The challenges presented by the recession reveal the essence of a firm’s leadership by laying bare all the dormant weaknesses that were most likely put in place when times were good. What are these weaknesses? They are primarily related to the culture of a firm’s day-to-day operation, how its personnel are managed, classified, and compensated.
Keep reading after the break.
“I was privileged to collaborate with Bucky for the last 12 years of his life and this had a profound influence on my own work and thinking. Inevitably, I also gained an insight into his philosophy and achievements,” shared Lord Norman Foster.
Recreating the legendary futuristic Dymaxion Car, Foster’s No. 4 version was a lengthy and expensive two year project, but was obviously a labor of love. Buckminster Fuller’s futuristic three wheeled car was brief, with a mere three actually built. Incredibly efficient the streamlined body with long tail-fin averaged 35 miles to the gallon and could achieve 120 mph. The Zeppelin inspired design with a V8 Ford engine was intended to fly as well, Fuller’s vision of revolutionizing how people traveled.
More following the break.
Exploring modern design and a technological future, the 1930s World Fair’s held in Chicago, San Diego, Cleveland, Dallas, and New York featured architects and industrial designers such as Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, and Walter Dorwin Teague. A modern, technological tomorrow unlike anything seen before, the World Fair’s presented visions of the future including designs for the cities and houses of tomorrow with a lifestyle of modern furnishings which were viewed by tens of million of visitors.
Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s exhibition is currently on display at the National Building Museum in Washington DC thru July 10, 2011. Building models, architectural remnants, drawings, paintings, prints, furniture, along with period film footage are all included within the exhibit.
Designer of UK Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo, Thomas Heatherwick was one of the speakers featured at the recent 2011 TED conference. Heatherwick and his design team won the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) commission to create the Pavilion following a competition that attracted a shortlist of ambitious architectural proposals. Exploring the relationship between nature and cities Heatherwick Studio sought an approach that would engage meaningfully with Shanghai Expo’s theme, Better City, Better Life, and stand out from the anticipated trend for technology driven pavilions, filled with audio-visual content on screens, projections and speakers.
The Huffington Post sat down with Thomas Heatherwick following his TED talk. Discussing China’s building boom and his creative process the full interview is featured following the break.
“Architecture is too insular.” How many times have I heard this? Too many times to count. I’ve heard it from architects and non-architects, alike. It is not necessarily insular in the strict sense. It is more the case that it appears insular because it is self-referencing and self-validating. OK, so on second thought maybe it is just insular no matter how you define it. But my definition has more to do with the inward gaze of the profession that makes it a world unto itself. Like all worlds it has a need for celebrities.
More after the break.
The Bankside Bikeshed proposal is a prototype for a lightweight bicycle storage shelter that can be installed through London’s South Bank. The project is by James Khamsi, whose goal was to design a new “MICRON” for London, a ubiquitous and interwoven aspect of the city.
More on this project after the break.
In the Spring 2010 academic semester, Wiel Arets and Robert McCarter co-taught “A Wonderful World,” an advanced architectural design studio at Washington University in St. Louis. The students were asked to consider the following:
To understand the world we are living in at this moment, we have to redefine the “Map of the World,” a mental construct which at least since 1492 has undergone many reinterpretations. We could read the world anno 2020 as a collective living space for all of us, in which all the continents are in reach within 288 minutes, and the maximum travel distance at each continent will be 72 minutes, the time in which every city on each continent will be able to be reached. During the studio research, the world will be our territory, the continents are our daily living space, and the metropolitan three-dimensional city our home, surrounded by an untouched green/blue environment. The basic question we should put forward is: How will the city develop within our extremely exciting, complex, but “shrinking” world?
Washington University in St. Louis shared with us work from the studio. Follow the break for a description and drawings.
Students Featured: Andrew Buck, Shaun Dodson, Stephen Kim, Meredith Klein, Wai Yu Man, James Morgan, Aaron Plewke Images: Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis
We also suggest you look at how students responded to the same questions proposed by Wiel Arets at the Berlage Institute Postgraduate Research Laboratory “A Wonderful World” class.
This article was written entirely by hand in the margins of a book I’ve been trying to review for the last few months. The book is entitled Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, by Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Remember those days? Probably not.
Currently he is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at Cal Berkeley. My guess is that he is not well-known among architects—his books are comprised of dense fields of text and the only images are graphs and charts with numbers. Given the current challenges the profession is facing, I thought now would be an appropriate time to introduce him. Actually, it’s a pity his ideas—which by the way are not merely his alone—are circulating now when they could have been instrumental in preventing the current recession.
More after the break.
New architecture firm names are getting out of hand. It’s as if they are trying to sound like Indie bands. Barring that, they often fall back on “Atelier such and such.” One trendy use of atelier has been the “Atelier insert-your-name-here” variation. This has been way overdone. There is also the “Atelier theoretical buzz word” version.
Since a name is how you present your firm to the world, it’s worth giving it some serious consideration. It’s more important to be apt and appropriate rather than too creative with names. Save the creativity for your designs.
More after the break.
Sectionhouse is a public outdoor concrete sculpture, a fragment of a house that displays the ways in which daily life is enacted within architecture. The project is located in the small Dutch rural town of Oisterwijk and was designed by The Cloud Collective, a collaboration of young designers, architects, urban designers, artists and theorists, spread out all over Europe, working for different offices, schools and governments.
More on this project after the break.
PREFACE
Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Energy has been running the Solar Decathlon to promote innovation in sustainable building technologies. The program places twenty collegiate teams from around the world in competition to produce prototype homes capable of producing more energy than they consume and powered exclusively by the sun. This year, the teams received the surprise news that their “sites” have been changed from the Mall to an as yet undecided alternate location. Even though one of the conditions of participation in the contest is to provide for the replacement of damaged lawn areas, the Department of the Interior and the National Parks Service are worried about the grass. Judging from the current state of the lawn, it would probably be in better shape after the Decathlon teams have removed their houses and fixed it.
Here is a link to a heart-wrenching video produced by the SCI-arc/Cal Tech Team. They ask you to contact members of Congress and The White House. Please support the Decathletes by calling, emailing, tweeting, facebooking, and writing.
More after the break.
David Kohn Architects and artist Fiona Banner have been selected to design A Room for London, a temporary installation that will sit on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall at Southbank Centre, London and be part of the London 2012 Festival. ArchDaily has been showcasing selected entries to the competition for months now and can be seen here. For more information pertaining to David Kohn Architects and Fiona Banner‘s winning entry please follow after the break.
The three fountains located in the Republic Square of Pilsen were designed by Ondřej Císler and constructed in 2010 following a 2004 two-stage competition. It took five years for local authorities to accept the design that jurors of the competition very positively received. When in 2010 Pilsen was announced to be a European City of Culture in 2015, the decision to finally construct the fountains was approved.
More on the project after the break.
Miami Marine Stadium, designed by architect Hilario Candela in 1963, hosted many events – political rallies, boat races, concerts, church services, television shows, movie set for Clambake staring Elvis Presley, and was an important part of the Miami area until 1992 when it fell to disrepair. After much dialogue and arm twisting the Miami Marine Stadium is to be preserved many thanks to the Friends of Marine Stadium. Original architect Hilario Candela, along with Jorge Hernandez, Catherine Lynn and students from the University of Miami’s Architectural Preservation Studio, have created a concept for the revitalization which has been incoprated officially in the to the Virginia Key Masterplan. A hopeful 2012 grand re-opening is planned for this important local neighborhood civic plaza.
More photographs following the break.
Rocker-Lange architects shared with us the release of their research project, Serial Architecture – Systems of Multiplicities, which was also part of the exhibit “Quotidian Architectures” in the Hong Kong Pavillion at the Venice Biennale 2010. The project, accompanied by a 400+ book, rethinks quotidian architecture in Hong Kong, a city with an average density of over 6,300 people per square kilometer. More images and architect’s description after the break.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
– Oscar Wilde
I’m drawn to John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals” for many reasons but primarily because it takes something obvious and turns it inside-out to reveal dimensions that were completely unexpected. The way he describes our cultural and personal engagement with animals got me thinking about how we look at architecture and why we look at it. What are we trying to see there? And is there a there there?
More after the break.
This week, we present the first of a special series called “Post-Occupancy” in which we feature the experience of the owner-dweller in different types of architectural spaces. Our goal is to present architecture by letting the users narrate for themselves what it means to them, how they experience it, how it has transformed them. We pose the questions. What do owners want? What do they need? How do they experience their homes after they’ve lived in them for a while?
Often, architectural discourse begins and ends with the designer. Here, the owners come first. They provide the answers in their own words, without the dialect of the discipline mediating what they say.
In this first installment, the goal was to examine the experience of domestic space from the point of view of a globe-trotting intellectual couple. James Massengale and Tracey Sands are both scholars. And as is the way of many academics, they have more than one residence: one in the United States and one abroad, located in the region of their studies. In this case, that is Scandinavia. And this is what they had to say.
More after the break.
This prototype system, Homeostatic Facade, is the latest in green building design. The line maze like facade consists of material that flexes and bends as an artificial muscle fighting solar heat gain by changing shape on its own. No computer programing or physical adjustments required. The system regulates a buildings climate by auto responding to environmental conditions and has an advantage over other systems because of its low power consumption and localized control.
Check out the video of the moving Homeostatic Facade following the break.
