Amidst the post-Sandy recovery efforts, we would like to share with you New York: Night and Day by Philip Stockton. The New York-based animator and director created the film in attempt to explore the city’s relationships between night and day from a series of fifteen preconceived locations. Using an interesting mix of non-traditional video time-lapse and animation, Stockton combined four to eight hours of footage from each location into single sequences using rotoscoping techniques.
Designed by STL Architects, the new Daegu Gosan Public Library focuses on the evolution of the role of the library in regard to the new ways we now learn and teach. With extensive amounts of information, that could historically only be accessed in and from a library, being readily available to nearly anyone, this library will be a place where people come to live and vast knowledge resources are more than stereo-typical encyclopedias. Instead of libraries being generically thought of as a dusty place where books come to age and be seldom used, this library will be a place where social interaction is the essence of existence. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Architects: Armando Montero + Samuel Bravo Location: Región de Aysén, Chile Architects: Samuel Bravo, Armando Montero Project Year: 2011 Photographs: Samuel Bravo
Intercontinental Curatorial Project, which promotes the role of architecture as the vital part of contemporary culture and life, presents its ongoing traveling exhibition Colombia: Transformed. The event is to be shown November 8-9 as part of the Dialogues with the Informal City: The Case of Latin America and the Caribbean symposium. This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to connect a range of fundamental themes affecting the current conditions and future of Latin America’s growing informal cities and by extension the rising global urban population.The event will take place at the Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the University’s Center for Latin American Studies and the School of Architecture. For more information, please visit here.
Designed by JBAD (Jonathan Barnes Architecture and Design), the proposal for the Daegu Gosan Public Library proposes to simply, and radically, invert the conventional relationship of public space, circulation and access. In doing so, the public space typically defined and confined as interior, enclosed space becomes externalized, extroverted, stretched, and reformed. With their ”INversion’ concept, the way of interpreting the library as structure and space provides an opportunity to create exterior public space in ways that are both more integrated with the library’s functions and more connected to its urban context. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Given the state of the economy around the world, many people are returning to school in the hopes of acquiring new skills while riding out the worst of the effects of the global recession. Toward that end, ArchDaily has begun a College Guide to help people explore different educational options. There are many issues to consider beyond a school’s “name” such as the types of programs architecture schools offer. The Guide has highlighted schools with programs in Building Ecology, Forensic Architecture, and Human Rights, to name a few, while some of the practical issues have included cost analysis, financial aid, and access to cross-disciplinary training.
What has not been explored in the Guide because of its scope is a more theoretical examination of pedagogical strategies. What direction has architecture academics taken and where should it go in order to remain socially relevant, practically agile, and economically competitive? To discuss these issues, we interviewed Michael Rotondi, a founding student and current Distinguished faculty member of SCI-Arc and principle at RoTo Architecture. Throughout the conversation, Mr. Rotondi’s insight combine with a constant and voracious intellectual curiosity to provide visions that are important to both students and educators.
When Wired correspondent Lauren Hilgers arrived to Broad Town, the headquarters of the Broad Sustainability Group in Changsha, China, she soon realized that this was not your typical workplace environment. At Broad Town, employees must be able to run 7.5 miles over the course of 2 days; recite company “policy” - covering everything from how to save energy to how to brush your teeth - at a moment’s notice; and refer to their boss as “my chairman.”
It may sound strict, but the workers at Broad are on a higher mission. The CEO and founder of the company, Zhang Yue, a.k.a the chairman, doesn’t just consider himself the head of a construction company, but of a “structural revolution.”
In a few years, Zhang has turned the world of skyscraper design on its head, pushing the technical and structural capabilities of pre-fabrication to its utmost (perhaps you’ve heard of the 30-story hotel he built in just 15 days). Not only do Broad’s techniques save time and money, they represent a potentially game-changing opportunity for China to maintain its unfathomable rate of growth in a way that’s both safe and sustainable.
But where does innovation enter in this revolution? China, for years an intellectual playground for Western architects, has become increasingly concerned with nurturing its own latent intellectual capital. However, if Broad’s paradigm takes hold (which, pragmatically-speaking, it should), what will that mean for architectural innovation? In a world of pre-fab structures, can architecture exist?
The Seattle Center HUB (Hybrid Urban Bioscape) is an innovative urban space that explores the value of urban hybridization as a design opportunity to address sustainable and technological issues in the definition of the contemporary public space. The starting point for the proposal by Aétrangère was to introduce an innovative approach to reach the same goals envisioned by the Seattle Center Century 21 Master Plan. Instead of conceiving the demolitions, reconstructions, new buildings, the underground parking, and the major open space as separate elements, they allow some degree of integration for sustainable features we focused on defining this public space project starting from a sustainable approach. More images and architects’ description after the break.
What’s scarier, Ando as a mime or Zaha as a witch? With their Costume Critique | Morbid Models post, Building Satire transformed Tadao Ando, Bjarke Ingels, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel into creepy trick-or-treaters. Review them all after the break!
A few days before the wrath of Sandy, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) broke ground on what will be the first net zero energy school in New York City and the Northeast U.S. Located on a 3.5-acre site on Staten Island, at the intersection of Crabtree Avenue and Bloomingdale Road, P.S.62 Richmond will serve 444 pre-kindergarten through fifth grade students. When completed in Fall of 2015, the cutting-edge primary school will harvest as much energy from renewable on-site sources as it uses on an annual basis.
Wave Dilfert: Wave (moves in wave-form oscillations) + Dilfert (geek-like intelligence, absorbs information like a sponge).
Wave Dilfert is a new kind of space that reads the changes in light and shadow occurring within it, catalogs and calculates them, then pulses, contracts or expands in reaction. The installation was inspired by the work of Ushahidi; a non-profit, crowdsourcing disaster relief, tech innovator. Much how Ushahidi de-mystifies the complexities of war-torn or disaster ridden locales, The Principals developed a system that could de-mystify the complexities of space through sourcing the information of its users and making it accessible through interaction.
Taking place October 26-December 2, the White Mountain Chilean Contemporary Architecture exhibition is composed of a selection of relevant works. Put on by Aedes Berlin, the event highlights the richness of the recent projects is originated and developed within its landscape. The atmospheric design of the exhibition demonstrates this significant creative moment of the Chilean buildings, often described as the continent’s most interesting today. For more information, please visit here.
For the Venice Biennale, a group of 20 Peruvian architects (with no state support) presented a reflection on one of the most interesting territorial projects in South America. After 80 years in construction, a 20km tunnel connecting the Amazon to the dry region of the Pacific Andes has been completed, a tremendous infrastructure project that will turn this region into a new fertile land.
The “Olmos Transandino Project” will be ready in early 2013, and will attract more than 250,000 people with agriculture jobs (you can see more at Build it Bigger). However, despite this incumbent massive migration, there is no urban planning project on the country’s agenda, leaving one big question still to be answered: what should this territory, with its new urban quality, be like? That’s what a group of 20 architects from different backgrounds and ages set out to present at the “Yucun or Inhabitat the Desert” exhibit at the Biennale.
Each office worked on a 25ha site for three months, coordinating with their “neighbours” to create a unified urban fabric, which is represented with 1:1000 models.
The most important part of the firms’ research was their historical investigation into the region’s ancient Moche culture, a civilization that built astonishing abobe cities, as well as the first irrigation systems, 2,000 years ago. Inspired by Moche traditions, the firms generated a plan that would provide a sustainable future to this new territory.
More from the curator of the exhibit after the break:
RIBACompetitions recently announced their two-stage design ideas competition for the Great Fen Visitor Centre in Cambridgeshire. Great Fen is an internationally acclaimed vision, one of sweeping scale and ambition. Over the next 50-100 years, more than 3,000ha of largely arable land will be transformed into a mosaic of habitat: open water, lakes, ponds and ditches; reedbed; fen, bog and marsh; wet grassland; dry grassland; woodland and scrub. The competition seeks to to create around and between a restored fenland landscape which provides a living landscape for wildlife and people. Registrations will close on December 19. The deadline for Stage 1 design submissions is 2pm on January 10. To register, and for more information, please visit here.
MONU – magazine on urbanism is a unique bi-annual international forum for artists, writers and designers that are working on topics of urban culture, development and politics.
This new issue of MONU is dedicated entirely to the topic of “Next Urbanism” – meaning the urbanism of the cities of the so-called “Next Eleven” or “N-11″, which include eleven countries: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey, South Korea, and Vietnam. These countries have been identified as growing into, along with the BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – the world’s largest economies in the 21st century. Next to interviews with Saskia Sassen and with the Nigerian-born architect Kunlé Adeyemi, and a series of contributions that discuss Next Urbanism in general, we feature eleven articles that focus specifically on the cities of each of the Next Eleven countries.
You can see more about the articles on their official website. Also, you can browse the entire issue break.
Despite strong opposition from preservationists and architects world-wide, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced his decision to support the demolition of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital. In a op-ed piece released by the Chicago Tribune, Emanuel supported his stance by arguing that Northwestern’s new biomedical research facility would “bring 2,000 jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment” to Chicago. Emanuel believes Goldberg’s “vision is alive in Chicago beyond one building” and allowing Northwestern to build the new medical center is crucial in keeping Chicago at the forefront of scientific innovation.
The redevelopment of Sydney’s an inner-city waterfront precinct of Barangaroo is making progress, as the Barangaroo Delivery Authority (BDA) has announced the five teams shortlisted for the master planning services for Barangaroo Central. The project will complete the long term vision for Barangaroo, which was masterplanned by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, by forming the “heart of the site” that will be the transition along the waterfront walk from the southern urban and commercial spaces to the natural form six hectare of the Headland Park.
Tadao Ando and the Japan Sport Council (JSC) have announced the eleven finalists who will compete in the final round of the international competition for the New National Stadium Japan. With the reconstruction, the National Stadium hopes to attract world-class events with the world’s largest spectator capacity and the world’s finest hospitality. The new stadium is already committed to hosting the 2019 Rugby World Cup and is slated for competition in 2018.
Tadao Ando describes: “Our wish is to see a stadium designed by someone who shares this earth, with wisdom and technology that looks to the future of out planet.”
This week we propose a much lighter film but that still linked with our profession since it shows most of the domestic issues of an architect’s life. Deadlines, unexpected changes of schedule, and overnight work become a routine on the main character’s work. In the comedy, this lack of hours for sharing with the family and rest of social life is beaten through a new device able to control time.
Does this issue of time sound familiar to any of you? Let us know your comments about how you deal with time and architecture.
Loisos + Ubbelohde just received the highest award at the 2012 Architecture at Zero competition for their proposal, ‘Silver Streak’. The contest, sponsored by PG&E and AIA San Francisco, was conceived as a response to the lofty zero net energy targets set out by the California Public Utility Commission. As the recipient of one of two honor awards, their design for the University of California, Merced campus features an administration building that acts as both a threshold to campus and an energy field in the large plane of the agricultural valley. More images and architects’ description after the break.
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