Month: October 2016

Cultuurhuis Winshoten / Atelier Pro

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© Roland Halbe

© Roland Halbe


© Eva Bloem


© Eva Bloem


© Eva Bloem


© Eva Bloem

  • Architects: Atelier Pro
  • Location: Meester D.U. Stikkerlaan, Winschoten, The Netherlands
  • Architect In Charge: Dorte Kristensen, Lisette Plouvier, Eelko Bemener
  • Area: 8125.0 sqm
  • Project Year: 2015
  • Photographs: Roland Halbe, Eva Bloem
  • Design Team: Allard de Goeij, 
André van Veen, 
Evelien van Beek
, Robert Witteman, 
Wesley Wijnands

© Eva Bloem

© Eva Bloem

The Klinker Cultural Centre was given a lively exterior to reflect the expressive nature of its programs. Its central location in Winschoten makes it easily accessible to the residents who can enjoy the cultural offerings of the theatre, arts centre, radio studio and library, or savour a coffee in the theatre café. In this way, residents themselves actively contribute to their city’s cultural life.


Site Plan

Site Plan

Cultural icon in Groningen region
The striking carved exterior of the centre is designed without front or back facades in order to better engage its surroundings on all sides. This also maximises and accentuates its footprint on the site, while the gentle angles of the continuous facade play with the laws of perspective and shorten visual distances. The horizontal sections, curved edges and overhangs recall 1920s Expressionist architecture in Groningen. The building anchors itself in Winschoten by echoing the morphology of its surroundings. It functions as a juncture between the small-scale buildings of the historic inner city and the larger scale of post-war developments and renovations. The adjacent city centre is characterised by double-storey masonry houses made of local Groningen clay. The reduced scale is emphasized by the horizontal bands that split and join as they move around the building. Major characteristics of the building are its richly detailed vertical masonry and deep, sloping window recesses which lend the building a strong and bold appearance. Different types of bricks were specially designed for the project and produced in traditional orange Groningen clay. The technical zones in the plinth also reflect a connection to the surroundings. The raw, brown/orange ends of the building feature CorTen steel surfaces perforated with the contours of Groningen’s landscape.


© Eva Bloem

© Eva Bloem

Façade
The main innovation is the fact that the facade is entirely sculpted from brickwork. A very specific production process enabled the use of deep reveals around the window frames. These are composed of six separate elements poured into one single structure in the factory and installed as one piece on site in front of the windows. 


Courtesy of Atelier Pro

Courtesy of Atelier Pro

The prefab facade is completely constructed without traditional sills or eaves/overhangs. Water that runs over the window frame is discharged through the drainage cavity. In principle no additional drain is necessary. In case of excessive leakage it was decided to implement gutters under every frame to reduce the risk of damage and make maintenance easier. For extra reassurance, the gutters catch excess water and drain it away through the sewage system.


© Eva Bloem

© Eva Bloem

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Why Choosing Yourself Is The Best Choice Of All

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You’re reading Why Choosing Yourself Is The Best Choice Of All, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Why Choosing Yourself Is The Best Choice Of All

find yourself

It’s time to take control of your creative career.

We live in a judgmental society. People judge us by our looks, our clothes, our pedigrees, our homes, even our pets. There’s no end to keeping up with the Joneses. Whether you’re looking for a job, submitting art to a gallery, trying to get a poem published, auditioning for a play, or seeking a business deal, you have to get by the gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers are just normal people, but they have been assigned to protect a turf. You may have the greatest novel in the world, but if it doesn’t fit into some kind of marketing plan that can raise lots of profits, it’s toast. You may feel so frustrated you want to give up.

With the Internet, it’s now possible for you to choose yourself and your audience. You may have thought about this, but aren’t sure it’s any easier than getting past the gatekeepers. Rather than one fell swoop, think of it as as series of small steps. Sure, it’s not easy to self-publish and sell a lot of books, or upload fine art prints and sell a lot of those. And some unsavory characters have gamed the systems, making it even harder for honest, hardworking creatives.

But the fact is, the opportunities are out there. And the Internet has merely brought back the way things once were—in the 19th and earlier part of the 20th century, it was common to self-publish or partner with a publisher. Dostoyevsky, Twain, Hemingway and Lewis Carroll all had to finance some of their own works.

Perhaps you’ve taken a stab at doing it on your own, and it hasn’t worked out. What’s great is you can reinvent yourself and keep going. You can test what works and what doesn’t. You can aim your work at the whole world or at your immediate groups.

Study what has done well. You’ll probably find it’s not the most intellectual, not the most creative, and certainly not the most obscure works. It’s those that reach out emotionally to an audience that’s well understood by the author. Did you know that Julia Cameron’s landmark book The Artist’s Way started out as a self-published book? It was called Healing the Artist Within. It didn’t get past the gatekeepers. But once it was out there in the world, the gatekeepers took notice and turned it into a best-seller.

Could it have done just as well without gatekeepers? Well, gatekeepers do have their advantages. They do marketing and distribution—but ask any author and you’ll realize that author is responsible for a lot of her own marketing, even with traditional publishers.

Some best-selling authors are doing it entirely on their own. You can make digital products or paper ones. You can free yourself of all printing and fulfillment duties, or, have your work printed and sell it yourself. You have a greater chance of climbing the success ladder by approaching smaller gatekeepers, such as libraries and bookstores.

The main thing to stick to it regularly, and keep up your confidence. You’re now writer, artist, publisher, gallery, and bookstore (or some of those, anyway). Keep a sense of humor and be patient. Reach out to others, but don’t spend all your time on social media. There’s no substitute for pounding the pavement. One vital thing that all publishers know is to know and understand your target market. Choose your audience.

Give back to your community

One artist just painted dozens of portraits of people in his Brooklyn, NY community. The portraits culminated in a parade, a museum show, and a ton of free publicity. Not only did he bring the community together, he gave them the gift of being immortalized in art, and did his career an enormous favor. That’s classic choosing yourself. Did he sit around and scheme? No, he truly wanted to give back to his neighborhood.

In many non-Western cultures, art is woven into the fabric of life. It’s not stuck in museums, it’s lived, in textiles, dance, language, food, and ritual. When you think about it, that way of living is truly giving back, rather than being fixated on impressing the suits. It’s joyful. It’s what art’s about.

Choosing yourself will increase your gutsiness in all areas. You might just take to it like a bird to flight.

Vicky Young is a writer and and illustrator. She works in traditional and digital art, and has a masters in art education. She blogs at Tablets for Artists.

You’ve read Why Choosing Yourself Is The Best Choice Of All, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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ZROBYM Architects Designs a Colorful Apartment in Minsk, Belarus

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💙 The Bird & The Sunset on 500px by Alyaksandr…

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💙 The Bird & The Sunset on 500px by Alyaksandr Stzhalkouski,… http://ift.tt/1TUaD2S

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6 Ways To Prepare For Change

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Some change is welcome – some change is not. Every month or year or two life has a habit of throwing something at us that we can’t expect; it could be a job promotion, acquisition, sale, tournament loss, separation or graduation. Change comes in a number of ways in our life almost constantly, dictating our future step by step of the way.

Change is sometimes uncomfortable whether it be starting a new job or moving to a big new house. There’s always an adjustment period for any new habits; and despite our reluctant fear of change, we spend our whole lives overcoming it and finding new ways to adapt and deal with change.

changeHere’s a couple things to remind yourself about when you are struggling to get through some changes:

1. Remember there is always another time

We tend to remember the bad changes more than the good changes and they reflect in our memory for a long time. Whenever a big change occurs we have to remember there is always going to be another time. Life has a tendency to move faster than we expect, and before we know it, new changes are occurring all around us. It only takes a minute for something to change in your life, and suddenly a new life is spiraling into being.

2. We anticipate and are prepared for change

It doesn’t take a lot for us to perceive the immediate future but when something jars us it affects our plans. Perhaps bad timing of work incident upsets your schedule for a while. We should anticipate and be prepared for change whenever it rears itself. We can appreciate the moment we have but know that it may not last forever – whether for better or worse; and we will survive on through.

3. We’ve survived through many changes

Remind yourself about all the times you’ve already survived a big change in your life. The last breakup, you made it through. The last time you got fired, here you are, we made it again. That time someone was really upset with you – well here we are. We seem to survive every single time our life changes, and we didn’t even break a sweat.

4. We’ve thrived with continuous change

And every time we go through one of those changes things seem to start looking better. Everything gets really low for a few days, a few weeks, or months; we’re not sure what’s going to happen! We are however, an expert on getting through our changes, however we do it; and every time we come right back up again.

5. We’ve lived through many changes

All those times we resurface from change, we continuing living the same life we did, being who we are, but with the memory in our heads; a lesson learnt, a story told or a tragedy survived. We become stronger with the knowledge and more confident the more experiences we have, and with that we become better people. We know what we can get through and we know how to do it.

6. Change is necessary

Change comes in the form of anything from relationship separation and family deaths to job changes, moving houses, accidents or successes. Regardless of what path we follow in life, we are bound to experience change, and our resilience to succeeding obstacles is profound. We learn to adapt to new environments, form new habits, and readdress the way we perceive ourselves. We become stronger versions of ourselves with better defensive mechanisms and a smarter way of conquering our challenges.

The post 6 Ways To Prepare For Change appeared first on Change your thoughts.

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Dining Room by Gisele Taranto – Week 1: Meeting – Casa Cor 2016

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Dining Room by Gisele Taranto - Week 1 (9)

For Casa Cor Rio 2016, the most important architectural and interior design event in Brazil, Gisele Taranto Arquitetura was challenged to create six different designs  for a dining room. The 26th edition of the event takes place in a house surrounded by Burle Marx gardens in Gávea, an affluent residential neighborhood located in the South Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Ovoo Dining Room by Gisele Taranto – Casa..

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Politics Live – readers’ edition: Friday 28 October

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Share breaking news, leave links to interesting articles online and chat about the week’s political events in our open thread

8.23am BST

I’m not writing my usual Politics Live blog today so, as an alternative, here’s Politics Live: readers’ edition. It is intended to be a place where you can catch up with the latest news and find links to good politics blogs and articles on the web.

Please feel free to use this as somewhere you can comment on any of the day’s political stories – just as you do during the daily blog. It would be particularly useful for readers to flag up new material in the comments – breaking news or blogposts or tweets that are worth passing on because someone is going to find them interesting.

Continue reading…

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Space Encounters converts Amsterdam factory into greenhouse-filled offices

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Glasshouses double as informal meeting spots inside this former warehouse in Amsterdam, which has been converted into offices for a pushchair company by Dutch studio Space Encounters. Read more

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Wooden House / MAATworks

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© Marcel van der Burg

© Marcel van der Burg


© Marcel van der Burg


© Marcel van der Burg


© Marcel van der Burg


© Marcel van der Burg

  • Architects: MAATworks
  • Location: Edmond Halleylaan 44, 1086 Amsterdam,The Netherlands
  • Architect In Charge: Lidewij Lenders
  • Area: 312.0 sqm
  • Project Year: 2010
  • Photographs: Marcel van der Burg
  • Contractor: Kerkhofs Houtbouw, Henrik-Ido-Ambacht
  • Structural Engineer: Raadschelders-Bouwadvies b.v., Spaarndam
  • Client: dhr. L. Verbeek, Amsterdam

© Marcel van der Burg

© Marcel van der Burg

In spite of the prefab wood elements used in this construction, this private house on Steigereiland in IJburg conjures up the idea of an outsize, five-storey wood-carving. Maatworks architects were commissioned to fill the entire building envelope with a town house inspired by the clients’ beloved Scandinavians houses. As in previous projects in IJburg, the architects used one material in particular: pine wood.Here that material was even painted bright red for the facade. Behind that eye-catching facade lies a prefab system based on glulam building components that allows the architect to connect nearly all the components both structurally and spatially. For example, the wall of the staircase are both banisters and walls for the adjoining rooms. Via a large skylight and several small openings in the stairwell, daylight penetrates deep into the house, an effect that is further enhanced by the floor-by-floor widening of the stairwell as it rises.


© Marcel van der Burg

© Marcel van der Burg

The house required minimal detailing because the dimensionally accurate prefab internal walls allowed for plain connections, while all the ducting and recesses for wall sockets were concealed during prefabrication. Pine’s tendency to yellow has been counteracted with a coating of lye. Maat architects avoid monotony in the interior with whitish-grey doors and cement covering floors, with integrated floor heating, finished wit fair-faced concrete.


Floor Plans

Floor Plans

The house was designed in accordance with the passive solar energy principle: large expanses of south-facing glass ensure that solar heat floods the house in winter, while architectural solar shading in the form of balconies and a roof overhang above the terrace prevent overheating in summer. Surplus heat is expelled via the skylight above the stairwell. In combination with the material properties of this “wooden house”, this provides for a pleasant indoor climate and Scandinavian-style domestic bliss in the middle of the big city.


© Marcel van der Burg

© Marcel van der Burg

Product Description. The wood construction of the house consists of prefab cross laminated elements. The elements were made by the german company Züblin. Due to the precision of the product,  we could even use it for the interior, for example the stairway in this house. 


© Marcel van der Burg

© Marcel van der Burg

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Aurora Arquitectos Carry Out an Intervention in an Apartment in Lisbon, Portugal

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Apartment in Estrela by Aurora Arquitectos (5)

Apartment in Estrela is a private home located in Lisbon, Portugal. Completed in 2016, it was designed by Aurora Arquitectos. Apartment in Estrela by Aurora Arquitectos: “It is not necessary to create a world, but the possibility of a world. Jean-Luc Godard in Reflexivity in Film and Architecture, 1985. Reflectivity as concept, as much in its use in film or literature as in its appropriation by architecture, refers to that..

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