When I came across this video of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, it reminded me of an excellent resource: the digital archives of the New York Public Library. Both of the photos above are from the archives, and are just two of the thousands and thousands that relate the fair. The fair invited to folks to wander around the “world of tomorrow” so it isn’t surprising the archive is packed full of the future from the past.
from The Fox Is Black http://www.thefoxisblack.com/2012/05/10/1939-new-york-worlds-fair/
These are images of the recently unveiled 2012 Serpentine Pavilion designed by Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Weiwei. This is the same team responsible for the Beijing Olympic Stadium back in 2008. The Serpentine Pavilion is built each summer adjacent to the Serpentinve Gallery in Hyde Park, London. The pavilion opens sometime toward the beginning of summer (if construction runs smoothly) and stays open into the fall, hosting lectures and planned events while welcoming visitors to wander around and take pictures with their phones. You can tell the architects among the crowd by their excessively expensive DSLRs.
This is the twelfth pavilion built by the gallery. To generate the form of this year’s pavilion, the designers overlaid plans from the previous eleven pavilions onto the site and started to manipulate the drawing into a three-dimensional form. The intersecting shapes were pushed down into the ground or pulled up to support a roof. That roof is covered with a thin sheet of water, and because the is below eye level for folks on the gallery lawn, that water will reflect the sky, trees and people around it. Below the roof, the history of site is excavated into the ground. The seats, platforms, columns, stairs and ramps are all derived from the ghosts of other pavilions that have either been moved or destroyed.
Oddly enough, the uniqueness of this summer’s pavilion will stem from references to previously-built pavilions. I’m not aware of any other Serpentine Pavilion that has done this. It’s a moment of self-consciousness that could easily be awkward (like a kind of architectural puberty for the pavilion) or dismissed as too esoteric (here is architecture referencing other works of architecture.) As with other works by Herzog and de Meuron, the exuberance of the work avoids both. There’s something exciting built into their work, or in this case, the ground.
P.S. The roof becomes a dance floor.
from The Fox Is Black http://www.thefoxisblack.com/2012/05/08/excavating-the-past-the-2012-serpentine-pavilion/
Two things about this building remind me of Tetris. The first is obvious: the massing of this building is blocky in a way that looks like an L-shaped piece glued next to one of the long skinny pieces. If you played with the same strategy that I did, you usually ended up with a tall, narrow crevice between two sides of your screen; no matter how badly you needed a long skinny piece, it would only rain L’s. This building is that rare and skinny Tetris piece, not only because it kind of looks like it, but also because it connects two sides of a city that have needed a connection.
The city here is Galicia, Spain, and the two sides are a historic district on one side and a commercial port on the other. A 20 meter bluff between the two effectively isolates each from the other and makes both sides rely on cars to visit the other. This highly visible project from Abalo Alonso Arquitectos responds simply “How about some stairs and an elevator?” The minimal program is wrapped in a durable concrete skin that is punctuated by deep-set windows to animate the blocky mass. The shape my seem a little clunky or funny, but it’s just the connection the city needed.
Ceterrifiant(et réel)escalier estfixé à l’extérieurd’ungratte-ciel deplus de dix étages.Le design est signé des architectesSabina Lang et DanielBaumannde L/B.
from Zeutch http://www.zeutch.com/archi/terrifying-staircase-on-exterior-wall-of-skyscraper-36315
“Tryk her for drama mellem husene”
I bedste tænd-for-blender-med-guldfisk stil satte den belgiske HQ tv-kanalen TNT en rød ‘event’ knap op på en typisk plads i en typisk lille by – hvor intet nogensinde sker – og inviterede byens borgere til at trykke hvis de ville have lidt liv i gaden. Jeg har ikke fundet et link til hvor man kan købe sådan en knap, men jeg vil gerne have et parti hjem til opsætning rundt om i det pæne pæne DK.
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from RASMUS BRØNNUM – en Arkitektur Blog http://www.rasmusbronnum.dk/2012/04/20/push-to-add-drama/
Jon Duenas is a Portland, Oregon based photographer who’s got a series of double exposed images which I’ve fallen in love with. It’s amazing how these images lay over one another, the details of nature blooming through portraits of young women. The first image looks alien, like a sentient plant taking the form of a human. My other favorites are the second and fourth images. The way the city lays over the face of the girl in the fourth image, the expression on her face, the sense of drama and panic in her hands. In my opinion it’s the best of the bunch. It seems like he does wedding photography to pay the bills, but it would be great to see him do a larger series of these images, don’t you think?
from The Fox Is Black http://www.thefoxisblack.com/2012/04/19/captivating-double-exposure-photographs-by-jon-duenas/
House with Slide is a minimalist and fun project developed by LEVEL Architects who thought primarily of the children during its design. This three floor residence is situated in Tokyo and its main characteristic is a continuous circulation route with stairs in one side and a slide in the other side to connect the different floors with access points throughout.
The other notable characteristic is the large empty rooms to allow the children lots of clear space to play and enjoy without too many elements, avoiding any potential danger for the them. For this reason, many of the shapes of the house also are rounded.
No doubt, I really enjoy the result of this original, well considered and bright project.
from Minimalissimo http://minimalissimo.com/2012/04/house-with-slide/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Minimalissimo+%28Minimalissimo%29
99% of these posts are not mine. They are merely passed forward from my reading of them, to this blog, as a representation and catalogue of my interests, for everyone as well as myself.
