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UNStudio's facade design for P.C. Hoofstraat 138 in Amsterdam is a playful spin on the idea of window displays. Aiming to provide the Dutch flagship store to have a subtle yet distinctly eye-catching storefront, the team at UNStudio created The Looking Glass. Said to be a "celebration textiles in... View full entry
Britain’s homes could be lit and powered by windfarms surrounding an artificial island deep out in the North Sea, under advanced plans by a Dutch energy network.
The radical proposal envisages an island being built to act as a hub for vast offshore windfarms that would eclipse today’s facilities in scale. Dogger Bank, 125km (78 miles) off the East Yorkshire coast, has been identified as a potentially windy and shallow site.
— The Guardian
Plans by TenneT, the Dutch power grid, aim to build a power hub potentially at Dogger Bank, a site in the North Sea, at a scale that far surpasses current offshore sites. A long-distance cable would send energy to the UK and Netherlands, with other countries possibly added later. Early studies... View full entry
The parliament of The Netherlands has passed a motion which would require that all new cars sold by 2025 will have to be electrified in some way [...]
The Dutch government hasn't yet banned gas and diesel-powered cars, however, and the motion does allow for hybrid cars to be sold beyond 2025. [...]
Although localized governments have sought to ban public cars from urban streets in a number of European cities, the Dutch Labor Party's motion is by far the most aggressive campaign
— motorauthority.com
Related on Archinect:Money, gas and death: the insanity of America's car worshipIs America actually shifting away from its car obsession? Not entirely.Paris pulls off an (almost) car-free dayMVRDV is building a giant staircase to honor Rotterdam's post-WWII reconstructionDutch court mandates... View full entry
Inspired by the human body, Jonkers, who works at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, created self-healing concrete. He embeds the concrete with capsules of limestone-producing bacteria, either Bacillus pseudofirmus or Sporosarcina pasteurii, along with calcium lactate. When the concrete cracks, air and moisture trigger the bacteria to begin munching on the calcium lactate. They convert the calcium lactate to calcite, an ingredient in limestone, thus sealing off the cracks. — smithsonianmag.com
More concrete news:Celebrating concrete architecture in a mini "block party"Getty awards over $1.75 million to fix crappy concrete in "Important Modern Buildings"Ten Top Images on Archinect's "Concrete" Pinterest BoardCould this revolutionary new material replace concrete?China used more cement in... View full entry
"What happens if someone gets a monthly amount without rules and controls? — independent.co.uk
Imagine if everyone was given a living wage, without any regulatory or qualifying hoops to jump through? The Dutch city of Utrecht, in a partnership with University College Utrecht, is running such a dramatic social experiment, starting at the end of the summer, offering an "unconditional form of... View full entry
The latest Show Case: featured a holiday home modeled after the Dutch vernacular ‘schapenboeten’, designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects. Donna Sink wondered "what makes fishing nets a good cladding material? Isn't the purpose of a net pretty much exactly the opposite of the purpose of a... 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 architects with... View full entry
[It] is the same technology as we use in Holland. It’s made up of concrete caisson, boxes, a shoebox of concrete. We fill them with styrofoam. So with [these] you get unthinkable floating foundations [...]
The house itself is the same as a normal house, the same material. Then you want to figure out how to get water and electricity and remove sewage and use the same technology as cruise ships."
- Koen Olthuis
— The Atlantic Cities
Dutch architect Koen Olthuis sees the future of architecture floating out to sea -- quite literally. Responding to undeniable ecological shifts of rising sea levels and seasonal flooding, Olthuis has proposed floatable-projects all along the social spectrum, designing prefabricated multi-use... View full entry
In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice... While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. — thatnewdesignsmell.net
I know I have been on a Dutch rag as of late, but where else can you buy postage stamps that honor not just architects, but architecture, and not just timeworn monuments, but experimental work that has not even been built? As a kicker, the stamps are designed so that, if you hold them up to a Web cam, they turn into 3D models floating in front of your screen. — Aaron Betsky, Architect Magazine
