Day 1: Image Of The Day by howardignatius Today we began our tour of Iceland by visiting this beautiful waterfall not far from Reykjavik named Öxarárfoss. It is Þingvellir National Park and flows from the river Öxará. http://flic.kr/p/cAmFGW
These images by Portuguese photographer Fernando Guerra offer a tour of Peter Zumthor‘s thermal baths at Vals, which celebrate their 20th anniversary this year (+ slideshow). (more…)
From the architect. This is a small house designed for outdoor living, with Living Spaces that engage the Garden, blurring the boundary between Exterior and Interior, and engaging the ground surrounding it and opening to the sky.
This House affirms the vibrancy of the design strategies of the modern houses of Los Angeles. What is new is that now we can build in a truly sustainable way, with cool roofs, dual glazed low iron crystal clear glazing expanses, new structural steel codes and advances in engineering that allow for even thinner overhanging roofs, thick slumped stone walls can be replaced with patterned walls with more efficient insulation and usable cavities.
Reenergizing and renewing the Modern Living Promise, the new House opens the interiors to the outdoors and the views: it’s an Open House, engaged with its garden, exterior spaces and the interiors merge in an attempt to bring us together again with our natural surroundings.
The Contemporary design echoes mid-20th Century horizontal lines (the famous ‘planes of Id’) that refer to the endless Los Angeles Horizon (only if interrupted by the vertical plane where the SmartTV screen is embedded). Thus this small house makes attempts to critically engage the urbanity of the the city it belongs to.
The House is a composition of horizontal volumes and a void interpreted as a garden anchored by a tree. The House is Split into two volumes perpendicular to each other, with a small court in between. A Specimen Tree is the centerpiece of this court, growing through the roof joining the two volumes of the house, growing through a rectangular Oculus, and soaring towards the sky.
The volumetric composition of the House is brought together by the continuous Roof/canopy (=Horizon). Thus the House defines Los Angeles as a city made of volumetric fragments and voids coalesced by the endless horizon. This House reflects the urban condition of Los Angeles: an endless Horizon that paradoxically brings together the divergent geometries of Los Angeles’ urban sprawl.
After working for OMA, BIG, FR-EE and REX, architect-turned-artist Se Yoon Park has dedicated the last three years to Light, Darkness, and the Tree, a sculpture series employing digital fabrication techniques to express an allegory for life. With assistants, Vladislav Markov, Kelly Koh, David Temann Lu, Ramon Rivera, Kara Moats, and Insil Jang, Park uses dynamic light and shadow to capture movement on surfaces that contort, split and disappear into each other.
In Light and Darkness, Park capitalizes on a variety of material qualities: wood, steel, and polyurethane resin provide structure, while ceramic and 3D printed Polyamide capture and diffuse light. Tree of Life is composed of multiple cast and hand-dyed units of Light and Darkness, delicately aggregated in a bond-free cantilever system. This balance is emblematic; for Park, the duality of the light and shadow in the sculpture recall the duality of life, while the tree, continuously and cyclically consuming and producing, captures divinity in nature.
News via Se Yoon Park
Opening to much fanfare earlier this week, Zaha Hadid Architects’ Port House holds a commanding presence over the port of Antwerp. The design combines a listed and formerly derelict fire station, which was restored as part of the project, with an eye-catching glass extension which rises out of the older building’s courtyard and thrusts itself towards the water in a dramatic cantilever. In the context of the port, where large infrastructure and colossal machines form the backdrop to everyday functions, the building boldly stakes its claim as the operational centerpiece, providing a space for the Port of Antwerp’s 500 employees. Photographer Thomas Mayer visited the building, capturing its striking external presence and investigating how its structural gymnastics translate to the building’s internal space.
“There’s just something about a winding road that ignites wanderlust,” says photographer Kathryn Dyer, and we couldn’t agree more! At an impromptu stop in California’s Yosemite National Park, Kathryn captured this incredible shot of Half Dome shining golden from a beautiful alpenglow and framed by trees. When you visit public lands, you never know what amazing vistas you’ll find! Photo courtesy of Kathryn Dyer.
All the world’s a stage – quite literally so, in the case of the Container Globe, a proposal to reconstruct a version of Shakespeare’s famous Globe Theatre with shipping containers. Staying true to the design of the original Globe Theatre in London, the Container Globe sees repurposed containers come together in a familiar form, but in steel rather than wood. Founder Angus Vail hopes this change in building component will give the Container Globe both a “punk rock” element and international mobility, making it as mobile as the shipping containers that make up its structure.
The project has been spearheaded by Vail, with Nicholas Leahy of Perkins Eastman acting as the project’s lead architect and Michael Ludvik as structural engineer. The two have previously worked together on the TKTS Booth in Times Square, and Leahy also has previous experience working on the London Globe in the 1980s. Additionally, the Container Globe team has enlisted the New York branch of Arup for the theater’s environmental performance studies.
The assembly of the Container Globe is kept logically simple, as seen in an animated video released by the team. The bulk of the theater is made up of the shipping containers forming the seating gallery, which are all modified in the same way and stacked into a tower of three such modules. Interestingly, while steel sheets are not usually the material of choice for performance spaces, the design team found that the containers’ corrugation, and its effect on acoustic reflection, actually lends itself well to housing live performances. The rest of the shipping containers are also cut through and added to, forming the backstage and balconies, with stairwells connecting the separate areas. The entire structure is then draped with a “tough industrial mesh,” providing shelter from wind and rain while also letting in daylight. The mesh will also help soften the sound of rain for those inside the theater.
Though currently unbuilt, plans are underway for the first Container Globe to be constructed in Detroit, where it would be used for performances of not just the Shakespearean persuasion, but also for live music, dance, and in winter as a sculpture garden. After this, Vail hopes to reproduce the Globe in other places around the world, anywhere the team can gain access to the shipping containers required–“ie everywhere,” as Vail puts it. In particular, Vail is interested in mobilizing the Globe to communities lacking in cultural infrastructure in order to increase accessibility to the arts.
The theatre is clearly a labour of love for Vail, who accredits the Sex Pistols and King Lear as equally formative influences in a TEDx Talk on the project. Having funded the project himself thus far, a Kickstarter will be launched in 2017 to help reach the project’s estimated cost of $6 million. It is an ambitious number to reach, in tune with the ambitious nature of the project itself.
In the hopes of connecting people and performance, the Container Globe also connects several creative tropes–Kickstarter, shipping containers and pop-ups, making it easy to dismiss as another passing trend. With the air of an eccentric uncle invested deeply in a hobby, Vail’s own passion makes one want to believe in his vision, regardless of whether or not one actually does. However, with its solid design backing and support from the London Globe, the Detroit community and across social media, the path towards a place to “party like it’s 1599” is set to continue.
London Design Festival 2016: British designer Sebastian Bergne‘s glass Drop carafe has been created to resemble an oversized droplet of water (+ slideshow). (more…)
Sig Nordal 