Archinect - News

John Pawson presents simplistic carved, stone miniature for Salvatori's The Village project

2021-07-07T16:49:00-04:00

The work of minimalist architect John Pawson is the latest edition to Italian product and design company Salvatori's, The Village project, a collection of miniature sculptures created by a cohort of international designers.

Pawson, with House of Stone, is the fifth contributor to the project, which includes work by Rodolfo Dordoni, Patricia Urquiola, Yabu Pushelberg, and Kengo Kuma. The Village tasks its participants to create miniatures in natural stone that express their interpretation of the concept of home. The project was inspired during the 2020 lockdown and Salvatori CEO, Gabriele Salvatori’s reflections on the importance of home.

For House of Stone, a single block of Pietra d’Avola limestone is carved and cut to create slits that allow light to permeate its newly formed apertures.

“For my contribution to The Village I wanted to create a volume that is both absolutely simple and deeply evocative,” said Pawson. “House of Stone is an archetypal form in miniature, stripped of...

Architects Patricia Urquiola, Kengo Kuma, and five other designers participate in new miniature home series called 'The Village'

2021-04-02T15:46:00-04:00

Tuscan-based product and design studio Salvatori created a series that "captures the essence of home" through miniatures titled The Village. Joined by Kengo Kuma, Yabu Pushelberg, and Patricia Urquiola, to name a few, the mini-series invited each architect and designer to develop a "series of whimsical imaginary houses, each designed to address important and fundamental themes of contemporary living."

Starting this past March, famed Spanish architect and curator Patricia Urquiola unveiled the collection's first series. Her contribution to The Village series is a set of small stone homes titled Kore. Urquiola shared during Salvatori's collection release, the series was "a reflection on domestic spaces, something that is more important than ever today. Home has become the center of our lives, our town or city, our habitat. We have all become domestic navigators, trying to orient ourselves to these new latitudes, ways of living."

Kore collection developed by Patricia Urquiola for The V...

Miniature architecture allows the visually impaired to experience scale and detail

2019-12-04T17:45:00-05:00

Despite changes in technology and forms of representation, around the world, architectural models continue to address an important issue in aesthetic experience: Providing access to architecture for the visually impaired.

"Whether it’s marveling at the height of the Eiffel Tower or gaining a new appreciation for the decorative tiling at the Taj Mahal, seeing these famous sites with one’s own eyes is one of the biggest pleasures of travel. But what about those with visual impairments?" writes Jessica Stewart of My Modern Met.

Matthias Church and Fisherman's Bastion. (Wikimedia Commons)

Mathias Church. (Wikimedia Commons)

It's an important question, one with an answer that displays itself in physical form. Scale models, like those created by German sculptor Egbert Broerken, situate themselves across the globe in various city centers, allowing the visually impaired to explore the urban landscape under the nerves of their fingertips.

Market Square. Poznan, Poland. (Wikimedia Commons)

Mai...

This McDonald's is for the bees

2019-05-22T18:48:00-04:00

McDonald's, the American fast food chain central to debates on overconsumption and sustainability, has started a few notable initiatives overseas. Over the last few years, several of their restaurants in Sweden have recently installed beehives on their rooftops to accommodate the globally waning bee population, for example. A more recent initiative is the McHive, the "world's smallest McDonald's" built in a Swedish forest, according to the corporation.

Interior of McHive.

The project was overseen by creative agency NORD DDB, both as a way to advertise recent initiatives by McDonald's to consider its impact on the environment and as a genuine method of increasing and sustaining the honeybee population. The interior of the McHive is a wooden beehive fit to serve thousands of bees a day.

Dan Ohlmann creates impossibly detailed miniature interiors

2019-05-14T13:28:00-04:00

If you ever find yourself in Lyon, France, you'll want to make time for a visit to the Musée Miniature et Cinéma, one of the city's most peculiar museums. It is most notably for featuring Dan Ohlmann's impeccably detailed 1/10th and 1/12th scale models of architectural interiors.

The Brooklyn Collection Miniature, by Dan Ohlmann.

His models are so realistic, in fact, that the only way their illusions can be broken is by the addition of the artist's body, whether that's a hand adding or removing a piece of furniture, his head poking through to revel in the model's completion, or even his whole body, as he was able to achieve in his rendition of a natural history museum.

Maxims de Paris Miniature, by Dan Ohlmann.

His practice can be likened to that of Thomas Demand, a contemporary German artist that photographs intricate models of architectural spaces. The crucial difference is that while Demand destroys his models after photographing them, Ohlmann proudly displays his behind glass, a...

Honey, I Shrunk the Objects: MIT researchers develop system for shrinking objects to nanoscale

2018-12-19T14:07:00-05:00

Researchers at MIT have developed a way to shrink objects to nanoscale. Using a technology called implosion fabrication, the method allows objects to be 3D printed at a scale smaller than what one can see with a microscope. "It’s a way of putting nearly any kind of material into a 3-D pattern with nanoscale precision,” explains neurotechnology professor and lead researcher Edward Boyden.

The technology has far-reaching implications and has potential applications in many fields, from optics to medicine to robotics. For example, researchers are hoping to use this technique to make smaller and better specialized lenses for cameras, cell phones, microscopes and so on.

The way it works is "a bit like film photography," describes Daniel Oran, a graduate student and one of the paper's lead authors. First, a latent image is formed by exposing a sensitive material in a gel to light, says Oran. Then, by attaching materials such as metal or DNA to the structure, researchers are able to shrink...

An artist creates brutalist cuckoo clocks based on Germany's social housing

2018-06-05T14:55:00-04:00

Artist Guido Zimmermann's Cuckoo Block series present a brutalist take on the traditional cuckoo clock design. Based in Germany, Zimmermann's pieces are largely inspired by local brutalist housing blocks found in Frankfurt and Berlin. He has also ventured out to create clocks based on notable brutalist structures such as as Marcel Breuer’s Hotel Le Flaine, and Ernő Goldfinger's Glenkerry House.

Check out some of these unique creations below:

All images courtesy of Guido Zimmermann.

UK model making firm specializes in custom miniatures of client's homes

2018-04-04T15:17:00-04:00

Custom miniatures are increasingly the focus of Chisel & Mouse, which Robert Paisley runs with his brother, Gavin. The duo, yearning for a more fulfilling career after working in software sales and banking, turned to model making seven years ago [...] A cottage industry of architectural model-makers has arisen in the U.K. to offer this bespoke service.

Chisel & Mouse's passion for architecture results in miniatures of famous architectural structures as well as custom models. Using modern and traditional printing and sculpting techniques, the group will make an exact miniature of anything you choose working from satellite data, architect's drawings, photos and sketches.

Maidman House by Chisel & Mouse. Image: Chisel & Mouse.

With their early Makerbot 3D printer, Chisel & Mouse have made molds of building such as the Tate Modern, the Battersea Power Station, and the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood, CA.

Battersea Power Station by Chisel & Mouse. Image: Chisel & Mouse.

Bauhaus Dessau by Chisel & Mouse. Image: Chisel & Mouse.

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.

Within and Without Architecture

2017-01-11T17:36:00-05:00

The imaginative possibilities of miniature things lie not in their being shrunken versions of a larger thing. The world of the miniature opens to reveal a secret life.

Sometimes you encounter a thing that is not “properly” architectural, but which yet has something profound to say about the discipline. In her latest article for Places, columnist Naomi Stead is drawn by a cartoon from The New Yorker to consider the relationships between the miniature, the uncanny, and mise en abyme in architecture.

A look at the dioramas of apocalypse

2016-06-29T12:54:00-04:00

Their ongoing series -- titled "The City" -- imagines a parallel universe where humankind is extinct and nature has already started to reclaim the concrete jungle. Think of it as a journey through apocalyptic architecture.

Commercial diorama makers Kathleen Gerber and Lori Nix's dystopian art project, "The City," is a miniature labor of love. Each diorama takes about 7 to 15 months to build, primarily because of the intricate level of detail contained within each scene. Check out this post-apocalyptic casino, replete with distressed slot machines and chintzy carpet:

Or this bombed-out circulation desk scene with half-opened card catalog drawers (a physical object filled with index cards that people used to look up library materials before computer searches):

Meanwhile, this subway scene features a decayed downtown, glimpsed through the permanently agape doors:

What's the latest in innovative model-making?

Miniature manhole rooms highlight reality of Bucharest's underground dwellers

2016-04-15T13:30:00-04:00

Borderlife is a street art intervention by Biancoshock in which three abandoned manholes in Milan’s Lodi district have been transformed into miniature dwellings. [...] With Borderlife the street artist wants to make us aware about the distressing living conditions of many fellow humans who are forced to live in confined spaces, especially manholes. He got his inspiration from the reportedly hundreds of people that are occupying manholes and sewer systems in the Romanian capital Bucharest.

Images of the BORDERLIFE street art intervention via Biancoshock's website.

Win a set of these mini The Architect Says notebooks!

2015-12-09T12:20:00-05:00

While sketching ideas on digital tablets is increasingly the norm these days, having a pocket-sized notebook (or three) on hand has long been a trusty essential for any designer. If you're in need for more notebooks to fill, the Architect Says notebook set might be what you're looking for.

As a companion to Laura Dushkes' best-selling book "The Architect Says", these miniature notebooks feature foil-stamped words of wisdom from icons R. Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, and Cesar Pelli. Each notebook consists of 64 gridded pages for drawing, planning, or jotting down notes.

Thanks to the Princeton Architectural Press, Archinect is giving away three sets of the notebooks to three of our readers!

TO ENTER THE GIVEAWAY:

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Artist Charles Young crafts mini paper metropolis on the daily

2015-01-27T14:36:00-05:00

No, these aren't props from an upcoming Wes Anderson film. These mini paper structures are all part of Paperholm, a daily project by Scottish artist Charles Young. Constructed by hand with only watercolor paper, PVA glue, the occasional dressmaking pin, along with an eye for detail, Young is building his own cityscape, one intricate building at a time.

Young started making small paper models while he was studying architecture at the University of Edinburgh. After completing his M.Arch degree last summer, he eventually began Paperholm as a motivational way to test and develop his creativity and model-making skills on a daily basis.

So far, he has built an array of treehouses, churches, carousels, cabins, towers, and other urban buildings. "I especially like making the structures with a lot of cut out detail even though these take quite a long time," Young wrote via email. "I quite often find myself coming back to tower structures but I try to keep the models varied to produce a mix ...

Microeconomics: A City in Miniature

2013-10-13T17:32:00-04:00

"It became a way of documenting the processes of gentrification and urban renewal...I’ll go to Flatbush Avenue and walk from Prospect Park out to the end, because that’s what Manhattan used to be" - Randy Hage

John Leland highlights the work of Randy Hage, who takes photographs of New York storefronts and then makes mixed-media, sculptural scale models of the storefronts he photographed. His work can be seen in the exhibition 'Fleeting Moments' currently on view at the Flower Pepper Gallery in Pasadena, Calif., from Oct. 5 to Nov. 15.

Here Now, Impossibly Small Architecture in Glass Cloches

2013-08-28T14:40:00-04:00

New York-based artist Thomas Doyle has made a career of crafting minuscule models of houses [...] and uprooting (sometimes literally) a handful of them via apocalyptic chaos. Sometimes, wrap around porches of butter yellow farmhouses fall into sinkholes and blue country homes get caught by tornados.

Many of his works—which, one could probably say are depictions of the fragility of the American dream—are on display next month at the Ronchini Gallery in London, as part of the space's Dream No Small Dreams series [...].