Tensegrity Sculptures by Kenneth Snelson

The sculptures of Kenneth Snelson based on the principles of tensegrity have been around for 40+ years, but I was re-introduced to his work by one of my students who had recently gotten ahold of the book of his work, Forces Made Visible, that came out earlier this year. His work is simultaneously very simple and very complex, both in principle and in physical execution, creating pieces that are both sculpture and engineering.

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go HERE to read more about tensegrity than you ever though you would want to know

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and go HERE to check out the book on amazon

Brain Wave Sofa: Sitting in your Brainwave EEG Data by Lucas Maassen

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The physical shape of the Brainwave Sofa [lucasmaassen.com] by Lucas Maassen and Dries Verbruggen from Unfold is determined by a 3 second wave of Alpha brain activity captured as an elektro-encefalogram (EEG) using a set of electrodes connected to the head. It shows the 3 seconds when the eyes are closed, as the Alpha activity is peculiar because it strengthens when one closes the eyes in contrast to other brain activity that dims. This, in fact, is to prepare the brain for the large input of signals when one opens the eyes.

The data is represented as a 3D data landscape by a computer application for visualizing neuro-feedback: the depth is the frequency of the brain-activity in hertz, the height is the strength of the signal, and the length is the timescale. Based on this 3D-EEG data, the file got directly milled in foam by a 3D CNC milling machine and then upholstred in felt by hand.

The resulting Brainwave Sofa is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a futuristic production workflow in which the designer only has to close his eyes and a computer ‘prints’ the result out as a functional form.

See also Tidal Data Table, Sound Chair and Sound of Light.

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via information aesthetics

Nomadic Wonderland by Enusuk Hur

Nomadic Wonderland by Enusuk Hur is an intricately formulated modular textile design system. The component based fabric system can be reconfigured into an endless number of different clothing/interiors/texture/sculpture configurations.

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via Enusuk Hur

Audiochmura (Audiocloud) by Piotr Adamski and mode:lina

A project of Audiochmura (Audiocloud) was inspired by the concept of Audioarchitektura (Sonicarchitecture) – brainchild of artist Piotr Adamski andmode:lina. It is a sonic installation using corrugated pipes as amplifiers emitting sounds gathered around its actual position. The shape of a cloud relates to something ephemeral, almost non-existent and likely to move. Audioarchitektura (Sonicarchitecture) is a utopian vision of a city that cannot be heard. An innovative system of sound emission, which isolates people from the unbearable audiosphere of crowded streets, traffic and all the noise that unnaturally has become an inseparable part of our life. Invisible Sonic-buildings, spread along the sidewalks, in parks and boulevards, emitting sound waves that drown out the city noise. Passer-by walking in their range are surrounded by the sound of hypnotic composition of Steve Reich’s concert, broadcasted live from the concert hall or a melody of raindrops falling on the tin roofs of urban buildings. Today this is a utopian technology, but Sonic Architecture is also a basis for discussion on acoustic ecology, city’s acoustic landscape and its impact on the inhabitants.

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via mode:lina

BIG Wins Competition for the World Village of Women Sports / Malmø

Danish architects BIG, in collaboration with British structural and civil engineering firm AKT, Swedish consultant Tyréns and German climate engineers Transsolar have just been awarded first place in a design competition in Malmø, Sweden for a 100,000 m2 first of its kind sports facility. The World Village of Women Sports seeks to create a natural gathering place for the research, education and training in all areas connected to the development of women’s sports. Located in the center of Malmø, the 100,000 m2 facility will create a regional landmark and new attraction for the area. The winning design was chosen among five submissions by a jury, comprised of the founder and main financier of the World Village of Women Sports, Kent Widding Persson, the co-founder and entrepreneur Mårten Hedlund, City of Malmø Architect,Ingemar Gråhamn and Architects Mats Jacobson and Cecilia Hansson together with representatives from the City of Malmø.

“BIGs design places great emphasis on architecture tailored to women with an unconstrained atmosphere and a feeling of well-being. The architects see the WVOWS as a town within a town rather than just a sports complex. The decisive factor has been the holistic approach and the overall impression of the design – the ability to interact with the neighborhood and environment, and creating attractive housing and functions at the same time.” – Mats Jacobson, Jury Member, WVOWS.

Composed as a village rather than a sports complex the WVOWS combines individual buildings with a variety of uses with open spaces and public gardens. The sloping roofscapes and alternating building volumes provide the complex with the varying identity of a small village thus reducing its scale to the adjacent neighborhood. The interior streets animated through public functions resemble a medieval downtown, supporting all aspects of human life – generous living, work and intensive play.

“Considering the special requirements of women of all cultures and all ages, special attention has been given, to provide the sports village with a feeling of intimacy and well being often lacking in the more masculine industrial-style sports complexes that are more like factories for physical exercise, than temples for body and mind.” – Bjarke Ingels, Partner-In-Charge, BIG

The central hall is large enough to accommodate professional football matches as well as concerts, conferences, exhibitions and flea markets. Rather than being an introverted sports arena shut off from the surrounding city – it appears like an open and welcoming public space, visible from all of the surrounding streets – generously offering its interior life to the passers-by. The pedestrian network around the main sports hall plugs into the surrounding street networks as well as the interior galleries of Kronprinsen, turning it into a complete ecosystem of urban life.

“The WVOWS fuses high levels of ambition within public space and private accommodation, living and working, health and recreation, sport and culture. Like a village rather than sports complex it merges the modern utopianism of the neighboring Kronprinsen with the intimate scale and specificity of the nearby historical city center of Malmø.” – Bjarke Ingels, Partner-In-Charge, BIG

“From the main football field at its heart, to the gyms and auditoria, from the handball halls of the university to the laboratories of the health facility, it is an entire village committed to sport.” – Nanna Gyldholm Møller, Project Leader, BIG

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via Bustler

“Cercle et suite d’éclats” / Vercorin / Switzerland by Felice Varini

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Last summer, Felice Varini did this installation called “Cercle et suite d’éclats” in Vercorin, Switzerland. The scale of this point of view artwork is very impressive.

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via todayandtomorrow

Low-cost chapel in Los Junquillos by Claudio Baladron Z. and Diego Grass P.

Today we’re delighted to present you with the project designed by Chilean architects Claudio Baladron Z. and Diego Grass P. for a new  little chapel in Los Junquillos, in the mountain region of Maule, South Chile. The project represent a simple but virtuous example of low res ex novo intervention in a difficult location. The same simple chosen materials allow to achieve a rarefied beauty mostly expressed by the pine wood in the interiors. The stern exterior reminds a depot, an industrial prefabricated. Despite the interiors keep the same essentiality and are definetely far from the european traditional church decorativism, the space releases a real sense of spirituality. The building polyfunctionality is not prejudicial to this warmth: village civil and spiritual activities co-exist in the same space, now public property of Los Junquillos.

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from the Architects:

There are oaks, wind and rain coming from the west. A dusty road is at the east.
Community soccer field is south; bamboo and empty beer cans all over the north.
Now there is also a wooden barn structure over a concrete platform,
with corrugated metal cladding in the outside and pine boards in the inside,
plus 100 chairs, lectern, altar, virgin figure and a cross.
Mass is once a month, community activities every evening. Both happen in the same space.
A new chapel for 100 people in the remote countryside of Southern Chile.

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via Yearbook

Detroit Ice Home by Matthew Radune & Gregory Holm

DETROIT — A photographer and an architect plan to freeze one Detroit’s thousands of abandoned homes this winter, encasing it in ice to draw attention to foreclosures that have battered the region.

The project from Gregory Holm and Matthew Radune, dubbed Ice House Detroit, is the latest example of the remnants of Detroit’s population loss and industrial decline serving as both artistic inspiration and canvas.

“I’ve been really fascinated by the whole mythology of Detroit and the structures and what they represent,” said Holm, who grew up on Detroit’s east side and lived in the suburb of Hamtramck from 1997 until moving to New York City four years ago.

Holm, 38, plans to photograph the transformation of the house, which will be sprayed with water and gradually covered in ice. In the spring, crews will salvage what building materials can be reused and demolish the home. The lot will be donated, probably for a community garden.

The Detroit area has a foreclosure rate that’s among the nation’s highest, and Radune said the city offers a unique backdrop for the artists’ work.

“It’s a project that couldn’t be done in the same way in New York City and it wouldn’t necessarily make the same sense,” said Radune, a 32-year-old freelance architect in Brooklyn who also is a DJ. “Detroit was a place where we could make it into more than architectural installation.”

Holm and Radune now are working to raise $11,000 online to fund the project, mostly for costs related to demolition, and hope to soon figure out where in the city they’ll freeze a home.

Detroit, which has shrunk from a population of 1.8 million in the 1950s to half that now, has tens of thousands of vacant homes and buildings.

“It’s Detroit’s distinctive history that makes it so resonant for this kind of work,” said John Beardsley, an adjunct professor with Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “It was a go-go city that in recent years has been identified as gone.

“This is not to say that Detroit can’t come back, but there is a particular poignance to this history.”

One deteriorating Detroit neighborhood became the outdoor art gallery for Tyree Guyton, whose more than two-decade-old Heidelberg Project has drawn international attention. Guyton transformed the houses, streets and lots with his colorful polka-dot art and collections of stuffed animals, shoes and old appliances.

More recently, a group calling itself Object Orange painted the shells of crumbling Detroit buildings bright orange to call attention to the city’s blight and decay.

Radune developed the idea for Ice House while studying architecture at Rice University in Houston. After talking it over with Holm earlier this year, they decided to collaborate. A book and film about the project also are planned.

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Ice House Detroit: http://icehousedetroit.blogspot.com

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via AP

Winners Announced for the Lavender Lake Art Factory Competition

The winning designs of the suckerPUNCH-curated Lavender Lake Art Factory competition have recently been announced. The international competition asked architects to submit concepts for an ‘art factory’ at the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York that will contain private/shared art studios, a storefront gallery/bar, analog/digital shops, and live/work spaces for rotating artists in residence. Both the interior and exterior realizations of the project should rethink the white boxes of modern art work and display spaces and conceive a sequence of spaces that address the diversity of contemporary art and design at multiple scales.

The jury comprised Abigail Coover (Hume Coover Studio, suckerPUNCH), Nathan Hume (Hume Coover Studio, suckerPUNCH), Mike Szivos (SOFTlab), Jose Gonzalez (SOFTlab), Armand Graham (Asymptote), Serra Kiziltan (Gage Clemenceau Architects), and Philip Mana (Studio Daniel Libeskind).

And these are the winning designs:

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1st Place: “Water Fields”
Pablo Esteban Zamorano & Marcos Cardenas (Santiago de Chile, Chile)

An art factory, an open public space, a beach, a picnic field, a crop garden, a space for the community and for culture, a land open to the water, the city and the arts. The border condition (water-land) of this site made us think about how these limits could react with each other to create something new. An hybrid space product of a simple movement: the inundation of the site, the analysis of a close up view of the canal and the projection of that into the site as a geometry, to translate what used to be water into land but now as a construction of the memory of the canal. The Gowanus Canal is now a new public space for the city that brings the canal back to the people.

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2nd Place: “Lavender Lake Art Factory”
David Jaubert (Brooklyn, New York)

Given the disparate relationship between the factory typology and public place exemplified by the surrounding context, the project seeks to explore the tension between the two as an impetus for a potential hybrid type. By shifting the ground plane on the site, the project’s parti allows for the multiplicity of the datum rather than it’s displacement, resulting in a site condition that aims to extend the synthesis between the public and private domain.

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3rd Place: “Lavender Lake Art Factory”
Chiara Gambassi & Jan Kudlicka (Bucine, Italy)

What or who influenced this project: Typical rude ambience of Brooklyn, train bridge on one side and the river on the other side. The urbanistic juxtaposition of the industry in the east and the living area in the west. Missing of the green places. So we tried to make a project which has got some similar story with the surroundings but with using new materials. Create the place with the symbiosis between the park/building.

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Honorable Mention: “HydroCarbon Architecture”
Cesare Griffa, Davide Guerra + Federico Rizzo/r&d Architecture (Turin, Italy)

The Gowanus site is A toxic body in which the degeneration of the space is a direct consequence of the industrial and criminal activities that took place here over time. The environmental clean up is a necessity. There is an hygienic problem that needs to be addressed, and social potential that need to be unveiled. A mere sterilization of the site is not enough, there is a need of oxygen to sustain life. The appearance of a Gowanus social movement can be the engine of renovation. Such a movement requires a specific space that embed also the dark and degenerated aspects of the area within an hygienic project.

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Honorable Mention: “YMCArt Center on the Gowanus”
Vanessa Keith/Studioteka Design (Brooklyn, New York)

Our project emphasizes public space for the community, a YMCA with a twist: art spaces + community spaces + research spaces. The main building, located to the north along fifth street, combines space for art with an environmental research and remediation program, including offices and research labs, which makes the project economically sustainable. We were intrigued by the concept of industrial symbiosis and the notion that the site’s industrial legacy could be transformed into an amenity for local residents. By incorporating site remediation within the program and structure, the project serves as a demonstration of a new locally focused strategy.

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via Bustler

Breathing Chair / Tofu Chair by Yu-Ying Wu

Taipei-based industrial designer Yu-Ying Wu’s Breathing Chair resembles a block of aerated tofu. Closer inspection reveals that the triangular voids vary in size, and their placement has been carefully calculated; the large triangles at the top-front-center “give” the most, creating a chair-like shape when compressed by a human body.

Wu’s chair, inspired by plant cells, took home a Red Dot Design Award in the home furniture design concept category earlier this year.

Not much in the way of information on production of further pictures – we’ll keep you posted as soon as we know more.

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via core77