Designers: Theo Jansen with Earthscape Location: Oita Art Museum / 865 Ueno Oita city Oita, Japan Photographs: Earthscape/Yusuke Komatsu, Shin Suzuki

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Wacom’s new Inkling Digital Pen is bridging the gap between sketching by hand and drawing on the computer.  The technology allows you to sketch anywhere on paper with a pressure sensitive pens, that can pick up 1024 levels of sensitivity and an electronic receiver that clips onto the drawing medium.  The information is stored onto the device, which has room for up to 50 projects and can then be transferred via a USB connection as digital media to a computer.

Italian architect Ernesto Rogers once famously stated that he wanted to design everything from “a spoon to a city”. Pritzker Prize winning architect Richard Meier has done nearly that with his newly designed wristwatch, which becomes part of the prolific collection of objects designed by the architect. In collaboration with the Markuse Corporation the Meier designed Ana Watch adheres to a modernist vocabulary, focusing on proportion, human scale and the manipulation of a strong geometry. “Working on various designs of objects used in daily life, such as watches, I am conscious of participating in a tradition of architects that worked in a variety of scales such as Joseph Hoffmann and Frank Lloyd Wright. In my case, the theoretical point of departure is consistently related to function and beauty,” said Richard Meier.

We want to know your opinion about architects and product design. For you, what is the importance of the architect’s ideals provided in a compact form? Leave us your answer in the comments below, and among all the registered users who comment, thanks to Markuse and Richard Meier Architects, one of our readers can win this exclusive watch.

You can become a registered user right here, and make sure to share with us your comment by Sunday, September 18th. More information about the Richard Meier designed Ana Watch along with official rules can be found after the break.

An Architect’s Dress code (Revised 9-12-11)

Employees contribute to the culture and reputation of the SVEHN JØSSANG ATELJE in the way they present themselves. An Architectural appearance is essential to a favorable impression with clients, and company shareholders (ie. Svehn). Good grooming and appropriate dress should reflect an employee’s confidence in his/her aesthetic convictions and inspire others to realize that they are dressed unimaginatively. An Architect’s attire should be minimal yet condescending at the same time.

Architect Joshua Prince Ramus (REX architects), just awarded as one of the five greatest architects under 50 in the world, will hold a main lecture at the MAXXI at 6:00pm on September 16th during the event Y1 – Independent Architecture Stuff organized by Cityvision Mag and curated by Francesco Lipari and Vanessa Todaro. More information on the event after the break.

Black Spectacles, who has teamed up with the Chicago Architectural Club, has recently created The Un-Competition Project. Invent a project, design it, and post your design on our Facebook page, with a 60 second video. They want to hear how you came up with your project, what your design is, and how you are going to get it built.

So, no, there is no competition brief, and no, they’re not going to get your project built. You make the project up yourself, big or small- you sell it, and you figure out how to get it built. Then document it in a video, and they’ll show it to the world. More information on the competition after the break.

Ten years since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the National September 11 Memorial was dedicated in a private ceremony with the victims’ families. It was officially opened to the public as of today, September 12th. The opening of the 9/11 Memorial is a first step towards the closing of a long chapter of construction at the World Trade Center site.

AWR recently announced the winners of the LOFT London Farm Tower Competition. Population growth and urban centralization lead to increased demand for real estate market and for food. One possible solution is vertical farming. AWR therefore proposed the design of a new kind of skyscraper on the Thames waterfront, inserted into the new city skyline.

The goals to achieve were to meet the requirements of the World Green Building Council, determine which materials are best suited for the construction of a vertical farm, identify resistant, light, transparent and long-term materials and experiment with innovative materials. Information on the competition winners after the break.

The Barcelona Ecological Center (BEC) is a proposal of Vilalta Architects about the future of the Bullfight Plaza ‘Monumental’ in Barcelona, Spain. The concept is radical: Transforming the bullring into a center of research and leisure regarding to environmentally friendly activities, especially the ones that respect and take care of animals. In other words, to use all the elements that already exist now in the ring to be reused in the opposite way. More images and architects’ description after the break.

On August 22, 2011 a live map that charts members of interior design, architecture, and related consultants on Twitter was released into the wild. In only three days it had already surpassed 8000 views, and added 120 professionals to the map.

Architecture photographer Paul Clemence shared with us a recent photo set of the current status of the One World Trade Center building by SOM.

I was downtown today, checking  out the commotion by Ground Zero and snapped these images of the Freedom Tower. Is for sure going up and we can already glance at its connection to neighborhood buildings, its presence on the skyline and some interesting architectural nuances.

- Paul Clemence

More photos after the break.

The Institute for Urban Design (IfUD) has organized New York City’s very first Urban Design Week. In mid September, IfUD will engage the city with a series of public events. Through lectures, tours, and a competition, IfUD hopes to analyze the city’s collective urbanity and imagine possibilities for the future.

This issue of Volume explores architects’ roles in the age of the internet. For us at ArchDaily, this is a topic we find very interesting. We ask all the architects we interview how the internet has changed their practice; their answers nicely complement this issue. (You can check them out in our interview section). I, personally, enjoyed the section titled “Tracing Concepts.” It illustrates the influence design ideas have had on the computing world and vise versa. For example, it details how Christopher Alexander’s ideas about design patterns has spurred on object-oriented programming and bottom-up design solutions.

“Of all things that are man-made, bridges are, with dams, the most “structural,” single-minded, and imposing. As connectors at a breaking point, they have a heroic force that is aided by a challenging structuralism. As a strand of continuity in a non-continuum, the bridge is full of implied meanings. It is the opposite of devisiveness, separation, isolation, irretrievability, loss, segregation, abandonment. To bridge is as cogent in the psychic realm as it is in the physical world. The bridge is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is a communications medium as much as a connector.”

-Paolo Soleri, 1970, from “The Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri”, published by MIT Press, 1971

This proposal, by architects Eirini Androutsopoulou & Dimitra Maniaki, defines a new icon and a strong identity for the city of Busan and drives a direct link between Korea’s past and Korea’s future image. In order to do so, the proposed scheme describes the idea of the Korean garden within the building’s shell and the new Opera House within the Korean garden. More images and architects’ description after the break.

As the 10th anniversary of September 11th is upon us, we thought it appropriate to share Amanda Lin Costa’s work-in-progress documentary about memorials built from the steel of the World Trade Center. Hangar 17, an expansive space at JFK Airport, has become the temporary resting place for collected debris from that day….beams, firetrucks, taxis, shoes, etc. Over the past ten years, select pieces have been distributed upon request to create memorials that are now scattered about world, including all 50 States. In her documentary, Costa focuses not only on the design of the memorials, such as those in Ohio, Saratoga Spings, Westchester and New Jersey, but also their experiential and spiritual quality.

More about the documentary after the break.

Architect: LAVA Location: Sydney, Australia Photographs: Courtesy of LAVA

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This proposal for the New Taipei City Museum of Art by DCPP Arquitectos is an open and welcoming design that erases the barrier of exclusivity normally surrounding the world of art, patrons, and experts. As such, the architecture is one that embodies this idea of erasure through eliminating the traditional borders between exhibition space and circulation, as well as exterior and interior. Every part of the museum is represented by a space without limits that can hold any type of expression. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The shaping concept of the buildings for the Busan Opera House by PAPER | TOTEMENT is based on placing simple forms together with their capacities and location determined by their functional tasks. The outside shape of the achieved agglomerate is made by cutting off the surpluses to make a cube form put on its edge. The aesthetics of the given object depends neither on a separate turn of any of its parts nor on their size or quantity, but is defined by a lot of similar but different elements with its external shape of an ideal Platon body in an unusual twist. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The new museum proposed by Lyons has been designed in response to its context – to the park, river, city and the surrounding mountains. The concept connects the building and its spaces with the unique features of the site and its surroundings. Its form, spaces and circulation patterns have also been designed to provide a rich and scenic experience for museum visitors and to offer maximum flexibility in the display and presentation of artworks and multimedia. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Storefront for Art and Architecture will be host to Matilde Cassani’s Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings, an archive and exhibition that unveils the secret sacred territory throughout New York. The exhibition will run from September 14 – November 5th with an opening reception on September 13 at 7pm. Cassani’s work explores the pluralism of religion as it manifests itself in contemporary non-traditional spaces – hidden away in the niches of the contemporary city. This exhibit will have a collection of analytical and speculative works, to be read as a public archive and exhibition.

Continue after the break for more on this exhibit.

What would the world’s landscape look like if it were concentrated into one megalopolis?  This graphic analysis illustrates the amount of land required to accommodate all 6.9 billion people based on the densities of cities across the globe.  The differences illuminate the adverse affects of suburban sprawl.

A team of graduate students recently created a temporary installation on the Kent State University, Kent campus in Ohio. The project grew out of an internal challenge in the matR design competition. Designed by graduate students Brian Thoma, Carl, Veith, Victoria, Capranica, Matt Veith, and Griffin Morris, the tunnel-like structure called “The Passage” was a study to support the conceptualization and actualization of innovative and experimental material research. The students created the initial form in Rhinoceros with a couple Grasshopper definitions as a waffle structure of 26 vertical ribs and 24 horizontal struts. More images and information after the break.

‘Avant-garde of tomorrow?‘ which is an exhibition on young Polish architecture, will inaugurate the opening of the Centre for Architecture and Design in Łódź, Poland on October 7th. The exhibition gathers 14 of most promising Polish designers and puts focus on individual design process rather than the final product. They prefer to observe how all the participants achieve their goal and which path they take. Whether it’s a generative process or traditional way of form-finding, the exhibition aims to bring these processes closer to a wider audience. More information on the event after the break.