May 20th, 2008

Berlin Philharmonic Hall on fire
David Basulto in Arch Daily
Another fire on a remarkable building. Today, the Berlin Philharmonic Hall by Hans Schauron caught fire. Firemen were able to control it, but its outer metal skin collapsed. Structural damage is unknown at the time, but it was seriously damaged by fire and water. This building, finished in 1963, was an icon for the Expressionist movement, with a great acoustic work achieved trough it´s inner spaciality which conditioned its external appearance.

Philippe de Montebello Headed to NYU
mediabistro.com: UnBeige
Where do you go after a storied, 31-year tenure at the helm of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Just a few blocks, actually, to New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where departing Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello will be the first professor to teach the history and culture of museums, The New York Times reported today. The move will be officially announced tonight at a NYU dinner. Mr. de Montebello, who turned 72 on Friday, said he planned to teach full time. But rather than lecturing on what might seem most obvious — how to run a museum, for example, or the history of 15th- and 16th-century French and Netherlandish painting, his scholarly area of expertise — he said he would cover the history of collecting and connoisseurship and the evolution of museums, including the central issue of how the museum's mission can be defined in today's world.

Five Green Ideas for Your Kitchen Renovation
Preston D K in Jetson Green
Gwendolyn Bounds invested about 16 months and $83k in her posh, green kitchen remodel.  The process was slightly more difficult than she imagined, but nonetheless, as you can see from the below video: the result is quite nice.  David Johnston, green building and renovation expert, unofficially inspected the work and gave her high marks for the eco renovation.  Her remodel included Energy Star appliances, locally made fly ash concrete countertops, Plyboo and Arreis cabinets, no-VOC paints, FSC-certified wood floors, Nu-Wool recycled newspaper insulation, LED lights, and double-paned efficient windows.

carl maston architect, residence
lavardera in materialicious
MidCentArc has posted a group of photos of a spectacular mid-century house in Los Angeles. It appears that it was(is?) the personal residence of architect Carl Maston, built in 1947. It’s a fantastic mid-century example, and fans, be forewarned of extreme longing and envy ahead.

Hotel Kirkenes / Sami Rintala
Nico Saieh in Arch Daily
Kirkenes is a city of 6000 inhabitants (ca. 9500 in the larger area) in North East Norway next to Russia. Far enough from the political and economical centers, such as capitals, bigger cities, giant business headquarter and cultural institutions, this Barents city has created its own way of international and dynamic interactivity on a grass root level in necessary everyday survival activity like fishing, constructing and tourism. Here meet the Sami, Russian, Norwegian and Finnish Kven human endeavor, divided only, unnecessarily enough, by artificial boundaries.

George Miller Brings the AIA Presidency Back to New York
mediabistro.com: UnBeige
'Tis a good week for New York City this week (and not just because the two of us are here right now). It's been announced that, for the first time in more than thirty years, there will be a New York-based president of the American Institute of Architects. And that person is George H. Miller, who will hold his current title of vice-president for another two years, then assume the presidency in 2010. He's the first NY-based president since 1971, back when Max Urbahn was in the role. Here's a bit: His platform as AIA president includes an aggressive push toward sustainable design, energy conservation, and carbon reduction, as well as a focus on affordable housing, comprehensive regional planning, and public transportation.

Latest Designs On Portland Discussion: "The Ever Growing City" With Urban Designer Arun Jain
Brian Libby in Portland Architecture
 What will Portland look like as it continues to grow in population? How do we maintain our reputation as a model for sustainable development, craft the right balance between a host of different competing interests and values, and add thousands of new residents without sacrificing what makes our city successful? How many questions will be in this paragraph? For the third installment of the bi-monthly discussion series "Designs On Portland" at Design Within Reach in the Pearl, I will be discussing these ideas with Arun Jain, Chief Urban Designer for the City of Portland. Jain didn't lay out the street grid or make Portland a bike and green-friendly city, but with his help we can keep it that way. Maybe we can even improve a thing or two (he said half facetiously).

May 19th, 2008

the awesome architecture of sigurd lewerentz
lavardera in materialicious
I just came across some great photos by p2an on flickr that he has taken of a few fantastic projects by one of my favorite architects, Sigurd Lewerentz from Sweden. This first little structure is the flower kiosk at the Malmö cemetery. It is a small concrete structure where visitors to the cemetery can buy flowers. It was one of his last projects, done in a brutally simply minimalism that just resounds with me.

0751 Suburban House - fourth scheme
lavardera in LamiDesign Modern House Plan Blog
Today we will look at the next scheme from the suburban house project. This scheme came later in the process and so the sketches are more fully developed than the other schemes we have looked at. In this scheme we returned to the idea of the gathering of spaces around the living room, with the secondary spaces seeking a physical connection back to the center of the house. We also struggled to find a way to make a positive solution to the need to elevate the plumbing in the house above the septic system without lifting the entire house out of the ground and compromising the connection to the landscape or bringing in large amounts of fill. What we arrived at was a rather complex interior space arrangement which followed a multi level path through the house, but existed within a simple massing under a simple roof.

Casey Becomes First LEED Platinum Condo
Brian Libby in Portland Architecture
 The Casey Condominiums in the Pearl District have been certified by the US Green Building Council at the top 'platinum' level of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). That makes the Gerding Edlen-developed, GBD Architects designed building the first high-rise condominium residence in the country to reach this highest standard of green building. This is Gerding and GBD's third LEED platinum project, following the Gerding Theater (the nation’s first platinum historic renovation and performing arts center), and Oregon Health Science University’s Center for Health & Healing (the nation’s first and largest LEED platinum medical office building). Gerding Edlen also has 38 LEED projects in its portfolio, more than any other developer in the country.

Deep-water city-states
Geoff Manaugh in BLDGBLOG
Wired reports on "a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires" who hope to develop "a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters."
They call this practice seasteading.
The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down and modifying an existing off-shore oil rig design known as a "spar platform." In essence, the seastead would consist of a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom that could be filled with air or water to raise or lower the living platform on top. The spar design helps offshore platforms better withstand the onslaught of powerful ocean waves by minimizing the amount of structure that is exposed to their energy.

John Todd wins Buckminster Challenge Award
Jorge Chapa in Inhabitat
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge honors visionary thinking that seeks to “solve humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity.” Starting this year, a $100,000 prize will be awarded in support of development and implementation of solutions that have the potential to transform the world. Setting a high precedent for the future, Dr. John Todd has won the First Annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge for his proposal Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia, which lays out a strategy for transforming one and a half million acres of strip-mined lands in Appalachia into a harmonious self-sustaining community.

Intent Shapes Environment, Environment Shapes Life
WorldChanging Team in WorldChanging
By Claude Lewenz
Sometimes we talk about the environment without considering what it is. There are two: the natural environment (made by Nature and adversely impacted by man), and the physical environment; the local environment that surrounds each of us in our day-to-day life – our room, our home, our streets and parks. When we talk about saving the environment, we tend to focus on the natural environment and the depredations done by man. The Environment Movement tends to include high-minded people who do not profit by that depredation calling for restraints on other people who do profit by it. Sadly, when high-minded people realise they will be adversely affected by those restraints (such as living in a suburb and being told the price of fuel is about to quadruple), many tend to back off a bit…

Kuwait's First LEED Tower To Be Crowned with Wind
Preston D K in Jetson Green
KEO International Consultants has received word from the USGBC that its design for Sabah Al Ahmed International Finance Center (ICF) has been precertified at the Gold level under the LEED-CS green building rating system.  The 1.2 million sf, 40-story tower is the first building in Kuwait to be registered or precertified by the USGBC.  As you can partially tell from the renderings, the design includes four stacked courtyard atriums ranging from 8-13 floors each.  Three of the atriums serve the office portion of the building, while the fourth atrium serves the 200 key, 4-star business class hotel.  The tower generates part of its energy from a PV system, as well as from roof-mounted wind turbines.  You may be able to see the lattice-work of wind turbines at the crown of the building; I think they're the vertical axis, helical-type, but it's hard to tell with this one image.  We'll make sure to keep you posted ...

McModern Update
John in A Daily Dose of Architecture
Last summer I passed along a cover story in AM New York about a "McMansion under construction in the historic Broadway-Flushing/Murray Hill neighborhood of Queens [that] pitted neighbors versus John Hsu," who was building a house in a style at odds with his neighbors. An article in this week's New York Magazine recounts how "the local homeowners’ association picketed his site [and] The Department of Buildings audited his plans twice, delaying construction eight months." Last summer all we could see was a concrete frame. Now we see that Hsu, with architects Grzywinski+Pons built just what he wanted: a tasteful Modern house that responds to its context but doesn't imitate it.

Element house / Sami Rintala
Nico Saieh in Arch Daily
I received an interesting invitation last May. In the Seoul metropolitan area there is a satellite city called Anyang, a small, in Korean context, suburban town with 700.000 inhabitants.
The city had decided to invite several international architects and artists to participate the design of a new park. The project, called Anyang Public Art Park, relates to the concept of art and architecture parks in Japan, the largest of which is Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial area in Niigata.

Willis Headquarters at Lime Street / Foster + Partners
David Basulto in Arch Daily
Foster + Partners just informed us that the new Willis headquarters at Lime Street in London is complete. As usual, the firm lead by Sir Norman Foster developed a urban piece that integrates with the city at street level and features environmental strategies to reduce its energy consumption and carbon footprint. This two buildings are developed as a series of overlapping curved shells while its section is arranged in three steps. The roof terraces overlooking the plaza on the lower two steps are directly accessible from the office spaces. Both buildings have a central core to provide open floor plates and maximum flexibility in use. The entire development is visually unified by its highly reflective façade. The pressed form of the panels and their mica finish give them depth and texture. A dynamic effect is established through the interplay of solid and glazed panels arranged in a saw-tooth pattern, the fins also increase insulation while reducing glare and solar gain.

Orquideorama / Plan B Architects + JPRCR Architects
Nico Saieh in Arch Daily
Architects: Plan B - Felipe Mesa, Alejandro Bernal + JPRCR - Camilo Restrepo, J. Paul Restrepo
Collaborators: Viviana Peña, Catalina Patiño, Carolina Gutiérrez, Lina Gil, Jorge Buitrago ...a. Architecture and organisms The Construction of a Orchideorama should come up of the relation between architecture and the living organisms. It should not make any distinction between natural and artificial, on the contrary, it should accept them as a unity that allows architecture to be conceived as a material, spatial, environmental organization that is deeply related to the processes of life.