Archinect - News

Ikea's design modifications for their new store in India and around the world

2018-08-20T15:29:00-04:00

This week, Ikea opened its first store in India–a feat the company has been planning for many years. But while the big, blue exterior of the store looks the same, the interiors, from the displays to the products themselves, have been subtlety tailored to accommodate cultural differences. It’s a strategy Ikea has used to expand from its origins in Sweden, now reaching 30 markets in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia...

As Ikea expands into Asia, the brand recently opened their first store in India tailoring their products to the county's culture. This is part of how Ikea introduces their brand to countries around the globe, by keeping their designs mostly the same with subtle, pointed changes for specific aspects of different cultures.

The company sends representatives to potential expansion areas in order to discern what alterations they may need to make. For India, Ikea created furniture designs with new materials to withstand the extreme humidity rather than using their standard material of untreated pine. They also created more stools and folding chair products to accommodate spontaneous family gatherings, common to many Indian households.

Check out the full article for other cultural modifications Ikea made around the world.

New York's lost soul as catalogued by Jeremiah Moss

2017-08-28T13:50:00-04:00

If New York City has 8 million stories, than at least 4,650 are referenced in the book, which will serve as an invaluable resource to future scholars of the city. As its narrative moves north through Manhattan, visiting neighborhoods that have been gutted in recent decades—the Bowery, the Meatpacking District, Times Square, Harlem—it is interspersed with deeper considerations of how we got here as a society.

Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul is a chronicle of New York City's hyper-gentrification of the past decade, which serves as a further development of the author's blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, that has extensively tracked the 'murdering' of the city's character through government policies and greed. Writing under the pseudonym of Jeremiah Moss, Griffith Hansbury—a psychoanalyst and social worker by day, and a poet and author by night, collected a 'body of evidence' of what has gone wrong with New York. Both personal and insightful, the book offers 27 chapters densely packed with detail—a thrilling mix of copious research and biting observations, featuring long lists of shuttered moms-and-pops and disappeared shopkeepers.

“I think too often people get stuck on the nostalgia of it,” says Moss. “They tell themselves these things which I think are memes, like ‘this is normal, New York is always changing, people have always complained about New York changing, goin...

Traveling the world to understand 'The Future of Cities'

2016-12-20T18:23:00-05:00

The inevitable, and accelerating, growth of cities is an undisputed premise in contemporary urbanist discourses. With the rapid rise of entirely new cities proliferating around the globe, questions arise of how much in urban life can be improved with a blank slate. This short film from The Nantucket Project (a TED-ish conference focused on big ideas) looks at how different cities are approaching that future – focusing on issues of technology, transportation, health and history.

Guggenheim Helsinki plans nixed by city, citing "the project’s excessive cost for the Finnish taxpayer"

2016-12-01T13:24:00-05:00

The mix of private and public funding for the Guggenheim Helsinki has officially been rejected in a city council vote, meaning that the plans for the museum designed by Moreau & Kusunoki are unlikely to ever be built. A new financing plan that drew the bulk of public funding from the city and the rest from private fundraising had been approved by the city board in November, but was vetoed by the larger city council last night. According to The New York Times, Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York, said about the vote that “I suppose that it was a reaction to a sense of engulfing internationalism, or a reaction against globalism. That’s how I’m explaining it to myself.”

Meanwhile, Helsinki City Council member and Guggenheim opposer Osku Pajamaki said that “I’m exhausted but relieved. Instead of buying a subsidiary of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, we can now focus on creating unique local cultural attractions in Helsinki.”

Offici...

An artist-in-residency is stranded aboard a bankrupt freighter off the coast of Japan

2016-09-08T13:50:00-04:00

Part of the 23 Days at Sea residency, British video and performance artist Rebecca Moss left Vancouver on August 23 in a Hanjin freighter, expecting to dock in Shanghai on September 15. Run by Vancouver's Access Gallery, the residency focuses on issues of globalization, but what ended up happening during Moss's residency, while on-theme, wasn't exactly its goal.

On August 31, with debts amounting to $900 million, Hanjin Shipping Company filed for bankruptcy. Now placed in a receivership, meaning "in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights", Hanjin was refused entry by Shanghai. It's now stuck in aquatic limbo off the coast of Japan, looking for a place that will allow it to dock. The shipping company is the seventh-largest in the world, accounting for 7% of container trade between North America and East Asia.

In an email to Access Gallery, Moss wrote: “I can’t begin to describe how it feels to look out the window and...

Trudeau stakes Canada's economic growth on architects

2016-08-23T14:09:00-04:00

With the U.S. presidential election coming up, a few Americans are considering moving to Canada, a move that actually might be lucrative if you're an architect. Responding to the forces of globalization, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is aiming to inject new economic life into his country by investing in traditionally brainy industries like architecture and accounting, as reported in this Bloomberg News article:

So if manufacturers won't do the heavy lifting, who will?

Enter Diamond. The world-renowned architect employs 180 people, including 140 architects, in an airy but respectfully renovated early 20th-century building in Toronto’s Fashion District. It was Canada’s education system that brought him to the country—he set up the post-graduate architect program at the University of Toronto in 1966—but his eye has always been turned outwards.

For more on architectural employment tips/trends:

Airbnb is turning into the hotel chains it disrupted

2016-08-08T17:56:00-04:00

Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados [...] The interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports, qualities that led the French anthropologist Marc Augé to define them in 1992 as "non-places," has leaked into the rest of life. [...] This confluence of style is being accelerated by companies that foster a sense of placelessness … Airbnb is a prominent example.

Nicholas Korody previously explored this phenomenon, of supposedly idiosyncratic Airbnb styling converging on the generic.

Related on Archinect:

"We have probably hit peak stuff," says Ikea boss

2016-01-19T19:24:00-05:00

The appetite of western consumers for home furnishings has reached its peak – according to Ikea, the world’s largest furniture retailer. The Swedish company’s head of sustainability told a Guardian conference that consumption of many familiar goods was at its limit. “If we look on a global basis, in the west we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff … peak home furnishings,” Steve Howard said [...]

Related:

Searching for Queen Elizabeth's architectural legacy

2015-09-25T03:53:00-04:00

Elizabeth II is the first major British monarch who will not have an architectural style named after her [...] The present Elizabethan era includes as many as a dozen architectural highlights and at least two broad architectural styles. “I cannot imagine a term or an argument that would tie all of this together,” says Stanford Anderson, a professor emeritus of history and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “'New Elizabethan architecture’ just ducks the question.”

Amid historic nuclear negotiations, Tehran's urbanism is shifting

2015-05-11T13:58:00-04:00

If ongoing discussions with the United States and others prove successful, sanctions affecting the Iranian economy will likely be lifted, exposing the country to a forceful wave of globalization. But the shift from isolation to inclusion has already begun to transform Tehran. [...] It’s a city that, at this moment, is intensely influenced by international relations, shaping itself into a burgeoning urban hub.

NY exhibitions reflect on Latin American midcentury architecture + design

2015-03-30T16:01:00-04:00

Until the advent of cable television and then the Internet, Latin Americans, creators and consumers alike, were often more aware of trends in Europe and the United States than in nations neighboring theirs: Whatever similarities in style that emerged regionally were largely the result of discrete, parallel responses to the challenges of urbanization, poverty and the need to somehow integrate modernity and tradition.

Midcentury architecture and design from the Latin America region seems to be a trend in recent exhibitions in MoMA, MAD, and Americas Society in New York. New York Times writer Larry Rohter compares and contrasts the exhibitions, which shed light on the all-too-familiar tension of integrating globalized innovation with local traditions and techniques that was present throughout Latin American architecture and design.

Rubber Duckie, you make globalization so much fun

2014-08-21T14:32:00-04:00

A six-story-tall floating "Rubber Duck" is making its West Coast debut at the Port of Los Angeles, where it will lead more than a dozen battleships and sailboats in the Tall Ships Festival L.A. parade [...] Dubbed the world's largest rubber duck, the giant inflatable was created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. "The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties," Hofman said on the event's website. "It can relieve the world's tensions as well as define them."

Adorable? Certainly. Humorous? Obviously. Architecture? Maybe.

According to Hofman's website, the Rubber Duck "doesn't discriminate people and doesn't have a political connotation... The Rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages!" This description accounts for all rubber duckies ever. What distinguishes this Rubber Duck is where its been. The giant inflatable has appeared on the shores of Beijing, Pittsburgh, Sydney, Osaka, São Paulo and others, to delight folks around the world. The ocean is the globalized world's bathtub, and this giant duck its bath toy.

Hofman claims the duck "doesn't have a political connotation", but its difficult to not see it as a symbol for globalized commerce. With the same universal cuteness the world-over, it visits ports (such as in Los Angeles) that support global shipping infrastructures, networking economies and cultures with a universally accessible cuteness. The duck's path is paved by human, economic forces, not natural ocean ones — un...

Ecumonopolis: City Without Limits

2014-01-23T14:55:00-05:00

Istanbul is still a very pretty city but that is not all. It is also a city in transformation under the impacts of neo-liberalism via the global age of unjust changes. Ekumonopolis looks at these conditions site specifically in Istanbul, called by George Brugmans as one of the oldest and, in the same time, the newest cities in Europe.

Please click the cc button on the bottom of the screen for the English subtitles.

Analyzing the tensions of transnational negotiations through kinetic cartography

2014-01-17T20:23:00-05:00

Negotiated edges – one world, different systems is a kinetic cartography "world machine" currently featured at the 2013-14 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Hong Kong. Created by multidisciplinary design team Chiu Ning, Yuet Chan, Lau Wai Kin, and Andrew Ng, the piece is relevant to the Biennale's overall discussion of boundaries in various architectural and urban contexts ranging from an individual to a global perspective.

If you're based in Hong Kong, you can check out Negotiated edges at the Biennale until Feb. 23, 2014. You can also watch the video below to see it in action.

Here's more info on the project:

"'Negotiated edges – one world, different systems' owes its inception to an architectural thesis on boundaries as strategic exploitation of resources through transnational linkages against the backdrop of globalization. The team further developed the concept by looking beyond restrictive binaries to the multiplicity of sites and context.

Negotiated edges, be...

Rem Koolhaas, Ai Weiwei, Superflex and others take part in Gwangju Folly Project

2013-11-08T15:09:00-05:00

Architectural follies impose on our assumptions of what architecture is and what it should be -- what is function, what is beauty, where do private and public space meet. Gwangju Folly II, part of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, highlights the politicization of public space through multiple folly-interventions in Gwangju. The project includes follies by Ai Weiwei, Rem Koolhaas and Ingo Niermann, Superflex, Raqs Media Collective, David Adjaye and Taiye Selasi, among others, this November 10-11.

Artistic Director Nikolaus Hirsch, with curators Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun, focus the follies on the contentiousness of public space, and its operation on the global scale. Positioned throughout the city, some follies are mobile (Ai Weiwei's "Cubic-meter Food Cart", a rumination on South Korea's pojangmachas) while others highly site-specific (Rem Koolhaas and Ingo Niermann's "The Vote" is installed in a high-traffic commercial area).

As the setting for Gwangju’s Democratic ...

Editor's Picks #308

2013-03-26T16:23:00-04:00

Archinect published work from Beyond Prototype, an advanced digital fabrication seminar developed at Columbia University...Nicholas Cecchi was impressed but also offered some criticism "This is amazing student work...However, I would like architecture schools to stop pushing students to contextualize this kind of research-based exploration. Showing these as enclosures (or the one as a gondola) only undermines the amazing generative capacity of this kind of design"

For the latest edition of the Student Works feature, Archinect published work from Beyond Prototype, an advanced digital fabrication seminar developed at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation by Jason Ivaliotis and Nicholas Kothari. In the course "Students develop parametrically controlled tessellations and transform them into building component systems that can be built using conventional sheet stock materials. These tessellated systems are extracted from the digital realm and built at full scale".

Nicholas Cecchi was impressed but also offered some criticism "This is amazing student work. The craft and quality is great, and the theory behind it is impressive. However, I would like architecture schools to stop pushing students to contextualize this kind of research-based exploration. Showing these as enclosures (or the one as a gondola) only undermines the amazing generative capacity of this kind of design. These should not be taken liter...

Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft

2012-06-11T14:22:00-04:00

In the future the wisest zone entrepreneurs will question this central feature and ask: Why enclave? What types of incentivized urbanism will actually benefit from physically segregated infrastructure—from being separate and even distant from the dense and dynamic central spaces of existing cities? Given that the zone is now generating its own urban programs — aspiring to be a city—what economic and technical benefits can result from constructing what is in effect a double or shadow of the city?

On Places, Keller Easterling traces the global rise of The Zone -- "a.k.a., the Free Trade Zone, Foreign Trade Zone, Special Economic Zone, Export Processing Zone, or any of the dozens of variants." From pirate enclaves to Puerto Rico, from Shenzhen to Dubai, she interrogates the spatial logic of extrastate zones created to avoid national laws.

INTERVIEW: Rem Koolhaas on the Invention and Reinvention of the City

2012-04-24T15:47:00-04:00

Things are changing enormously in almost every sense. The effects of globalization have been positive and negative. My generation of architects is the first that could work almost anywhere in the world. We had the option to repeat the same building everywhere or to push ourselves forward, to create an encounter between ourselves and the local culture.