I went to an open house a number of months ago for a new project by KUBE architecture. From the street, this Georgetown home, designed by Janet Bloomberg, seems to be yet another Georgian town house. When you open the door you find yourself transported to a modern space more at home in Los Angeles or manhattan than the 18th century streets of DC’s 2nd ward, yet the starck transition works. It sets you up for a series of well lit rooms that play with the modern trope of compression and release but manage to avoid the pitfall of hyper-glossy surfaces that are too often found in contemporary spaces. Instead Janet has chosen a muted palet of textural elements which alternate between the sheen of brushed metal, the warmth of rich wood veneers and the pleasantly imperfect nature of unglazed ceramics. The house is anchored by a floating stair whose verticality is emphasized by a curtain of steel cables running from the ground floor to the second story. While an interesting architectural element, the steel cables at times present a bit of a challenge in visual and physical comfort. When I visited the house was very crowded, the steel cables [...]
With the recent closing of many of the area’s Circuit City stores and the bleak financial forecast, this Sunday’s Washington Post article about what to do with big box stores after they close down, seemed to be fortuitously timed to impact the local planning discourse. For this article, the Post assembled a collection of local architects and artists, such as Darrel Rippeteau, Roger K. Lewis, Esocoff & Associates, et al., and asked them how they would reuse a big-box store. The graphics in this article are intriguing and open an sub/urban planning discussion on what to do with the trappings of early twenty-first century American development once this business model has changed. The proposals include luxury housing, gardens, vineyards, and other adaptive reuse measures. This is all green and good, but I have to question the safety and cost of reusing these big box stores. Like fast food franchises, big box stores are not built to last. They are not constructed with any concept of their permanence, instead they are meant to go up quick and cheap and come down the same way when the new mega-ultra-super mart opens around the corner. The advantage of reusing old warehouses and factories [...]
So it looks like Dubai is approaching its Po-Mo phase, Philip Johnson beware!
In an almost deferential move, there is a new building slated for construction that looks like a Turbine (see this post at Inhabitat). Instead of going the Masdar route and building a building that generates its power, this building just refers to the shape of turbines as a way of co-opting the green building trend and making it a design statement. In place of power generation, the “turbine” will generate spectacular views of the desert mirage that is Dubai for the dinners in its floating restaurant.
SCOTT BURNHAM has a realy good post about the Beijing Stadium. He contends that the now ubiquitous “Bird’s Nest” shows a striking similarities to the improvised safety screening that Chinese migrant workers erect in buildings. This woven mesh of slates IS eerily similar to the form of the outer skin on Herzog & de Meuron’s Stadium.
Here are some links to articles that have peaked my interest in the last few days: ‘Can of ham’ to rival Foster’s Gherkin – Building What is it with Londoners and buildings that look like food? I am waiting for the Yorkshire pudding building, or the spotted dick building. FreshWater House by Chenchow Little Architects | CoolBoomThis is a nice little piece of critical regionalism. The shutter walls are really genius way of bringing operable shutters to a contemporary design style. In addition the bundle of sticks element of the architecture thoroughly responds to the beach setting. 19th century Western town layout: myth vs reality | Cyburbia – urban planning communityCyburbia has an interesting discussion on the depiction of frontier/western towns in cinema and in real life. I find the discussion of early planning and zoning and false fronts very interesting. AIA Deconstructs Green-Building Standards| News | Architectural RecordArchitectural Record has an article about the AIA’s analysis of three different green building standards: LEED 2.2, Green Globes, and SBTool 07.
The Times Online has an interesting article on the new CCTV building in Beijing. I’m sure everyone has seen this new iconic building by now, it rises like a wracked square casting an imposing shadow over the city below.
It is no surprise to me that the co-architect of OMA’s CCTV building, Ole Scheeren, is an impossibly young (35 years old) German Architect who was lived through the unification of Communist and Capitalist Germany. In the shape of the building it is easy to see the fingerprints of earlier experiments in modernism, in both the stark oppressive communist variety and the lofty grasping skyscrapers of New York and Chicago. And yet it has been distorted and made more complex. It is almost as if someone took the Arche de La Defense and twisted it until not only did the building distort, but the skin was also skewed.
[Image via Life Without Buildings via io9.] In his blog Life Without Buildings, my fellow Tulane Alum, Jimmy Stamp, discusses the latest proposed moon habitat from NASA. Like most of the other articles I’ve seen he discusses the igloo-like shape and inflatable (gas-itechture) structure, yet this discourse is really lacking. What we are seeing here is not just another exploratory vehicle that will double as a place for astronauts to sleep. Consider Voyager for a second Ann Druyan recorded all sorts of sounds emblematic of the human race, to act as a time capsule, a display of who we are; this is the first piece of human architecture to be built on another celestial body, and I have to ask, where’s the outrage? Of all the structures in all of human history, this is what we build, an inflatable breast? It looks like something Greg Lynn would create, but instead it was designed by engineers? In addition, since when do we allow engineers to create the first lunar human dwelling? Where is the discussion of the space it makes, the space within and the views out? Are there views out? How does it interact with its environment? All of these [...]
So Inhabitat has an article which starts off like a bad joke; an architect, a developer and a builder decide to build a LEED certified home for$100,000. And that is it, there is no punchline, because its not a joke. They are building two 1000 square foot homes for $100 a square foot; they have been working at it for over a year now and just sold their first of two homes. You can read their blog and web page at 100khouse.
Frank O. Gehry’s new building at Princeton University – the Lewis Library – is nearing completion. Princeton’s website has an article describing the new building and giving us a sneak peak inside.
I hate to prejudge this building, but from the pictures, I worry that this is going to be even worse of an occupant experience than MIT’s Stata Center. The bright contrasting colors of the interior and the sharp dramatic angles seem to go one step beyond the Stata, which looked like it was falling down, instead, the exterior of the Lewis Library looks like a jumble of child’s block swept under a rug and the inside looks like something from a medieval view of hell.