Archinect - News

Russia's historic wooden airports are still in use today

2018-09-12T14:47:00-04:00

This is the era of the glass and steel airport. As if made from the same mold, shiny, glittering terminals have become a status symbol for any city with aspirations. But all of this is a world away from the remoteness of Russia's Arctic regions and the Siberian wilderness [...] built in the mid-20th century when the Soviet Union saw in air transport a way to expand the state's reach to every corner of its territory, even if that meant little more than a dirt runway and a radio shack.

A collection of Russia's historic wooden airports are the antithesis of our current experience of most urban airports. Rather than immense glass and steel constructions, these old structures are made of simplistic wooden designs.

While many may look dilapidated, several are still in operation with regular airline service. Take a look at some of these unique transportation hubs below:

Mar-Kyuyel' Airport, located in Russia's Far East. Image: Russian Platinum.

Solovki Airport, located near Russia's Solovetsky Islands. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Seymchan Airport, located in Magadan Oblast, Russia. Image: Sever.Aero.

Mezen Airport, located in Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia. Image: Shutterstock.

Check out the full collection of Russia's wooden airports here.

Cube Haus commissions top architects to design modular, affordable homes

2018-05-08T15:57:00-04:00

What if buying a house were more like buying a car? Could the process of choosing between a Ford, Volkswagen or Nissan ever translate into picking between an Adjaye, Rogers or Assemble? Beyond the dream of ever being able to buy a house, the prospect of commissioning an architect-designed home is an impossibly remote prospect for most of us, a luxury confined to the glossy pages of Sunday supplements and Grand Designs.

The founders of Cube Haus have commissioned well known architects such as Adjaye Associates, Skene Catling de la Peña, and Carl Turner Architects to design modular homes at affordable prices. Targeting infill and backland sites in the London area, Cube Haus is looking to fill a small housing niche with well-crafted, off-plan new properties.

Off-site production and lower margins allow the company to produce houses 10%-15% cheaper than equivalent properties in a given area. The trick is to come up with modular designs that can properly adapt to different, awkward sites. Cube Haus aims to create a portfolio of building types that can be scaled up for larger number unit sites—creating affordable housing designed by some of the top names in architecture.

The Power of Smallness by Aina Coll Torrent

2018-02-08T00:24:00-05:00

MONU magazine's current issue #27 on "Small Urbanism" shows how small things can have a great impact on city life and planning, exploring themes such as micro-occupations as political protest, urban furniture to recover public spaces and fight criminality, acupunctural interventions for refugee settlements or tiny models used for military strategies.

There are architectural spaces that capture you through their smallest details. Almost five years ago, I visited the Crematorium building by Asplund in the Woodland Cemetery, in Stockholm. After crossing the artificial landscape along a seemingly introverted building, I remember entering a forecourt, grabbing a beautiful door handle and entering a waiting room before reaching the chapel. A wooden bench was softly emerging from the wall, like a curved silk fabric, oriented towards a long window to an enclosed courtyard. The warmth of the space, enhanced by the metaphor of a domestic carpet and the rounding and softness of the corners, was suddenly disturbed by the image of a very small window which was framing very precisely the artificial hills and trees that were guiding the visitor when entering the site. The feeling of connection to an endless outside world condensed in a window was, somehow, sublime.

View through the window at the Woodland Crematorium, by Erik Gunnar Asplund....

Excavate the hidden architecture models inside these unique note pads

2018-01-16T13:32:00-05:00

The Omoshiro Block is a note pad that unveils itself as it gets used revealing an architecture miniature hidden inside. Using laser-cutting technology, what appears as a regular cube of paper note cards eventually turns into an intricate miniature model.

These unique note pads are designed by Japanese architecture model company Triad. The blocks feature various notable architectural sites of Japan such as Kyoto’s Kiyomizudera Temple, Tokyo’s Asakusa Temple and Tokyo Tower.

Triad's noteworthy miniatures aren't cheap and can be hard to aquire. Ranging from about 4000 yen to 10,000 yen they are currently only available at the Tokyu Hands Osaka location, however you can stay up to date by following the company's Instagram account.

MONU #27 on "Small Urbanism" released

2017-10-16T12:39:00-04:00

“… And Though She be but Little, She is Fierce!”, the title of Liz Teston’s contribution using a quote from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, captures the content of this MONU issue on “Small Urbanism” very well. For when it comes to urbanism, small things seem to matter, whether they are actions, small physical elements, information and communications technology, or small-scale interventions. With regard to actions, Teston shows how transient micro-urbanisms of protest architecture can have a significant impact on our cities. During such actions, human bodies can alter public spaces through practices that challenge the arrangement of urban power and convert it into a channel of opposition, as Ana Medina argues in her piece “Dissident Micro-occupations”. In her explorations of dissident architectural practices, she reveals that spaces for protests are in fact not designed, but taken over by the dissidents to transform the architectural urban landscape. However, t...

NYC's hot new developer design trend: the 1902 Flatiron Building

2016-04-07T19:36:00-04:00

“The lots that determine the Flatiron shape have previously been avoided since the resultant interiors are unusual and not easy to market,” Patrice Derrington, director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University, wrote last week in an email. “However, ‘as needs be’ developers are attending to these less favorable sites, as they eke out every last possibility.”

As new New York City real estate gets increasingly rare and pricey, architects are facing unusual design challenges. Herewith, some of most expensive, tiniest, and outré in NYC design news: