Video> Proposed Utopian City Moves Like Clockwork
Clockwork City by T0R0YD. (Screen Capture)
“Clockwork City” is the fantastical vision of animator Roy Prol calling for a city of rotating rings that change the notion of getting around in large city. As the video (after the jump) notes, the 3,000 meter diameter “Clockwork City” won’t need cars or even transit since work and home are a mere minutes away, anywhere in the city. The city itself is in effect one large form of public transportation. To get to work, the video notes, “Just wait at home until you see your workplace closer.”
Four concentric rings each 280 meters wide housing offices, residential, industrial, and agricultural/energy zones are traversed by smaller cogs joining them together. Boldly proclaiming “endless movement” complete with the prospect of an ever-changing skyline, it’s unclear how such a “Clockwork City” could be built or sustained. What are your thoughts? (Via Digital Urban.)
Dude! Behold The Skate House
Skateboarders, commence drooling. Behold this prototype for the PAS House, a Malibu home in which every surface will be skate-able. The secret? There will be no corners. From the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom the ground becomes the wall and then the ceiling in a continuous surface forming a tube with a 10 foot radius. The furniture is also curved for skating, including some groovy looking tables and beds.
The project, located at the top of Las Flores Canyon in Malibu, will by sometime next year be the home of skateboarder Pierre Andre Senizergues (hence the name PAS), a former world champion skater, and owner of skateboard company Sole Technology. It’s being created by designer Gil Lebon Delapointe and LA architect Francois Perrin, who for the prototype of the living area bent plywood, previously soaked in water, using a traditional skateboard ramp fabrication technique.
Unveiled> OMA’s Parc des Expositions in Toulouse
View of the exterior of PEX (all images courtesy OMA)
OMA has won a competition to design the new Parc des Expositions (PEX) convention center in Toulouse, France. Designed to hold conferences, exhibitions, and concerts, the new hall will function as an opening to the city and a hub in the countryside. OMA has configured a plan for that preserves much of the surrounding area while organizing future development along to a 2.8 kilometer centralized stripe, with PEX filling 660 meters of that length. The project is divided into three programmatic bars: the multipurpose event hall for performances and concerts, which opens up to the exterior, a vast column-free exhibition hall, and a large parking silo with ramps that are visible to halls through glass walls. Led by French projects director, Clement Blanchet, the project is expected to be complete in 2016. Read More
Letter from Rome: YAP Opening Night at the MAXXI
stARTT's illuminated fiberglass flowers (Courtesy James Stevens)
Imagine a warm summer evening in Rome. Then imagine stretching out on a cool, grass lawn underneath giant Jurassic tulips the size of a cherry tree. Their glow softly illuminates conversations over cocktails. Add a backdrop of the serpentine jewel of Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI museum, and you have theater.
Rome is all about theater.
Kimmelman Bags NY Times Archi-Critic Post
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN (COURTESY WIKIPEDIA)
An internal New York Times email, acquired by AN today, announced that Michael Kimmelman would start this fall as the New York Times’ new chief architecture critic. Citing Kimmelman as “one of the paper’s great writers”, Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor, wrote how Kimmelman started at the paper of record as a music critic and “swiftly morphed into an art critic.” And now after four years as a foreign correspondent, he will fill out his all-purpose critic portfolio as architecture critic.
Sustainability Martyred in Name of Saint Green
Eco-Pantheon, Rome 126AD (Courtesy Star Strategies+Architecture)
Has the green movement gone too far? STAR Strategies + Architecture examines the prevalence of “green-washing and the abuse of sustainability” in their project O’ Mighty Green, where they posit that the notion of “green” has taken on a life of its own outside of sustainability and has become on many levels a new sort of religion. As the architects said in their introduction:
Sustainability currently shares many qualities with God; supreme concept, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; creator and judge, protector, and (…) saviour of the universe and the humanity. And, like God, it has millions of believers. Since we humans are relatively simpleminded and suspicious and need evidence before belief can become conviction, Green has come to represent sustainability; has become its incarnation in the human world. But sustainability, like God, might not have a form, nor a colour.
To demonstrate this absurdity, STAR has implemented what they call “sustainability as a photoshop filter” and clad a variety of iconic—and notorious—buildings with green walls, even invoking the spirit of St. Green, the patron saint of sustainable architects. The architects have taken a similarly snarky view of contradictions in preservation. (Via Dezeen.)
What are your thoughts? Are architects guilty of praying at the green altar?
Architects Offer a Glimpse into the Future
WORKac's Infoodstructure Brooklyn uses food to create new infrastructures
Glimpses of New York and Amsterdam in 2040 at the Center for Architecture (through September 10) is a clarion call for designers to redefine sustainability in architecture. Though it didn’t start with this intention, the visions of 10 young architecture firms imagining future landscapes of New York and Amsterdam raise questions about what changes are imminent for urban development and what part architects can play. The projects suggest both practical and fantastical interventions to improve the prospect of urban growth in the face of ecological, geographic, and demographic shifts.
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.
Video> Theo Jansen’s Walking Strandbeests
Strandbeests by Theo Jansen made from yellow piping.
In his own words, Dutch artist Theo Jansen is “creating new forms of life.” His mechanical creatures, the Strandbeests, are comprised of hundreds of yellow plastic tubes forming a skeletal structure that is able to walk along the beach with only the help of the wind. According to Jansen’s web site, he is looking “to put these animals out in herds on the beaches so they will live their own lives.” He has given his latest creations “stomachs” able to store the wind using a series of bicycle pumps powered by sails or wings on the Strandbeests. The air is compressed into plastic bottles that can power the machine when the wind dies down.
A Bittersweet Archi Film from Cuba
Porro's School of Plastic Arts.
We got to see one of our favorite new architectural documentaries on Sunday, called Unfinished Spaces: Cuba’s Architecture of Revolution, by Alysa Nahmias and Ben Murray. The film documents the creation, and subsequent scuttling, of Cuba’s National Arts Schools. Designed by architects Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti, the highly expressive Modernist schools, built mostly of Terra Cotta, were an example of visionary architecture and idealistic arts education for all, from dance to visual arts. But after the Castro government wearied of creative expression and embraced Soviet-style building, they changed their minds, shutting down construction, although classes later continued in the schools’ ruins. Now the country has once again done an about-face and is hoping to save them, despite a lack of government funding. Look at our next issue for a full review. And if you’re in LA, check out more screenings of the film on June 24 and June 25. Read More
Revealing The Airplane Of The Future
Aircraft manufacturer Airbus unveiled its conceptual designs for a futuristic, see-through plane last week in advance of the 2011 Paris Airshow, which began today. The “Concept Cabin” showcases what commercial air travel could look like in 2050, and is packed with interfacing technologies and design features to give passengers an ultra-personalized and otherworldly experience.
Pictorial> Tour FIRST by Kohn Pedersen Fox
(Courtesy KPF)
Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) shared a few images of their newly complete Tour FIRST tower in Paris, France, now the city’s tallest building. Standing 760 feet tall in the city’s La Défense district, the glass tower isn’t completely new. It’s actually a major addition on top of a 1970s structure designed by Pierre Dufau—a move the firm said makes the building more sustainable than new construction. New windows were punctured in the old structure’s concrete skin and the building was opened up to surrounding public space. With Tour FIRST, New York-based KPF continues its skyscraper spree, having designed what are currently the tallest buildings in Hong Kong and London.
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