Unveiled> INABA′s Norwegian Skylight
Courtesy INABA
INABA has won a competition to design a permanent art work for the new concert hall in Stravanger, Norway. Called Skylight, the approximately 43 foot tall helix-like form will be visible to city through the transparent glass cladding of the five story great hall. At night colored, artificial light will animate the form and indicate cues like curtain calls. During the day it will reflect natural light throughout the space.
Plumen Light Bulb Wins Design of the Year
If one of the main complaints lodged against the compact fluorescent lightbulb is that it’s ugly, all that’s about to change with the Plumen 001. The energy efficient bulb has been hailed as one of the first major re-designs of the CFL, and today, it won Brit Insurance Product Design of the Year 2011.
Created by product designer Samuel Wilkinson and British electronics company Hulger, the Plumen is made out of two interwoven glass tubes. The curved design has a new silhouette from every angle. In addition to radiating warm white light, it uses 80% less energy and lasting eight times longer than incandescents. Read More
Video> Subterranean City of Ants Unearthed
Unearthing a giant ant colony (Still from video)
Architecture built by other species can be just as fascinating as our own. Take this excavation of a giant ant colony covering 50 square meters and descending 8 meters into the ground. Researchers filled the (hopefully abandoned) insect city with ten tons of cement and proceeded to excavate the surrounding dirt, revealing hidden tunnels and fungi farms. According to the film, the ant colony was also designed with good ventilation in mind. In all, it’s estimated that the ants moved some 40 tons of earth to create their metropolis. (Via Swiss Miss.)
Swooping Bridges of Google Earth
Millau Bridge (Google Earth via Clement Valla)
Brooklyn-based architect and designer Clement Villa has collected a series of Google Earth views of bridges that appear to have melted, succumbing to gravity, and hanging languidly across their respective terrains, offering a surreal nod to Dali’s Persistence of Memory. (Via Notcot.)
Mixed Media> SHoP Talk: Botswana Innovation Hub
The roofscape of the SHoP-designed Botswana Innovation Hub.
With over 270,000 square feet and costs projected at $50 million, the Botswana Information Hub is ambitious on many levels, both literally and figuratively. The winner of an international competition, the SHoP-designed research campus brings green technology to the Gaborone, Botswana.
The sinuous structure merges into the landscape, with various levels seeming to kinetically lift from the earth. An “energy blanket” roofscape blends solar and water re-use systems into the sweeping composition. Gregg Pasquarelli tells AN all about it.
Unveiled> SOM-Day in Danang
Courtesy SOM
SOM Chicago has been selected to master plan a new technology, university, and residential city outside Danang, Vietnam. FTP City, named after a growing telecommunications company, will cover 445 acres, and included buisness districts, a town center, residential neighborhoods, and a university campus. Unlike nearby single communities being developed nearby, the SOM plan calls for a diverse, mixed-use community, according to a statement from the firm.
Revealing A City′s Hidden Digital Landscapes
Immaterials: Light painting WiFi (Courtesy yourban.no)
Ever hit a WiFi dead spot when moving about the city? A new visualization project called Immaterials: Light painting WiFi by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen reveals the hidden landscape of digital signals though long-exposure photography and a stick equiped with a WiFi sensor and LED lights. Here’s more from YOUrban.no:
The city is filled with an invisible landscape of networks that is becoming an interwoven part of daily life. WiFi networks and increasingly sophisticated mobile phones are starting to influence how urban environments are experienced and understood. We want to explore and reveal what the immaterial terrain of WiFi looks like and how it relates to the city.
Looks like this project could feel right at home with the upcoming MoMA exhibition, Talk to Me, exploring the feedback of our environments. (Via information aesthetics.)
Biennale for the People: Landscape Urbanism in Israel
“On the way to the sea” 121 Ben Gurion Rd., Bat Yam. Project by Derman Verbakel Architecture.
Biennales have proliferated in recent years marking the redistribution of culture and also its global consumption. Once wed to the rarefied setting of Venice, they can now be found in Barcelona, Rio, Lisboa and… Bat Yam.
“Bat Yam?” you ask. In this unknown and unlikely Israeli town, the curators of the Bat-Yam Biennale of Landscape Urbanism have fashioned a wonderful new genre of biennale that is more “urban action” than exhibition. A rather poor, largely Russian immigrant “outer borough” of the elegant white city of Tel Aviv, Bat Yam calls to mind Brighton Beach with palm trees. The city constitutes a frayed but dignified modernist fabric built from an amazing array of gemütlich variations on the Maison Citrohan with a sensitive implementation of the tenets of open space, light, air, and the hierarchy of ways.
MoMA/P.S. 1 Young Architects Program Winner Announced
Interboro's design for MoMA P.S.1 (Courtesy Interboro)
P.S. 1 and the Museum of Modern Art have just announced that Brooklyn-based urban design and planning firm Interboro Partners are the winners of the 2011 Young Architects Program. Now celebrating its 12th year, the honor means designing what by now is widely recognized as the liveliest party space of the summer, the outdoor plaza of P.S. 1 in Queens.
Japanese Architect′s Midget & Giant House
Midget & Giant by Ryuji Nakamura
Japanese architect Ryuji Nakamura has designed a very small house to fit over a computer’s webcam for a design workshop called Design East 01. The miniature is called Midget & Giant, and, well, you can see the results. [via Today & Tomorrow.]
Unveiled> BIG Wins Again in Greenland
(Courtesy BIG)
Bjarke Ingels continues his relentless forward march toward world domination, winning yet another project, this time a gallery in Nuuk, Greenland. With so many recent mountains, it appears BIG has moved on to new iconographies inspired by land art, a barnacle perhaps?
Video> Chef Preps Sustainable Culinary Campus
Rendering of the whimsical elBulliFoundation campus
Our friends at The Feast bring us news that molecular gastronomy guru Ferran Adria plans to build a campus for his elBulliFoundation that’s reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss fantasy. Adria aims for this complex to be ultra sustainable, with a goal of zero emissions.
Wondering what you might expect to find inside these whimsical, Wonka-esque structures? So were we. We hear that the current plan calls for an archive and brainstorming space (yes, brainstorming). Even more exciting, there will be “coral-like ceramic caverns” for the foundation’s chef-scholars to work in.
With a kitchen this crazy, we can’t wait to see what culinary creations are sure to follow.
Watch a fantastic video of the culinary campus after the jump.
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