The intervention was aimed to keep the preexistent use of the building – single housing -, seeking to improve its dwelling, salubrity, comfort and security conditions. On a conceptual level, the project is based on the rehabilitation of the existent house, developed in order to balance the infrastructural needs of a modern home with the delicacy of a centenary construction.
However, when confronted with new spatial and functional necessities, it takes a different approach, clearly distinguishing itself from the pre-existence, not only in its shape and also by its materiality.
It’s our understanding that, by exploring this relation, we are able to find meaning and a framework that allow the contemporary dwelling of historical buildings.
Last year Monoskop delighted the architecture and art community by making many of the Bauhaus publications available to freely download. As a perennial fan of all types of architecture publications, I had previously written about the exceptional qualities of Bauhaus-produced publications and how these visual teaching tools ultimately influenced more recent publications in the canon. Below we share an edited excerpt from “Architects’ Books: Le Corbusier and The Bauhaus,” a chapter from the larger research project, Redefining The Monograph: The Publications of OMA and Rem Koolhaas.
To access Monoskop’s treasure trove, which includes titles by visionaries such as Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and others, visit Monoskop’s Bauhaus archive.
As the Bauhaus operated in a generally experimental and revolutionary status, the information taught was not unified in any particularly accessible form. The Bauhausbücher were produced in order to expose the elements of the Bauhaus education to the original, small student body. These books later proved invaluable when the school was closed by the National Socialist Government in 1933, their contents holding authentic records of Bauhaus education. Merging theory and practice, the books, designed by Moholy-Nagy, are a testament to his creative ideas. He saw traditional forms of information dissemination as supplying information to students without stressing the relevance and relationship to the world in which they were living. His books sought to clarify these relationships through stimulating images and insightful (though at times lengthy and ethereal) text.
Much of Moholy-Nagy’s work drew influence from the futurist poets, Dadaists and the Russian Constructivists. Their use of imaginative expression embodied the idea of a unified experience of textual media with visual communication. In these avant-garde works, harsh diagonals and bold text suggest the style of contemporaneous advertisements. The futurist emphasis on youth, speed and technology reflected the changes that the Bauhaus sought to incorporate into its style. Futurist typography communicated movement and captured dynamic thought processes.
Whereas earlier prominent book designers, like William Morris, saw mass-production, typesetting and standardization as a detriment to the quality of publications, others embraced the new technology as an opportunity to take the art of book making to a more technological level. In his discussion of the “new typography” Moholy-Nagy explains,
The new book production, which has to be understood on the scale of a library rather than a single volume, must and will utilize the pertinent findings of publicity and propaganda where the communication has to be measured in terms of economical effectiveness. Catalogs of merchandise, illustrated advertising, posters on billboards, front pages of tabloid newspapers, move toward inventive visual articulation.
Dull or low-quality typography was avoided through the use of devices such as position, size and pictorial composition. The Dadaists and futurists ascribed to these methods, abandoning traditional horizontal typesets. Moholy-Nagy warned however, that typological shorthand easily loses meaning and becomes merely decorative; thus it was important to understand the fundamentals of typography. He lauded the modernist magazines and advertisements for achieving the right blend of simultaneous action with refined organization.
In his book Bauhaus, Modernism and the Illustrated Book, Alan Bartram suggests that the Bauhaus indeed operated with the language of advertising. Stationery, posters and the Bauhausbücher all exhibited the “aggressive” Bauhaus style and typography. This provocative style, however, was not necessarily always accessible or easy to read. In many of his books, Moholy-Nagy used strange notations and dismissed the convention of using indents to mark new paragraphs. As futurist poetry demonstrated, however, the “expressive presentation of content” the Bauhaus artists held so important did not always result in clear communication.
The trademarks of the “Bauhauserie” include heavy rules, large numbers and headings, shapes (arrows, circles and squares) and vertically or angled typesets. While the main text of the books did not always follow these trademarks, some of the illustrations in the books, particularly charts, display this dynamic aesthetic. These books are meant to be picked up, opened to an arbitrary page and flipped-through. The inclusion of many photographs leaves the text as secondary to the image. In Moholy-Nagy’s book Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography and Film), he explained that unlike traditional books (in which illustrations supplement texts) the text in his book supplemented the image. This is striking, but yet understandable. The Bauhaus designers maintained that the connections made visually between images in a book, or what one experiences in quotidian life are more important than the text that illuminates it. The purpose was not to instruct what to see, but how to process that which is seen.
The new concept of space developed by the Bauhaus was not limited to three-dimensional built space. Moholy-Nagy and other important teachers in the school played with traditional page layouts and created new designs that manipulated and challenged established conventions of book design. Emphasizing the visual qualities of a page, the books edify through textual content as well as through the principles of design expressed in the layout.
The publications put forth by the Bauhaus reflected a revitalized take on the collaboration between the visual and built arts. In von material zu architektur and later in Vision in Motion, Moholy-Nagy incorporated photography, literature, poetry and other forms of art to create a novel design teaching tool.
Whereas books in the traditional sense are carefully read for their textual content, art and architecture readers will scan and look, arrested by things that are literally (and figuratively) bold. The importance of the images is underscored by the general weakness of the Bauhausbüchermain body texts. At times lofty and repetitive, the passages occasionally act merely as filler. When these books are read critically however, it is apparent that they are true works of complete art. The deliberateness with which they were designed is the ultimate testament to the design principles contained within. Pushing the limits of book design, Moholy-Nagy and his contemporaries set the stage for the publication of the elaborate, intricate architecture books which Koolhaas brought to the mainstream.
From the architect. The Enclave at the Cathedral is a new residential development located on the property of Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The Cathedral and its surrounding gardens and buildings form an 11.3-acre campus collectively referred to as “The Close.” The new residences sit on the site that formerly housed stone sheds used by skilled masons to cut the granite used to construct the Cathedral. Given the proximity of the new building to the Cathedral, the siting, massing, and design of the building were critical. In response, the building is set back on all sides, providing a continuous border of landscape and an extension of The Cathedral Close to the street edge. The building is stepped to open views of the Cathedral’s North Tower at Amsterdam Avenue, and a new landscaped plaza is created at the intersection of West 113th Street. The fifteen-story building is separated into two volumes along its 113th Street frontage, opening views of the Cathedral’s Transept, and a new grand stair provides access to the Cathedral’s nave. The carving of the building’s corners and setbacks allows multiple interior views of the Cathedral, as well as to Morningside Park to the northeast.
The Enclave’s façade is composed of a series of different shaped cast-in-place structural concrete ribs, derived from the transformation of the Cathedral’s buttresses. The depth of the ribs varies along West 113th Street, creating an articulated façade that changes as one moves around the building. When viewed obliquely, the ribs obscure the glazing and unify as a building face. At the top of the building, the concrete ribs taper and separate from the glass façade, mimicking the Cathedral’s buttresses. At the bottom, this same tapering increases the size of the landscape border.
The hand-chiseled concrete of the stepped Amsterdam Avenue façade recalls the work that once took place on the site and presents a quiet deferential expression to the Cathedral. Along Morningside Drive, the solidity of the building disappears, and becomes an abstract form of glass, contained within a delicate concrete frame.
Inside, the entrance lobby connects the eastern and western portions of the building by way of a sky-lit gallery below the new transept stairs. The gallery and amenity spaces open to an outdoor terrace overlooking the park. The building interiors follow the material expression of the exterior and contain 430 apartment homes.
Product Description. The formwork was a created with plywood faced with a high-density plastic overlay creating a smooth finish to accentuate the undulating facade. The concrete mix, from Casino Concrete, was a slag/cement mix (no fly ash) with a 40% slag content in order to lighten the color as much as possible to appear more like limestone in the context of the Cathedral. The West facades were hand chipped by a mason. The top surfaces of the exposed perimeter beams were protected from weather by coating the top surface with a polymer membrane matching the concrete color and texture.
Overeat on Thanksgiving? You’re not alone. It looks like this bear clearly enjoyed its meal and is ready for a nap. This photo was taken near Wonder Lake in Alaska’s Denali National Park by visitor Georgia Riddick and donated to the park.
Let me guess.
You have a niggling pain in your lower back. It’s not painful enough for you to seek medical help, yet it is irritating enough to frustrate you every day. All you want is for it to go away and stop bothering you.
The thing is, there is no lack of solutions out there. There’s yoga, physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage – a buffet of options for you to choose from.
But you just can’t seem to find time to try any of them.
I have good news for you: You can actually relieve your back pain with some simple exercises. Best of all? You can do them right now, without the need to take additional time off your busy schedule.
Ready?
Here they are: 10 Yoga Stretches You Can Do Right Now To Relieve Your Lower Back Pain
The downward dog is a classic yoga pose that is easy to do. It helps to decompress the spine and open the anterior chest wall — problematic areas that are affected by sitting too long in front of the computer.
How to Do The Downward Dog:
Step 1: Go on all fours on the floor (i.e hands and knees on the ground).
Step 2: Raise your knees and straighten your legs – you should now be in a push-up position.
Step 3: Slowly bring your head through your arms, moving your head towards your feet.
Step 4: The final position should look like you created a triangle between you and the floor.
The cat and cow pose helps improve both the flexibility and strength of your core and back muscles. Yogis claim that this particular exercise can help massage and stimulate the organs in your belly, like your kidneys and adrenal glands.
How to Do The Cat and Cow Pose:
Step 1: Similar to the Downward Dog pose, firstly, get on your hands and knees.
Step 2: Bring your head through your arms, while trying to round your back. You can also try imagining you’re trying to bring your belly button towards your spine. Hold this position for about 10 seconds.
Step 3: Raise your head towards the sky and try to imagine moving your spine closer to the floor. You should be feeling your back arch backward. Hold this position.
The child’s pose is another yoga pose that is both easy to do and relaxing for the entire body. A simple stretch like this can help release tension in your back, shoulders and your chest. It also helps lengthens the spine – areas commonly affected when you hunch in front of your computer. Yogis recommend this exercise if you have constant fatigue or dizziness as it’ll help to rejuvenate you.
Yogis recommend this exercise if you have constant fatigue or dizziness as it’ll help to rejuvenate you.
How to Do The Child’s Pose:
Step 1: Again, get on all fours on the ground.
Step 2: Slowly move backward towards your heels. Sit your butt down onto your heels. You should feel like you’re in the traditional Japanese Seiza pose.
Step 3: Stretch out your arms in front of you as much as possible. You should feel a stretch down your back.
The lack of mobility caused by sitting for long hours tends to impact your hip flexors. The pigeon pose is part of a group of exercises known as the hip opening exercises. These exercises are perfect for tight hips because it helps to stretch the hip rotators and the hip flexor muscles.
How to Do The Pigeon Pose:
Step 1: Go on all fours on the floor.
Step 2: Bend one leg in front of you, perpendicular to your body. (A good way to do this is to imagine as if you were sitting cross-legged). Keep the other leg outstretched.
Step 3: Hold down the perpendicular leg and stretch by keeping your back straight. You should feel a nice stretch down your hips and legs.
The cobra pose is another exercise that helps lengthen your spine. As a stretching exercise, it helps decrease the stiffness in your lower back while improving your back flexibility. If you’re a lady, also know that this exercise can help to soothe menstrual irregularities.
How to Do The Cobra Pose:
Step 1: Lie flat on the floor.
Step 2: Place both hands beside you, as if you were going to raise yourself up to do a pushup.
Step 3: Raise your chest and neck up, and stretch backward. At this point, your back should feel like it is arching towards your heels. Hold this position.
See Also: 13 Yoga Trends To Immerse Yourself In On Your Journey To Health & Happiness
The supine spinal twist helps to address an often overlooked area of the body. This exercise creates space in your lower back, which is an area that is usually overly tight. This tightness causes a wide range of issues from back pain to pain down your legs. If you have poor digestion, yogis also believe that doing the supine spinal twist can help “reset” your digestive system.
How to Do The Supine Spinal Twist:
Step 1: Lie on your back, with your legs 90 degrees in the air. (Pretend you’re about to do a crunch.)
Step 2: Spread your arms flat on the ground beside you. You should look like you’re trying to form a T-shape.
Step 3: Slowly and gently twist your hips to the right side. The side of your right knee will be close to, if not touching, the ground
Step 4: Try to keep both shoulders flat on the ground.
Step 5: Now, slightly raise your hips back to the middle, and then to the left side. Same thing applies: the side of your left knee should now be as close to the ground as possible (without touching).
Your hamstring muscles actually get shortened from long hours of sitting – and this affects your back.
Why?
It’s because the health of your lumbar spine is actually directly affected by the health of your hamstrings.
How to Do The Supine Hamstring Stretch:
Step 1: Lie flat on the floor, your legs outstretched.
Step 2: Raise one leg up towards the sky, keeping it as straight as possible.
Step 3: Hold and grab onto the underside of your thigh.
Step 4: You should feel the stretch in your hamstring.
Step 5: Repeat Steps 2 – 4 for your other leg.
When we talk about damage to the back, we often neglect the upper portion of our back. The truth is, our back extends from our shoulders all the way down to our hips – and excessive sitting affects them all. The Thread the Needle pose helps release the tension that is held in the upper back and between the shoulder blades.
How to Do Thread The Needle:
Step 1: Get onto your fours again, knees and hands on the floor.
Step 2: If you notice, there is a “hole” created between your right hand and your right knee. Place your left hand through the “hole”.
Step 3: Place your left shoulder on the floor and hold this position. For a more advanced variation, you can raise your right hand up.
Step 4: Repeat Steps 2 – 3 for the other side.
This pose helps to give you all the benefits of inversion – without you having to learn a handstand. Inversion helps to regulate blood pressure, move stuck fluids and improve your digestion.
How to Do The Legs Up The Wall:
Step 1: Grab a pillow or roll a towel until it is as thick as your fist.
Step 2: Walk towards the nearest wall (make sure you have space behind you!)
Step 3: Place the pillow/towel on the floor, preferably about one hand away from the wall.
Step 4: Place your butt on the pillow/towel and lay on the floor.
Step 5: Move yourself closer to the wall so that the back of your thighs are touching the wall.
Step 6: Straighten your legs.
Step 7: Hold the position and stretch.
This is probably the toughest exercise in this list. It helps stretch your chest, neck, and spine and rejuvenates your tired legs. It is also beneficial for ladies who are experiencing menstrual issues and can even be therapeutic for people who have asthma, osteoporosis, and high blood pressure.
How to Do The Yoga Bridge:
Step 1: Lie on the floor with your feet tucked near your bottom.
Step 2: Raise your hips up slowly and lift off your thighs and lower back. The only point of contact between you and the floor should be your feet, your upper back, shoulders and neck.
Step 3: You can leave your hands on the floor, or for a more advanced variation, place your hands on your hips.
Step 4: Hold the position for at least 15 seconds.
Step 5: Recover by unrolling your spine (i.e place your lower back on the floor first, then hip, then your butt.) Do not just let go! You might injure your hips or spine.
Now that you have 10 exercises you can do any time in the office…
How should you proceed?
All you have to do is to choose one of the above exercises and incorporate it to your daily routine. Set a timer (on your phone or your watch) to remind yourself to take a break from work every two hours to do the exercises. They will give you a quick relief from your back pain, and also help to strengthen the various parts of your body important to your back health.
See Also: Five Simple Ways To Beat Low Back Pain
The post 10 Stretches To Do Right Now For Back Pain Relief appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
View of the best known waterfalls in the world, niagara falls in Ontario 📸: @samramgoesto !!!
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From the architect. The house’s existing structure was in impeccable condition and DATA had merely to give it a good sand blasting to refresh the brickwork and canopy. The inside however was to undergo a complete makeover to thwart the constraints of a relatively small floor space of 120 m2. It reinvented the volume of the building while keeping its proportions. It had good head room but to change the volume while maintaining the proportions was a key aim. DATA gutted the building to create a three floors (ground, first and mezzanine) exhibition space. The main room has been separated o by a wall to screen the stairwell, bathrooms, storage and technical rooms.
In the main space, a large cylindrical structure which combines the transparency of glass with the lightness of the metal, solves the main challenge of the project: freeing the ground floor as much as possible, inviting visitors to mount the stairs to the upper floors by offering a light and airy set design. Composed of curved glass walls to a height of 5m on a metal structure, the cylinder enjoys an additional exhibition level while it is also doted with a 50 m2 mezzanine, carried by the retaining wall. Suspended from the underside of the sphere is the flagship component of the exhibition space of the Semapa: thanks to a pulley the model appears and disappears into the heights of the cylinder in a matter of minutes freeing the floor for other events like presentations and inaugurations. This architectural device has the double merit of adding scale instead and maintaining an important scenography without cluttering an already reduced space.
Anticipating the uses of the director’s house, more than a set design, Semapa will actually deliver a useful building. A genuine workspace, a workshop and meeting place, a base from which the urban project will spring. Despite the cylinder which concentrates the place’s technology and is supported by large PRS type beams and braced by metal rods to the wall, the space remains in effect raw and open to multiple uses. The existing openings have been retained and set o by large windows, orchestrating the transparency of the building from the Seine as from the School of Architecture, which just happens to be facing it.
Having also won a further prize for the scenography of the place, the agency is developing a series of seven themed routes to follow through the neighborhood. Heritage; Crossings; Neighborhoods today; City on the Move; Innovation and sustainable development; Urban Arts and General public. The exhibition also presents two films: an overview of the Parisian left bank, and several interviews on characteristical topics concerning the neighborhood.
After the success of its 6th edition in 2007, Sketchup became one of the world’s most widely used 3D modeling software products. This is thanks to its intuitive toolbar, interdisciplinary use within the creative industry (not just architects) and having a free version that doesn’t use watermarks.
Its open source library helped the software to provide a wide range of 3D objects, while hundreds of users developed their own plugins not only to solve the problems of each version but also to exploit the potential of their tools.
We’re going to introduce you to 10 of the plugins shared by Sketchup Tutorials Facebook page using their demonstrative GIFs. If you don’t know how to add a SketchUp plugin, don’t worry! You can learn in this video also posted by them.
Created by Sam D Mitch, this plugin creates multiple offsets of selected surfaces in a model.
Download here.
It seems so basic that it’s surprising this wasn’t already included with Sketchup, but someone actually took the time to program a plugin to fix it. Developed by the user SLBaumgartner, this plugin allows you to calculate and draw angles on the surface of a volume.
Created by 3dalbertsoft, this plugin allows you to create a helical turbine by selecting a curve and a predefined shape in SketchUp. A dialog window lets you choose numerous parameters to create the final shape. We think it is quite useful to define seams, seals, springs, tensioners and cables. And there’s a YouTube tutorial!
Created by Kirill B, LSS Matrix allows you to create a sequence of chained components by simply updating the parent block. As the GIF accompanying this description demonstrates, you can create a spiral staircase by creating a block with two steps and then choosing the number of copies. You can learn how in 2 minutes with this tutorial on Youtube.
Download here.
Created by ThomThom, this plugin solves one of Sketchup’s major shortcomings: its trouble working with non-flat quad surfaces. With Quad Face Tool we create figures with continuous edges as topographies or, as we see in the GIF that accompanies this description, give a much more real surface to a helmet that was originally reticulated. Yes, there is a Youtube tutorial!
In 2012, Google sold Sketchup to Trimble Navigation. Although this case is not a plugin, it is a good example of the positive synergy Sketchup achieved with Google: the “Location” tool allows you to choose the satellite image of the place your project is going to end up by entering an exact address in Google Maps. Then, with a click, you can replicate the actual topography of that location. Very useful.
Created by CPhillips, this plugin allows you to create an invisible control cage around an object. What does that mean? It is a mesh defined by a series of control points in its vertices and edges that let you manipulate the dimensions of a selected object. The GIF that accompanies this description uses the example of a diagrid mesh transformed into a bowl by adjusting the lower points or into a vase if you adjust the upper points. Highly recommended tutorial here.
Created by Chris Fullmer, this plugin allows you to replicate a component onto a surface. As in previous cases, when editing the base component, the rest are automatically updated. Highly recommended for designing parameterized façades.
Download here.
Another one by ThomThom, this plugin offers a series of new cameras for your projects’ animations.
Download here.
Created by Fredo6, this plugin generates parameterized volumes when selecting a series of curves on a 3D model. Once created, it offers nine different possibilities, including the possibility to redefine its final thickness. Very useful for designing furniture.
Download here.
