Architects of Invention has unveiled their design for the CORAL Hotel, an upscale lifestyle community in Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa. Located on the reclaimed portion of the main island of Seychelles, the project will feature professionally serviced apartments, a spa, several restaurants, a clubhouse, a pool, private marina and direct access to the beach.
In an effort to replicate sustainability solutions from nature, the project utilizes biomimicry and is based on the models, systems, and growth of coral. The architect states that “the structures of the project derives from the content of units in continuous movement resembling a sea creature, coral or the moving of the sea.”
In order to optimize ocean views from apartment windows, the apartment complex will be “arranged as single or several interlocked architectural spaces along the entire length of the parcel.” Thus, half of the apartments in the building will have ocean views.
Each apartment will average 40 square meters, with either one or two bedrooms, a mixed kitchen and living room, a bathroom, and a spacious terrace.
Furthermore, the ground floor of the building will house the main lobby, restaurant, bar, spa, and retail space.
Learn more about the project here.
News via Architects of Invention.
The 20 houses vying for this year’s RIBA House of the Year award have been announced, including a forest home for a pair of artists, a London residence covered in mirrors and a cluster of cabins in Dungeness (+ slideshow). (more…)
With things heating up outside, it’s important that we know how to stay hydrated throughout the day. Without water, we simply couldn’t function!
Our bodies rely on water to remove harmful toxins, lubricate our joints, and keep migraines and other ailments at bay. It is also a vital component in our body’s day-to-day chores carrying valuable nutrients around our system.
According to reports, as many as 60% of the population drink less than one glass of water a day. That’s quite astounding considering that we should ideally be aiming for a minimum of eight glasses in order to remain hydrated and healthy.
See Also: How Much Should You Really Drink?
With just one glass of water a day comes dehydration. Hunger, migraines, lethargy, and irritability are all common signs of a dehydrated body. So with that in mind, it’s time to think about how YOU can drink more water.
Here are 5 of the best ways on how to stay hydrated even during hot days.
If you dislike the taste of water then that’s no excuse as there are tons of ways you can jazz it up. Add a slice of lemon or lime for a citrus burst, or slice up your favourite fruits and berries to make a tropical tasting concoction. Try adding flavoured ice cubes too, perfect for a hot summers day!
Sounds obvious but when you’re out and about you might not think to stop for a glass of water. If you get into the habit of carrying around a sports bottle, you’re more likely to continuously drink and keep your fluid levels topped up.
There are all sorts of fancy water bottles out there today, and you can also purchase bottles with built-in infusers and filters to create an even tastier drink.
If you set yourself a goal, then you’re more likely to achieve it by having something to work towards. For example, if you’re in the one-glass-of-water-a-day club, then try aiming for 4-5 glasses a day and gradually work up until you hit the recommended eight.
It’s all about progress!
Another way to introduce more water into your diet is to eat more water-filled fruits. Foods such as watermelon, strawberries, oranges and apples will still help in contributing to your daily water intake.
They’re super healthy and packed with tons of other goodness too. Why not make a side fruit salad part of your everyday lunch routine?
See Also: Healthy Eating: 5 Killer Strategies to Lose Weight to Live Longer and Happier
You know what they say. There’s an app for everything out there now. That includes water consumption too, fortunately. Try the Waterlogged app, to keep track of your progress and receive reminders throughout the day to DRINK MORE WATER!
So there we have it. Just a few top tips on how to stay hydrated this summer. Make that office water cooler your new best friend and ensure you beat the headaches by consuming more of the clear stuff these summer months.
The post Top 5 Tips On How To Stay Hydrated appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
From the architect. By commissioning a temporary summer pavilion by a leading architect every year, the Serpentine Galleries in Londons Kensington Gardens is known as an international site for architectural experimentation. Its Architecture Programme expands for 2016 with four Summer Houses joining the Serpentine Pavilion.
Queen Caroline’s Temple, an 18th century historical “summer house” attributed to William Kent and situated in the proximity of the Serpentine Gallery, stands seemingly purposeless facing
a large meadow. A second, today extinct, Pavilion also designed by William Kent was situated on a nearby man-made mountain constructed from the dredging of the artificial The Long Water. This small Pavilion rotated mechanically 360 degrees at the top of the hill offering various panoramic views of the park and, reciprocally, different views of itself when seen from the park.
It was meant to be seen in the park and was meant as a structure from which to see its surroundings. The little mountain and house disappeared at some point in history.
With this in mind (temporality and the absent house) Barkow Leibinger designed a Pavilion in-the-round standing free with all its sides visible. It is conceived as a series of undulating lines constituting bands and forming part of the structure that is reminiscent of a contour drawing (or the act of drawing a form without lifting the pencil up from the paper and only looking at the subject). The logic of generating a structure from loops of ribbon is a self-generating one and comes from a logic of making that is, by coiling material in your hands round and round then stacking the material upon itself.
The new Summer House is organized as four bands of structure beginning with a bench level attached to the ground, a second band of three C-shaped walls crowned by a third and fourth level which forms a roof that cantilevers a tree-like canopy over the smaller footprint de ned by the undulating loops of bench wood. The horizontal banding recalls the layered coursing of Kent’s Summer House albeit its idiosyncratic nature. The Summer House is constructed with plywood skin on a steel tube frame, materials intrinsically in harmony with the looping geometry of the structure.
In 2003 George Steiner—a Paris-born, American, UK-based literary critic, philosopher and essayist—gave a lecture in Tilburg, a small Dutch city on the Belgian border. His talk, which he called “The Idea of Europe,” was delivered through the Nexus Institute, making some waves in certain circles but, ultimately, was not widely discussed. I found a copy of the transcript earlier this year in Amsterdam’s Athenaeum[1], who had tucked it in the corner of a sunken room on a shelf devoted to “Brexit.” I read and read it the following day while on a journey to Brussels.
As I trundled across the Flemish hinterland Steiner’s words, delivered with judicious insight and a reassuring cautionary edge, served as a reminder of one irrevocable fact: that Europe is a continent “of linguistic, cultural, [and] social diversity;” a “mosaic”[2] of communities that have rarely been united under an institution of the same scale and ambition as today’s European Union. But before the European Union came the European café.
Cities like Paris, Venice, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Budapest, Geneva, Lisbon, and even historic Istanbul, have harbored some of the most tempestuous interiors in Europe. Within these cities were, and are, the greatest of the great cafés and coffee houses: Café Central, Café A Brasileira, and Da Florian on Piazza San Marco – “the drawing room of Europe” and the oldest café in Europe; Les Deux Magots and Café Gerbeaud. Places of political discussion, artistic argument, assignation, and conspiracy.
In their heyday they were modern agoras – settings which, in the words of Steiner, were the very “locus of eloquence and rivalry.”[3] More recent loci, such as the Café Philosophique founded by Marc Sautet at the Café des Phares in Paris’ Place de la Bastille (which ran until his death in 1998), embody this idea: places of discursive discourse and self-reflection. They have allowed people, like Steiner, to feel at home anywhere in Europe; “the price of one cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, buys you the day at the table [of a café]” – with no strings attached. It’s “the most egalitarian society in the world,” he once declared[4].
The basis of Steiner’s argument—that the grand intellectual cafés of Europe remain the hotbeds of contemporary discourse—is nostalgic – a fact which he himself recognises. They have, on the most part, collapsed into nothing more than wistful signposts to a bygone European landscape, and today they almost exclusively serve tourists. Piazza San Marco is filled, hour upon hour, by quartets serenading patrons of Byron, Proust and Dicken’s old haunt. Café Central in Vienna serves up more Apfelstrudel with lashings of whipped cream to tourists searching for the atmospheric setting that inspired Lenin, Trotsky and Loos than the waiters care to count. These places are no longer real, in the real sense of the word.
The power of sentimentality, which is exploited most superficially in contemporary tourism, should not be underestimated – there is a sinister margin to this “sovereignty of remembrance.” There are, of course, two sides to every story and Europe—above all—has born witness to some of mankind’s darkest moments alongside some of its most magnificent. “Europe is the place where Goethe’s garden almost borders on Buchenwald,” Steiner acknowledges in his lecture; “where the house of Corneille abuts on the market-place in which Joan of Arc was hideously done to death.” A literate European, he continues, “is caught in the spiderweb of an in memoriam at once luminous and suffocating.”[5]
European café culture, as a reflection from and on society, is no less contradictory. The world has globalized and European nations, some of which directly instigated this shift, have transformed alongside it. In 1998, just as Sautet’s Café Philosophique in Paris ceased to be, the Seattle-based Starbucks Corporation entered the European market through the UK. The British, who certainly haven’t cultivated a café culture in the same way as other European countries, have taken to this new, more superficial variant, like ducks to water. Significantly, however, they have been reticent to embrace it as a national trait; chains of the Costa Coffee and Caffè Nero ilk, for example, both rely heavily on pseudo-Italian branding (of an Italy which no longer exists).
The United Kingdom, as it’s citizens face the decision of a lifetime and lifetimes to come, must recognise that self-professed differences from ‘continental Europe’ are, in fact, one of our greatest assets. European café culture was, as Steiner credibly argues, a potent facilitator of social change and intellectual progress. But England had the pub, with it’s own cultural “aura and mythology.”[6] The café, like the pub, is immediately recognisable and universally understood as a public interior – at once a cloister and a marketplace; a place for introspection as much for interaction, bound by communal consumption and with infinite variety.
The European Union’s greatest test will be to acknowledge, accommodate, and develop its mosaical identity without the scourge of nationalist rhetoric and without individual states occasionally attempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Challenging times demand collective perseverance and, dare I say, a little circumspection. Striving for homogeneity in Europe is, to my mind at least, not a feasible long-term solution to the difficulties that we currently face, and will face in decades to come.
Although Steiner’s idea of Europe may partly feel a little wistful, it remains poignant and profoundly relevant. “Café culture” represents the ideological embodiment of the notion of the congregational city – of concord, discord and cohesion, even in the most fraught political conditions. If it is a paragon of the idea of Europe, then we should strive for it and accept nothing less. The United Kingdom must be a part of this shared vision and not abandon its promise.
James Taylor-Foster is ArchDaily‘s European Editor-at-Large.
Footnotes
[1] The Athenaeum bookshop on Spui in Amsterdam was founded by Johan Polak, a Dutch publisher and bibliophile who, according to Rob Riemen, was a strong advocate of George Steiner’s teachings – in particular, his belief in the European ideal of civilization.
[2] “The genius of Europe is what William Blake would have called ‘the holiness of the minute particular’.” Steiner, G. The Idea of Europe. Tilburg: Nexus Institute, 2012. p.32
[3] ibid. Steiner, G. p.18
[4] Steiner, G. in “The Art of Criticism No.2” – Paris Review, Winter 1995 No. 37
[5] ibid. Steiner, G. p.22-23
[6] ibid. Steiner, G. p.18
Sig Nordal 