In the beginning of 2010, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced the creation of a “Silicon Valley for Russia,” to be located in a southern suburb of Moscow, that would feature research facilities, university laboratories, start-ups, meeting hubs, and housing. After an international competition in 2011, each of the districts within this larger project was awarded to its own architect. After careful planning, Agence d’Architecture A. Bechu & Associés has unveiled its design for District 11 of the project.
Concentrating on ecological housing, this district will contain individual houses dedicated to researchers and their families, under the greater goal of positive social interactions.
Like penguins gathering on ice in a circle to keep each other warm, one hundred villas are grouped in tens, in a vast clearing surrounded by a river to accommodate snowmelt explained the architects in a press release. This organization also allows for the formation of micro-communities around a central square, reminiscent of a village.
Each of the villas will be unique, giving occupants their own identity within the urban ensemble, but will all feature a modular concrete frame, green roof, and use of renewable energy and water recycling.
How do you feel about failure? If you are like most people, failure makes you uncomfortable. It’s something you want to stay away from. The fact is: fear of failure is a common type of fear that many people have.
I wish I could say that I’m immune to it, but I’m not. Looking back, I can see that I was afraid of failing. I have made progress, but I’m still working on it now.
What should we do then? How can we overcome our fear of failure?
From what I have learned, the first step to overcoming fear of failure is having the right perspective toward failure. Instead of seeing it as something negative, you should see it as something positive.
Here are some positive views about failures:
1. Failure is the price of trying something new.
Einstein once said: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
Like it or not, doing something new involves risks, including the risk of failing. After all, it’s new; you aren’t familiar with it. So it’s likely that you will make some mistakes.
The only way not to fail is to stay where you are and not grow. If you want to grow, however, you must be willing to pay the price of failure.
2. Failure gives you wisdom.
Failure can teach you lessons in a way that others can’t. The fact that you have put your resources into something and get undesired results will leave an impression on you. You will grasp the lesson at a much deeper level than just reading books, for instance.
William Saroyan once said: “Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure.”
3. Failure tests your enthusiasm.
Failure is inevitable on the way to success. That’s why the important thing is how you respond to it. This includes whether or not you can maintain your enthusiasm. Can you still be enthusiastic even after you fail? Can you still be optimistic? I know this is easier said than done, but this is something we should all learn to do.
Winston Churchill put it this way: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
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After having the right perspective toward failure, what should we do? Thomas J. Watson gave us this advice:
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.
This advice might seem extreme, but I think it’s good advice. It means that you should be willing to have more failures. Or, put another way, you should make more attempts that could lead to failures. Why? Because this means that you are pushing boundaries. You are accelerating your progress. You don’t just stay where you are.
Of course, we are talking about intelligent failures here; just repeating the same mistakes over and over is stupidity.
King had wanted to become a writer from a young age. So he wrote short stories and sent them to magazines. But what happened? He got rejected. Again and again. He didn’t stop though. He read the rejection letters, learned from them, and kept writing.
Long story short, he eventually made it in the writing world. And he made it big time.
King’s story is an inspiration to me. He was willing to have failures, and have them often. He learned from them and kept getting better.
So here is what you should do: consider failures as positive and make more attempts. That’s the way you can grow and get better. As George Bernard Shaw once said: A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Fluted stone panels form a frame around a huge window in the facade of this building designed by Walters & Cohen Architects for the American School in London. Read more
Work has finished on Bjarke Ingels Group‘s first condominium project in the United States, a pair of glass high-rise buildings that overlook Biscayne Bay. Read more
From the architect. The Wehrhahn Line is the largest and most sophisticated recent urban development project in Düsseldorf, reaching its successful conclusion this weekend after 15 years of construction and planning. One highlight of the route is the design of the new U-Bahn tunnel and the six U-Bahn stations. Architecture and art strikingly come together, characterizing impressions of the spaces. The artists also contributed to the remarkable decisions as equal partners from the beginning of planning and have not permitted any advertising spaces in the new stations.
Pempelforter Strasse Station: “Surround” Model
The project was implemented by the office of netzwerkarchitekten from Darmstadt together with artist Heike Klussmann, who together in 2001 won the EU-wide architecture competition for all six stations against major international competition. Together they developed the overall concept of a U-Bahn tunnel as an “underground continuum,” similar to a giant snake as it slips through the earth, widening at the respective stations before continuing on its path. In contrast to the colored spaces of public space, it features a light relief-like grid structure. The smallest graphic unit of the design is a rhombus generated by the structural joints and constantly varied, resulting in a spatial drawing. The structure of Continuum systematically shrinks or expands resulting in a dynamic spatial effect.
The stations are connected via openings to the urban space, each maintaining its own identity while acting as a connection to the city above. The central guidelines for the design of the stations were spaciousness, generous sightlines between platform levels and concourse levels, clarity, easy orientation and allowing as much natural light as possible deep into the stations. During the second competition in 2002, artists Ralf Brög, Ursula Damm, Manuel Franke, Enne Haehnle and Thomas Stricker were selected. Together with the architects each developed a specific design for the access areas of a specific station. Additionally, Heike Klussmann undertook the design of Pempelforter Straße.
For the station at Kirchplatz, Enne Haehnle wrote poetic texts and then gave them sculptural life. The lines of text leading passengers down into the subway begin at the three entrances, lead down into the station, intersect there and then accompany the passengers to the tracks. A fourth text scrolls across the central skylight. The lines of writing, forged from steel cables that were then covered with a bright color, can each only be read from certain perspectives owing to their 3D qualities. A game between abstraction and legibility thus unfolds, depending on the passengers’ location and angle of vision.
Manuel Franke has used hundreds of panels of luminous green glass to create an immersive chromatic environment interrupted only by a powerful flow of lines that accompany the passenger from the street, through the concourse and down to the platform. Delicate linear subdivisions alternate with explosive bursts of color. These zestful colors were achieved by way of a specially developed analog process realized by an artistic intervention during manufacturing.
Benrather Strasse Station: “Heaven Above, Heaven Below” / Thomas Stricker
Through a conceptual inversion of the space surrounding the architecture, Thomas Stricker has brought the universe, with its planets and stars, its tranquility and weightlessness into the underground world of the subway station. In cooperation with netzwerkarchitekten, the interior design of a spaceship was developed for the station. A stainless steel embossed matrix covers the walls, interrupted by large panoramic windows in the form of multi-media displays. These screens show 3D video animations of the universe, giving passengers a window looking out onto outer space.
Heinrich Heine Allee Station: “Three Model Spaces” / Ralph Broeg
Ralf Brög designed the three new entrances to the Heinrich-Heine-Allee station as visual and acoustic venues for the performance of changing sound compositions – as an “Auditorium”, a “Theater” and a “Laboratory”. Each of the three model spaces boasts a high-quality sound system, enabling the most wide-ranging acoustic interventions possible; they can be used in coming years to present works by as broad an array as possible of composers and sound artists. For the opening, contributions by author and director Kevin Rittberger (Theater), composer Stefan Schneider (Laboratory) and musician Kurt Dahlke and artist Jörn Stoya (Auditorium) were to be heard.
The “Laboratory” focuses on the experimental use of tones. Sound sculptures hang in space while opposite the “Interference Atlas” visualizes optical phenomena. In the “Theater” a theater curtain can be discerned on the ceramic surface. Messages and other sound material is audible. Viewers find themselves asking where they stand: Are they a part of the play or are they the audience? The “Auditorium” is equipped with 48 loudspeakers that can be individually controlled. The 3D wall elements enable the spread of sound to be modulated, thereby optimizing the acoustic properties of the room. This equipment facilitates a unique compositional approach and an equally unique listening experience.
Ursula Damm has created an interactive installation involving multiple elements. At its center is a large LED screen displaying the real-time movements of passersby on the city surface – transformed through a computer program. The resulting images of small, virtual life forms are create through the constantly changing dynamic energy of the passersby. This concept recurs in the blue glass of the station’s walls. Geometrically interpreted aerial views of Dusseldorf are presented as whole or excerpts.
At the Pempelforter Strasse station Heike Klussmann works with the 3D effects of the space’s specific geometries. She measured the station and transposed the measurements onto a 3D model. She took the directions of movement from each entrance, extended them into the station and placed four white bands, each with the same measurements as the entrances, as an inverted sculpture over the floor, walls and ceiling. The directions of the edges of the space were recorded so that they could break and process the geometry of the room. The band structure has an independent existence after breaking with the geometry of the space and as an inverted sculpture cuts across the perimeters of the station’s spaces. The resulting three-dimensional effect of this game with the dimensions of surfaces and spaces is surprising. It seems that the actual boundaries of the subway station have dissolved.
A Place Called Home is a residential project completed by Caroline Brodard – Architecture d’Intérieur. The home is located in Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, Switzerland. A Place Called Home by Caroline Brodard – Architecture d’Intérieur: “The remodeling of this house for a family of four children is about digging up old memories of my own childhood in a similar family environment. The existing house was dark and cold, so we first worked..
