March 21st, 2008

Eric Owen Moss Architects - 3555 Hayden
ArchitectureMNP
Eric Owen Moss - architecturally pimpin’-out Culver City, California since it was still cool to wear turtlenecks.
As with all things in life, architecture is met and conceived with entirely different vantage points. As young students, there is a tendency to veer to things that catch your creative eye, and as one’s architectural senses begin to develop, the understanding of a greater meaning behind a project begins to direct a designer’s thinking [an architectural spirit if you will]. As one further matures, gaining more insight into their projects and themselves, a certain style is achieved that bears the knowledge of continual architectural studies, trials, errors, and successes. Eric Owen Moss falls into this latter category

Kevin Cavenaugh Plans 14-Unit Housing Development By 13 Designers
Brian Libby in Portland Architecture
Over the last several months, one of Portland’s most accomplished designer-developers, Kevin Cavenaugh, has been at Harvard University as part of a Loeb Fellowship, just as then-Oregonian architecture critic Randy Gragg did the prior academic year. In the past, Cavenaugh has been responsible for the Rocket building on Burnside (the red one with the sunscreen panels featuring individual artworks and Rocket restaurant on top), the Ode to Rose’s mixed use building on Northeast Fremont (a local AIA award winner, with Fife restaurant on the ground floor), and another very successful mixed use project at Southeast 28th and Ankeny housing Noble Rot wine bar. Trained as an architect and previously employed at Fletcher Farr Ayotte, Kevin is not a registered architect and thus it is never his name listed as the architect of record on the documents, but they are definitely his buildings.

FLATPAK COMES TO LIFE: The Goodwin-Wise Flatpak House
Mike Chino in Inhabitat
Two years of development have found the world’s first production FlatPak house well on track to becoming a real home for the Goodwin-Wise family. Artist and owner Amy Goodwin recently posted a stunning set of photos on her website to document the construction progress of her Flatpak home, showcasing the modern design marvel in fine form. Nestled amid verdant greenery in Massachusetts, the Goodwin-Wise house has weathered some kinks in the woodwork (i.e. a two year assembly period), but by the looks of things the streamlined process and final product have been well worth the wait.

Landscape Futures @ Penn
Geoff Manaugh in BLDGBLOG
Anyone in the Philadelphia area looking to hear about climate change, ruined cities, tectonic warfare, James Bond, the literal end of the earth, and a bit of Hollywood-style archaeology, consider stopping by Meyerson Hall at the University of Pennsylvania (located here), at 3:30pm today – the first Friday of Spring – to hear BLDGBLOG talk about these and other subjects. This will be a combination of my Bartlett, SCI-Arc, and AIA-Baltimore lectures, focusing specifically on long-term landscape processes – aka landscape futures.
The above image, for instance, from The Museum of Nature by Finnish photographer Ilkka Halso, will be making an appearance.

China, A Country Without Memory
admin in mirage.studio.7
Clearing of the old and making way for the new, tall, definitely soulless apartment blocks. The McDonalization of architecture is China has lead to the birth of disposable architecture, in short, a society that is disposable and not worth caring, cities that are not worth defending. Ming and Qing Dynasty neighborhood of traditional courtyard houses in Beijing being demolished to make way for luxury housing; a city razed as a result of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, now the largest dam in the world; a new city built to accommodate the relocation of populations whose former cities will be flooded by the Yangtze River; a traditional district in Chongqing waiting to be destroyed, surrounded by new construction; anonymous construction sites marking the empty moment between the erasure of the past and the arrival of the future. - Sze Tsung Leong

James Dyson Gets the Okay to Build His Design School
mediabistro.com: UnBeige
Speaking of James Dyson, as we just mentioned in that post and made a promise yesterday, it looks like the inventor and importance-of-design-pusher has won over the people of Bath in the UK and they're going to let him...

New Green Complex in China by Steven Holl
Ali Kriscenski in Inhabitat
Architect Steven Holl always appeals to our sustainable side, capturing our imagination with beautiful designs that incorporate both social and environmental responsibility. His new design for a mixed use development in China is bringing a green sensibility to the skyline of Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan. The ‘Sliced Porosity Block’ will house offices, apartments, retail, a hotel, cafes and restaurants within five towers and a multi-level plaza rivaling Rockefeller Center. This high-performance building will integrate green strategies in heating, cooling, lighting and materials to attain an LEED gold certification.

Papercut is Right
Michelle Linden in Atelier A+D
While I don't think the execution is perfect, Yeshop Papercut succeeds as part retail space and part sculpture. I personally prefer the top two photos, and don't necessarily think that the boolean boxes shown in the lower photo are ideally placed for aesthetic balance... however, the idea is quite nice. Using very affordable materials (cardboard and osb) as well as a laser cutter (I hope!), the joint effort by dARCH Studio and Yiorgos Eleftheriades succeeds in creating the kind of shop you'd like to visit to check out cutting edge fashion.

100K Project, Unleashing the Modern Green Virus!
Preston D K in JETSONGREEN.COM
I've been following the 100k Project since the beginning and I'm completely sucked into the process.  It's a simple concept: low cost, modern, and green -- something all houses should be.  Today, they posted all new renderings with James Hardie Vertical Panel siding in various shades of gray.  The new renderings present an entirely different look and feel that's incredible.  Chad, I'm giving you major props on this one.  Interface Studio Architects is right on with that look.  I just wish I could buy one of them!

March 20th, 2008

Eye Candy: Pod Village
architecture.MNP
Accounts vary on the origins of this complex, and indeed, as to whether it was meant to be a hotel development or a housing development. Apparently, it was constructed in the 1960s and included/was to include a dam to protect it against sea surges, floors and stairs made of marble and a small amusement park. The site was commissioned by the government and local firms and there is no named architect. Local papers at the time reported that there were numerous accidents during construction which caused the death of some workers. As news of these accidents spread, no one wanted to go there, even to visit, and the project was subsequently abandoned. The ghosts of those who died in vain are said to still linger there, unremembered and unable to pass on. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture

New faucet design saves energy while saving water
Carol Gulyas in Green Options
Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.We are familiar with motion-sensing faucets that turn on when we move our hands under them, and automatically turn themselves off, so we don’t have to handle the germy handles. We like that. But Toto takes this design much further [...]

Green? Dense? Walkable?
Alex Steffen in WorldChanging
Here's a debate where none is needed: the argument about whether green building, compact communities, or transit-supportive design is a better approach to improving the world. The latest piece to kick up some dust is a report from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, which, as reported by Reuters, says "Green" construction could cut North America's climate-warming emissions faster and more cheaply than any other measure...
Elsewhere, people reaffirm that North Americans' best bet for carbon reduction is walking and taking transit, while others (often including myself) think density is the best lever, if we have to pick one with which to start.

Boulder: The U.S.'s First Smart Grid?
Alex Steffen in WorldChanging
One of the fun things about editing a project like Worldchanging in times like these is the frequency with which our predictions and speculations get run down and overtaken by commercial realities. We've written a lot about smart grids, touting their potential benefits, from neighborhood survivability to enabling pug-in hybrid-electrics to act as a system of batteries during peak use surges.

Crystalline Fertilizer Company Headquarters in Minsk
Cate Trotter in Inhabitat
Despite being the manufacturer of chemical fertilizer (something that is not usually seen as ‘green’), the Belarusian Potash Company (BPC) has managed to incorporate green design features and employee health and well-being into their design for the new headquarters in Minsk, Belarus. Giving new meaning to the term ‘biomimicry’, (chemicalmimicry?) the colorful new fertilizer headquarter building resembles a gigantic crystalline structure.

Natural Building Network
Kelly Hart in Green Home Building and Sustainable Architecture
There is a fantastic on-line resource for all people interested in natural building: www.naturalbuildingnetwork.org. This site was initiated in 2005 by a group of people who collectively have considerable experience in the realm of natural building, which they define as "any building system which places the highest value on social and environmental sustainability. It assumes the need to minimize the environmental impact of our housing and other supporting systems while providing healthy, beautiful, comfortable and spiritually uplifting homes for everyone."

Pleated Recycled Textile Chair by Nendo
Abigail Doan in Inhabitat
It’s no secret that needless waste and heaps of scraps are part of the equation in today’s textile and garment manufacturing process. Granted there are some amazing results in terms of cutting edge fashion and eye-catching furniture designs, but this often comes at a huge cost in terms of the throw-away elements. The Cabbage Chair by Japanese designers, Nendo, defies this trend by taking waste paper from the pleated fabric industry and turning it into an organic marvel. This gorgeous recycled textile waste chair was designed for the XXIst Century Man exhibition curated by Issey Miyake. It’s no coincidence (visually) that ‘Pleats Please‘ has found a new expression in this layered demonstration of waste as upcycled renewal.

Children's Museum Battle Moves to Plan Commission - plus Germania Club, Marina City. IBM Updates
Lynn Becker in ArchitectureChicago PLUS
Chicago Children's Museum
In a newsletter sent out last week, 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly writes that the Chicago Children's Museum's proposal to build itself a new home in Grant Park will "very likely [be] heard at the April 17th, 2007 meeting" of the Chicago Plan Commission. It could be that the Museum thinks it has the votes to muscle its way through the Commission. Heavy lobbying has been going on in the City Council, with the Sun-Times reporting that the museum continues to play the race card in smearing opposition to its land grab as racist. The photo you see here is of the current park, derisively dismissed by Mayor Richard M. Daley as "nowhere".

Like a Car Wreck, I Can't Look Away
Michelle Linden in Atelier A+D
I find these headless cow benches by Julia Lohmann really disturbing and yet I can't stop looking at them. They'd be really interesting scattered in a large field or placed throughout city streets... kind of like the Chicago cows, but without heads (and yet somehow not as tacky).