Archinect - News

Fairy Tale Architecture: The Butterfly Dream

2018-12-20T12:08:00-05:00

Fairy tales have transfixed readers for thousands of years, and for many reasons; one of the most compelling is the promise of a magical home. How many architects, young and old, have been inspired by a hero or heroine who must imagine new realms and new spaces — new ways of being in this strange world? Houses in fairy tales are never just houses; they always contain secrets and dreams.

"The Butterfly Dream" by Bernheimer Architecture is the third and final installment of this year's Fairy Tale Architecture series, curated by writer Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer. ⠀

The team imagined the butterfly in Zhuangzi's famous parable as a drone, collecting data which can be abstracted to explore the transformation of things. The drawings of this story consist of data from the flight of the drone. These data were converted into a flight path, and then a flight-space. This space was then extruded into shapes and volumes, illustrating both the act of flying as well as the act of (detached, remote) seeing.

Fairy Tale Architecture: Little Red Riding Hood

2018-12-20T11:08:00-05:00

Just as ‘girl, wolf, woods’ signals Little Red Riding Hood, ‘gable, lintel, square cutout, arc’ signals Robert Venturi’s Mother’s House.⠀

In the second installment of our holiday series on fairy tale architecture, Mary English and Xavier Vendrell of Rural Studio present a playful take on Little Red Riding Hood, inspired by Robert Venturi's Mother's House.

"The story has three elements: Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf, and the house. The image of Little Red Riding Hood is iconic; any image of a wolf is iconic; so the house needed to be an iconic house," they explain. "It had to be a house that anyone would recognize as a house. In a way, the Venturi house is a house that a kid can draw, with the roof form and the chimney. And any adult will understand it is a house, but it’s something more, and obviously an architect or a designer will have another level of reading."

Fairy Tale Architecture: The Death of Koschei the Deathless

2018-12-20T10:08:00-05:00

It was the theme of nesting that primarily fascinated us about the Koschei tale, as it corresponded with ideas of sectional nesting that we have exploited as an architectural technique for generating spatial intricacy - LTL Architects.

Our holiday series on fairy tale architecture returns this week with three new features, curated by writer Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer. ⠀
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First up: in "The Death of Koschei the Deathless," LTL Architects examine the strange habits of a fearful man who sought to escape his death through an obsessive nesting of forms within forms and spaces within spaces. Their beautiful rendering of this very strange tale focuses on Koschei's buried reliquaries and how they function in space and in time. The madness and beauty seen in precise details help us access the hopes and fears encoded in the story. ⠀

A fairy tale for an age of global urbanization

2015-12-30T17:26:00-05:00

The people understood that the monster’s power was fed by liquid gold. It could go anywhere and set up a tower, even in the middle of an old neighbourhood where nobody had asked it to come. [...] The city, however, was not about to go down without a fight. After all, it had survived many a bad period across the centuries, and was still alive – unlike those kings and queens and powerful companies of old. The neighbourhoods could see they had to get together and fight this monster.

Saskia Sassen and her son, Hilary Koob-Sassen, wrote and illustrated an urban fairy tale for theguardian.com, complete with villainous gentrifiers, Chinese skyscrapers, Jane Jacobs-style wisdom, and a cautionary conclusion on "smart" cities.