As we’ve reported over the last two months, efforts have been underway in Arizona to preserve the David Wright House, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “ most innovative, unusual and personal works of architecture,” from demolition by developers. No intact Wright building has ever been intentionally demolished, and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy (FLWBC) has been hard at work to make sure this one isn’t the first.
A wood-based nanomaterial composed of cellulose nanocrystals and cellulose nanofibrils is being evaluated at the Forest Products Laboratory, in support of a project at the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland. The material, presumably stronger than Kevlar, is being produced to create clear composites as reinforced glass for clear applications. US Forest Services has opened a $1.7 million pilot plant in Wisconsin to develop the wood-based nanomaterial, whose future applications may include windshield and high performance glass.
By Sherin Wing and Guy Horton
Utah’s red rock country is sublime in a Martian Chronicles sort of way. Its geologic folds, wrinkles, bridges, and domes compose a forbidding yet stunningly beautiful world of rock and sky. It’s the sort of landscape John McPhee would lyrically traverse in his book Basin and Range, in what he refers to as a “physiographic province.” It is also the psychological province of vision quests, the kind of vast and mystical space that Jim Morrison might have experienced. These are just some of the images that emerge from this landscape.
The work of Imbue Design, the Salt Lake City-based, three-person firm made up of Hunter Gundersen, Matt Swindel, and Christopher Talvy, is inserted here to form a meditative retreat that rises out of what McPhee would describe as a “silent world of austere beauty” (1). The project is captivating not merely because of its form or material, but because of its program as a meditation retreat for practicing Buddhists or others seeking to enter a silent world. It’s also a home away from home.
Read the interview with the Imbue’s design team after the break
Today the Nederlandse Tuinbouwraad (NTR) announced the City of Almere, along with it’s MVRDV-designed proposal, as winner of the prestigious world horticultural expo, Floriade 2022. The event takes place once every ten years in the Netherlands and is currently ending in Venlo.
The MVRDV plan for Almere is not a temporary expo site but a lasting green Cité Idéale as an extension to the existing city centre. The waterfront site opposite the city centre will be developed as a vibrant new urban neighborhood and also a giant plant library which will remain beyond the expo.
The ambition is to create a 300% greener exhibition than currently standard, both literally green and sustainable: each program on the site will be combined with plants which will create programmatic surprises, innovation and ecology. At the same time the site will be with a vast program such as a university, hotel, marina, offices and homes more urban than any other Floriade has ever been before, it is an exemplary green city. Continue after the break for more!
Featuring more than twenty-five films from eleven countries, public programs, and an architectural driving tour of Lower Manhattan, the fourth season of the Architecture and Design Film Festival is taking place October 18-21. Returning to Tribeca Cinemas, in New York City, the films in this year’s Festival consider a range of topics, including contemporary and historic visionary architects, the creative design process, architecture as cultural emissary, the creation of the High Line, and modernist architecture on the East and West Coasts, among other subjects. The Festival features two world premieres, two U.S. premieres, and numerous films shown in New York City for the first time. Tickets go on sale October 1. More information after the break.
The proposal for the New Harbor Service building by IaN+ aims to define a simple and severe architecture. The project’s construction scheme reflects eastern philosophy; its clean aesthetic and unadorned simplicity, where structure turns into a decorative system clearly defining space. The grandeur of the complex will become the new symbol of the city and at the same time, these openings as large telescopes, frame the view from the city towards the sea and the infinite. More images and architects’ description after the break.
North Carolina State University’s School of Architecture recently launched their Fall 2012 lecture series which focuses on “Material | Digital.” The series begins September 24th with Grace La of La Dallman. Featuring other keynote speakers throughout the series, it concludes on November 19th with a local practitioner panel. For more information, please visit their website here.
Opening October 12th, the ‘Pleated Shell Structures’ Exhibition consists of a short term, site specific research prototype designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid and her firm. Presented by the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in their gallery, the exhibit positions itself within the argument of parametric design research to focus its efforts on design methods that encompass an operative pathway from design intent to manifestation. The exhibition will be on display until December 2. More information after the break.
Several wineries and vineyards have captured the public’s eye in recent years thanks to their distinctive architecture, which thoroughly conveys the atmosphere of their surroundings while reflecting the tradition of the winemaker. Through selected vineyards, this book traces the path of winemaking from grape harvest to tasting – all through the eyes of architects and winemakers: Based on numerous conversations with them, the authors are able to tell the personal stories behind the origins of each building and how it relates to its special place, all while expressing the sensual experience that is part of the world of wine. Besides information about the various wine-growing regions and the history of “wine architecture”, the book familiarises the reader with the winemaking process and wine itself, making the book a handy wine and travel guide from the architect’s perspective.
With last year’s opening of the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero and the near-completion of the World Trade Center One, Daniel Libeskind’s vision for the World Trade Center site is close to presenting the future of NYC’s downtown financial center, 11 years after the attacks. Studio Daniel Libeskind was selected to develop the master plan for the site in 2003, and since has been coordinating with NYC’s numerous agencies and individual architects to rebuild the site. The project, in Libeskind’s words, is a “healing of New York”, a “site of memory” and “a space to witness the resilience of America”.
Follow us after the break for more on the elements and progress of the master plan.
3-D Printing technology is developing at quickening pace as both engineers and architects experiment with its technological and social potential. Consider Enrico Dini’s D-Shape printer that prints large scale stone structures out of sand and an inorganic binder or Neri Oxman’s research at MIT which involves a 3-D printing arm and nozzles that can print with a variety of different materials, from concrete to recycled plastic.
Dutch firm DUS Architects, in collaboration with Ultimaker Ltd, Fablab Protospace, and Open Coop, have added another 3-D printing machine to the list known as KamerMaker, the room builder. KamerMaker is the world’s first mobile 3d printer and has the ability to print “rooms” that are up to 11 feet high and 7 feet wide. The machine was unveiled at OFF PICNIC, a precursor to Amsterdam’s annual PICNIC technology festival.
Join us after the break for more.
Architects: Mestura Arquitectes Location: Lleida, Spain Project Year: 2010 Photographs: Jordi Clariana, David Capellas, Francesco Soppelsa
As part of the masterplan, ‘Bassin a Flots’ designed by ANMA/Nicolas Michelin, Barcode Architects and Habiter Autrement recently presented the Pôle de Compétences (Center for New Businesses). The 7,000m2 project will be a part of the masterplan, which aims on a phased transformation of the present introvert industrial harbor area into a new lively precinct with an urban mixture of living, working, and recreation. The slender 90 meter long and 21 meter tall building presents itself as a pure monolith volume stretching out over the entire length of the site. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The Thailand Pavilion, titled “Common Collage”, presents 100 ideas that can provide people with a common ground. The exhibition, curated by Apiradee Kasemsook, Nuttinee Karnchanarporn and Tonkao Panin, presents 40 boxes of equal size, volume and weight. The boxes were designed by different Thai architecture firms, designers, lecturers and students. Each one intends to speak within its own logic.
See more pictures of the Thailand Pavilion after the break
Designed by Cannon Design, the expansion of the University of California Riverside (UCR) Recreation Center will provide additional fitness and activity spaces integrating with the existing building and site creating a unified recreation complex. Located at the north boundary of the main campus within the natural Arroyo Zone, the design also includes views to the Box Springs Mountains to the east. The building is scheduled to open in 2014. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Serving as a backstage area for artists who perform at the Olympic Hall in Munich, the business area can be booked for conferences, meetings, seminars and other events. In order to meet established requirements calling for variable use of the business area, pfarré lighting design created a system which is as effective when the area has no partitions as when it is subdivided into separate areas. More images and their description after the break.
The HARDWARE SOFTCORE Installation, designed by Gabriele Falconi, is directed to the interaction of the viewer, to his involvement, even physical, as an actor aware of choices and paths. Of monumental size, its modular installation was born from the idea of using the standard scaffolding system, which is made of shiny galvanized steel, repeating and assembling in vertical and horizontal direction.“The use of construction element, the simplest, declined to unusual, different, ambiguous shapes. For a skeleton of a large lizard, a cathedral with many naves, an interstellar starship. All that is involved here is multiple and transforms itself, starting from temporary basis to monumental forms, contradicting its premises. And finding its attractive side in construction hardware.” – Falconi. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The St. James’s Market development, designed by Make Architects, is a key area in central London that will be reinvigorated if the plans, on behalf of The Crown Estate, are approved. As one of The Crown Estate’s flagship sites, the St. James’s Market project entails the redevelopment of six buildings to the south of Piccadilly Circus bounded by Jermyn Street, Haymarket and Regent Street. With much of the newly configured site being ‘traffic free’, the site will be divided around significant public realm improvements to include a new public square. More images and architects’ description after the break.
C+S Architects‘ contribution, Facecity, for the 2012 Venice Biennale, gives form to the idea of the curator, Fulvio Irace, of continuity in architecture. The exhibition reconsiders the architecture of Milan in the 50s and 60s, where architects, belonging to different generations and with different positions, built the identity of the city without giving up their personal poetics.
The central topic of this thought is the facade, commented by Alberto Savinio in Ascolto il tuo cuore città, 1945: ” …On the facade of buildings is not only written their date of birth, but also written the moods, the manners, the most secret thoughts of their time…, together with the flat window, theorized by Gio Ponti as the way to shape modernity.”
Continue after the break for more.
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the 2012 shortlist for the Stephen Lawrence Prize – an £5000 award that recognizes fresh talent with construction budgets of less than £1 million. The prize is sponsored by the Marco Goldschmied Foundation in memory of an aspiring young architect who tragically lost his life in 1993.
The 2012 Stephen Lawrence Prize shortlist is:
The winner will be announced at the RIBA Stirling Prize Dinner on October 13, 2012, in Manchester. The 2012 judges include architects Phil Coffey, Marco Goldschmied and Doreen Lawrence.
Continue after the break to learn more about each project.
Presented in an “interwoven tangle”, Japanese architect Akihisa Hirata has revealed his view of architecture and ecology, along with form and function, in his first ever international solo exhibition at the The Architecture Foundation in London. Now on view, the immersive 1:1 scale installation – “a contorted loop” – display’s over a hundred study models and conceptual sketches, an interview with the architect, and intimate films of based on his projects.
The exhibition opened shortly after Hirata’s receipt of the Golden Lion award at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale for his contribution, with Kumiko Inui, Sou Fujimoto and Naoya Hatakeyama, to the Japanese Pavilion, curated by Toyo Ito.
Continue after the break for more.
Designed and built by a very talented student team at Arizona State University, the Peritoneum shade structure reflects their collaboration and interdisciplinary skills as they employed their respective talents for this temporary shade structure. Originally built on a plaza space on the university campus, the project was recently moved to be displayed in a major art district in downtown Phoenix along Roosevelt Row. The design, which won the ASLA Student Award of Excellence 2012, is an undulating blue structure that evokes a calming, cooling environment, and captivates others by its daring interpretation of typical shade structures. More images and the students’ description after the break.
Designed and built by Dániel Baló, Dániel Eke, and Zoltán Kalászi, the concert hall installation in the Archabbey of Pannonhalma was intended for the classical concerts of the Arcus Temporum Festival. Fitted for the gym of the abbey’s boarding school, the installation uses just two elements as the artwork’s clear but complex structure still engulfed the spacious dimensions of the gym. The light bulbs’ strict geometrical grid and the parallel waving layers of the translucent textile, which also improved the gym’s acoustics, were dropped from the ceiling into the space below. More images and architects’ description after the break.
