Architect: Kris Yao | Artech Architects Location: Yilan County, Taiwan Clients: Yilan County Government Design Team: Glen Lu, Hua-Yi Chang, Fei-Chun Ying, Chih-Hao Chiang, Shun-Hui Chen, Tien-Kai Yang, Chii-Chang Jong, Christina Tseng, Lei Wang, Nina Yu, Jun-Ren Chou, Tien-Yu Lo Site Area: 39,426 sqm Total Floor Area: 12,472.74 sqm Completion: March 2010 Photographs: Jeffrey Cheng, Chi-Yi Chang
Our Facebook Fan Page has finally reached 500,000 fans, making it the largest architecture community in Facebook! To celebrate it, we partnered with Moleskine to host a fantastic giveaway.
Born in Munster – Germany and now based in Berlin, Christian Richters‘ working area is currently all over Europe, the USA and Asia, shooting projects for some renown architects like Bernard Tschumi, Toyo Ito, Zaha Hadid, UN Studio and David Chipperfield among others. He studied design and photography at the Folkwang Art School in Essen, but it was architecture that finally drove his career to the next level… And we are very lucky for that. He now works with VIEW Pictures, where you can check out his extensive portfolio of amazing architecture.
1. When and how did you start photographing architecture?
I have always been photographing – it started as a hobby when I was a young boy, and already then it was buildings, streets, industrial sites, ships which fascinated me.
After finishing my studies at Folkwang Art School in Essen, Germany, I initially mainly photographed historic architecture for books and magazines. In the early 1990s there was a shift towards contemporary architecture, and more and more architects were becoming my clients. This is what I am focussed on today, but I still maintain working on long-term historic projects for book publishers or NGOs.
Perkins+Will‘s VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre in Vancouver, BC is designed to meet the Living Building Challenge, the most rigorous set of requirements of sustainability. Formally and functionally, it encompasses the goals of environmentally and socially conscious design. The building is an undulating landscape of interior and exterior spaces rising from ground to roof level and providing a vast surface area on which vegetation could grow, thus reoccupying the land on which the building sits with the landscape. The building also features numerous passive and active systems that reuse the site’s renewable resources and the building’s own waste.
More photos after the break, including a video about the project!
During the 2011 AIA Arkansas Convention I had the chance to meet one of the most influential architects in the state: Marlon Blackwell.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal, announces the launch of the book and website related to its current major exhibition, Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, on view in the CCA’s main galleries for an extended run until 15 April, 2012.
Produced by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Lars Müller Publishers, the book, in French and English editions, bears the same title as the exhibition and is available from March 2012. Edited by exhibition curators Giovanna Borasi (Curator of Contemporary Architecture, CCA), and Mirko Zardini (Chief Curator and Director, CCA), the book extends the research produced for the exhibition and includes essays by leading academics Margaret Campbell, Nan Ellin, David Gissen, Carla C. Keirns, Linda Pollak, Hilary Sample, Sarah Schrank, and Deane Simpson.
The book investigates the historical connections between health, design and the environment, bringing to light uncertainties and contradictions in cultures informed by Western medicine. Within this framework, the essays it contains reflect on themes related to the exhibition such as the relationship between the built environment and human health; pollution; modernism and hygiene; planning strategies for dealing with urban disease; the challenges of the urban environment on health; the relationship between physical health and the built environment; urban design in an ageing society; and the impact of sun on health.
More about the book, the microsite and the exhibition after the break.
Together, Skylar Tibbits and Arthur Olson presented a large-scale installation at the 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA entitled The Self-Assembly Line – a large-scale version of a self-assembly virus module, demonstrated as an interactive and performative structure. A discrete set of modules are activated by stochastic rotation from a larger container/structure that forces the interaction between units. The unit geometry and attraction mechanisms (magnetics) ensure the units will come into contact with one another and auto-align into locally-correct configurations. Overtime, as more units come into contact, break away, and reconnect, larger, furniture scale elements emerge. Given different sets of unit geometries and attraction polarities various structures could be achieved. By changing the external conditions, the geometry of the unit, the attraction of the units and the number of units supplied, the desired global configuration can be programmed. Continue reading for more.
Designed by Henning Larsen Architects and Batteriid Architects, the Harpa Concert Hall was one of the finalists for Building of the Year. On the border between land and sea, the Center stands out as a large, radiant sculpture reflecting both sky and harbor space as well as the vibrant life of the city. This is all very elegantly represented in Pedro Kok‘s video which gives us more insight to the building from multiple viewpoints.
The ASM International World Headquarters, originally constructed in 1959, is an architectural composition by two influential designers during the mid-twentieth century: John Terence Kelly, who studied under Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius, and R. Buckminster Fuller, well known for his geodesic domes, environmentally-conscious designs and the dymaxion car. The complex includes the building, dome and garden on the 45-acre site known as Materials Park. The renovation, led by The Chesler Group and Dimit Architects, brings new life to Kelly’s building. According to Architectural Record, (Snapshot, Laura Raskin), Michael Chesler of The Chesler Group, campaigned to salvage the architectural marvel, giving it a place in the National Register of Historic Places and using tax credits to fund the renovation.
Pictures and details of the renovation after the break.
In 1995, Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza packed a few changes of clothes, some poetry books and a single sketchbook as he set forth to Peru. These few items were all he needed to record and interpret his voyage, allowing him to integrate his investigations into his architecture. More than a half a century earlier, Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi ventured into the peaks of Macchu Picchu were he captured a famous series of portraits of the ancient Inca ruins. His project was more political, it acted as a re-appropriation of the site by its locals, but the tools of Chambi and Siza are the same: the production of images to define a reality.
The Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) presents Alturas de Macchu Picchu: Martín Chambi – Álvaro Siza at work – an exhibit featuring thirty-five original sketches by Álvaro Siza alongside the historic 1920s photographs by Martín Chambi, now on view at in the CCA’s Octagonal Gallery until April 22, 2012. Continue reading for more information.
In memory of those persecuted in the seventeenth-century Finnmark Witchcraft Trials, the Steilneset Memorial rests along the jagged coastline of the Barents Sea in Vardø, Norway. Photographer Andrew Meredith has shared with us his photo series documenting this masterpiece created by a unique collaboration between the world-famous Swiss architect Peter Zumthor (Basel, 1943) and the influential contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois (Paris, 1911-2010).
Zumthor simply describes his collaboration with Bourgeois in an interview with ArtInfo as the following, “I had my idea, I sent it to her, she liked it, and she came up with her idea, reacted to my idea, then I offered to abandon my idea and to do only hers, and she said, ‘No, please stay.’ So, the result is really about two things — there is a line, which is mine, and a dot, which is hers… Louise’s installation is more about the burning and the aggression, and my installation is more about the life and the emotions .”
Continue reading to view the photographs and learn more about the Steilneset Memorial.
As a follow up to last weeks coverage on the Rio Carnival 2012 kick-off in Oscar Niemeyer’s newly renovated Sambadrome, we would like to share with you this stunning tilt-shift video capturing the essence of Rio de Janeiro and the colorful parade of the Carnival. You will also catch a glimpse of famous mosaic sidewalks of the Copacabana Beach Boardwalk designed by the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx.
Creators: Keith Loutit and Jarbas Agnelli Music: Jarbas Agnelli Special Thanks: Rede Globo, Liesa and Jodele Larcher
*This video was filmed during Carnival of 2011.
Architecture can be experienced in several ways, from writings to a travel, but so far it has been photography the main medium to transmit this experience. At ArchDaily we’ve had the chance to work with some of the world’s best photographers (amateur and pros), and in this section we present you more about their work and thoughts.
This time we present you Cristobal Palma (@CPalmaPhoto on Twitter, and Facebook), who has been featured several times at ArchDaily with his work that not includes architecture but also urban and documentary photography, which appears in media such as The New York Times, Monocle, Wallpaper, among others.
Back to the “experience”, Cristobal has been experimenting with video, exploring an enhanced experience that allows us to see architecture in a different, dynamic way. Take for example our recent feature about the Clifftop House in Maui by Dekleva Gregoric Arhitekti, in which the combination of video + text + drawings offers us another experience.
You can watch more videos by Cristobal Palma here. Full interview:
1. When and how did you start photographing architecture?
I started shooting architecture as a student at the Architectural Association and then I learned a bit more about the profession working as an assistant to Sue Barr. After working for Sue I slowly started to work independently for small practices in London and Santiago and for magazines.
Today, Wang Shu from Amateur Architecture Studio has been announced as the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate.
Here you will find a selection of his recent projects, such as the New Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the Ceramic House and the Ningbo History Museum.
The young architectural studio Urbanplunger was recently awarded third prize in the international competition to design a Night Club Hotel in the dense city of Hong Kong. Their proposal consists of a uniquely suspended building structure described as an “architectural parasite” that leans on neighboring buildings in order to elevate itself above ground. Read on for more.
