Once in a Lifetime presents tantalizing new possibilities for exploring and relaxing that redefine the idea of luxury travel.
The book showcases quality destinations beyond superficial pomp that represent a conscious choice for slowing down our hectic lives. The inspiring range of examples includes enchanting tree house hotels, incredible eco-friendly resorts, farms on which guests help with the work, simple hotels and glamping sites in spectacular scenery, as well as glamorous houses, trains, and boats. These are not only depicted in stunning photographs, but also insightfully described by renowned international travel, design, and architecture journalist Marie Le Fort.
Best of Housing by DETAIL Magazine: Housing is something individual: we each have our own ideas and aspirations for it, and we express a lifestyle by the way in which we house ourselves — the way in which we dwell. To dwell means to be “at home”, where one ideally has a sense of well-being.
When it comes to housing, there have been numerous studies of standards, developments and trends, which have analysed and compared people’s needs. But as needs change over time, so do trends. And also the global and demographic changes affecting society alter the way we dwell and flexibility becomes a decisive criterion.
The subject of housing also includes the integration of individual buildings in an urban context. Especially in cities, people often live in compact spaces in which there are fewer personal spaces and more communal areas. Yet each of us longs for a space of our own. Therefore it becomes important that designers develop ideas that meet our shared need for a balance between personal and communal space.
As innovation and new developments in technology now follow each other faster and faster, making yesterday’s architectural fantasies today’s construction realities, there’s already a movement to return to the essential things in life: be it a quest for sustainability, which implies basic principles such as incorporating a region’s typologies and materials, or for reasons of expense, which often prompt a search for efficient designs or manufacturing technology, or even aesthetic requirements that allow people to step out of our increasingly noisy and heterogeneous environment.
Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References offers a unique and unparalleled view of this internationally renowned architect. Wiel Arets’ optimistic outlook towards the future, which he calls ‘A Wonderful World: A New Map of the World’, underlies his global philosophy. This book presents Arets’ lectures on that topic, debates between him and other thinkers and makers, 60 exemplary designs from his studio, and an extensive series of interviews with Arets. Within these texts his background, education, projects, and teachings are interwoven in a discussion that highlights the evolution of his career.
Guilt has been effectively used to control and manipulate the masses. But it can also be the start of a change for the better: awareness, concern, action. Engagement and guilt are never far apart. Engagement is sublimated guilt. We can build on guilt, but can we build with guilt? Is guilt a material to design with?
Guilty Landscapes is the theme for the latest issue of Volume Magazine, a joint effort between AMO, C-LAB and Archis.
The firm’s founder David Stark Wilson cites his experiences in nature as the most profound influence on his architecture. In this volume he has chosen to pair images of his architecture beside the images from nature that inspired his designs. The origins of the firm’s work are also deeply rooted in the vernacular buildings of California and this influence is clearly illustrated in this impressive monograph.
There are few organizations that would utter the words: “we need to constantly look for ways to make ourselves redundant” (46).
But Architecture for Humanity isn’t your typical organization. Since its inception in 1999, the company has put design professionals in the service of local communities, empowering these locals to the point where, frankly, they don’t need the architects any more.
Beyond chronicling inspired designs and against-the-odds accomplishments, the book importantly offers a provocative philosophy : architecture belongs, not to the architect, but to the people and the world for whom it is designed.
More about life lessons and tips from Design Like You Give A Damn after the break…
One of the most impressive pavilions at the Shanghai World Expo 2010 was the UK Pavilion, designed by Thomas Heatherwick. In this book, we can see not only the impressive pavilion, but also a comprehensive overview covering the studio’s entire history. Over 150 projects are represented, each fully illustrated with images selected from Heatherwick’s personal and studio archives.
This informative 11″ by 11″ hardcover book presents a curated collection of award-winning residential and master planning work from leading American designers. Meticulously detailed and site-specific, the featured projects focus on sustainability, technology, and the human spirit. They reflect ideologies and philosophies that are rooted in the modernist doctrine or distilled from vernacular precedents.
The collection of Inspiration And Process In Architecture is a new series of illustrated monographs dedicated to key figures in contemporary architecture. This new collection features Zaha Hadid, Giancarlo De Carlo, Bolles+Wilson and Alberto Kalach whose stories are told through notes and drawings never before seen.
Detail recently sent us Net Zero Energy Building from their Green Books series. Like everything Detail does, this books takes a thorough look at the technology surrounding this specific subject. It also, as always, gives great examples from the Virginia Tech Solar House to the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College.
Description: Net-zero energy buildings, equilibrium buildings, or carbon-neutral cities depending on location and underlying agenda, the statistics vary. The variety of terms in use indicates that a scientific method is still lacking which poses a problem not just in regard to international communication, but also with respect to planning processes as a response to energy challenges. The clarification and meaning of the most important terms in use is extremely important for their implementation. Since October 2008 a panel of experts from an international energy agency has concerned itself with these topics as part of a project entitled Toward Net Zero Energy Solar Buildings. The objective is to analyze exemplary buildings that are near a zero-energy balance in order to develop methods and tools for the planning, design, and operation of such buildings. The results are documented in this publication. More than just a showcase presentation of select projects, the focus of this publication is on relaying knowledge and experience gained by planners and builders.
https://www.archdaily.com/215319/net-zero-energy-building-detail-green-booksAmber P
We recently received a book we wished we had earlier, Writing About Architecture. Lange’s book pulls from “lessons learned from her courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts.” ”The book offers works by some of the best architecture critics of the twentieth century including Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs to explains some of the most successful methods with which to approach architectural criticism.” The book “could serve as the primary text for a course on criticism for undergraduates or architecture and design majors.” We here at ArchDaily are now using it as a resource. We have a feeling the pages will be worn through pretty quickly.
https://www.archdaily.com/215279/writing-about-architecture-alexandra-langeAmber P
It is hard not to want to pick up this book and start reading with the project displayed on the front cover. Fantastic! This book grapples with the issue of how to marry old buildings with new design. The book offers a wide range of projects that should challenge architects and planners working at any scale. The text is tremendously accessible while being sophistically insightful.
Last week, we received copies of two of Steven Holl’s newest publications, Scale and Color Light Time. Published by Lars Müller, the books examine Holl’s preoccupation with light and color as ways to inform the shaping of space. Holl’s architecture has consistently defined itself with formal gestures grounded in light and meaningful applications of textures and colors. While accurate to associate Holl with water color, the books shows the range such a medium has had over Holl’s career, as it has afforded the flexibility to serve as both an exploratory and explanatory tool.
The monograph 2G presents a new way of approaching Chilean architecture. In the wake of the interesting publications of Mathias Klotz (2G 26, 2003), Smiljan Radic (2G 44, 2007) and Cecilia Puga (2G 53, 2010), now comes that of Pezo von Ellrichshausen, a firm that has proven itself around the world for its consistently outstanding, contemporary works (you can see some examples here).
https://www.archdaily.com/219446/2g-pezo-von-ellrichshausenAmber P
Mark Foster Gage, from the Yale University School of Architecture and Gage Clemenceau, has put together a wonderful collection of text that together shed light on the various ideas about beauty through history. Gage’s added commentary helps relate each of the text to contemporary thinking on architecture and design. The text range from Plato, Aristotle, Vitruvius to Nehamas and Zangwill. (I, personally, found the last piece by David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese very intriguing. It bridges many of the theoretical positions with advancements in cognitive science.) If you are interested in the theoretical side of architecture but don’t where to start or you prefer the practical side over the theoretical this book is a good one to have under your belt. It gives you the basics from which you can expand upon, if you are so inclined.
You can see an ArchDaily interview with Gage here, and some of his work here.
https://www.archdaily.com/208477/aesthetic-theory-essential-texts-for-architecture-and-design-mark-foster-gageAmber P
Slogans like these constantly inundate us across media sources, and the premise is always the same: a healthy body is sexy, desirable, better. The opposite is similarly true: if you’re fat or obese, you aren’t just unhealthy, you’re sick. You need to be ‘cured.’
This moralization of “healthy” is symptomatic of a greater obsession and anxiety over our health in general, an obsession that has led to what Giovanni Borasi and Mirko Zardini, editors of Imperfect Health, call “medicalization; a process in which ordinary problems are defined in medical terms and understood through a medical framework” (15). The book has been published by the Canadian Center for Architecture with Lars Müller Publishers, and it is part of an exhibit accompanied by an online TV channel.
This process has similarly formed a concept that design and architecture are tools for healthiness and well-being; hence the proliferation of Green built environments that supposedly (1) recuperate nature from dastardly human deeds and (2) “craft a body that is ideal or at least in good health, apparently re-naturalized or better yet, embedded in nature” (19). Just think of the NYC High Line‘s recuperation of land left “damaged” by technology, a vastly popular project that motivates the human body to walk, run, and play in nature rather than sit sedentarily (unhealthily) in a toxin-emitting vehicle.
But is this idea itself a healthy way to conceptualize of Architecture? Is this goal of “healthiness” even possible to attain?
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