Comments update: readers have been discussing Bjarke Ingels‘ impact on architecture this week, after Time magazine named him as one of this year’s most influential people. (more…)
To mark the conclusion of the 55th Milan Design Week (also known as Salone del Mobile), ArchDaily has compiled a list of the best architect designed products unveiled at the event. This year’s notable items include works by Zaha Hadid, BIG, Herzog & de Meuron, MAD, David Adjaye, and Daniel Libeskind, among others.
A faucet created as a response to AXOR’s prompt for designs that “[anticipate the] meaning of water within the living spaces of tomorrow.” Adjaye’s ‘Ritual’ design is a bronze trough with a wedge-shaped granite inlay.
For Artemide, BIG created a new typeface in wall-mounted, light-up letters. Each form is created with a group of simple elements that are connected by electromagnetic joints that become invisible when illuminated. The system allows for any shape to be created, either a letter or not.
Made from polyurethane plastic, Zaha Hadid’s ‘Mew’ table appears to be two interlocking waves of resin, but is actually one continuous surface. According to Saway & Moroni, “Although it brings a successful summary of two distinct surfaces to mind, the Mew table desk starts out from a single enveloping figure to take the form of a futuristic, magically fluid origami.”
Fashioned from granito nero assoluto (fine black granite), Zaha Hadid’s shelving design for CITCO can be mounted as a group of four brackets or broken up into separate units. “Valle is a shelving system finely crafted in black granite that continues my explorations with Citco into the unique properties and performance of stone,” said Zaha Hadid.
For their nearly-complete Manhattan skyscraper, Herzog & de Meuron have teamed up with Laufen to complement the tower’s design with meticulously executed bathroom products.
Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Android’ radiator for Antrax is meant to appear like a sheet of paper or fabric rippling in the breeze. An environmentally conscious design, the panels are fashioned from 100% recycled materials and the radiator itself require limited water to operate.
Like erratic pen movements or the scrambling of a stock market chart, Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Time Maze’ disguises an analog clock’s face and function as an intersection of jagged lines.
MAD’s ‘Marilyn’ handle for Olivari recalls the firm’s design for Absolute Towers in Mississauga, Ontario (just outside Toronto). That pair of towers became colloquially known as Marilyn Monroe for their curvaceous shapes.
Nendo’s H-horse for Kartell is a transparent plastic rocking horse inspired by the shape and formal characteristics of I-beams (also known as H-beams). The horse form is achieved by connecting and shaping only three planes of material.
The design of Nendo’s ‘Sway’ table for Marsotto Edizioni plays with the physical limitations of marble by creating tables that appear on the verge of toppling over. According to the designers, “The weight of marble is often perceived as a negative factor, but this element has been actively exploited, resulting in the creation of a table that is tilted to one side.”
In a new frontier for the “Internet-of-Things,” Carlo Ratti’s ‘Lift-Bit’ furniture for Vitra is made modular and mutable by the use of an app. Connectivity gives you the ability to move separate stool wirelessly, enabling users to create armchairs, couches, chaise lounges, and just about any other seating arrangement you can think of.
Durango 133 is an exercise on the insertion of a contemporary project at the corner of Durango and Tonala streets, one of the few vacant lots within the historic fabric of the Roma Norte district of Mexico City.
The building is located in a site of atypical dimensions for the area (63m on the facade and a total of 1,100 m2) which borders historic buildings of artistic value within the Heritage Conservation areas of the city.
The building consists of 4 floors with 18 duplex units to the street and 4 internal single-floor apartments.
The exterior units are designed as a combination of two typologies that are typical in the neighborhood.
In the first 2 levels, we propose a series of terraced houses with individual entrances from the street. The ground floor is raised half a level on the sidewalk to protect the privacy of the homes and their relationship with pedestrians and the street.
Over these houses there are duplex apartments that borrow the concept of elevated open street, typical of the neighboring buildings from the early twentieth century.
On April 26th 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine suffered a catastrophic failure, resulting in a nuclear meltdown and a series of explosions which scattered radioactive material across large areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. More than 50,000 people were evacuated the following day, and over the next 14 years another 300,000 people were moved, leading to an exclusion zone today measuring 2,600 square kilometers that will likely remain in place for hundreds of years. To this day, the human cost of the disaster is still unknown, with estimates that in their lifetimes, anywhere between 4,000 and 200,000 people will be affected by cancers attributable to the incident. Along with the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster of 2011, the Chernobyl Disaster is one of only two level 7 nuclear events in history.
Today, exactly 30 years later, the incident at Chernobyl remains one of the most poignant demonstrations of humanity’s mastery over its environment, and also one of the most powerful demonstrations of how easily, and how catastrophically, that mastery can go awry. But humans are if nothing else resilient, and throughout history have used every means at their disposal to put right the problems they have caused for themselves – including a number of structures constructed to mitigate the effects of man-made disasters, both from humanity’s past and its possible future.
In the six months after the Chernobyl Disaster, construction teams hastily constructed the cheerily-named Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Sarcophagus, a structure containing 400,000 square meters of concrete to stop the further spread of radiation and the contaminated materials contained within the building. However, the hurried nature of its construction means that the Sarcophagus has a number of problems, not least its structural reliance on damaged parts of the original building. Due to the radiation levels in and around the structure, it was deemed impossible to maintain the Sarcophagus, and a decision was taken in the 1990s to build a new protective structure over the entire existing system.
The Chernobyl New Safe Confinement (NSC) consists of a barrel vault 92.5 meters tall, 270 meters wide and 150 meters long constructed of steel and polycarbonate. In order to reduce the radiation exposure of those constructing the NSC, the entire structure is being assembled 180 meters away from the reactor itself, and when completed it will be slid on rails into place.
19th century Chicago had a problem that was common to many rapidly-expanding cities at the time: human waste. However, in Chicago this problem was more acute than in most cities, as the city’s flat plain and slow-flowing river was not conducive to washing away human excrement – not to mention the fact that the city took its drinking water from Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the river. By 1854, the problem was already so bad that a cholera epidemic killed 6% of the Chicago’s citizens, but in the following five decades the city’s booming population only made the problem worse. The river’s south fork, known to this day as Bubbly Creek, got the name thanks to the slaughterhouses that lined the river and threw their waste into the water, causing bubbles of methane (which would occasionally catch fire) as the animal corpses began to rot.
The solution to these problems took place in three stages: first, every building in Chicago was raised by 10 feet (3 meters) to make space for a network of sewage pipes; second, what was at the time the world’s longest tunnel was constructed to extract water from Lake Michigan two miles out from the shore; and finally, when both of these measures failed to produce long-lasting results, the decision was taken to reverse the flow of the river entirely. This was achieved with the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal, whose complex construction is covered beautifully in this episode of 99% Invisible. However, the short version of the story is that between 1892 and 1900, the construction of the canal joined the Chicago river with the Des Plaines river, meaning that instead of flowing into Lake Michigan from the Chicago river, water flowed out of Lake Michigan, via the Chicago river and canal, and ultimately into the Mississippi river network. Shortly after the canal was opened, a headline ran in the New York Times sarcastically declaring that “The Water in the Chicago River Now Resembles Liquid.”
Around the world, many countries keep a repository of the seeds of their indigenous flora for emergencies; in case of catastrophe, these seeds act as a backup of their ecosystem. But since 2008, the Norwegian government has also operated the Global Seed Vault, storing samples from countries around the world to serve as the backup to these backups. The complex operates in a similar way to deposit boxes at a regular bank: Norway owns the facility, but the containers of samples themselves are owned by their respective countries, and only they can request access to them.
The site at Spitsbergen Island was chosen for a number of reasons: firstly, long-term storage of seed samples is best done at cold temperatures, and the icy conditions 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole help to reduce cooling requirements; secondly, the region experiences very little seismic activity; finally, at an elevation of 130 meters it is protected from even the worst predicted rises in sea level. Buried 120 meters deep in a sandstone mountain, the facility is cooled to -18 degrees celsius, and even in the event of a power failure would take several weeks to warm up to the ambient rock temperature of -3 degrees. Last year, the seed bank had its first withdrawal, after another seed bank located in Aleppo, Syria, encountered problems moving its collection away from the Syrian Civil War.
Completed in 1959 as a safeguard against the worst possible outcomes of the Cold War, the existence of this 56,000 square meter underground facility in Virginia was not public knowledge until 1979. In the event of a disaster, the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center was designed to act as a bunker for the United States military and governmental officials as part of the country’s “Continuity of Government” plans. On a day-to-day basis, it is the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Crucially, the facility includes a radio station which, in the event of an emergency, would be the central control point of the emergency broadcast system. And, the facility is not defunct now that the Cold War is over – it was most recently used for emergency operations after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, when some members of congress were evacuated to Mount Weather by helicopter.
Another underground bunker facility constructed during the height of the cold war, the facility at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado is even more impressive than the Mount Weather Complex in its extensive underground network and impressive engineering solutions. The complex was originally built as the Combat Operations Center for the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), a joint security initiative between the United States and Canada set up to monitor North American airspace for incoming threats.
Though NORAD has since moved to the nearby Peterson Air Force Base, the facility is still used by the US Air Force as a training facility, and its formidable protective capabilities remain in place – including the springs which protect its interior structures from seismic shocks, its doors designed to withstand a nuclear blast as strong as 30 megatons from as close as 2 kilometers away, and its independent power plant, heating and cooling systems, and water supply. Today, the threats which it is designed to protect against, in order of decreasing likelihood, are “medical emergencies, natural disasters, civil disorder, a conventional attack, an electromagnetic pulse attack, a cyber or information attack, chemical or biological or radiological attack, an improvised nuclear attack, a limited nuclear attack, or a general nuclear attack.”
Sweden’s northernmost town, Kiruna, exists almost entirely as a result of the huge iron mine nearby, which supplies 90% of the iron used in Europe. However, before too much longer the town could very well cease to exist thanks to that same mine, as the excavation threatens to undermine the entire town. Ceasing excavation is certainly not an option either: without the mine and the jobs it provides, explained the city’s deputy mayor to The Guardian, “no devil would have built a city here.” To avoid this, the city commissioned White Arkitekter, in collaboration with Ghilardi + Hellsten Arkitetker, to envision a masterplan that would move the town of 23,000 people 3 kilometers to the east.
The proposal, which has now been underway for two years, involves moving 20 of the town’s most important buildings by carefully dismantling them and moving them to the new site. The rest of the town will be constructed anew, gradually moving everyone over a period of almost 20 years. However, the masterplan also includes a longer, 100-year plan to reduce the town’s reliance on the mining industry – showing that, in spite of humanity’s propensity for a startling lack of foresight, we can also be pretty good at learning from our mistakes.
New York-based Studio Dror has proposed adding another huge domed structure to Montreal’s Expo 67 site on Île Sainte-Hélène, where Buckminster Fuller‘s Biosphere has sat for almost 50 years (+ movie). (more…)
a “quincho” is a pavilion that is usually installed
at the back of urban lots, and which has in these
latitudes the mission to cover exceptional events,
whose cyclic repetition of
studied frequency and dosage, flirts with
capital sin and its consequent harmful burdens
to our health.
but to define specifically “why is this quincho
as it is?” the previous description is not consistent with its
structure, which although is revealed founding in its affirmation,
it is not conclusive.
we do what we do to orient ourselves, we understand ourselves as languaging beings, and in our eagerness
for collective existence and making use of the mandate of the
discipline (ensuring the habitability of beings
as humans), we venture to produce new
tools of resources and possibilities, that
overcome the opportunities for a better life, as
message and offering that allows us to be in others.
we reaffirm our saying written in stone,
once imitative empathy is overcome, we conjure new ways
to summon matter, as a sign of our patent
need to improve ourselves improving in others.
a rubble ceiling, reused glass, cement floors,
some cable and some lighting, to accompany
life scenes.
the most important question about Quincho Tía Coral
can’t be but…
are its barbecues delicious?
Japanese architect and 2014 Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban will visit Ecuador on April 30 to help with disaster relief following the recent earthquake, according to a press release from the College of Ecuadorian Architects – Pichincha Province (CAE Pichincha). Known for bringing innovative and high quality design to the people that need it the most, Ban has developed successful responses to disasters in Asia, Africa, Europe and Central America.
On April 16, a 7.8 earthquake hit the coast of Ecuador, killing nearly 650 people, injuring more than 12,500, and destroying nearly 7,000 buildings across the country.
Ban has expressed his solidarity with Ecuador and plans to visit the affected areas as well as lead a training conference in Quito on May 2nd.
More information on his visit will be released in the coming days.
View some of Shigeru Ban’s past disaster relief projects, here.
Zaha Hadid Architects has been selected to design a building for a technology park near Moscow, the first major project the firm has secured since the death of its founder last month. (more…)
New York’s Museum of Modern Art has issued a letter to quell speculation over the closure of its architecture and design galleries. (more…)
