With the guidance of their instructor Matthias Hollwich, students Andreas Tjeldflaat and Greg Knobloch from University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design have proposed an alternative to the traditional prisons seen throughout the United States. The innovative high-rise penitentiary acknowledges the fact that nearly two-thirds of the 14,000 inmates released annually from New Jersey correctional facilities will return to prison within five years. 499.SUMMIT offers a solution that intends to reverse that statistic and help inmates successfully transition back into society.
Known as an architect, artist and cartoonist, Jimenez Lai has lectured on and exhibited his work nationally and internationally. He is known for his imaginative cartoon narratives and architectural installations. He is the founder of Bureau Spectacular and currently an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. His graphic novel, Citizens of No Place, will be published by the Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation this year.
Created by Reiser + Umemoto for the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, “Manhattan Memorious” explores what Manhattan could have been. The film visualizes several unrealized projects from Manhattan, including Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Midtown, Rem Koolhaas’ City of the Captive Globe, RUR’s East River Corridor, Paul Rudolph’s Eastside Redevelopment Corridor, Morphosis’ West Side Yard and others.
Filmed in 1921, Manhatta reveals a typical day in Lower Manhattan in the early part of the 20th century. Painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand created this silent film to discover the relationship between film and photography, while exploring their love to the City. Just as it is today, the City is amidst endless chaos.
Koen Olthuis’s Dutch practice, Waterstudio, has been preparing for the environmental impacts on architecture for ten years now – building a practice on the assumption that a new solution for inhabitation is on the water. Having lived in Amsterdam, Olthuis has intimate experience with the battle against water that people have posed for themselves. In an interview with Jill Fehrenbacher for Inhabitat, Olthuis describes how Amsterdam was settled, what it means to have a city built upon water and the maintenance required. Olthuis’ desire to colonize the oceans is not new, but his techniques, which he touches upon in this TEDx Talk in Warwick, focus on a refined and innovative way of approaching this strategy that is progressive in that it requires far less maintenance.
Oyler Wu Collaborative, in collaboration with Michael Kalish, shared with us their video, reALIze, which documents the development and fabrication of the 2011 reALIze installation, a tribute to the life and cultural significance of Muhammad Ali. The project is aimed at exposing a new generation to this larger than life character by building an appreciation for the nuanced emotional, aesthetic, and technical principles that collectively form experience – a concept that holds true as much for human persona as it does for architecture.
In this TEDx Talk, Jason Roberts – known as the “The Bike Guy” in his Oak Cliff community outside of Dallas, Texas – gives his audience a how-to guide in improving a community one block at a time as part of a project called “The Better Block“. The project did not start off as an organization with vast goals and strong following; instead it started off with Roberts’ interest and desire to develop his community into one that had a legacy apart from the highways and overpasses that dominate the landscape. Inspired by the rich history and existing street life of European cities with their historic buildings and monuments, plazas, and vistas; Roberts started small and eventually built a foundation and organization that is now nationally recognized and used as a tool to develop cities across the country.
Above is a video of NOW presenting their project, Kulttuurisauna, a new public building for the city of Helsinki, the World Design Capital 2012. Their design features saunas, cafe, offices, and a courtyard that opens directly to the sea. Using their model as a reference, you are able to get a sense of the spaces and their relationship to each other, as well as to the city itself which is discussed in the video.
Denmark's third largest city, Odense, has a major transformative plan for their city center by 2020. In the 1960s, the Thomas B Thriges Gade allowed Odense to accomodate the demands of growing vehicular traffic, but since then, the city has been hard pressed to break from this defining infrastructure. Utopian City Scape and Entasis have teamed to create a multi-stage development plan for the city center as a way to restore the cohesiveness of a city that has been fragmented by the Thomas B Thriges. The plan sees the introduction of a massive amount of building (more than 55,000 sqm!) that will provide over 300 housing opportunities and 1000 work places. By filling in the street, the smaller networks of secondary streets will be strengthened to create pedestrian passageways and prominades, creating intimate moments that become defined by the edges of the buildings. While we enjoy the light rail system that works its way around the city center, the idea of including a parking lot that accommodates nearly 1000 vehicles seems a bit contradictory. Perhaps, without it, citizens would rely move heavily upon the public infrastructure and the new "connected" feeling of the city to circulate. The absence of cars would further strengthen Odense's move away from a city defined by the vehicle and would allow the master plan to implement its sustainability theme on a macro level.
Beijing-born architect Ma Yansong has become an important, emerging voice to a new generation of architects. Shortly after establishing MAD architectsin 2004, his practice earned worldwide attention (2006) by winning an international competition to design a residential tower near Toronto, expected to be completed in the summer of 2012. In this interview with Studio Banana TV, Yansong discusses a few of his latest works, including MAD’s first museum completed last year in Ordos, Inner Mongolia. Continue reading for more information.
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.
Explore the stunningly beautiful and vibrant city of Berlin through the eyes of resident and film producer, Pilpop. He believes that it is the inhabitants in which make Berlin such a unique city. To observe and attempt to understand the way in which people use the city is quite possibly the ultimate form of education, as there is something new to discover each time you turn a corner.
Video: Pilpop Music: “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” by Franz Liszt
