Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola has filled new Milan hotel Room Mate Giulia with a colour clash of custom furniture from Italian brand Cassina (+ slideshow). (more…)
Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola has filled new Milan hotel Room Mate Giulia with a colour clash of custom furniture from Italian brand Cassina (+ slideshow). (more…)
From the architect. Design of the offices for a Montreal-based film production company with the goal to create a bright, functional and well-planned interior that stimulates creativity. The firm designed a versatile central work area surrounded by individual spaces. The place has a clean, warm and unique, and distinguishes itself through the simplicity of its materials. Plywood panels and steel work perfectly with the white walls and ceilings, while giving a slight industrial touch.
“We want to thank the team of APPAREIL architecture; skilled people that were very eager to satisfy our needs for our new workspace. The wooden furniture, all custom made, add the warmth and depth that was missing at this industrial space. We wanted to have separate areas for each employee, without being closed off. Kim Pariseau has brilliantly accomplished what we had in mind. The design is innovative and clever, and we could not wish for something better. ” – The owners
Photographer Paul Clemence of ARCHI-PHOTO has shared with us images of Adjaye Associates’ nearly-completed Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The building draws inspiration from the nearby Washington Monument, mirroring the 17-degree angle of its capstone in the museum’s tiered corona. Adjaye has described the building’s ornamental bronze lattice as “a historical reference to African American craftsmanship.” The skin can also be modulated to control the transparency and amount of sunlight reaching the interior spaces. The building will open to the public on September 24, 2016.
Continue on for Clemence’s full photoset.
Find the rest of the images in the gallery below.
Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has revealed renderings showing his design for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is based on nearby tar pits (+ slideshow). (more…)
Rio 2016: an orange and black flag representing the life jackets worn by asylum seekers has been designed for the Refugee Olympic Team (+ movie). (more…)
Escobedo Soliz was selected to construct the temporary installation for the PS1 warm ups in summer 2016 through the YAP Program 2016 of MoMa Ps1. Weaving the courtyard is not an object nor a sculpture standing in the courtyard of the PS1, but a series of simple but powerful actions on the preexistence that generate new and different atmospheres in every space of the courtyard.
The intervention works together with the preexisting walls to generate embankments on the topography, platforms of soil and mirrors of water. Using the modulation of the holes on the concrete walls, left by the formwork ties, they make a weaving system to create an ethereal and colorful cloud of ropes that provides many different textures, colors and shadows below the courtyard.
They use the materials as they are, without altering their original state, therefore in the end of the summer these materials can be reused, for their usual purposes. Since its foundation in 1971, the PS1 has been one of the first and most important venues for site-specific art In New York. The Proposal is in essence, a site-specific architectural intervention that can only belong in this courtyard.
After installation, the ropes will be donated to Weavinghand, a community of weavers of Brookyn, with them they will make some rugs to be donated to various public institutions. The benches will be sold to the general public during uninstallation in the PS1.
Haworth white papers: working styles are changing, but ergonomic design is stuck in the days of the “cubicle farm” and not evolving quickly enough to support more mobile employees, according to US furniture giant Haworth. (more…)
The Sydney Opera House has revealed designs for a $202 million renovation project, the largest upgrade program to the Jørn Utzon-designed building since it opened in 1973. Announced by New South Wales Deputy Premier and Minister for the Arts, Troy Grant, the project’s main goal is to “improve access and ensure it meets the needs and expectations of audiences, artists and the 8.2 million people who visit each year.”
The Opera House is already one of Australia’s premier tourist destinations and performing arts centers, contributing $775 million annually to the NSW economy and a national-identity value of $4.6 billion. The renovation project is expected to preserve the icon and improve its functionality to meet its increasing popularity as a tourist attraction.
The $202 million dollars has been allocated from the Cultural Infrastructure Fund and will go towards upgrading and improving existing facilities, as well as transforming existing space for new functions. The NSW Government has outlined four main areas for renewal:
Upgrade the acoustics, accessibility, efficiency and flexibility of the Opera House’s largest internal performance space, the Concert Hall, which hosts world-leading classical and contemporary musicians, speakers and other performers;
Transform office space into a new Creative Learning Centre, a dedicated place for children, families and young people;
Remove the existing intrusive marquee from the Northern Broadwalk, and build a premium Function Centre within the building envelope, with spectacular views of the harbour; and
Create a welcoming, car-free entrance under the Monumental Steps, and improve access to a more comfortable and inviting main foyer.
“When my father was re-engaged to look into the Opera House, he realised it was necessary to look at the Opera House with new eyes,” said Jan Utzon, son of Jørn, himself an architect and member of the Opera House’s Eminent Architects Panel. “He realised times had changed and that a functioning arts centre will always need to adapt to the culture of the moment.”
Perhaps the most important renovation will be to the main concert hall, which will be redesigned by Melbourne-based ARM Architecture. In its current form, the acoustics of the hall had been described as “hideous.”
“For the first time the Concert Hall will deliver the true ambitions of the original creators of this incredible building – and the real winners will be the audiences. People will be able to come and sit and enjoy the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and other great orchestras of the world right here at the Sydney Opera House in one of the greatest acoustics in the world,” said Sydney Symphony Orchestra Managing Director Rory Jeffes.
In addition to the four areas above, the plan will also include a $45 million project to replace the engine in the Joan Sutherland Theatre, the Opera House’s second largest internal performance space.
The Concert Hall upgrade is expected to take 18 months to complete. Construction will begin in mid-2019 and is expected to be complete in time for the Opera House’s 2021 season. The Sutherland Theater will also be closed for 7 months in 2017, but all other facilities will remain open and fully operational during the renovation.
More information on the project can be found here.
News via Sydney Opera House.
A roundup of the best team uniforms from Rio’s Olympic opening ceremony, a “giant flying bum” and Japanese houses of the future by world-famous architects (pictured) feature in this week’s issue of Dezeen Mail.
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Located in the northern suburbs of Chicago, this house sits opposite a unique object: the Baha’i Temple, 135 ft. high of white stone, symmetrically spherical, and monumental. The street-side face of the house must negotiate not only the scale and specificity of this alien architecture but also, the eclectic nature of the suburban environment. And the house must negotiate a 40 foot elevation differential between the road and the lake.
The house consists of four levels. A two story structure, windowless on the street, contains the garage, a gym, and a guest suite. This façade is unresidential in scale, but acts as foil to the monument it faces. Almost an inversion of the opposite grand stairs that lead up to the temple entrance, the main house entry is located at the top of the stair with the spaces of the house revealing themselves on the way down to the beach below. As one descends down the processional – light filled stairway the house gives itself away, beneath the typical American suburban lawn above. The architecture creates an experience, where the whole is pieced together through one’s mental landscape of moving down and through the house.
A mostly buried building with large operable windows facing the lake, the house requires less energy than a similar building of its type and size; tempered by the earth both passively through the combination of a green roof system and buried facades, and actively, by means of geothermal wells feeding heat pumps for heating and cooling the building. The above ground gym’s wall are clad in continuous insulation and its roof houses a network of solar hot water panels.
The house is about the transition from suburban streets to lakeside beach on this unusual site. There are overlapping journeys provided by the house, from working world to family life, from formal to informal, from public to private worlds.