Italian brands create “too many products that look the same”, says Giulio Cappellini, whose furniture company is making a comeback under new owner Haworth (+ slideshow). (more…)
Italian design needs to go back to its origins, says Cappellini
Architecture
AR Issues: How the Internet Has Promoted the Banality of “Notopia”
Courtesy of The Architectural Review
ArchDaily is continuing our partnership with The Architectural Review, bringing you short introductions to the themes of the magazine’s monthly editions. In this introduction to the July 2016 issue, Editor Christine Murray continues the crusade, begun in the previous issue, against “Notopia.” Here, Murray describes Notopia’s connection to our 21st century digital society, arguing that “the failed promise of the internet is how it has hurt the real world.”
It may be found even in an attractive metropolis, densely packed with fine buildings old and new, replete with coffee shops and bicycle lanes. Here, Notopia is a simulacrum of inhabitation, like a stage set for its players. Nothing is what it seems. The historic apartments that overlook the twisted pedestrianized lanes of Barcelona are in fact hotel rooms for weekend visitors. The towering sea-view condominiums of Vancouver are foreign investment properties bought in exchange for citizenship. Detroit’s streets of elegant gabled houses have no services, the municipal water systems long turned off.
Courtesy of The Architectural Review
A real city lives. It is a trading post, a natural meeting place where humans converge to exchange, not only goods, but ideas and culture. They set about marrying and employing each other. It is a hub for adventuring and joint venturing, with homes, schools and places of work within touching distance. It renews itself, a city with neighborhoods of all kinds of people, from grandchild to grandmother.
We can design for diversity of pursuits and culture – for different social classes, ages and incomes on the same street, and public space for them to meet. But the missing link is as much economic, as spatial. The nicer homes are uninhabited – purchased from abroad, the owners pay few taxes and visit rarely, and invest only in their business overseas. They have no need of a housekeeper or the local convenience store, and their presence produces no job opportunities in the country, let alone the community. Similarly, Airbnbs create a small economic boost for the few, but the tenants do not need schools or nannies, and do not vote in local elections. In these scenarios, money takes up space, drives up property prices, and pushes people out.
Notopia is a disease that prevents, either by design or in a complete failure of housing policy, the creation of a self-sustaining socioeconomic human ecosystem.
Courtesy of The Architectural Review
On the internet, in our digital communities, we gather on social media where deals are done, love is found, food ordered, frustrations shared, gifts purchased, questions answered, capital raised and petitions signed. We have grown more cosmopolitan, appearing in each other’s homes via Skype, investing in each other’s businesses, even a world away. While the scourge of Notopia brings social segregation, delivered and delineated in neighborhoods gentrified or sunk, online there are no borders other than barriers we erect selectively, friending or blocking.
The failed promise of the internet is how it has hurt the real world – the home, the local shop, the municipality, and ourselves. The digital world is one of sensory deprivation: there is nothing to touch, taste or smell, a realm bereft of delight and intimacy of the most human kind.
In the city, we can be surprised by the unexpected pleasure of a conversation with someone we would never have “swiped right.” It’s where an umbrella is held over your head by a stranger, the bike courier cuts you up and you curse loudly, and the market seller offers you the sharp taste of exotic fruit.
Courtesy of The Architectural Review
There is the half-remembered dream of a late evening in a public square in a vibrant quarter of a large city. Teenagers loiter in clusters, residents lean out of windows in conversation with the restaurateur, who serves coffee to the last customer, as the street cleaner begins the night shift. This natural, social symbiosis is nearing extinction – in some places, because nationalism and intolerance deny the migrant traffic that would fill population gaps. Cities need people to thrive.
We must stop the spread of Notopia and its generic anywhere-architecture, and build social ecosystems instead. Our buildings must not only respond to local conditions and climate, but also enable a shape-shifting range of incomes and inhabitants. We must seek balance, not too many Airbnbs, few vacant homes, enough young people, enough jobs, and productive, not just disruptive, economies. We need start-ups and large commercial spaces, subsidized and market rents, family and student housing, the more collocated, the better. We need policies such as rent control, freedom of movement and intelligent city planning to enshrine a self-renewing vitality.
The promise of this virtual world that we have built online – its freedoms of expression and connection – has failed us. What might the post-digital city look like, and how can we design its neighborhood economics to work for us?
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Rosales Quijada House / GITC arquitectura
© Felipe Díaz Contardo
- Architects: GITC arquitectura
- Location: Del Valle, Chicureo, Colina, Región Metropolitana, Chile
- Architects In Charge: Felipe Vera Buschmann, Rodrigo Belmar Expósito (GITC)
- Area: 4800.0 sqm
- Project Year: 2010
- Photographs: Felipe Díaz Contardo
- Construction: GITC Construcción
- Area: 230 m2
- Site Area: 4.800 m2
© Felipe Díaz Contardo
From the architect. The project
Detached house, for a marriage, two children and services. Public areas on the first floor and private spaces in the second. In this higher volume, parents and children are parted; the first to de east and the children to the west. On the second floor, the ends of each volume has the most private places to finish in the center with the most common areas (father desk and TV/multimedia room for children); creating a large central volume of double height; which contain the relations and nexus (both foot how sight) between this double duality (private / public and children / parents)
© Felipe Díaz Contardo
Plan 1
The materials
Concrete, steel and native woods
A dialogue between the weight and mass of Concrete with the lightness and warmth of the wood. The base structure on the first and second floors is concrete, delivering a “sturdy table” to line the outside with a steel and wood. Both on the second floor as the double volume center height, native wood used dried and processed internally. Canelo was used in walls and ceilings, and Tineo or Coihue in floors.
© Felipe Díaz Contardo
Glass bricks
This element was used to create the east wall of the kitchen, like a kaleidoscope filtering out the morning light in the kitchen; and distorter the lighting that receive bathrooms, and in the function how a screen to separate access and dining. It is a playful element that gives movement and illuminates at the same time that separate them.
© Felipe Díaz Contardo
Functional and spatial axes
The Corridor. Inhabiting the maximum length
The second floor hallway is transformed into a large corridor that ends in two terraces; the small west terrace flying over the main entrance, and the large east terrace. This corridor, which runs the maximum internal length of the house (24 meters + terraces) in addition to the semi-interiors latticework of the terraces, is accompanied by a large horizontal south window, communicating the neighboring fields inside the house.
© Felipe Díaz Contardo
Plan 2
Staircase and central volume
The main staircase, located as a finish of the central volume of double height that is projected to the north courtyard, rests on a large vertical wall that is peeled away from the house and allows the entry of solar illumination throughout the day (being this wall a support of the rays and shadows the sun); becoming a true sundial that indicates both the advance of the day, as the change of the seasons.
© Felipe Díaz Contardo
Arquitectonica Designs New Luxury Residential Tower for Boston
© Arquitectonica
Arquitectonica has released the plans for Pierce Boston—its first building in Boston—a luxury residential condominium in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. With the recent large-scale real estate boom, the Fenway area is undergoing a massive transformation, with Pierce Boston to become the first building of its caliber in the neighborhood.
In an effort to balance new luxury with the existing iconic fabric of the area, the building is designed in simplicity with contemporary materials, so as to modernize the building against its context. Glass and metal will panel the façade, with the metal paneling patterned down to the scale and texture of a more traditional masonry brownstone. “As the building comes to grade and its opacity increases, it more closely reflects the history of the neighborhoods within which it rises” explained the architect in a press release.
© Arquitectonica
Overall, the mixed-use tower will feature 109 condominium units, 240 rental units, and over 20,000 square feet of street-level retail space. With a curtain wall and floor-to-ceiling windows, the building is designed to maximize 360-degree views of Boston, Cambridge, the Charles River, and the Emerald Necklace.
© Arquitectonica
News via Arquitectonica.
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Comic Break: “Bait And Switch”
Courtesy of Architexts
We all know that clients can be difficult to work with. But, doing a personal project for a boss… if you haven’t done it before, you’re really lucky. As much as you tell yourself it’s a great thing to have your boss trust you enough to do something for him or her, the stress is so much worse. Have you been there before?
Perhaps you’d like to share your experience with us for our new book project, Architects, LOL, or just enjoy the depictions of the daily trials and tribulations of architectural practice in our webcomic.
