The project – a Maritime Research Facility located beside the Lower Harbour in Cork – involves a tall element housing research spaces and a lower tank hall containing testing facilities. Conceived as a stone outcrop on the edge of the water, subject to the action of wind and sea, the plan form is driven by the size and relationship of the four testing tanks, used alternately still or agitated with paddle mechanisms and profiled floorplates to simulate wave action, coastal erosion, ocean floor modelling.
A large volume, long span space is required to facilitate a slow balletic movement of heavy lifting gantry cranes, instrument bridges, access gangways, suspended camera equipment, people and forklifts moving independently over each other and travelling along and across each tank – thus a series of 45m long trusses swing across the volume supporting a folded roof. Workshops cluster along the east side of the tank hall, indented for natural ventilation like gills of a fish or barnacles on a rock outcrop, while larger indents give access for deliveries (east) and people (west). Research spaces are stacked to the sea, open to light and views northwards. Continuing the indented nature of this addition on the edge of the Harbour, surfaces of the research tower are eroded deeply on north and east facades, analogous to the action of wind and water on driftwood, generating a series of indented planes on the elevation to the sea for windows and balconies.
The roof is geometrically resolved as a series of mathematically generated planes triangulated into different slopes, reflecting the Z-shaped swing of the trusses over the tanks mapped onto the fixed points of the workshops. Tension between the folded form above and the captured volumes beneath present an oscillating rhythm which intersects the serrated edges of the plan in a range of relationships.
Nowadays, our Android phones are our constant companions (unless you’re an Apple user). We can’t even think a minute looking at our smartphones. Browsing something on the internet, connecting with friends via social networks- everything can be done via our Android phone with ease. But unfortunately, most of us don’t even know the proper functions and many interesting options of the Android phones.
Do you know why Android phones are popular amongst many of us? It’s all because of the simple functionalities and easy modules of the operating system.
A few days ago, I was personally stumped by a question – how to change the pointer speed of the Android phone. Being an avid user of Android, I tested many things on Android but I realized I didn’t know the answer to this question. That’s why I thought I should write about it once I finally found the answer.
Pointer speed: Pointer speed refers to the sensitivity of the screen when you touch the screen and do various activities using your fingers. It’s the same concept of the trackball of the mouse on your PC. Adjusting this speed is essential when you are doing something else apart from regular mobile use.
If you are using an Android phone having OS 5.1 Lollipop or higher, here’s how to adjust your pointer speed.
Step 1: The first step is very simple. The process starts with the “Menu” option on the home screen of your smartphone.
Tap on the “Menu” and a list will pop out of it. There you will see an option called “Settings”. Tap on that option.
Once you have tapped on the “settings”, a detailed list that includes a few options will appear in front of you.
Step 2: Select the option called “language and keyboard”. Another screen will appear. Keep scrolling down.
Step 3: An option labeled “pointer speed” will appear. Tap on that and change the sensitivity of the pointer speed.
Note: Pulling the sensitivity to the left decreases the speed while pulling it to the right increases the speed of the pointer.
Remember, 50%- 60% is the optimum for the users. If you are playing a first-person shooter game or FIFA, then you may need to increase the pointer speed to match the environment of the game.
That’s it. Even a novice or beginner can do this without any further help friends. Keep us informed if you hget stuck anywhere.
The post How to Change the Pointer Speed in Android appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Campaigners in the UK have launched a petition to save Durham University’s Student Union Building, also known as Dunelm House, after the university announced its intention to demolish and replace the brutalist structure earlier this month. Designed in 1966 by Ove Arup and the Architects’ Co-Partnership, the building is perhaps the most important 20th-century edifice in a city that is better-known for its UNESCO World Heritage-listed cathedral and castle.
Dunelm House and the adjacent Arup-designed Kingsgate Bridge are considered among the highlights of the legendary engineer’s career, alongside such feats as the Sydney Opera House. The building sits on a steep bank on the River Wear, with multiple terraces facing out towards the river, while Kingsgate Bridge crosses the river at a slight angle to meet the with the building’s entrance. Arup, who was born in the nearby city of Newcastle, was so fond of the two structures that he even requested for his ashes to be scattered from the Kingsgate Bridge after his death in 1988, while a bust of Arup sits near to Dunelm House’s entrance.
In explaining its decision to replace the building, the university cites an estimated repair cost of £14.7 million and states that “Dunelm House is not able to accommodate new uses” as part of its university estate masterplan. However, a petition launched by a group causing itself Save Dunelm House argues that a simpler solution to this problem is simply to revise the masterplan – while pointing out that recent new buildings constructed by Durham University have not shown themselves to be better value for money than the expected repair cost.
“Dunelm House has a gross internal area of 3,980 square meters, making the refurbishment cost an estimated £3,600 per square meter,” explains the petition. “That seems like a lot of money, but it is cheaper than the cost of Durham University’s new Ogden Center for Fundamental Physics (the new abstract timber building) which is costing £11.5 million for 2,478 square meters – that’s a whopping £4,640 per square meter! Refurbishing the building could be cheaper than building new.”
At the time of publishing, the petition has collected over 1,200 signatures. Visit the petition here to add your name.
News via Save Dunelm House and Durham University.
From the architect. House built for a couple with the idea of providing a contemplative and reflective space. This theme was addressed in two ways:
A more intimate, where the whole house is organized around a small patio and differences in levels. This internal patio allows a visual contact between the surroundings of the house, bringing the residents’ life together. Nature, on this small scale, can be observed according to the variations of the seasons.
A curved glass was drawn so that the patio space had no segmentation at its edges and space could be seen through a lens.
The theme was also approached on the scale of the landscape. The land has a wide view of the Serra da Mantiqueira. Thus, starting from the most intimate dimension, traveling almost a spiral, one can climb up on the landscaped roof and observe the landscape amplitude.
The levels were chosen so that it could be observed over the house of the left lateral neighbor, increasing still the perception of the amplitude of the Mountain range.
In this way the house appropriates the surrounding landscape. The mantiqueira mountain is part of the garden of the house.
For these purposes, the house, the inventiveness of solutions and details allow a simplicity and objectivity of the project, privileging comfort and not the spectacle.
The furniture of the house was designed specifically for this project, through the study “MOBLE furniture architecture”
TLDR; Best of 2016.
Dear readers,
This 2016 has been a hectic, frenetic year with complex geopolitical, social, and cultural issues placing our world at a crossroads of an uncertain future. Do we look back into the nostalgia of a safe past, or do we step up and be an active part of a hopeful future?
As architects we have a tremendous responsibility in this scenario; historically, our profession has shaped the collective ideas of the future, generation after generation, by weighing-in on the crises that arise in our societies. In the absence of clear leadership to guide us towards an inspiring future, this is our opportunity to serve as agents of change for the future we deserve.
ArchDaily’s role is to provide inspiration, knowledge, and tools to the architects who will face the hyper-urbanization currently underway in our world. And I am happy that the orchestrated effort of our global team is working towards this ambitious goal, reaching more than 500,000 daily readers in our English, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese editions, taking advantage of the Internet to connect architects from every corner of the world and bring architectural inspiration and information exchange in an unprecedented way.
As we turned 8 this year, we unveiled a new site design and an improved building products catalog, both of which are under constant improvement thanks to the data we gather from more than 3 billion monthly events and interactions created when you use ArchDaily. One example is the “Recommend For You” widget that we launched in the sidebar of projects and articles, crafted specifically for each user and based on a recommendation engine built by our engineers and data scientists. We will continue to diligently focus on similar projects during 2017 by developing more data-driven solutions to help you navigate the vast amount of projects and knowledge that we have amassed in the “ArchDaily Iceberg.” We’re also dedicated to improving what we expect to be a useful tool in your daily design workflow, the My ArchDaily platform—a service already used by hundreds of thousand of architects to save and sort projects.
Our growth has also helped us connect directly with you, our users, in different ways. Reaching 2 million fans on Facebook and 1 million followers on Instagram has given us more robust settings to transmit knowledge and inspiration. Even live!
We are also teaming up with some of the world’s most important construction materials manufacturers—such as Saint Gobain, CEMEX, Hunter Douglas, Equitone and more than 300 companies worldwide—to bring you compelling content and the latest industry news. By connecting the projects that we publish with invaluable data about the products used to realize them, we hope to enlighten architects about the palette of materials available to them.
Our team covered the year’s most important events, including the Pritzker Prize, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Lisbon Triennale. In our coverage of the most anticipated of 2016, the Venice Biennale curated by Alejandro Aravena “Reporting From the Front”, we explored new formats in order to highlight and show immersive experiences through 360º video content. Venice marked another important achievement for ArchDaily, as I was appointed as the curator for the Nordic Countries Pavilion.
Aligned with the initiative to provide more immersive content we launched our VR for Architects section.
And we will continue to work hard with our global team to bring you a curated selection of projects, together with news and articles that add value to the architects in their day to day efforts to build the future that we deserve, as you can see in our Best of 2016 section.
David Basulto
Founder & Editor in Chief
The best architecture of 2016
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You see some amazing things on America’s public lands, like this cute little bobcat hanging out within the snow-covered trees in eastern Oregon. Can you spot it? While common, bobcats are rarely seen. Sometimes called wildcats, bobcats are roughly twice as big as the average house cat. They have long legs, large paws, and tufted ears, and gets its name for its tail, which appears to be cut or “bobbed.” Photo by Kevin Eldredge, @mypubliclands.
What if you were told that you burn calories even without exercising?
Oftentimes, when we think of burning calories, we think of hitting the gym, dancing the Zumba, jogging in the park, and busting out the Wii Fit. We fail to realize that everything we do that requires movement of the body actually burns calories.
If you’re a waiter, at the end of the day, you’ve burned some mega calories running back and forth from kitchen to table and back again for hours and hours. You’re a stay at home parent? Chasing after kiddos, playing catch and roughhousing burns calories! Everything does!
Is vacuuming every day going to turn you into a sports calendar model overnight? Nope.
But it WILL help you stay on track with your diet, especially if you’re logging your caloric intake. If you’ve discovered that you’re about to go over your daily calorie allowance by noon – then it’s time go out and rake some leaves.
So, if the word “exercise” makes you wanna run… the other way… no worries. Here are 30 realistic and “non-exercisey” activities that you can do (or do MORE of) that will burn 100 calories.
See Also: 7 Easy Tips on How to Get the Perfect Nap
See Also: 6 Ways to Lose Weight (and Still Have Fun)
The post 30 Unusual Ways to Burn 100 Calories Without Exercising appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
From the architect. This small mosque of 100m2 included a renovation of an existing masonry cross-vaulted space and the addition of a minaret, grafted onto the existing structure as a symbolic landmark, next to the 18th century old palace. A new civic plaza was created in what was before an adjoining parking space, turning the frontage of the mosque into a public square with seating, water fountain, ablution space and shading under a newly planted fig tree.
Given the non-alignment of the existing structure with the required directionality to Makkah, the design approach was first set to correct the orientation though a series of physical transformations and additions. The directionality towards Makkah became the only tool/language mobilized to shape the new mosque and its surrounding, at all scales, from the interior of the mosque to the outdoor plaza
On the architectural level, the mosque’s new slender minaret is linked horizontally through a gently concave canopy to a curved wall at the plaza level, delineating a portico for the mosque below and creating a transitional space between the interior of the mosque and the street as well as adding privacy for the mosque from the outside.
The envelope of the mosque is strictly formed of thinly sliced painted white steel plates, faithfully angled in a parallel direction to Makkah. When looked at obliquely from an angle, the steel plates stack to compose a complete and comprehensive volume of the mosque. Looked at frontally, the mosque’s volume, through its thin planarity, disappears and blends with its visually rich historical backdrop, momentarily suspending belief in its actual presence.
Rather than the traditional inert Cube/Dome/Minaret volumetric expression of normative mosque architecture, the design offers a lighter reading of the typology, an ephemeral tectonic presence. The concave/convex planar surfaces of the new mosque brace the outside plaza and street in an extroverted geometry, and link it to the interior religious space which would have been usually hermetically enclosed. As we now know, these two spaces (the religious space within and the public space of the street without) were hybridized in the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings where the public space of the city intersected the public space of the mosque.
Structure/Ornament/Words/Sounds
Atop the minaret, the word Allah (God) is folded bi-axially from the minaret’s elements, becoming an integral structural element that is reinforcing the fragile steel armature, rather than being just an ornamental applique. The minaret becomes a frail element that without this calligraphy would fail structurally and break apart. Seen from one side, Allah is read in an affirmative solid form, a modern interpretation of calligraphy. Seen from the other side, Allah is read as a void, a doubtful absence, but also emanating the immaterial and ineffable idea of God, in reference to the lack of representation in Islam. It is also a deconstruction of the word from a metanarrative to a text that can be interpreted, through the creation of a physical rather than an optical lenticular. Here, the text is literally a construct, and writing/reading happens between the lines. The Minaret itself is the same height as the surrounding trees; and when seen frontally becomes transparent to blend with its context.
Below, at the curved wall entry to the mosque, the pixelated and equally structural word Insan (Human) is added to the steel plates, to create a Hegelian dialectic of God/Man. The juxtaposition of both renders the idea of humanity as an integral part of the equation with God, placed in a new dialectic, and becomes a reminder of the humanistic tradition of Islam, as referenced in noted Islamic theologian Mohammad Arkoun’s book Humanisme et Islam – Combats et Propositions (Paris, Vrin, 2005) which places Islam at the origin of the18th century Enlightenment project.
Insan becomes the epicenter of the ground plane of the plaza.
As one moves around the mosque, the planar reading of the mosque formed by the steel plates becomes transparent, while the two words (Allah/Insan) becomes more apparent, and vice versa. The overall lightness of the mosque’s tectonic sits also in a relational contrast to the heaviness of the Moukhtara’s palace stone volumetric.
A fig tree shades the new plaza, and creating a book end along with the existing Olive tree on the other side of the street, alluding to the ‘Fig and Olive’ verse (souret at-teen) in the Quraan and referencing the importance of both trees in Christian tradition as well. At the threshold, the entry to the mosque’s hall, which accommodates both women and men in the same space, is articulated with a chiseled glass façade holding two wooden doors that float within it.
Interior
On the inside of the existing structure, the minimal intervention involved a ‘white-out’ of the concave surfaces of the vaults, using special Lime mix brought from Aleppo in Syria, as well as the introduction of a new skylight that cuts the vaulted space to register the direction of the Quiblah wall towards Makkah, and bring light towards the Mihrab space.
Through the skylight, one can see the minaret in a visual looping of exterior back to the interior, linking visually the disassociation in typical mosques between the sound and the vision.
Similarly, the Mihrab is articulated with a concave reflective polished stainless steel arched wall that, though pointing towards Makkah, implodes this axiality by merging it visually with the wider context, bringing outside in, and distorting the interior spatiality of the mosque.
Towards the back of the mosque where the actual reading of the Quraan would happen, a wooden wall with the word iqra’ (read) is articulated in relief. It references the Islamic scholar Youssef Siddiq’s argument and interpretation that the first word in the Quraan, iqra’, of which the Quraan word is a derivative, argued for a critical and contextual reading of the Quraan as a post-structuralist ‘text’ to be read critically, and not as a meta-narrative to be recited blindly.
The call to prayer, in collaboration with artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Nisrine Khodr, was re- interpreted along the same lines as a variation on the normative call to prayer by the idea of having it spoken rather than sung, in a return to the words where the listener focuses on the meaning rather than the melody.
Overall the design of the mosque is a celebration of the ethos of modernity as it relates tectonically to the notion of abstraction, of ephemerality, and representationally to the continuity of the humanism tradition in Islam. It represents a part of a cultural war of ideas that needs to be fought against the fundamentalist forces across religions, a war where architecture is a weapon.
Valley Villa is a residential project designed by Arches in 2016. It is located in Vilnius, Lithuania. Photos by: Norbert Tukaj
The post Contemporary Villa Surrounded by Lush Forest in Vilnius, Lithuania appeared first on HomeDSGN.
Sig Nordal 