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Every night in Tokyo, the few remaining residents of the Nakagin Capsule Tower bed down to sleep in the once-futuristic white pods they call home.
Unlike the tiny, coffin-like cabins of Japan's numerous capsule hotels, where office workers who have missed the last train can catch a few hours' sleep, the 140 units at Nakagin represent a special part of the history of architecture, and one that is worth protecting against plans to tear it down, say campaigners.
— globalpost.com
"We're going to collect donations from all over the world. We're trying to buy each capsule one by one. Each room counts as one vote, to decide what to do," said Masato Abe, founder of the Save Nakagin Capsule Tower Project. View full entry
News of the planned destruction of the Hotel Okura building in Tokyo to make way for a larger 38-story glass tower has brought cries of protest in Japan and elsewhere in the world. Monocle, the wide-ranging global magazine, has started a petition to save the old Okura on behalf of “all lovers of modern Japanese architecture.” — nytimes.com
Monocle's savetheokura.com petition website is still up, but it seems that the fate of Ol' Okura has been sealed. View full entry
The installation you see above is a project by Masakazu Shirane and Saya Miyazaki called "Wink," their entry into Kobe Biennial's Art Container Contest. The kaleidoscope concept uses mirrors (in keeping with Sir David Brewster's classic), but is also held together by zippers. Shirane and Miyazaki claim this makes it the first "architecture" based on zippers; proving you can create an adaptable, reconfigurable space using the same tech found in your pants. — engadget.com
As Okinawa and Kyushu prepare to take the brunt of what was until Monday categorized as a “super typhoon,” local infrastructure will be pushed to its limits, especially in Kyushu, where the area is saturated from heavy rains last week. — The Diplomat
Typhoon Neoguri is the strongest typhoon of the 2014 season, thus far. As it barrels through the Ryukyu island chain and towards mainland Japan, the storm is already taking its toll. Reports claim 25 people have been injured, thousands are without electricity, and 540,000 have been ordered to... View full entry
Oita, a medium-sized manufacturing city in the southwest of Japan, hopes to make its mark next summer as the host of the first Toilennale—an arts festival celebrating toilets. [...]
Tourism is the main focus of the art exhibit, but the Toilennale also promises to improve city services by renovating and beautifying bathrooms throughout downtown, beyond the 12 being turned into installations.
— qz.com
Is it too late for Koolhaas to include the Toilennale in the "toilets" Fundamentals tome?Get up to date on Venice Biennale news (toilet and non-toilet):Terri Peters' coverageRound-up of critical reactions from architectural publications View full entry
Tokyo’s extreme housing production and resulting market is a product of Japan’s uniquely liberal zoning rules. Taken along with its dense network of profitable, private railways, Tokyo is the closest thing this planet has to a city that has completely surrendered itself to market forces. And its construction numbers show it. — nextcity.org
That's because, as the economists Richard Koo and Masaya Sasaki show in a report, 15 years after being built the average house is worth nothing. [...] "It's not environmentally sustainable but also not financially sustainable. People work very hard to pay off a mortgage that's ultimately worth zero."
[...] It has also produced a huge number of architects, who are kept busy by buyers wanting a new house that reflects their lifestyle.
— theguardian.com
Rooftop farms have been established all over the world to enable growing food in dense urban areas. In Japan, a whole new kind of an urban rooftop farm was opened recently. Soradofarm is an urban agriculture project that uses the rooftops of train stations to accommodate urban gardens for waiting train passengers that want to use their transfer time to relax and train their gardening skills. — popupcity.net
What is “micro public space”?...To date, Atelier Bow-Wow have presented, in exhibition settings, numerous installations featuring small structures, furniture and so on...More than just small buildings, these works are devices supporting the interaction and activities of all sorts of people, and while compact in size, create places open to a diverse audience". — The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
Starting February 15 and running through May 6, 2014, a new exhibition grants a close look at the practice of Atelier Bow-Wow. The exhibit will explore various approaches to public spaces – via a combination of numerous “micro-public-space” works actually able to be... View full entry
Archinect is delighted to present 5468796 Architecture's travelogue for their award-winning research project, Table for Twelve. The Winnipeg-based firm received the 2013 Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture from the Canada Council for the Arts, awarded to emerging Canadian... View full entry
When it comes to museums, Hiroshi Sugimoto doesn’t mince words.
“This is the worst space I ever encountered,” he told the Journal before opening a retrospective of his work at Seoul’s Leeum Samsung Museum of Art late last year. The Japanese artist was especially unhappy about a steep escalator leading down into the main gallery space of the OMA-designed building. “Why do that? It’s terrible,” he lamented. “I feel a kind of bad will from this architect.”
— blogs.wsj.com
Space Oddity was conceived by rub-a-dub in 2012, while studying under the DRL at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, a post-professional MArch program. They state that while their proposal "is obviously not a viable option for actual space travel...Lately there has being a lot of noise about space design...We believe a lot of these projects are only solving technical issues".
Fred Scharmen was intrigued "Very nice work. Thanks for posting this".
Amelia Taylor-Hochberg Editorial Manager for Archinect, interviewed rub-a-dub (a team of Sebastian Andia, Rodrigo Chain, Apostolos Despotidis and Thomas T. Jensen) to learn about their project 'Space Oddity', for the latest edition of the Student Works series. Space Oddity was conceived... View full entry
Recently featured as part of our ShowCase series, "Restaurant on the Sea" by CASE-REAL is an elegant restaurant located smack on the coastline of Teshima, a tiny island in Japan's Seto Inland Sea. Opening for the Setouchi Triennale, the restaurant continues to serve local... View full entry
The hotel's name refers to the idea that you'd only need to spend nine hours there — a radical concept in a world of lodging that offers a host of amenities to tempt you away from the place you're actually meant to be visiting. But the people behind Nine Hours believe you're better off spending as little time as possible under their roof: just one hour to get ready for bed, seven hours to sleep, and one hour to get up in the morning. — theverge.com
How can we understand a place, and seek to define it? What elements do we identify as components of that place, and how do they interact with each other? In a recent lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hitoshi Abe, chair of UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design department... View full entry