Towering bamboo poles encase this cylindrical wooden theatre in France, which opened in a fanfare last week, despite suffering vandalism just a few days before (+ slideshow). (more…)
French designer Philippe Starck has created a minimal and recyclable summer sandal collection for Brazilian brand Ipanema. (more…)
MS House is a home located in São Paulo, Brazil. It was designed by Studio Arthur Casas in 2014. MS House by Studio Arthur Casas: “This summerhouse near São Paulo was built for a couple with three grown-up daughters. It had to conciliate the dichotomy between framing astonishing views to a golf course and woods towards the dark south and seeking abundant light on the street side, towards north. The..
Filmmaker George Lucas has confirmed that he is pulling his MAD-designed museum from Chicago and plans to move the proposal to America’s West Coast. (more…)
Dezeen promotion: this year’s What Design Can Do conference will focus on European identity and how the continent can learn from new initiatives emerging in Africa (+ slideshow). (more…)
Stockholm-based firm Kjellander + Sjöberg (K+S) won the Swedish division of the Nordic Built Cities Challenge 2016 with their vision to transform Sege Park, Malmö into a socially sustainable residential hub. Their project “It Takes a Block” uses climate-smart and economically varied housing models to test architecture’s capability to foster sustainable living. The proposal was developed in association with students from Lund University and Danish landscape architecture firms BOGL and Sted.
The design responds to the critical need for urban density in Swedish cities by providing 800 compact apartment units across the 40,000 square meter site. Despite the high density and block arrangement, the scheme contains a multitude of shared spaces and open, unprogrammed communal zones. These areas are intended to act as points of shared knowledge and resources, consolidating waste and fostering a greater sense of community interaction within the complex.
The proposal intertwines typologically variant apartment types with public program, with the intention of creating “rich socioeconomic variation.” Careful consideration of the existing environment will further this variation by creating conscious links to integrate the new development into its surroundings. The new building stock is proposed to “organically grow” from the existing 1930s buildings and parklands, creating a diverse new urban neighbourhood.
“The starting point of the design has been the fact that the long-term sustainability is ensured by providing opportunities for residents to engage and interact with their local environment,” K+S said of their design.
K+S are currently engaged in several multi-residential projects across Sweden, including a new civic block in Kiruna, which applies similar approaches to climatic control and community-centric planning. The practice’s interest in sustainability, visible across their portfolio, has been further explored at this year’s Venice Biennale.
The overall winner of the Nordic Built Cities Challenge will be announced in November. K+S are one of six winners vying for the top honor, with the other projects dotted throughout the Nordic countries, in sites such as Trygve Lies plass in Oslo, Norway; Karsnes harbour in Kopavogur, Iceland; and Hans Tavsens Park and Korsgade in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Learn more about the Nordic Built Cities competition, here.
News Via Kjellander + Sjöberg.
Short History
The Ravelijn “Op den Zoom” is a fort-island of the city of Bergen op Zoom in The Netherlands which is made in the beginning of the 18th century by Menno van Coehoorn, a famous fort builder. This is the only “ravelijn” of him still present. The island sits just outside of the former center of the city. At the end of the 19th century the fortress lost its defensive function. Nowadays the island-fort is mainly used for small public and private events.
The assignment
The assignment was to make a kiosk with public toilets and an information point on the Ravelijn
Concept
The fort is made of a brick foundation with earth walls on top. The earth walls surround the fort on all sides. But the wall at the side of the city is not an original one. In times of war this one was not necessary, because there was no attack expected from that side. We used exact that not historic earth wall to make the kiosk in it. It sits on the side and it’ s incorporated in the fort. We made 2 entrances, one for each toilet. The information point is accessible through those entrances.
In the information point there is a glass roof to provide daylight. There is a big horizontal, gas-spring operated hatch at the front.
Material
The kiosk is made entirely out of Accoya
Itacolomi 445 Apartment is a private residence located in São Paulo, Brazil. It was designed by Diego Revollo Arquitetura.
In this article, written by Christian Dimmer and illustrated with photographs by Max Creasy, the post-earthquake and tsunami coastal architectural landscape of the Japanese Prefectures of Aomori, Iwate and Miyagi are presented and studied.
Few disasters were as complex and their implications as hard to grasp as the compound calamity of earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown that hit the North-East of Japan on March 11, 2011. While over 500 kilometers of coastline were devastated, the disaster unfolded in each of the hundreds of towns affected differently depending on local topographies, urban morphologies, existing landscape formations, collective memory of past disasters and preparedness, and the social ties within the communities.
When travelling along the rugged coast of the Prefectures of Aomori, Iwate and Miyagi—with their tiny towns and fishery ports nestled into deep coves and then entering the vast agricultural planes near the big cities of Ishinomaki and Sendai, followed by the depopulated no-go areas in Fukushima—recovery from the traumatic disaster continues to greatly vary. The challenges of reconstruction are further complicated by the fact that most of these peripheral communities, far away from the prospering metropolitan centres of Japan, have long been depopulating and rapidly ageing.
Despite these vastly different scales, topographies and multi-layered challenges the traveller is struck by the repetitive repertoire of generic reconstruction responses: giant concrete seawalls and tetrapods sharply separate sea and fishing communities, not heeding the beauty of the landscape, or the working routines of the fishermen; vast plateaus of new building land are created in the tsunami-endangered lowlands for detached, suburban homes that might never materialise because of a lack of economic opportunities of prospective residents; featureless high-rise housing estates are created for disaster victims in low-rise rural communities that will further isolate their traumatised, mostly elderly inhabitants.
Scattered across the vast, weed-grown emptiness of the reconstruction areas we find occasional architectural statements by luminaries like Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Riken Yamamoto, Sou Fujimoto, Klein and Dytham among others, who, with their “home for all” project series, sought to create nodes for community life in the aftermath of destruction. Five years later, the best of these have grown into vital community centres that are heavily used, while others are merely used as storages or not at all.
This suggests that recovery is not merely a matter of rebuilding physical structures like new roads, ports, seawalls and community centers. To deal with the complex issues at hand—depopulating, and hyper-raging towns with few job opportunities and traumatised populations—new planning and design practices are needed to enable and empower communities; to cope with trauma; to develop new economic models and strategies that bring back young people from the metropolitan centres; to strengthen creativity and self-reliance.
Architecture has an important role to play here. It can provide for vital and lively meeting places; create civic pride and place identity by utilising local materials and crafts and involving its future occupants in design, programming, and management. However, more than just placing architecture inside a community from outside, without deeply understanding the local needs, designers must seek to integrate these structures into the social practices and the life of communities; it must be a living architecture that grows and develops.
More importantly, architects and planners need to design processes and relations within the community that foster social capital and community resilience, to adapt to the challenges ahead.
You can see the Tohoku Projects Map with post-disaster recovery projects, here, and view daily updates on Tohoku’s recovery, here.
An oversized dormer window extends from the asymmetric roof of this house designed by architects Hiroki Tominaga and Yae Fujima for an elderly couple in Japan’s Gifu Prefecture (+ slideshow). (more…)
