selophane.blog » Architecture Installation

Sur la banquette

spencer — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:07:27 +0000

Today starts DesCours, New Orleans's second annual AIA sponsored public art installation festival. For the next five days the public spaces all over the French Quarter and Central Business District (CBD) will be transformed into interactive design installations. Not only is this a cool chance to inhabit spaces by up and coming artists and designers, but local fixtures such as Rebirth Brass Band and the Trème Brass Band will be filling the spaces with sounds that are distinctly New Orleanian. This "Architects Week" on an urban scale is free and open to the public.

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Sur la banquette

Flat packed boxes made of ticky tack all look the same

spencer — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 03:43:01 +0000

This Sunday the Washington Post ran two different architecture/design articles, one about the MoMA prefab housing exhibit - "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling" and the other about IKEA's new catalog and its pastiche of Modern and Classic styles. Both articles dwell on the nature of consumerism and mass production in our modern world, but from highly different angles. Philip Kennicott is quite deliberate in his discussion of the evolution of manufactured housing, from the early portable emigrant cottages through the era of Sears and Roebuck to the famed Modernists (with a capital "M") Le Corbusier and Moshe Safdie and on through a contemporary piece designed by Richard Horden and Haack + Hoepfner Architects. Through this history lesson he also grapples with the two sides of pre-manufacturing/pre-fab, the mass produced bland utilitarian home and the architectural object d'art democratized and brought within the public reach. In the end he ends up questioning whether pref-fab can ever really be the answer to the Design like you Give a Damn movement, or if it will be the next wired-tired-expired status symbol.

Post from: selophane.blog

Flat packed boxes made of ticky tack all look the same

Paperchitecture: Shigeru Ban’s Tea House

spencer — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:58:31 +0000

Yanko Design has an interesting article which they referenced from Dezeen about Shigeru Ban’s paper Tea House installation being put up for auction. Now as much as I’d love to own this piece of architecture, I know that I would never be able to afford it. On the otherhand, I can admire it and learn from it. Ban’s use of paper has been his recent ongoing material de-mode. Paper as a building method is an interesting, though not intuitive, choice. There are some fundamental problems that come with paper; first, structural stability can be compromised by water, second, (non-coated) paper is very difficult to clean, and third, the presence of sunlight and air can cause acid-rich paper to deteriorate overtime. All of this non-withstanding amazing things have been created from paper; Frank Gehry’s famous series of chairs, Ban’s recent work with paper tubes, as well as recent pieces at DWR and other retailers. But the paper design that strikes the most similarity to the Paper Tea House is some of the recent office furniture from MUJI. They have the same kraft paper color and texture, as well as the crisp almost modern edges. Paper as an architectural and design material [...]

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Paperchitecture: Shigeru Ban’s Tea House