Ernesto Neto’s Lacy Pavilion Offers A New Take On Islamic Architecture
Neto’s pavilion, While culture moves us apart, nature brings us together. (Curtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery)
Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto has been exhibiting his work for almost 25 years. With his latest work, Neto crocheted a netted pavilion shaped almost like a spider that is currently on view at the Sharjah Biennial 11 in the United Arab Emirates. The Biennial, titled Re:emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography and curated by Yuko Hasegawa, investigates the overlapping public and private life found in the historic Islamic architecture of the Sharjah courtyards.
Mode Lab Launches Online Learning Resource for Parametric and Digital Design
(Courtesy Mode Lab)
Intrigued by parametric architecture but don’t know where to begin? Meet Mode Lab, an online network connecting creatives to everything architectural and design related including courses, talks, and workshops that help teach how to use advanced systems like Data Trees, Grasshopper, and Kangaroo. Other courses offer lessons in Organic Modeling to Parametric Pleating to Algorithmic Design. The group just launched their new website, with several upgrades that make taking courses even easier. Courses are now easily sortable by format, subject, or software; a growing community of instructors have joined the Mode Lab team; payment has been streamlines; and work by Mode Lab members is now featured on the site. Mode Lab’s growing online destination is transforming the way designers and architects interact, share, and gain the skills and knowledge to develop innovative ideas.
Boxman Studios Continues Push To Pop-Up Shipping Containers
Google Village at TED Long Beach. (Courtesy Boxman Studios)
Boxman Studios, the company that pioneered the shipping-containers-turned-housing trend back in 2008, is now embarking on a whole new shipping container revolution. As part of their sustainable building efforts they are adapting decommissioned containers to enhance already complete buildings and even stand alone as pop-up shops, venues, restaurants, transit stations and more.
3-D Printing Goes Big: Architect Proposes A Möbius-Strip House
The proposed 3-D printed Landscape House. (Courtesy Universe Architecture)
It’s been over three decades since the 3-D printer was invented, and to be sure, the technology has come a long way. Now, Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars is putting the technology to the ultimate test by proposing to print an enormous Möbius strip house with over 10,700 square foot of house. The Landscape House, as Ruijssenaars named it, will be a two-story structure replicating the natural form of a figure eight by using “one surface folded in an endless Möbius band” he says on his website, intending for the building to effortlessly fit into the natural world.
Brooks + Scarpa Propose a Flowing Interfaith Chapel Defined by a Latticework Structure
(Courtesy Brooks+Scarpa)
Brooks + Scarpa and KZF Design have designed a swooping, lakefront Interfaith Chapel proposal for the University of North Florida’s campus in Jacksonville. The 7,000-square-foot chapel is intended to serve a diverse array of students, faculty, and the surrounding community representing many religious beliefs. It’s unique shape, built with a complex bending wooden lattice, is designed as an allegory of Justice, Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, and Fortitude.
Architect Proposes Greening the West Side Highway with the “Vine Line”
Rendering of the Vine Line proposal for Manhattan’s Upper West Side. (Courtesy Laurence Tamaccio Architect)
Stuck with the post-Sandy realization that buried waterfront highways are unlikely to be buried for fear of flooding, designers are looking to spruce them up, instead. The emerging “funderpass” movement hit Brooklyn last week, and now Manhattan’s Upper West Side has its own proposal, the leafy “Vine Line.”
Architect Laurence Tamaccio has proposed hiding, or rather masking, an elevated section of the West Side Highway between 61st and 72nd streets with a green scheme of vines and waterfalls. Plans had been on the table to bury the highway once and for all after a collapse in the 1970s and the contentious process of rebuilding it, but after Hurricane Sandy, that option seems in doubt. So far, Tamaccio’s plan, which also offers a grey water filtering system and a café, has been greeted with support from the community board and many local residents.
Here Comes The School Boat: Living With Bangladesh’s Floods
Bangladeshi School Boat (Courtesy Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha)
For five months a year Bangladesh endures a monsoon season, suffering from two floods yearly leaving millions of citizens living in river basins stranded without basic necessities. But a non-profit organization founded by an architect based in northern Bangladesh, Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, has decided to build flood resistant schools that come to the homes of students. Health care facilities and homes are also being built to float by the non-profit.
Boston’s City Hall Hits The Road
Boston’s City Hall To Go Truck. (Courtesy Isabel Leon/City of Boston via WBUR)
What’s on today’s lunch menu? Well for Boston residents it may be a library card, a dog license, or even registration to vote. With Boston’s food-truck-inspired “City Hall To Go” municipal services are no longer bound to one location. A menu of seasonal services are now rolling to locations throughout the city to serve residents less able to travel to the actual city hall or navigate their website. Citizens can also report complaints at the truck.
Archability Teams with Habitat for Humanity for Sandy Relief
(Background photo by Edward Reed / NYC Mayor’s Office)
Archability, an online database for architecture and design match-making, is showing support for the victims of Hurricane Sandy with its “Building Relief” campaign. The site has pledged to donate half of all sales now through January 22 to Habitat for Humanity’s Disaster Response initiative. The site is also asking architects selected for projects through Archability’s services to contribute 15 percent of their commissions to the campaign.
“As a New York resident this tragedy hit particularly close to home, so starting a relief program just seemed natural,” Livingstone Mukasa, Archability founder and CEO, said in a statement. ”We want to utilize Archability’s global talent pool to increase awareness and provide financial assistance to the victims who are in a difficult rebuilding process. Habitat for Humanity provides the perfect channel for helping repair and construct homes in the wake of Superstorm Sandy.”
KPF Designs China’s Newest City Around a Central Lake
Plan for Meixi Lake in China’s Hunan Province. (Courtesy KPF)
It’s no secret that China continues on a trajectory of continued urbanization, placing strain on already-overcrowded cities. To help alleviate this congestion, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) has designed a 120 million-square-foot master-planned new city in China’s Hunan Province called Meixi Lake. The new city is centered around a large, 2.4-mile-long lake and will one day be home to some 180,000 residents.
Designers Reuse Hurricane Debris in Furniture for Reclaim NYC Auction
Woodworker Daniel Moyer is crafting the high+dry.table, an exaggeratedly long
legged occasional table made from salvaged lumber on Fire Island. (Courtesy ReclaimNYC)
To benefit the victims of Hurricane Sandy, New York City designers are hosting a furniture auction, selling pieces made from the storm’s reclaimed materials. The silent auction, Reclaim NYC, is organized by AN alumna Jennifer Krichels Gorsche, writer Jean Lin, and designer Brad Ascalon will sell the work of more than twenty artists who have all pledged to donate proceeds to the American Red Cross in Greater New York. The pieces range from tables and chairs to lighting fixtures to art objects. Some designers have even represented themes of the storm and flooding in their work and will continue to include these themes in upcoming work.
Reclaim NYC will take place on December 19 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. at Ligne Roset’s SoHo showroom, located at 155 Wooster Street.
Home, Sweet Four-Foot-Wide Home: Warsaw Welcomes A Tiny New Addition
Etgar Keret inside his new home, the Keret House. (Courtesy Dom Kereta / Facebook)
A sliver of a house was completed in late October in the unlikeliest of locations, a leftover space between two buildings in the once Jewish ghetto of downtown Warsaw. At slightly under four feet across at its widest point—and a mere 28 inches at its narrowest—the Keret House, envisioned by Polish architect Jakub Szczensy of Centrala, stands firmly among the world’s slimmest buildings. The unconventional house was commissioned by Israeli writer Etgar Keret, whose mother survived Nazi occupied Warsaw on the very street of the Keret House.
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