With the help of crowdfunding, Luke Shepard journeyed with a friend through 36 cities in 21 countries over the course of three months to capture over 20,000 images of some of Europe’s greatest structures. The end product resulted in a four-minute film entitled Nightvision, which aims to inspire appreciation for the "brilliance and diversity of architecture found across Europe".
The list of buildings featured in this film can be found on Shepard's site here.
Since its opening in 2001, the ever inspiring Jewish Museum in Berlin has experienced the addition of the Studio Daniel Libeskind designed Glass Courtyard in 2007, and The Academy which was recently completed and opened in 2013. With the museum as the focus and inspiration driving these two recent additions, Spirit of Space took this opportunity to provide us with another look at this emotionally moving masterpiece. From the very beginning, Libeskind believed the extension to the museum was about establishing and securing an identity within Berlin, which was lost during WWII. In cinematic form, their film attempts to express the uneasy sequential essence of Libeskind’s work.
Spanish architecture photographer Miguel de Guzmán has stepped into video, a new dimension of architectural representation, as we saw a few weeks ago with his video for the Espinar House.
The Jewish Museum is just as emotionally moving and utterly disorienting today as it was when it first opened. Taking a fresh reflective look, Spirit of Space has produced a short film capturing moments of this singular architectural experience. The soundscape is jarring. Shots linger with trepidation. Perceptions waver with marks of appearance and disappearance. And in cinematic form, the film attempts to express the uneasy sequential essence of Daniel Libeskind’s work.
At a lecture he delivered in April this year at the 4th Holcim Forum 2013 in Mumbai, Pritzker Jury member and Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena approached sustainability from an unconventional angle. The key to achieving the "Economy of Sustainable Construction" (the title of this year's Holcim Forum), Aravena claims, requires two things: "in this generation, more psychiatrists; in the next generations, more breasts."
Alix Bossard shares this must-watch video that outlines Le Corbusier's five revolutionary principles of modern architecture. Using gorgeous motion design, the video briefly introduces us to everything from le Modulor to Villa Savoye and Les Cités Radieuses. Enjoy this two-minute recap of the career of one this century's most influential architects.
Urban explorer The Unknown Cameraman takes us inside an abandoned Futuro House, one of the roughly hundred that were constructed in the 1960s/1970s. Shot around "various undisclosed locations in New Jersey" the video shows the futuristic saucer-shaped prefabricated dwelling made of fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic. Matti Suuronen, the Finn who conceived of the hatched house, thought of it as the ideal ski cabin (that could be plopped down and easily removed, regardless of the roughness of a given terrain).
Legendary American architect Steven Holl has collaborated again with Spirit of Space to produce two short videos on the recently completed Campbell Sports Center in New York City. While always compelling to hear an architect discuss a project, these videos integrate the architect's narration with different dynamic shots of the building's detail and context, thus truly immersing the viewer in the project.
The first video (above) features Steven Holl and senior partner Chris McVoy explaining the project's inspiration, design concept and program; simultaneously, the filmmakers take us into the space and show how the new athletic facility is being used by the student athletes. The second, shorter, video (after the break) shows the building in the city, revealing the fascinatingly complex relationship between the passing subway cars, the field hockey players, the movement of shadows and the building itself.
See the second video, after the break...
Building a skyscraper? Forget about steel and concrete, architect Michael Green says build it out of wood. As he details in this intriguing talk, it's not only possible to build safe wooden structures up to 30 stories tall (and, he hopes, higher), it's necessary.
On the occasion of James Turrell's new site-specific installation at the Guggenheim, the American artist joined Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and co-curator of James Turrell: A Retrospective, in conversation about the different aspects of the artist's singular oeuvre on view in three concurrent exhibitions in Houston, Los Angeles, and New York.
Imagine a pervious asphalt that not only significantly reduces noise pollution, but saves millions in maintenance and repairs by its ability to self-heal. Well, this type of super-asphalt is not far from being distributed world-wide as experimental micromechanic pioneer Erik Schlangen of Delft Technical University has been studying the material’s potential on a test track in The Netherland’s for the past few years.
Basically, with the introduction of small steel wool fibers, Self Healing Asphalt is capable of repairing micro-cracks and significantly extending the service life of roadways through induction heating. Similarly, Schlangen is leading the research on Self Healing Concrete, where by infusing concrete with a harmless limestone-producing bacteria that feeds off of calcium lactate - a component of milk - the material has the potential to self-heal micro-cracks in the presence of rainwater.
A few weeks ago, investors, business leaders, real estate developers, politicians, architects, urban planners, landscape architects, experts in transportation, innovation, engineers, economists, financiers, community organizers, scientists, artists, students and those with an active interest in urban development gathered in Prague to attend the reSITE Conference. As part of the conference, Cecil Balmond-- formerly of Arup Engineers and currently leading Balmond Studio in London -- led a two-stage international design competition workshop to imagine the future mobile event pavilion. (Stay tuned, we'll be posting these results soon!)
A little over thirty years ago, Shanghai was a fairly dense, mid-rise city with no skyscrapers. Now, Shanghai has been transformed into a global metropolis with over 4,000 skyscrapers - twice as many as New York. In an attempt to capture the “diversities and eccentricities of the metropolis that is Shanghai beyond the famous skyline,” photographer Rob Whitworth and urban identity expert JT Singh joined forces to create ‘This is Shanghai.’
To mark the occasion of World Refugee Day on June 20th, the IKEA Foundation announced an important new collaboration with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Refugee Housing Unit to design a new type of shelter which will replace the outdated tents currently in use in refugee camps worldwide.
As you'd expect from IKEA, the result is a flat-packed, modular design (ideal for cheaply transporting to refugee camps) that can be assembled in 4 hours. Though it is expected to cost about twice as much, it will last much longer than the tents, which must be replaced roughly every six months - a particularly important improvement, as the average family stays in a refugee camp for 12 years.
The design also carries a number of other advantages, such as increased space and privacy, better temperature control and enough solar energy to power a light in the evening. The design is currently being tested in Ethiopia before being deployed worldwide, however, this is not the end of IKEA's collaboration with UNHCR. These shelters are just the first part of a long-term collaboration which will hopefully provide healthcare and education - and ultimately a better quality of life for the world's refugees.
More coverage of architecture's involvement in refugee aid, after the break.
Zaha Hadid Architects worked together with design offices Kollision, CAVI and Wahlberg to create the interactive installation 'Parametric Space' for the exhibition 'Zaha Hadid - World Architecture', which is on view at the Danish Architecture Centre through September 29, 2013. The installation is a fully parametric space that reacts to the visitors' movements by changing shape and expression. Learn more after the break.
Derived from 40 years of research by architect, professor and author Jan Gehl, The Human Scale takes a critical look at the way we build and use our cities. Assumptions about modernity are questioned, as director Andreas M. Dalsgaard urges the viewer to imagine what would happen when we put “people into the center of our equations”.
The Louisiana Channel at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark shared with us their video, titled 'Snøhetta - Memories of Architectural Landscapes,' which captures the inner and outer landscapes of Snøhetta. The 30-minute tour features one of the heads behind it all - Norwegian architect Kjetil T. Thorsen, who reflects upon some of Snøhetta's major landmarks such as the Alexandria Library, the opera house in Oslo and The 9/11 Memorial Pavilion on Ground Zero in New York.
From the very beginning in the 1980's, Snøhetta's architecture has been inspired by landscapes, both natural and urban. ”Landscapes are a massive force”, says Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, co-founder and director of Snøhetta: "And they are masterpieces, which architects can be inspired by." To view more of Snøhetta's work, please visit here.
