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.
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.
Architect/Interior: Park+Associates Pte Ltd/ 2nd Edition Pte Ltd Location: 158, Cecil Street, Singapore Area: 3,300 sqf Project Year: 2010 Photographers: Edward Hendricks
Architect: Sanders Pace Architecture Location: Manchester, Tennessee Project Team: Brandon Pace, Michael Davis, Michael Aktalay, Larry Davis, Matthew Davis, Carah Ferry, Will Spencer, Garrett Ferry, Ashley Pace, John Sanders, Stephanie Dowdy, David Scott, Shane Elliot, Leslie Smith Project Area: 900 SF (x2 pods) Project Year: Summer 2011 Photographs: Sanders Pace Architecture
Right outside of Rio de Janeiro lies Rocinha, the largest slum in South America. This informal settlement, first occupied by a community of farmers, has quickly developed into one of the most dense living situations on the planet. About half the size of Central Park in New York City, this favela is home to an estimated 150,000 people. With the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games both taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Rocinha will become a hot topic in the next few years. Due to its small size, this project by Kyle Beneventi proposes an urban strategy to make Rocinha a very walkable city, dealing principally with voids to break up the blanket of uniform building mass. More images and project description after the break.
Aleppo is one of the oldest cities in the world. It has always been perceived as one of the most important and influential cultural centres far beyond Syria and the Arabic world. To live up to this fame the city has decided to open an international competition about the design of a cultural centre whose main program is to comprise in addition to a library also an opera and a theatre. This proposal by Marc Anton Dahmen / STUDIO DMTW is designed so that the volume of each of the three main functions, opera, theatre, and library, is optimally tailored to the specific demands of the respective utilisation and clearly visible from the outside. More images and project description after the break.
An art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art. The idea behind this proposal by James Law Cybertecture, which was awarded a merit of honorary mention, is to create an architecture that becomes an art piece itself. To create spaces that are unique and flexible. The fluidity and formless spaces is designed to promote movement and interaction. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Peter Bohlin Glenn Murcutt Renzo Piano Samuel Mockbee Michael Graves Fay Jones Philip Johnson Richard Neutra Alvar Aalto Walter Gropius
What do these people have in common? Yes they have all been awarded the AIA Gold Medal “in recognition of a significant body of work of lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture” – but I’m not interested in that and it’s not what I am talking about. No, the correct answer is that none of them are named ‘Bob’.
Should I be worried? No disrespect to all the other Bob’s that are out there but can you really be that good of an architect when your first name is Bob? A certain amount of evidence exists that is not in our favor. Dating back to 1907, there has never been a Gold Medal winner whose name was Bob. What about the architectural equivalent to the Nobel Prize, The Pritzker? Nope – not a Bob to be found. We did get Robert Venturi in 1991 but he’s a Robert and not a Bob. From what I understand, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe used to call him Bob but they didn’t like each other and I think it might have been meant as an insult. (I’d ask Mies if he were alive and I could …. but he probably wouldn’t have accepted a phone call from a ‘Bob’)
The Force is strong in Colorado! The winner of our Star Wars: The Blueprints/ArchDaily giveaway is Blake Pfannenstiel, of Aurora, CO. Congrats, Blake! We hope you enjoy the book!
Earlier this week one of Europe’s great ethnographic museums, the Museum der Kulturen Basel, reopened its doors. Two years of reconstruction, refurbishment and expansion including a Herzog & de Meuron design for the historical walls was among the updates that it received. Their design is described as a ‘stunning crown for the historical walls: the beautiful rooftop of irregular folds fits harmoniously into the rooftops surrounding the cathedral’.
Director Anna Schmid commented, “Our innovative approach to life’s cultural dimensions makes them more accessible. We want to be a place for new encounters and inspiration.”
Next week we will be taking our Architecture City Guide to Tokyo and we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Creative Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.
While these are two separate projects, they are connected through a common concept. From the understanding of the location as a big natural park surrounded by the city of Yecla, it derives an intervention strategy with a main gaol: To achieve the introduction of the activity with no impact, building a new symbiotic relationship where the man inhabits the forest without violence and the landscape obtains usability. After visiting the location we stated that the best option is an intervention without transforming the forest, keeping a responsible intervention strategy, respecting the forest and avoiding big earthworks which may break the continuity of the vegetation cover and natural cycles.
But you can browse the last one: 417
