Archinect - News

Proposals for the puzzle at the heart of Church’s vision

2016-09-05T12:47:00-04:00

Twenty-one architects and landscape architects made concept sketches for a theoretical summer house — an open-air structure sometimes known as a “folly.” It would have occupied a central spot on a grassy knoll on the southern slope that fronts the main house.

Ted Loos reviews a new exhibition, “Follies, Function & Form: Imagining Olana’s Summer House”, running through November 13th at the Coachman’s House Gallery at NY's Olana State Historic Site.

It's 2023 in London

2013-09-23T01:35:00-04:00

The project identified nine key trends; More globally than city wide connected communities, Neighbourhoods become more important, Collaborative production as well as consumption, Active aging population, Flexible working, Fragile energy supply and environment, Inequality causing skills and housing divides, Increasing collection and use of personal data and Socially divisive access to communication technologies

Future Londoners is a series of imaginary characters, created by Arup, Social Life, Re.Work, Commonplace, Tim Maughan and Nesta, to explore the possibilities of urban life in the future.

h/t Bruce Sterling/Beyond the Beyond

The Tall Tower Project aka "pie in the sky"

2013-09-19T00:36:00-04:00

"We are some distance from understanding the jet stream well enough to manage the natural risks associated with structural integrity," adds Prof Keith Hjelmstad.

Leo Kelion writes about the 'Tall Tower Project' an initiative inspired by author Neal Stephenson's simple question: how tall can we build something? Seeking the answer/limits Mr. Stephenson has begun exploring plans for a 20km (12.4 miles) tall tower. To learn more about the project or get involved see Tall Tower Project.

Cyberpocalypse at Brickworld 2013

2013-06-29T20:40:00-04:00

"We hoped the canals would simply make it easier to move around the city, for civilians and police but the reality is Water Level is one giant port of entry for whoever has the cash." - Yoko Aramaki, City Planner

At Brickworld 2013, Nathaniel Brill and a team led by Carter Baldwin, worked together to produce a vision of a cyberpunk city of the somewhat near future.

h/t Fred Scharmen

Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers

2013-05-08T12:43:00-04:00

*This screed is awesomely entertaining and full of cool links, even though it’s almost entirely implausible..There’s also the occasional built-from-scratch Brasilia. So, some people might build a city like this in some central-planned, high-tech rush, before realizing that urban drones, bacteria, and 3DPrinters are fated to become as old-fashioned and pokey as swoopy, Space Age Brasilia is right now. - Bruce Sterling

As part of the Futurist Forum series, Chris Arkenberg composed some vignettes, suggestive of how urban architecture(s) could transform from than the rigid construction methodologies of today, the result being that "Architecture will lose its formal rigidity, softening and flexing and getting closer to the life we see in plants".

h/t Bruce Sterling here

#FolkMoMA

2013-04-11T14:04:00-04:00

Get it trending: #FolkMoMA

Fairy Tale Re-Imagined by Bernheimer Architecture

2012-11-02T15:28:00-04:00

In the terms of the story, we wanted to distill experience to a shape, a volume, instead of a literal space-type (“castle” or “gingerbread house,” etc.) We chose this path in part because the structure of the story wasn’t accessible, the events were scattered, random and untethered to a place. So we had to find the rope, make the place, invent a story-space outside the tale itself.

In the Halloween installment of Places' ongoing series of architectural fairy tales, fabulist Kate Bernheimer and her architect brother, Andrew, investigate the shape of fear itself. Re-imagining a Brothers Grimm fairy tale at the site of a World War II bombing, Andrew Bernheimer and Vera Leung design and fabricate a model for the unsettling tale “The Boy Who Set Forth to Learn What Fear Was.”

Previous on Archinect: The House on Chicken Feet

Jeanne Gang and Michael Kimmelman propose a way to save Prentice Women’s Hospital

2012-10-17T16:31:00-04:00

Adding on top of the old Prentice is intended as a thought exercise in what might be called a third way that may not always get its due in preservation battles...And this is where Ms. Gang comes in, compellingly. After our conversation she rapidly crafted a concept for a 31-story skyscraper atop the cloverleaf.

Jeanne Gang and Michael Kimmelman team-up and offer a proposal which could save the concrete, cloverleaf structure from 1975 by Bertrand Goldberg. While Northwestern University argues, it needs new biomedical research facilities, saving Prentice would be too costly and/or difficult, preservationists have been trying to save the building from demolition. However, Gang and Kimmelman have a simple solution "Build a research tower on top of Prentice".

The House on Chicken Feet

2011-12-22T14:23:00-05:00

We were able to meet the Grimms’ strict design requirements by employing a slender tower design of vertical cylindrical stems that are joined by intermittent outrigger beams with a reinforced space at the very top for Rapunzel’s long captivity.

This week, Places has a holiday series on fairy tale architecture. Participating firms — Bernheimer Architecture, Leven Betts, and Guy Nordenson and Associates — have selected favorite tales and produced works exploring the intimate relationship between the domestic structures of fairy tales and the imaginative realm of architecture.

Baba Yaga's Hut, by Bernheimer Architecture

Jack's Beanstalk, by Leven Betts with Bret Quagliara

Rapunzel's Tower, by Guy Nordenson and Associates

A brief history of architecture fiction.

2011-07-25T16:40:28-04:00

Admittedly, commercial real estate signs are not a particularly literary sort of fiction, but this sub-genre does have its own traditions and mores. Its practitioners exercise what we might consider a tentative form of realism: After all, their stories should be plausible enough to, ideally, attract capital. Thus certain rules and strictures — relating to commercial potential, practical materials and the laws of physics — must be observed.

Rob Walker, the man behind the now defunct "Consumed" column for the New York Times Magazine and one of the founders of the Hypothetical Development Organization, reviews the history of architecture fiction over at Places-Design Observer. The piece titled Implausible Futures for Unpopular Places, discusses the work of HDO which Walker locates in a particular tradition of visual story-telling, "architecture fiction,". Some of the first examples of architectural fiction were produced by Archigram in the 1960s but Walker extends the term to more contemporary efforts like those of BLDG BLOG or the Museum of the Phantom City.

For more on this check out an old forum discussion Fantasy Architecture?.....

This can be classified as

2011-04-25T23:36:26-04:00

We like to think of our architectural treasures as milestones of human progress. The Egyptian pyramids, say, or the Eiffel Tower. Perhaps we imagine a Planet of the Apes-like scenario where our ruined monuments will stand as testament to our civilisation long after we're gone. But what will most probably outlive anything else we have ever built will be our nuclear legacy.

Steve Rose explores the design of nuclear waste storage for the Architecture-Arts and Design section of the Guardian. He asks since few architects have to design anything to last more than 100 years, how do you build a nuclear waste facility to last for millennia? For a couple of related posts check out Friends of the Pleistocene. Hat Tip Bruce Sterling