Abandoned Spaces / Georges Rousse
Georges Rousse is a French photographer who makes photos of desolate or abandoned spaces. But before he does that, he paints some precise geometrical shapes which are some kind of optical illusions.
Winners Announced of Designs for Australia’s cities 2050+ Competition
The Final stage in the process of choosing entries from the national ‘Designs for Australia’s cities 2050+’ competition to be exhibited in the Australian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale has been announced. A total of 17 proposals were chosen from the shortlist.
Most of these will be rendered in 3D for screening in the Australian Pavilion in Venice, while others may be incorporated in a smaller capacity.
The Creative Directors were impressed by the range of approach and philosophy of the ideas expressed in both stages of the ‘Designs for Australian Cities 2050+’ Competition. In many ways the competition exceeded expectations and they look forward to broadcasting selected entries on the worldwide stage of the Biennale.
The team’s two-part ‘NOW + WHEN Australian Urbanism’ exhibition will highlight six of Australia’s most interesting urban and anti-urban regions as they are ‘NOW’, before dramatically representing the 17 futuristic urban environments from the competition imagining a ‘WHEN’ we reach 2050 and beyond.
The teams chosen to contribute to the exhibition are:
Sydney 2050: Fraying Ground, RAG URBANISM, Richard Goodwin (Richard Goodwin Art/Architecture), Andrew Benjamin, Gerard Reinmuth (TERRIOR)
Symbiotic City, Steve Whitford (University of Melbourne, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning) + James Brearley (BAU Brearley Architects and Urbanists, Adjunct Professor RMIT)
The Fear Free City, Justyna Karakiewicz, Tom Kvan and Steve Hatzellis
A City of Hope, EDMOND & CORRIGAN, Design – Peter Corrigan (everything), Realisation – Michael Spooner (and support)
Mould City, Colony Collective, Madeleine Beech, Jono Brener, Nicola Dovey, Peter Raisbeck and Simon Wollan
Sedimentary City, Brit Andresen and Mara Francis
Aquatown, NH Architecture with Andrew Mackenzie
Multiplicity, John Wardle Architects & Stefano Boscutti
Ocean City, Arup Biomimetics, Alanna Howe, Alexander Hespe
-41 + 41, Peck Dunin Simpson Architects, Fiona Dunin, Alex Peck, Andrew Simpsons in association with Martina Johnson, Third Skin, Eckersley Garden Architecture, Angus McIntyre, Tim Kreger
Survival vs Resilience, BKK Architects (Tim Black, Julian Kosloff, Simon Knott, George Huon, Julian Faelli, Madeleine Beech, Jane Caught and Steffan Heath) Village Well, Charter Cramer and Daniel Piker
Terra Form Australis, HASSELL, Holopoint & The Environment Institute, Tim Horton, Tony Grist, Prof Mike Young, Ben Kilsby, Sharon Mackay, Susie Nicolai, Mike Mouritz
Island Proposition 2100 (IP2100), Scott Lloyd, Aaron Roberts (room11) and Katrina Stoll
Implementing the Rhetoric, Harrison and White with Nano Langenheim, Marcus White, Stuart Harrison and Nano Lagenheim
How Does it Make You Feel (HDIMYF), Ben Statkus (Statkus Architecture), Daniel Agdag, Melanie Etchell, William Golding, Anna Nguyen, Joel Ng
Loop-Pool / Saturation City, McGauran Giannini Soon (MGS), Bild + Dyskors, Material Thnking, MGS – Eli Giannini, Jocelyn Chiew, Catherine Ranger, Bild – Ben Milbourne, Dyskors – Edmund Carter, Material Thinking – Paul Carter
a tale of two cities, Billard Leece Partnership Pty Ltd
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via Bustler
MAP Manual of Architectural Possibilities) 002 QUARANTINE by David Garcia Studio
RADDblog previously reported on MAP 001 ANTARCTICA by David Garcia Studio, and they are now releasing the second installment: MAP 002 QUARANTINE.
from the designers:
DAVID GARCIA STUDIO is proud to be exhibiting at the prestigious STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE in New York, at the “LANDSCAPES OF QUARANTINE” exhibition, curated by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley. The Studio will be exhibiting and launching the second issue of MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities). MAP 001 focused on Antarctica, and with MAP 002 QUARANTINE will be investigating and questioning the subject through research and projects, and the realm of architectural ideas. Four projects are treated on this issue: A Domestic Isolation Unit, an Instantly Quarantinable Farm, a Zoo of Infectious Species, and a Quarantined Library on a cargo ship. Along with the projects, our fact page will focus on a series of topics regarding quarantine, from the biological to the political, the geographical and beyond. We are happy to have Peter Cook along again, writing the introduction. Each number of MAP 002 is individually numbered from 1 to 2000.
The opening will take place Tuesday evening, March 9th at 7 pm, where MAP will be on sale.
“LANDSCAPES OF QUARANTINE”
9th March – 17th April, 2010
STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE
97 Kenmare Street New York, NY 10012
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Contemplating The Void / Iwamoto Scott
Iwamoto Scott’s proposal for the Guggenheim’s Contemplating the Void.
LIGHTCONE uses fiber-optic lines to turn the void into a light channel with different purposes:
Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim itself, LightCone forms a choreography of light, art and movement through space.
Informed by Wright’s spiral-conical geometries, LightCone combines three different arrays of suspended fiber-optic lines: 1) The central conical array transmits and transforms the light of the sky from the large overhead skylight. 2) The surrounding spiral array pulls in the changing light of the city outside from the spiraling skylights that follow the ramp. At night these two arrays switch over to artificial light powered by batteries, solar-charged from transparent photovoltaic film applied to the skylight glass. 3) The peripheral array’s mediated light projects images from the NY Guggenheim’s collection. Fed from a digital database, these images can be arranged in a variety of ways: by default they are organized chronologically along the building’s five ramped galleries into five decades. Within each structural bay between the supporting piers, the viewer can use an interactive device to reorganize a sampling of the collection by artist, by genre, by size, by color, etc.
LightCone ultimately attempts to further Wright’s interests in exploring the plasticity of structure, the continuity of space, and “bringing the circle into the third and fourth dimension”, while integrating five decades of content from the Guggenheim’s collection into the building’s spatial experience.
- Iwamoto Scott Architecture
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via archdaily
The Dovecote Studio by Haworth Tompkins
….London architects Haworth Tompkins have inserted a Corten steel artist’s studio into a ruined Victorian dovecote in Suffolk, UK.
Called The Dovecote Studio, the structure has a pitched rood and occupies the same space as the original building’s interior.
A skylight in the north side of the roof illuminates the plywood interior, which includes a mezzanine with a desk and corner window overlooking marshes towards the sea.
The steel was welded together to form a watertight box, constructed on-site and lifted into the brick shell by a crane.
from the architects:
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The Dovecote Studio
The Dovecote Studio forms part of the internationally renowned music campus at Snape Maltings, founded by Benjamin Britten in derelict industrial buildings on the Suffolk coast.
Britten was inspired by the almost abstract landscape of the reedbeds at the boundary between the land and the sea: the ruins of a nineteenth century dovecote sit directly on this boundary, looking out across the marshes.
The Dovecote Studio inhabits the ruins and expresses the internal volume of the Victorian structure as a Cor-ten steel ‘lining’, a monocoque welded structure that was built next to the ruin and craned in when complete.
The building is fully welded in a single piece, like the hull of a ship, to achieve weather tightness, and then fitted with a simple plywood inner lining.
A large north light roof window provides even light for artists, while a small mezzanine platform with a writing desk incorporates a fully opening glazed corner window that gives long views over the marshes towards the sea.
The single volume will be used by artists in residence (it can operate as a simple bedsitting room with a compact kitchen), by musicians as rehearsal or performance space (there is a large opening door to an adjoining courtyard), by staff for meetings or as a temporary exhibition space.
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via dezeen
Echo House / Ottawa / Ontario / Canada by Kariouk Associates
Task
To marry eighty-four years of history by integrating a contemporary, open and functional living space inside a 1924 landmark that overlooks the Rideau Canal.
Project Challenge
The starting point for this renovation was a modest Victorian home in poor condition, whose rooms with small windows and dark interior spaces were separated from one another, as was typical of homes built in an era when privacy was a cultural priority. In another gesture to Victorian public decorum, the arrangement of the existing interior spaces reinforced the antiquated ideal that work life and family life should be kept distinct. Although the client required the renovated space to welcome work life in the home while continuing to maintain clear separations from their family life, it was also important to create a modern, bright space that, albeit small in size, would still appear spacious and visually connected.
Project Response
Echo: noun; “A sympathetic or identical response, as to sentiments expressed; a lingering trace or effect”.
That the house had scarcely been changed since it was originally constructed was both a virtue and a challenge that enabled design opportunities. The footprint of the house is small (approximately seven-hundred square feet). It was therefore not possible to create a loft-like setting on the ground floor that seemed simultaneously open and provided the required distinct work/living spaces. The house was re-envisaged as a vertical loft – an open, four-storey volume reaching from the basement to the ceiling of the new roof. The new main level and former basement level are opened to each other by a wide stair that highlights views to the home’s original stone foundation walls. Hence, the former Victorian main living level, once segregated into four separate rooms, is now made open and spacious. The small, original windows are replaced with large windows both at the front and rear of the new parlour, visually extending that space into the front yard and the back yard, and, finally, enabling views from the back yard (all the way through the house) to views of the Rideau Canal.
The remaining spatial requirements included very private spaces: a study that could accommodate several thousand books, a den, and a master-bedroom suite. In order to achieve the seemingly paradoxical request for a loft-like home but with spaces as private as the former Victorian ones, the study, den, and “book vault” are designed as distinct volumes suspended inside the larger, four-storey volume. Because these volumes “float” high up within the now-emptied shell of the original house, they achieve the required visual privacy from the parlour below and the street outside (despite the expanded areas of windows). Though these spaces are small, they are bright and airy and seem large since they all have visual access to both windows and other interior spaces of the home.
The very most private areas of the redesigned house (such as closets, toilets, and stairs) are arranged along the south wall of the house and are shielded by a three-storey hickory “modesty screen.” At the top level, the master-bedroom suite cantilevers over the front facade and yard and also appears as a distinct, floating volume, and forms a canopy over the entry. In this way, the former attic space of the Victorian house is redesigned to provide for light and views where none existed before in the original home, and due to its elevated position, it does so while maintaining privacy. At the initial request of the clients, this renovation allows the values of a bygone era to be given voice in the current era.
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via archdaily
QUINTA MONROY by Elemental
To put it simply, this project is amazing. From mammoth:
Quinta Monroy is a center-city neighborhood of Iquique, a city of about a quarter million lying in northern Chile between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert. Elemental’s Quinta Monroy housing project settles a hundred families on a five thousand square meter site where they had persisted as squatters for three decades. The residences designed by Elemental offer former squatters the rare opportunity to live in subsidized housing without being displaced from the land they had called their home, provides an appreciating asset which can improve their family finances, and serves as a flexible infrastructure for the self-constructed expansion of the homes.
The first challenge that Elemental faced was a strict budgetary limit of $7500 (USD), the standard Chilean per-family housing subsidy. This subsidy would have to purchase the land, architecture, and infrastructure of the development, yet is only enough — at market-rate construction costs in Chile — to buy thirty square meters (322 square feet) of built space on such a center-city site. Because of this, social housing in Chile tends to be produced as outlying sprawl, where land can be bought more cheaply, allowing a greater percentage of the subsidy to be devoted to the architecture. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not fully elucidated in Elemental’s project description (though I am led to believe those reasons are the low value of the land social housing is usually built on and the low quality of the construction), social housing in Chile tends to depreciate in value, rather than appreciate, further miring families in poverty, as the housing subsidy is the largest single sum of aid that most impoverished families will receive from the Chilean government. If that movement could be altered — if the housing could be designed so that it appreciates rather than depreciates — it might be the difference between long-term poverty and a gradual climb towards sustainable familial self-sufficiency.
Elemental’s first decision was to retain the inner city site, a decision which was both expensive and spatially limiting: there is only enough space on the site to provide thirty individual homes or sixty-six row homes, so a different typology was required. High rise apartments would provide the needed density, but not provide the opportunity for residents to expand their own homes, as only the top and ground floors would have any way to connect to additions. Elemental thus settled on a typology of connected two-story blocks, snaking around four common courtyards, designed as a skeletal infrastructure which the families could expand over time:
We in Elemental have identified a set of design conditions through which a housing unit can increase its value over time; this without having to increase the amount of money of the current subsidy.
In first place, we had to achieve enough density, (but without overcrowding), in order to be able to pay for the site, which because of its location was very expensive. To keep the site, meant to maintain the network of opportunities that the city offered and therefore to strengthen the family economy; on the other hand, good location is the key to increase a property value.
Second, the provision a physical space for the “extensive family” to develop, has proved to be a key issue in the economical take off of a poor family. In between the private and public space, we introduced the collective space, conformed by around 20 families. The collective space (a common property with restricted access) is an intermediate level of association that allows surviving fragile social conditions.
Third, due to the fact that 50% of each unit’s volume, will eventually be self-built, the building had to be porous enough to allow each unit to expand within its structure. The initial building must therefore provide a supporting, (rather than a constraining) framework in order to avoid any negative effects of self-construction on the urban environment over time, but also to facilitate the expansion process.
Finally, instead a designing a small house (in 30 sqm everything is small), we provided a middle-income house, out of which we were giving just a small part now. This meant a change in the standard: kitchens, bathrooms, stairs, partition walls and all the difficult parts of the house had to be designed for final scenario of a 72 sqm house.
In the end, when the given money is enough for just half of the house, the key question is, which half do we do. We choose to make the half that a family individually will never be able to achieve on its own, no matter how much money, energy or time they spend. That is how we expect to contribute using architectural tools, to non-architectural questions, in this case, how to overcome poverty.
Elemental, in other words, have exploited the values and aims of ownership culture (whichmammoth has suggested understands the house to be first a machine for making money and only second to be a machine for living) not to support a broken system of real estate speculation and easy wealth, but to present architecture as a tool that can be provided to families. While the project is embedded with some of the assumptions of the architects (such as that faith in the potential of ownership culture, for better or worse), this tool is primarily presented as a framework, a scaffolding upon which families are able to make their own architecture. This seems like an important step — made visually apparent by the strong contrast between the simple lines of the initial framework and the colorful and varied familial additions — in the direction of what Lebbeus Woods describes as offering architecture as “the rules of the game”, or, the thinking he describedbehind a “capsule” which could offer architectural aid to people living in slums:
From the side of the slum dwellers, it might seem an unwelcome intrusion from outside, just another quick fix imposed by the economically advantaged on the desperately poor, serving the interests of the rich by transforming the slum according to their well-intentioned but—to the slum dweller–necessarily opposed values. It is especially important, then, that the transformative capsule enables the slum-dwellers to achieve their goals, serving their values, and does not reduce them to subjects of its designers’ and makers’ will. Inevitably, the values, prejudices, perspectives and aspirations of the designers and makers will be imbedded in the capsule and what it does. Therefore the slum-dwellers should, in the first place, have the right of refusal. Also, they must have the right to modify the capsule and its effects as they see fit. It cannot be a locked system, capable of producing only a predetermined outcome. The implication of these freedoms is that the capsule, whatever its capabilities, could be used to work against the intentions of its designers and makers. Because the effects of the capsule would be powerfully transformative, its possession would involve risk for all the groups, and individuals, involved.
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via mammoth
The Gentrification of Brooklyn by Specter
Interesting hand painted billboards made by Specter for “The Gentrification of Brooklyn” exhibition. Some are great, and some are a bit over the top.
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A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter by Caleb Larsen
A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter by Caleb Larsen is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay. Here is the auction, the current bid is $4,250.
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.
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Foreshortened Space by Ron van der Ende
Foreshortened Space by Ron van der Ende is a series of bas-relief sculptures in salvaged/reclaimed wood.
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via Ron van der Ende
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