientate and excite the visitor, while turning them into uplifting spaces. More…
From Paul Goldberger at The New Yorker…
In 1965, a hotel owner named Jay Sarno began construction on a new hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, and decided to set his creation apart from the competition by modelling it on a Roman palace. Caesars Palace was really no different from any other big hotel, but the Roman arches and columns stuck on its façade, not to mention the tunic-clad cocktail waitresses inside, were such a hit that the place spawned a generation of imitations, each aiming to outdo the last in eye-popping extravagance. Las Vegas became the world’s largest theme park, with hotels intended to make you feel that you are in Venice, or Paris, or Egypt, or New York, or Bellagio, or on a pirate’s island, or among King Arthur and his knights. Or—given that these weird simulacra have become famous in their own right—that you are, quite simply, in Vegas. Sarno’s palace was vulgar and crude, but his achievement is one that even the most accomplished architects can only envy: he defined a city’s style.
But it’s been clear for a while that Las Vegas has been running out of themes. More…