Piet’s Key to the Serpentine Secret Garden
Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion 2011 (Walter Herfst)
This year’s Serpentine pavilion by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor opens on Friday, July 1. The first images reveal not just a simple structure of humble materials but also a new type of collaboration for the Serpentine series. Zumthor invited the Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf to join the project, and although Zumthor retains top billing, his design gives Oudolf center stage. Oudolf recently shared a plan with us of his vibrant garden scheme that forms the heart of the timber-frame structure.
QUICK CLICKS> Flyways, Pitstops, Bikes and the City
Time lapse photography reveals an enlightened path (Courtesy Lost at E Minor).
Heavenly highways. No, this isn’t a preview of the Rapture (whose marketing graphics leave much to be desired)–it’s a series of time lapse photographs of the quotidian take-offs and landings of airplanes, courtesy of Lost At E Minor.
Out of Gas. Sunday Zipcar drivers take note: when the current lease runs out, the Gaseteria-turned-BP at the corner of Lafayette and Houston Streets in Manhattan will become the site of a new “super-secret five- to seven-story commercial loft development with luxury retail” reports The Observer.
Pro “Roberta Moses.” In her article “Anatomy of a Take Down,” Karrie Jacobs of Metropolis deftly deconstructs the critical pile-on around DOT Commissioner Janet Sadik-Khan and her transformation of New York City’s streets. If Jacobs were mayor, she says, she’d throw Sadik-Khan a ticker-tape parade.
Two-wheeled Commute. Happy National Bike to Work Day! Dissuaded by inclement weather in the northeast? For inspiration, check out Street Films’ video–after the jump–of Lucette Gilbert, in her “very late 70s,” who has been getting around New York by bike since the transit strike of 1980.
QUICK CLICKS> Denver, Dyker, Dijon, and Mad Ave
Denver's new Clyfford Still Museum by Allied Works will house 2,400 artworks.
Still Life. Fast Company previews Brad Cloepfil/Allied Works Architecture’s design for a new 28,000 square foot Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which will hold 2,400 works from the artist’s estate. Suzanne LaBarre writes that Still’s will stipulated “that his estate be given, in its entirety, to an American city willing to establish a permanent museum dedicated solely to his artwork.”
Melting Pot. Bloomberg reports that, based on latest Census numbers, New York is back to being the most diverse city in the U.S., beating out L.A. The Italian-American Brooklyn neighborhood of Dyker Heights takes the prize for the biggest shift, with a 31% increase in Asian residents since the last Census.
Scan this! In case you missed it, this week MVRDV released renderings for a mustard factory turned call center in Dijon, France, with an intriguing facade composed of QR tags, via Bustler.
New Mad Men. Tommy Hilfiger and his real estate partners buy the old Met Life clock tower on Madison Avenue with plans to convert it into a hotel, writes The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, in the Meatpacking neighborhood, Hilfiger’s weird preppy pop-up cottage stays up through Sunday.
QUICK CLICKS> Splitsville, Sprawling, Lab Lead, Bird Brains
FOA partners in more collaborative times. (Valerie Bennett/National Portrait Gallery, London, 2002)
No Joint Custody. Archinect reports that partners Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo of London-based Foreign Office Architects (FOA) have made their professional divorce official. According to a press statement, each partner will now head up his/her own office and all staff will be retained and assigned to one of the two.
Urban Fuel. University of Quebec researchers have published a study showing that higher gas prices translate into–logically–less urban sprawl: “On average, a 1% increase in gas prices has caused: i) a .32% increase in the population living in the inner city and ii) a 1.28% decrease in low-density housing units.” Read more at Infrastructurist.
Lab Experiment. The New York Times profiles the new director of MIT’s Media Lab, Joichi “Joi” Ito, a 44-year-old venture capitalist from Japan, who comes to the job with a wealth of experience but no academic credentials. But “He has credibility in an academic context,” Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law prof and Creative Commons founder, told the Times. “We’ve been collaborators, and I’ve stolen many ideas from him and turned them into my own.”
Big Bird Brains? Are pigeons just playing dumb for crumbs and sympathy? As far as birds go, city-dwelling pigeons have proportionally bigger brains than their avian country cousins, writes Per Square Mile.
Zumthor′s Secret Garden: First Look at 2011 Serpentine Pavilion
Peter & Piet: Landscape architect Piet Oudolf will collaborate with Peter Zumthor on the 2011 Serpentine Pavilion (Courtesy Serpentine Gallery).
Today the Serpentine Gallery released the first renderings of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor‘s plans for its annual 2011 pavilion. Zumthor has recruited Piet Oudolf, the Dutch landscape designer who helped transform the High Line in New York, to work with him on the concept of a “hortus conclusus” (in case you skipped Latin class, that’s a secret garden within a garden).
Quick Clicks> Clouds, Danger, DC, Rigor
Video screen capture of Qatar World Cup stadium's shading "cloud," via CNN.
BYO Cloud. Not since the Romans stretched the vela around the Coliseum has there been such a radical solution for stadium shading. Qatar plans to create man-made clouds (“a lightweight carbon structure carrying a giant envelope of material containing helium gas”) to float over the stadium where the World Cup will be held in the summer of 2022. More details in The Daily Mail.
Fatal attraction? Why do we live in dangerous places? Scientific American investigates their allure and the ecological consequences–good and bad–for both plant and animal life.
ESI 2 DC. The Washington Post reports that President Obama has tapped New York’s own Edwin Schlossberg, founder of the interactive design firm ESI, to serve on a federal panel that helps oversee the architecture and design of the nation’s capital. (Schlossberg is the more designer-y half of Caroline Kennedy and also one of the founders of the not-for-profit desigNYC.)
More rigor, less speed. At Slate, Witold Rybczynski makes the case for slow architecture: “No wonder that Renaissance architectural treatises often seem cerebral; architects spent a lot of time thinking before they started drawing.”
BIG’s First Step into the Final Frontier
A reflective sphere floats above a highway outside Stockholm in BIG's winning "Energy Valley" master plan (Courtesy BIG).
BIG won’t let its ambitions be impeded by the laws of physics–namely, gravity. For a competition to plan and design the area around the Hjulsta Intersection, a massive highway infrastructure project just north of Stockholm, BIG teamed up with firms Grontji and Spacescape to create “Energy Valley,” and their winning master plan addresses not only the area around the highway interchange but also above it. The plan’s surreal defining feature is “a reflective, self‐sustaining hovering sphere mirroring Stockholm as it is, new and old, creating a 180 degree view of the area for the drivers on their way in or out of the city.”
Covered with photovoltaic film and tethered to the ground, this mysterious giant orb would supposedly generate enough solar and wind power to keep itself aloft while also providing power for over 200 surrounding houses. Read More
QUICK CLICKS> Support, Prefab, Wright, Genius
Temporary housing designed by the office of Shigeru Ban.
Shigeru Ban‘s Tokyo office is developing temporary housing structures for those displaced by the natural disaster in Japan, reports Archinect; click here to help support the project. Stateside, AIA president Clark Manus issues a statement encouraging U.S. architects to do all they can to support Japanese recovery efforts.
The New York Times covers Forest City Ratner‘s plan to use prefab building components for a 34-story apartment building at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Engineered by Arup and designed by SHoP, the units should be pretty high-end as far as modular housing goes, but construction workers argue that the prefab approach will mean less jobs.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy trumpets the news that twelve of the master’s houses are currently on the market (starting at $800k for the Arnold and Lora Jackson House in Beaver Dam, WI), via Design Crave.
Acorn Media announces that the acclaimed BBC “Genius of Design” series is available on DVD. The five part documentary focuses on the highlights of industrial design throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
QUICK CLICKS> Restored, Represented, Drafted (event tonight!)
The Secretariat building in Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier and completed 1954. Ben Leply/flickr.
Dilapidated modernism. Chandigarh, the northern Indian city planned and designed by Le Corbusier over 60 years ago, has become the focus of preservation efforts following years of neglect and piecemeal plundering, reports the UK’s Guardian.
Cycle support. Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation, spoke to attendees of the National Bike Summit in DC this week, encouraging them to lobby their congressional reps to take steps to make communities cycle-friendly. Streetsblog notes LaHood’s appearance coincides with the release of the Urban Bikeway Design Guide by the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
Pier on the half shell. The Battery Park City Authority has leased the languishing Pier A at the western edge of Battery Park to father-and-son restaurateurs Harry and Peter Poulakakos, who are promising to turn the pier and its landmark 1886 building into an oyster bar-beer garden with one heck of a view. More details in Crain’s NY.
Tonight: Drafted! In New York? Don’t miss AN executive editor Julie Iovine in conversation with Michael Graves, Granger Moorehead, Gisue Hariri and Jeffrey Bernett at 7pm tonight, Thursday, March 10 at the Museum of Arts and Design for Drafted: The Evolving Role of Architects in Furniture Design, part of MAD’s “The Home Front: American Furniture Now” series. Click here for tix.
Quick Clicks>Trucking, Biking, Leaking, Exploring
Jaime Oliver's Food Revolution Truck debuted at TED and hit the highways.
Iron skillet meets iron fist. Some of the most striking visuals to come out of this year’s TED conference weren’t made for the stage but for the street: Jamie Oliver‘s Food Revolution truck, an 18-wheeled kitchen classroom designed pro bono by Rockwell Group, launched last week and represents just one of the outcomes of Oliver’s 2010 TED Prize wish to make kids healthier. The wish of this year’s TED Prize winner, the artist currently known as “JR,” is that people will participate in his global art project INSIDE/OUT and help paper streets with gigantic portraits of themselves. Step 1: set up photo booths that print poster size pics of conference participants–quite a surreal experience, writes Guy Horton for Good.
Get over it. So says the New Republic to New Yorkers who complain that New York DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has stepped on some toes in her quest to make streets slimmer, bike lanes fatter, and pedestrians safer. The griping was highlighted in a March 4 profile of the commissioner in the New York Times.
Leaky legend. The Economist reports that Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright‘s home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin, is banking on this year’s 100th anniversary of the site to raise money for much-needed restoration work: the roof is leaking, the wood beams are sagging, and families of bats keep trying to settle down in the rafters.
Urban archaeology, armchair edition. Yurbanism rounds up new apps that are sure to appeal to urbanists, like “Abandoned,” which uses GPS to identify abandoned buildings near your location, complete with links to pics: “Explore modern day ruins from empty mental asylums to shipwrecks under the Great Lakes. Discover the history and location of dead amusement parks, overgrown hospitals, forgotten hotels and creepy ghost towns.”
Quick Clicks> Glass, Steel, Foam, Reel
The living area of the 1928 Maison de Verre in Paris, with its modular shelving and ivory rubberized floor. (Courtesy WSJ Magazine. Photo: Todd Eberle.)
Glass wear. Alistair Gordon visits the entrancingly translucent Maison de Verre in Paris, Pierre Chareau‘s 1928 house of glass blocks, and speaks with current owner Robert M. Rubin about his ongoing restoration of the early modernist icon. Here’s a preview of Gordon’s feature that will appear in the next WSJ Magazine.
Steely resolve. The Calatrava-designed PATH hub for the World Trade Center is now over budget to the tune of $180 million, reports DNA. The stratospheric overrun is due in large part to the decision to use extra steel to “harden” the building for security reasons. The Port Authority Board passed the revised budget on Thursday morning, promising to bankroll the extra costs with a contingency fund.
Featuring…foamcore! San Francisco’s Museum of Craft commandeers a space near the Moscone Center for a pop-up installation that presents architectural model-making as a form of craft. The show offers a glimpse into the process of 20 notable SF-area architecture firms, writes the San Francisco Chronicle.
Awards go immaterial. Producers Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer talk to the Hollywood Reporter about the set design for this year’s Oscars (airing this Sunday), revealing that they’ll rely on projections to create a constantly changing, animated environment within the Kodak Theater. Architect David Rockwell, who designed the sets in 2009 and 2010 (and snagged an Emmy in the process), this year passed the torch to production designer Steve Bass.
Quick Clicks> Scanning, Aedas, Retro, Epic Growth
Mayor Bloomberg demonstrates how to scan QR codes on building permits. Photo: Edward Reed/flickr.
Vox populi. Complaining just got easier for neighborhood watchdogs in NYC. This week Mayor Bloomberg announced that building permits posted at construction sites will soon have QR (Quick Response) codes that can be scanned by smart phones. A wave of the wrist will bring up all the particulars of the construction site online and allow passers-by to report anything amiss or just find out more about project. More details about digitization of the buildings department on the mayor’s website.
Gardens grows. The Architect’s Journal reports that Aedas, Glenn Howells, and Jestico + Whiles have been selected to design the replacement for Robin Hood Gardens housing complex in east London. The plan for the £500 million development includes the demolition of the early 1970s buildings designed by Alison and Peter Smithson.
Midlife crisis. Owners of mid-century modern homes in Massachusetts are retrofitting aging residences designed by TAC and other firms, equipping them for the future and saving them from the wrecking ball in the process, writes Kathleen Burge in the Boston Globe.
Before and after, epic version. Web Urbanist presents the rise of the modern metropolis through a series of eye-popping images. (Shenzen, China wins for most dramatic transformation, while New York 1954 and New York 2009 look eerily similar.)
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