Archinect - News

Albert Frey’s futuristic Aluminaire House is still holed up in desert storage limbo

2022-04-26T13:26:00-04:00

The Albert Frey Aluminaire House that was donated and shipped to the Palm Springs Art Museum about five years ago will remain disassembled in its shipping container for at least another year or longer. Key issues raised by the city may keep visitors from ever walking through the Aluminaire House, even when reconstructed.

Frey’s experimental 1931 house (created in partnership with A. Lawrence Kocher) first came into the museum’s coffers in 2020 after a six-year bout in storage and a $600,000 gift, which was supposed to go towards its permanent installation on a corner plot on the Palm Springs Art Museum’s campus.

The PSAM and its staff are however working closely with DW Johnson to address previously unforeseen mandates for ADA accessibility and temperature control, a process which will involve the refabrication of many of its metal panels and cost upwards of $2 million, according to the director’s statements in The Desert Sun.

Previously on Archinect: Albert Frey's Aluminaire House acquired by the Palm Springs Art Museum

“There’s a big difference between a building that’s installed temporarily for an exhibition and a permanent building,” museum director Adam Lerner explained of his institutional predicament. “[It] is like somebody left a puppy at your doorstep. And you’re like, well, I have other p...

Herb Greene’s Prairie House seeks landmark status

2022-04-15T11:49:00-04:00

Those involved with the house and the Prairie House Preservation Society expect it to be a big draw to the area for tourists, artists and the Norman community. Late last year, the Prairie House Trust bought the unusual two-bedroom, 2,100-square-foot home surrounded by open land and turned the management of it over to the nonprofit society.

Greene’s sculptural creation will be turned into a museum under the scheme after being in the hands of private owners for many years. Greene’s longtime colleague at OU, and another pioneer of the highly experimental American School movement, Bruce Goff, is now also being used as a bit of a draw for architecture lovers, with the inaugural Goff Fest festival taking place in Tulsa last November. Those associated with the preservation effort hope the recently renovated house will further add another tourist trap to a state with quite a bit to offer in its growing artistic community.

“I believe that with cultivation and time this can be a real reason that people are going to want to come to Norman,” Norman Arts Council executive director Erinn Gavaghan told the local paper. “It’s incredibly important to the history of architecture at OU. We knew we didn’t want to lose this place.”

LIN Architecture's latest wood pavilion experiment in rural China is a sight for sore minds

2022-03-11T19:08:00-05:00

LIN Architecture has returned to rural China's Jiangsu Province with an update to its previous “space experiment” into ergonomics, proxemics, and human behavior titled simply Wooden Pavilion #2.

Personal space, a respite into which individuals have the bandwith to contemplate life’s private moments, and the juxtaposed desires to incubate social interactions and create a functional unifier of community form the purpose of the 50-square-meter (538-square-foot) pavilion all based on human scale.

Photo: Songkai Liu

At a glance, its interior, defined by dramatic vantage points and radical geometries, would make an ideal backdrop for photographers and filmmakers alike. LIN wanted something more than just aesthetically pleasing: They searched for an answer to “macroscopic urban problems” that beset the small Jiangsu province village, they wanted something sumptuous, something that was unique to the environment, something that can heal.

Photo: Songkai Liu

Photo: Songkai Liu...

'An experiment of archetype': LIN Architecture’s experimental wood design is all about interiority

2021-12-22T17:09:00-05:00

A groundbreaking new exploration of the physical elements of interiority comes to us in the form of an all-black wood pavilion by LIN Architecture in China's Jiangsu Province.

Labeled as a “space experiment” and located near the river on Jiangxin Island in Zhenjiang, the design forgoes functional elements to instead focus on a triad of ergonomics, proxemics, and behaviorology.

Light seeps in through the crevices, and the sea breeze blows in through them. Photo: LIU Songkai.

“The scale of human behavior is one of the concerns of this project. Research on the behavior of different people is a very good design resource for architects. By observing and understanding the behavior of people, designers can discover all kinds of possibilities of space,” its creators said, adding that “breeze, sunshine, the sound of waves, drizzle, sweet osmanthus fragrance, affecting feelings, perceptions, touch, hearing, [and] visual elements” were the true materials of their design.

Lying in front of the ...

Space Saloon and Designers on Holiday to take a "DeSaturated" look at water scarcity using desert-based design-build workshop

2020-03-06T19:33:00-05:00

Looking for a unique design-build experience this summer? Well, you're in luck because non-profit design laboratory Space Saloon has announced its third annual design-build festival, DeSaturated. Created in collaboration with design studio and campsite residency group Designers on Holiday and rural resilience group Blue Sky Center, the eight-day design festival aims to bring a one-of-a-kind immersive experience that is open to all students and young design professionals within the disciplines of art, design, and architecture.

The festival invites individuals to experience a hands-on approach to architectural research, experimentation, and prototyping. Spanning over eight days in New Cayama, California, this year's design brief focuses on water scarcity.

Space Saloon tool training. Photo © Daniel Schwartz

Blue Sky Center. Photo © Alex Nye

According to the program's directors, Danny Wills and Gian Maria Socci, "Participants will engage directly with a diverse group of interdisciplinary...

The House of the Century is falling apart

2019-07-12T15:59:00-04:00

When the so-called House of the Century rose from the swampy earth back in the early 1970s, it arrived as a vision of the future, a biomorphic experiment in modern living. Back then it was a bright white jumble on the shoreline, and depending on your angle of approach, it looked like either a man's erect genitalia or a giant schnoz. Today, this futuristic house is a decaying relic of the past, and its future is a subject of concern and conjecture.

Though Ant Farm, the experimental architecture firm founded by Doug Michels and Chip Lord in 1968, is not among the most well known firms of that era, they produced a number of projects both famous and deserving of fame. They are perhaps best known for their early experiments with inflatable buildings or their art installation of 10 half-buried Cadillacs in the Texas desert (titled 'Cadillac Ranch'). Less publicized, however, is the House of the Century, an indescribably-strange lake house.

"The light beam entry to the House of the Century, shown in 1973." Photo by Chip Lord.

Built in 1973, the house was built for wealthy art patron Marilyn Oshman and her family as a weekend getaway. According to Mark Lamster, Oshman let the architecture firm conjure anything that came from their wildest dreams. The design was inspired by "Automotive styling; the Apollo program; the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi; and above all Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome and honorary capta...

Space Saloon prepares for round two of experimental design-build workshop set in California's High Desert

2019-03-13T15:44:00-04:00

Last summer, students from SCI-Arc and INDA ventured out to the Morongo Valley to take part in a week-long course in which they designed and built a series of exploratory units. Titled 'Landing', the mobile educational camp was the brain child of Danny Wills and Gian Maria Socci, who set up the workshop in order to explore new formats for education.

After a successful first run, the duo (who co-founded the design laboratory Space Saloon) are gearing up for round two. For their second annual iteration, titled 'Fieldworks', the team will look at the cumulative methods of scientific field research, questioning the approaches, techniques, and processes used to collect raw data outside of a laboratory setting.

Design-build projects this year will be led by Andrew Kovacs of Office Kovacs, Zeina Koreitem & John May of MILLIØNS, and Kyle May (KMA). Additionally, daily workshops will be hosted by a range of professionals, from sound and media artists to historians and architects.

Registrati...

Junya Ishigami: imagining other architectures

2018-04-04T13:52:00-04:00

Freed from the conventions of architecture and construction, what would this world look like? It’s a question Japanese architect Junya Ishigami has been trying to answer for the past decade, dreaming of structures that are as light as a cloud, as vast as the sky, as random as the trees in a forest or the stars in the sky.

Glass Pavilion, Park Groot Vijversburg, NL. Image: junya.ishigami+associates.

The Guardian's architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, takes a closer at the fascinating work of Junya Ishigami, the bright new star on the Japanese architecture firmament, who is catching more and more mainstream attention with substantial commissions around the world. "[...] it’s tempting to close your eyes and fall under the spell of one of the most original minds in a generation – and be transported to a place where other architectures are possible," Wainwright writes.

This Swiss firm is experimenting with prefab movable housing

2018-03-20T15:29:00-04:00

Swiss architectural practice Rahbaran Hürzeler Architekten is developing an experimental residence to be realized anywhere. Called movable house, every aspect of this project is determined by motion from floor plans to structural elements to energy storage.

Movable house rendering © Rahbaran Hürzeler Architekten

The movable house is not designed with a specific site in mind, but rather can be constructed almost anywhere. The main goals of movable house are that it can be put up quickly with easy and efficient transportation of all structural elements.

Movable house rendering © Rahbaran Hürzeler Architekten

This prefab architecture can stand alone or be attached to an existing building. The four main areas of the structure are arranged around a central library which doubles as a transitional space to connect it all together. This creates a flexible and transparent living space for a family of four on the smallest possible footprint.

The story behind Kunlé Adeyemi's Makoko floating school collapse

2018-03-02T14:02:00-05:00

There is a persistent risk of doing harm, dashing hopes, and eroding trust with trial and error, no matter how virtuous the objectives. It is the duty of the powerful to minimize that risk as much as possible. “It was supposed to be innovation, but now we’re being told it was experimentation,” Papa Omotayo, a Lagos-based architect and friend of Adeyemi’s, said of the floating school a few days after the collapse. “The issue is, can you experiment in a community like [Makoko] [...] ?”

Kunlé Adeyemi's floating school was built in 2013 and collapsed in 2016. The structured was meant to served 100 elementary students in Makoko, a heavily populated slum on Lagos' waterfront. Classes were only held for about 4 months in the 3 years it stood.

Now two years later, Allyn Gaestel analyses the full story around the failed structure in her long-form piece titled "Things Fall Apart". The question is raised: is it ok to experiment with trial and error in marginalized communities?

Allyn Gaestel explains, "The project was a chimera composed of flawed and superficial ideas and curated by deflection, obfuscation, and overestimation." As the situation stands now money has been donated, however no decision has been reached on what to do next.

Here comes the "dronescraper"

2016-03-31T15:23:00-04:00

A drone skyscraper has been proposed by designers Hadeel Ayed Mohammed, Yifeng Zhao and Chengda Zhu that acts as a central control terminal for drones to dock and recharge, situated in the heart of Manhattan. The ‘dronescraper’, dubbed ‘the hive’ has been proposed as an alternative to Rafael Vinoy’s 432 Park Avenue superstructure, which is set to become the tallest residential tower in the western hemisphere.

The skyscraper has been undergoing some significant design reconceptualizations lately. Here's a round-up of the most interesting takes:

"The Other Architect" explores alternative practices and radical research projects

2015-10-27T15:59:00-04:00

For as long as architecture has been reduced to a service to society or an “industry” whose ultimate goal is only to build, there have been others who imagine it instead as a field of intellectual research: energetic, critical, and radical. But how can we produce or maintain this position?

The Other Architect, an expansive exhibition that considers "architecture’s potential to identify the urgent issues of our time" through twenty-three case studies from the 1960s to the present, opens tomorrow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.

Curated by Giovanna Borasi, the exhibition looks at various groups that have sought to critically intervene in the architectural profession, as well as to mobilize architectural thinking towards an expanded field. If the "normal architect" works within established conditions and using a defined toolset, these "other architects" developed (or borrowed) new methodologies, experimented formally and conceptually, and sought alternative organizational structures.

Architecture witnessed a proliferation of radical experiments beginning in the mid-20th century, resulting in outputs in a variety of a media, such as pamphlets, manifestos, videos, questionnaires, and books. In the exhibition, the material is organized in thematic ga...

WIRED on the 'Future' of Architecture

2015-04-06T13:42:00-04:00

As Kushner sees it, the advent of social media changed architecture in the same way it has changed other industries. It’s a real time barometer for how the public feels about any given project. He sees this as a good thing. The beauty and frustration of architecture is that it’s unavoidable; we’re all stakeholders, even if we don’t want to be. In the past, the voices of only a select group of these stakeholders would be heard. Today, anyone with an internet connection can be a casual critic.

Aaron Betsky To Lead Taliesin West

2015-01-25T19:10:00-05:00

“I look forward to continuing the tradition of experimental architecture he did so much to define.”

Betsky seems to be the man of the hour these days, writing popularly discussive articles in defense of architecture and participating in social media. Congratulations and looking forward to seeing what becomes of the heavily branded institution in need of a new life.

What is likely the world’s thinnest home

2012-11-15T22:29:00-05:00

When Mr. Keret, 45, received a call from the architect, he was initially puzzled. “This guy with a very heavy Polish accent said he wanted to make a house in proportion to my stories,” he said. “It sounded like a prank.”

Steven Karutz profiled Keret House, a recently completed example of "experimental architecture" by Jakub Szczesny, a Polish architect. Mr. Szczesny, 39, designed the space for an ideal resident, specifically Israeli writer, Etgar Keret. The architect who belongs to a collective called Centrala, built the house in an incredibly thin gap between two existing buildings.