What is the connection between sex, architecture and design? Opening tomorrow, September 29,Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979 explores the role of architecture in the famous men’s magazine Playboy. Colomina, along with the curators of NAiM/Bureau-Europa in Maastricht, The Netherlands, centers the exhibition around the research of Beatriz Colomina, a professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture and founder of their Media and Modernity program, who has been studying the connection for the past three years.
Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979 illustrates how cities, buildings, interiors, furniture and products have always played an important role in the fantasy world of Playboy. Ever since Hugh Hefner launched Playboy in 1952, its erotic spreads have featured the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Moshe Safdie, and Paolo Soleri. As Colomina’s program argues, “sexual revolution and architectural revolution are inseparable.” The exhibition reveals how Playboy reshaped masculinity with the influence of architecture and design.
Today, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) honored Swiss architect Peter Zumthor for his significant influence on the advancement of architecture by naming him the recipient of the 2013 Royal Gold Medal.
It all started in Switzerland, in 1979, when Zumthor founded his “small yet powerful and uncompromising practice”. Since, he has built a prestigious, international reputation for creating “highly atmospheric spaces through the mastery of light and choice of materials”. From his small rural chapels to the Thermal Baths at Vals, the Zumthor experience ignites the senses, with “every detail reinforcing the essence of the building and its surroundings.”
RIBA President Angela Brady, stated: “Peter Zumthor’s work renews the link with a tradition of modern architecture that emphasizes place, community and material practice. His writings dwell upon the experience of designing, building and inhabitation while his buildings are engaged in a rich dialogue with architectural history. I will be delighted to present him with the Royal Gold Medal.”
UP Projects and The Architecture Foundation has announced Duggan Morris Architects as winner of the Open Architecture Challenge to design the next phase of the acclaimed Floating Cinema project. This project has been commissioned by the Legacy List with corporate partner Bloomberg as part of the Bloomberg East series of artist-led programs to animate the waterways in East London working in partnership with the Canal and River Trust.
With a world plagued by the current economic crisis, David Chipperfield fears that the architects’ role is shrinking and the professions ability to influence the shape of our cities is diminishing.
Since the inauguration of this year’s Venice Biennale, Chipperfield has been amidst of a few heated debates, most notably debunking the harsh criticism of Coop Himmelb(lau)’s Wolf Prix – who claimed the “hollow” event was “no longer about lively discussion and criticism of topics in contemporary architecture” – by affirming Prix “hadn’t even visited Venice”.
Interestingly, Chipperfield has now initiated a debate, using similar rhetoric as Prix, that calls attention to the dwindling role of the architect and the impotence of contemporary architecture. The catch? He blames politicians.
Kickstarter, a site based on the seductive idea of “crowdfunding” – in which consumers collectively invest in a product in order for it to become reality – has taken on a life of its own. From straightforward consumer products (like a cool watch) to creative projects (Roman Mars’ radio show) and even to large-scale Urbanism projects (including an entire riverwater pool), Kickstarter has evolved to finance ever more complex, ambitious, and risky endeavors.
But are there limits? Can you harness the purchasing power of the public to “crowdfund” anything? To, say, design/build a city?
Well, if Colombia’s BD Bacatá building, the first ever crowdfunded skyscraper, is anything to go by – the answer would seem to be yes.
More images of the first ever crowdfunded skyscraper, BD Bacatá, after the break…
Vessel is a site-specific response to the theme of Common Ground – a wooden structure, composed of a stacked planks, that works in conversation with the layered brick construction of the Arsenale. Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey have created a contemplative space, hollowed out of solid matter, that is at once a light funnel, a lantern chamber, and a passage.
A wood-based nanomaterial composed of cellulose nanocrystals and cellulose nanofibrils is being evaluated at the Forest Products Laboratory, in support of a project at the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland. The material, presumably stronger than Kevlar, is being produced to create clear composites as reinforced glass for clear applications. US Forest Services has opened a $1.7 million pilot plant in Wisconsin to develop the wood-based nanomaterial, whose future applications may include windshield and high performance glass.
Today the Nederlandse Tuinbouwraad (NTR) announced the City of Almere, along with it’s MVRDV-designed proposal, as winner of the prestigious world horticultural expo, Floriade 2022. The event takes place once every ten years in the Netherlands and is currently ending in Venlo.
The MVRDV plan for Almere is not a temporary expo site but a lasting green Cité Idéale as an extension to the existing city centre. The waterfront site opposite the city centre will be developed as a vibrant new urban neighborhood and also a giant plant library which will remain beyond the expo.
The ambition is to create a 300% greener exhibition than currently standard, both literally green and sustainable: each program on the site will be combined with plants which will create programmatic surprises, innovation and ecology. At the same time the site will be with a vast program such as a university, hotel, marina, offices and homes more urban than any other Floriade has ever been before, it is an exemplary green city. Continue after the break for more!
With last year’s opening of the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero and the near-completion of the World Trade Center One, Daniel Libeskind’s vision for the World Trade Center site is close to presenting the future of NYC’s downtown financial center, 11 years after the attacks. Studio Daniel Libeskind was selected to develop the master plan for the site in 2003, and since has been coordinating with NYC’s numerous agencies and individual architects to rebuild the site. The project, in Libeskind’s words, is a “healing of New York”, a “site of memory” and “a space to witness the resilience of America”.
Follow us after the break for more on the elements and progress of the master plan.
3-D Printing technology is developing at quickening pace as both engineers and architects experiment with its technological and social potential. Consider Enrico Dini’s D-Shape printer that prints large scale stone structures out of sand and an inorganic binder or Neri Oxman’s research at MIT which involves a 3-D printing arm and nozzles that can print with a variety of different materials, from concrete to recycled plastic.
Dutch firm DUS Architects, in collaboration with Ultimaker Ltd, Fablab Protospace, and Open Coop, have added another 3-D printing machine to the list known as KamerMaker, the room builder. KamerMaker is the world’s first mobile 3d printer and has the ability to print “rooms” that are up to 11 feet high and 7 feet wide. The machine was unveiled at OFF PICNIC, a precursor to Amsterdam’s annual PICNIC technology festival.
C+S Architects‘ contribution, Facecity, for the 2012 Venice Biennale, gives form to the idea of the curator, Fulvio Irace, of continuity in architecture. The exhibition reconsiders the architecture of Milan in the 50s and 60s, where architects, belonging to different generations and with different positions, built the identity of the city without giving up their personal poetics.
The central topic of this thought is the facade, commented by Alberto Savinio in Ascolto il tuo cuore città, 1945: ” …On the facade of buildings is not only written their date of birth, but also written the moods, the manners, the most secret thoughts of their time…, together with the flat window, theorized by Gio Ponti as the way to shape modernity.”
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Academy of Architecture for Health (AAH) has announced four recipients of the AIA National Healthcare Design Awards program. The awards program highlights the “best of healthcare building design and healthcare design-oriented research” that exhibit “conceptual strengths that solve aesthetic, civic, urban, and social concerns as well as the requisite functional and sustainability concerns of a hospital”.
The AIA National Healthcare Design Award recipients are:
Grounds for Detroit – In this collaborative project, a distinct urban space – the mid-block of residential neighborhood – has been imported to Venice from Detroit. The installation is a recreation – and re-imagining – of a project undertaken in a abandoned single-family house in Detroit 2010.
In the original work, five architects collectively bought a property on Moran Street for $500 cash at a public auction. Each practice then contracted a distinct intervention within its formerly domestic spaces: a kitchen was transformed into a mobile threshold; a bedroom into a hermetic multi-sensory chamber; the dinning room a stepped interior topography; and the detached garage became a atmospheric observatory.
Yesterday, we announced that Los Angeles based Neil M. Denari Architects (NMDA), in collaboration with Taiwanese architectural firm Fei and Cheng Associates, have been selected as winner of a highly publicized, international competition for the new Keelung Harbor Service Building in Taiwan’s largest port city. As promised, we now present to you the winning proposal.
Serving as a “Gateway to the Nation”, the project site consists of a new cruise ship port terminal, a 250 meter long, three level building that will accommodate the largest ships in Asia; a 53,000 square meter Harbor Authority office complex; parking for 1000 cars; and a third phase 23,000 square meter speculative office building. The NT$6.2 billion (US$211.5 million) renewal project will be completed in phases. Construction will commence next year on the three-floor terminal, which is planned for completion by 2015. Work on the complex’s office building is expected to come to a conclusion in 2017. Learn more after the break, with the architects’ complete project statement.
Last April, we announced the opening of Pedro E. Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life – a retrospective exhibition organized by the Julius Shulman Institute (JSI) at Woodbury University that honored the incredible life and career of the great 20th century architectural photographer, Pedro E. Guerrero (1917-2012). JSI was thankful to have Guerrero join the exhibition’s opening night, where he entertained the crowd with his charismatic personality as he shared fascinating stories from his life.
Sadly, the world is still in mourning over Guerrero’s passing last week, as he died at the age of 95 on Thursday, September 13, 2012, at his home in Florence, Arizona.
Woodbury University and the Julius Shulman Institute would like to share a few words from JSI director Emily Bills:
“The Julius Shulman Institute is deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Pedro E. Guerrero. We were honored to host a retrospective of his work last April, which included the lively, and often hilarious, conversation he shared with Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. Guerrero will be remembered as one of the great architectural photographers of the twentieth century, capturing the essence of work by Frank Lloyd Wright, Edward Durell Stone, Marcel Breuer, Joseph P. Salerno, and many others. He will be dearly missed.”
Read Guerrero’s obituary in the New York Times and the LA Times to learn more about his epic life and career. Continue after the break to view some of his best photographs that were featured at the exhibition.
Álvaro Siza. Viagem sem Programa, on display at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia through the duration of the Venice Biennale, narrates the most personal aspects of Álvaro Siza’s work in architecture and his concept of life. In response to Siza being announced as the recipient of the 2012 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, curators Greta Ruffino and Raul Betti, along with organizer MedicinaMentis Cultural Association, began to work closely with the Portuguese master to put together this one-of-a-kind retrospective.
The exhibition features an exclusive collection of 53 works, personally selected by the architect himself, that were developed from travel notes and sketches, along with a 38-minute video interview.
Continue after the break for more images of Álvaro Siza. Viagem sem Programa and check out our previous coverage for more information.
