This photographic series documents buildings in the former Eastern Bloc, with the intention to save them despite association with a totalitarian regime (+ slideshow). (more…)
These images taken by late photographer Julius Shulman show buildings from the USA’s Mid-century Modern movement that “slipped from public view” (+ slideshow). (more…)
Experience of a induced way
The design of a new inner space understood as a scene for the action, within a forced perspective, where the visitors walk along inside it becoming unconscious forward movement: to make an induced way experience a reality.
The Light Box is a place for lighting encounters and has been designed with the clear intention of addressing the users into the last room like a fine-drawn fishing net. The lines of action show a way by using visual and haptic perception together, across the set, becoming our physical movement of displacement: the bent reception furniture, the curved ceiling from left to right, the folded right wall to the left, the three glass surfaces advancing like pieces of smaller width while you approach them…
White color: Symbol of conceptual cleanliness. It constitutes a deep investigation on the infinite shades of white and its different textures (glossy porcelain, smooth matte painting, satin-gloss lacquered DM, white led light, white fluorescent light).
Artificial lighting: The precision of a laser dissection was necessary used to carry out the breakdown of the corners between the different surfaces.
Furniture: The fixed furniture has been designed using DM which has been lacquered in white color, adapted to the specific activity requirements.
The past ten years have seen a new twist in tall building design: buildings that rotate as they rise, either for engineering or purely aesthetic purposes. Inspired by this recent trend, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has produced a new graphic entitled Tall Buildings in Numbers “Twisting Tall Buildings” to analyze the “recent proliferation of twisting towers creating a new generation of iconic buildings throughout the world.”
The infographic compares the buildings by height, along with the tightness and total degrees of their rotation. Continue after the break for the full graphic and links to the projects on ArchDaily.
Twisting Tall Buildings is also included within 2016 Issue III of the CTBUH Journal, which also includes a case study on Evolution Tower, Moscow – the seventh tallest twisting tower in this study. You can purchase a copy of the journal here.
News via CTBUH.
Movie: in this exclusive Dezeen movie, Chinese architect Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio explains why he recycled material from traditional Chinese buildings to construct the Ningbo History Museum. (more…)
A house in Aspen that has been renovated to celebrate its imperfections (pictured), Peter Zumthor’s latest renders for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a debate over the relevance of the Kardashians to architecture feature in this week’s issue of Dezeen Mail.
Read Dezeen Mail issue 319 | Subscribe to Dezeen Mail
The RH House is located around Puyehue Lake – X region, Region de los Lagos, at the south of Chile. It is a place full of vegetation, with a great panoramic view of the Osorno, Puyehue and Puntiagudo Volcanoes.
This house is located on a small hill on the inside of the ground. From there we looked for the way to emphasize the panoramic views of the place, with large glass panels on its façade towards the woods, framing the Puyehue Volcano with a large window at the dining room, and the Osorno and Puntiagudo Volcanoes from the bedrooms.
The main requirements were to design a house for a numerous family, with wide spaces and well illuminated. Our main objective was for people to be able to be either on the inside or on the outside of the house, since the weather is very variable during the day. The house considers a second stage with three extra bedrooms and a terrace expansion, which complete the projected volume.
The program is divided into two “volumes” that intersect each other in a “T” shape. With this we manage to rescue the views of the landscape and nature around in all its dimensions.
One of the volumes comprehends all the bedrooms in general, and in the other we can find services and public areas. The materiality used to construct this house are Volcometal (a mix of iron and zinc), covered with oregon pine wood dyed white. Drawing on the resources of the area, demolition larch shingles were rescued as a coating for a wall in the living room, and on the exterior we used a dark dyed norway due to low maintenance costs and durability.
The design of the house was thought with the intention of maintaining the southern Chilean typical architecture elements such as: perimeter eaves, gabled roofs and wood as the main materiality; with a more contemporary look with simple lines.
When it comes to skyscraper architects, the first name that comes to mind is often Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. No firm has completed more supertall buildings than SOM, and to this day, they remain a leader in the field, designing both the western hemisphere’s and the world’s tallest buildings in One World Trade Center and the Burj Khalifa. Yet, arguably, the height of their powers came in the 1970s, directly following a lull in skyscraper construction that allowed the Empire State Building to retain the status of world’s tallest building for nearly 40 years.
It was then that Falzur Khan, a SOM architect and structural engineer, came up with the structural innovation that revolutionized the skyscraper industry, leaving lasting impacts on the construction methods of supertall buildings today.
Drawing from a recent story published by Mental Floss on the designer, we’ve come up with a list of facts about his life and role in the world of architecture.
Continue reading for the 8 things you should know about Falzur Khan.
Khan was the lead structural engineer on two of the tallest skyscrapers of the 1970s, both found in Chicago: the John Hancock Center (1969) and the Sears Tower (1973, now known as the Willis Tower)
He didn’t see his first skyscraper in person until he was 21 years old. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the tallest building in his hometown measured only 3 stories.
Khan was the first to discover that building a skyscraper in the the shape of a tube could greatly reduce material size and weight. His buildings were supported not by an inner grid of concrete and steel, like the Empire State Building, but by their facades.
For the Hancock Center design, Khan introduced SOM to computer modeling techniques for the first time, hiring two programming experts to calculate difficult equations in record time. The engineers left soon after to work on another revolutionary project, Star Wars.
To understand how wind and building sway would affect users in the upper floors of his skyscrapers, Khan placed test subjects into a bathtub placed on top of rotating platform designed to mimic the oscillating motion of a Maytag washing machine.
His strategy for visualizing structural diagrams bore a striking similarity to method acting: “I put myself in the place of a whole building, feeling every part,” Khan said in an interview with Engineering News-Record. “In my mind I visualize the stresses and twisting a building undergoes.”
Khan died of a heart attack in 1982, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where today, construction is underway on the Kingdom Tower, which will become the world’s tallest building upon its completion in 2020.
Founded in 2004, The Fazlur Khan Lifetime Achievement Medal is awarded by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat for individuals who have “demonstrated excellence in technical design and/or research that has made a significant contribution to a discipline for the design of tall buildings and the built urban environment” throughout their careers.
You can find the full story on Fazlur Khan’s role in the construction the John Hancock Tower on Mental Floss’s website, here.
Opinion: meaningful architectural reactions to crises may take time, but quick temporary structures can be just as effective, and both are far preferable to not responding at all says Mimi Zeiger. (more…)
From the architect. ColiRoma OneHundredTwentyEight is part of the urban fabric of the Colonia Roma Norte in Mexico City. The district’s features and use of public space offers a unique perspective on progressive neighborhood living within the city, and as such, reflects contemporary society, where life and living happens not only in our private spaces but also in our nearby public spaces.
Activities, like those of the Condesa-Roma Cultural Corridor, generate vibrant personal relationships with neighbors that allow for living together in the public space. This is how the concept of livable space and lifestyle has a direct impact on this residential project.
The building is configured using conceptual elements of public-private space. First of all, the building and its urban setting lead to spatial permeability between the two through an “urban pit stop”. This is a flexible space of public-private interrelationships, located a half-level below the sidewalk, that can become a gallery, forum or place for interacting during the Cultural Corridor, etc. It can also be a common area for building residents, turning into an exclusive space for gatherings if required, allowing for flexibility in use and reaffirming the impact of neighborhood living on the area.
Additionally, a public bench is built around an existing tree outside the main façade, where bicycles can be parked or where pets and people can sit and mingle freely.
On the other hand, from a residential perspective, the building consists of 8 apartments, 2 town houses, 2 penthouses, a roof garden and 2 subterranean parking levels. The apartments have a linear spatial configuration, generating a sequence of interior cubes of light and natural ventilation across their inner walls. This affords street views and views toward the inside and back cubes, which produce spatial transitions along the linear path of the apartment, exposing light, shade and indoor and outdoor environments.
There is an apartment on the first level configured as a studio-loft. Another of the apartments on the fourth level plays with the open space by preserving the living room-dining room as an open terrace of double height, and the top of an existing tree relates spatially as an element of nature. The townhouses and penthouses have two levels, two overlook the street and two overlook the rear light and ventilation cubes, maintaining the spatial transition and revealing the indoor and outdoor environments. The roof garden has 6 private areas and a spa in the common area, encouraging and facilitating interaction among neighbors.
The balconies and the spatial configuration of the apartments are visible from the main façade. In the center are the 2-storey blocks. The studio-loft appears as a pewter cube with urban phrases, which calls attention to the vehicle and pedestrian access. At the top, a 2-storey cube with pewter details highlights the apartment with the open terrace. The existing tree and the public bench also interrelate well. Everything is a communication of components and elements, permeability of spaces, interaction of public and private use.
The overall finishes are exposed: the structure is based on metal columns that are painted black, with exposed intermediate floors made of corrugated metal; the flat slab support system uses reinforced concrete which holds an exposed concrete ceiling; the general interior installations are exposed, except for the service areas, the window frames are black aluminum with clear glass. The main façade has pewter details and sliding panels of perforated laminate.
