Twaddle and Topocast Make Houston Textural
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The tiles’ intricately curving geometry was derived from a photo of a power transformer. (Courtesy Topocast)
Topocast and Randy Twaddle used Rhino to produce a 3D version of a 2D pattern. The 3D model became a 3D print, which was used as a prototype for casting 65 sculptural tiles.
The entrance portal of Mirabeau B, a 14-unit residential complex in Houston’s Hyde Park neighborhood, is home to a 7-foot-high, 25-foot-long white wall of deeply textural tiles. Each tile is 20 inches square and features on its surface a three dimensional pattern that resembles nothing so much as the carapace of a Sci-Fi race of crab creatures. In fact, the pattern was derived from a photograph of a power transformer and its tangle of intersecting wires atop an electric light pole. It was worked into its current condition through a collaboration between print and textile artist Randy Twaddle and Dallas-based design and fabrication studio Topocast.
Twaddle had used this image to generate several of his designs for wall coverings and rugs and the like. In this instance, he manipulated the image until arriving at a pattern that could be repeated and assembled modularly in a system of tiles. Twaddle delivered the 2D pattern to Topocast, which began to develop a workable 3D version. “Most of the 3D was done in Rhino,” said Topocast founder Brad Bell. “We also used the Rhino plugin T-Splines to create the intricate curvature and geometries.”
Gensler Triangulates a New Santa Clara Headquarters for Nvidia
Rendering of Nvidia planned Silicon Valley headquarters in Santa Clara. (Courtesy Gensler)
Silicon Valley definitely has the architecture bug. We’ve recently seen remarkable new designs put forth by Foster + Partners for Apple and NBBJ for Samsung. Now Gensler has released ambitious new designs for tech company Nvidia, located in Santa Clara. The 24-acre complex’s two 500,000-square-foot buildings are each shaped like triangles, a configuration that Gensler principal Hao Ko explains facilitates collaboration by allowing connections to each side of the building to be the shortest. (The triangle, he adds, is also “the fundamental primitive that defines all shapes in the digital realm.”) Undulating roofs will be made up of smaller triangle pieces, breaking down the overall mass and allowing for ample skylighting, in the in-between spaces. Construction is set to begin this summer, with completion in 2015. Apple’s circle now has geometric competition. Who’s next?
AIA Awards 2013 Latrobe Prize to Research Study on Global Urbanization
AIA College of Fellows Awards 2013 Latrobe Prize for “The City of 7 Billion.” (Courtesy Plan B Architecture & Urbanism)
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) College of Fellows announced today that it will award the 2013 Latrobe Prize of $100,000 to the proposal, “The City of 7 Billion.” This ambitious research study will explore how population growth and resource consumption, on a global scale, affects the built and natural environment looking “at the world as a single urban entity.”
On View> Victoria Sambunaris’ Photography Captures Human Interactions with Landscape
Untitled (Distant steam vents, Yellowstone), 2008. (Victoria Sambunaris)
Victoria Sambunaris: Taxonomy of a Landscape
Museum of Contemporary Photography
600 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL
Through March 31
Victoria Sambunaris has photographed the American landscape from coast to coast, investigating human interaction with and relationship to the natural environment. Over a decade’s worth of color photographs taken with a 5 by 7 field camera capture the multiple layers of America’s expansive landscapes that are interrupted by human development. Born to Greek immigrant parents driven by the American dream, Sambunaris has become fascinated and identifies with the unease of the Mexico/United States border. Her photographs of over 2,000 miles of these borderlands suggest an innate similarity between the two lands in spite of national boundaries. Taxonomy of a Landscape also includes a complete archive of Sambunaris’ travels with maps, journals, road logs, collected souvenirs, and sketches.
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- Untitled (Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park, Texas), 2010
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- Untitled, Orange Scheider, Fort Worth, TX, 2000
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- Untitled, Houses, Wendover, UT, 2007
Wallace Roberts & Todd Designs Affordable Housing for LGBT Seniors in Philadelphia
Rendering of the John C. Anderson Apartments. (Courtesy WRT)
A new affordable housing project designed by Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT) is in the works for Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender (LGBT) seniors in the City of Brotherly Love—it will be the second of its kind in the nation. Hidden Philadelphia reported that construction on this 56-unit complex, called the John C. Anderson Apartments, has already commenced and will be located on 13th Street right in the heart of the Washington Square West neighborhood, a part of Philadelphia that has long been home to a gay and lesbian community. The development is named after city councilman John C. Anderson who was “instrumental in the passage of Philadelphia’s civil rights bill for sexual minority people.”
AN Visits Joshua Tree to Celebrate the Upcoming “Never Built:Los Angeles” Exhibition
Karl Daubmann, Greg Goldin, and Sam Lubell (Chris Miller)
This past weekend AN West Coast Editor Sam Lubell joined the A+D Museum in Joshua Tree to discuss the upcoming exhibition, Never Built: Los Angeles. The A+D Museum hosted the party at the Blu Homes-designed home of Tim Disney in Joshua Tree. The gorgeous prefab is sited in the middle of a what looks like a Martian landscape, with weird trees and amazing rock formations. Partiers were treated to a preview of the show from the curators, moderated by Blu Homes’ creative director Karl Daubmann. If you want to find out more about the show, watch the curators appear on Southern California station KCET’s SoCal Connected this evening at 5:30 and 10:30 PST.
On View> Dara Friedman’s New Film Dances Through City Streets, Now Showing in Los Angeles
(Courtesy Hammer Museum)
Hammer Projects: Dara Friedman
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles
Through April 14
Miami-based artist Dara Friedman is known for her black and white films of dancers dancing through city streets. For her film Dancer (2011) she used a 16mm camera to examine urban space and individuals within these spaces, filming improvisational dancers in a variety of styles, from flamenco, to ballet, to belly and break dancing, and more. In her work, Friedman also investigates accepted concepts of performance-based art. Her grainy films sometimes capture the sounds of street traffic, and she sometimes dubs music that is not always in rhythm with the dancers’ movements. For her first exhibition in Los Angeles, Friedman has prepared an 8mm film that is a follow-up to Dancer.
Architecture Billings Index Sees Strongest Gains Since November 2007
BILLINGS (BLUE) AND INQUIRIES (RED) FOR THE PAST 12 MONTHS. (THE ARCHITECT’S NEWSPAPER)
The Architecture Billings Index showed renewed strength in January, with a jump to 54.2 from 51.2 in December (any score above 50 indicates positive growth). All four regions were in positive territory with the Midwest leading at 54.4, the long struggling West showing strength at 53.4, the South came in at 51.7, and the Northeast at 50.3. The Index posted the strongest gains since November 2007.
Christoph Ingenhoven to Deliver Keynote at Facades + PERFORMANCE
Atrium of 1 Bligh Street, Christoph Ingenhoven’s sustainable office tower in Sydney. (Courtesy Ingenhoven Architects)
“I think contemporary work environments are about communication. We tried to make interior space a community, “ said architect Christoph Ingenhoven of 1 Bligh Street, a sustainable office tower completed a little over a year ago in Sydney. Ingenhoven translated his idea of community into a building defined by a spectacular 28-story interior atrium capped by a skylight. With interior walls and elevators of glass, every view is a living, bustling cross-section. The atrium acts as natural cooling system while other green features include vacuum tube solar collectors for power and an onsite wastewater recycling system, adding up to a structure that is off the charts for its energy efficiency and low environmental impact.
Ingenhoven, recognized for his groundbreaking integration of progressive sustainability and modernist design, will deliver the keynote lecture on April 11 at Facades + PERFORMANCE, an upcoming conference on high-performance building enclosures sponsored by The Architect’s Newspaper. At the two-day event including a symposium and workshops, experts in the industry will analyze, discuss, and dispute the development, implementation, and maintenance of facades. Registration information available here. Read More
Modernism Week: Sneak Inside Palm Springs’ Future Architecture and Design Center
Exterior of E. Stewart Williams’ Santa Fe Savings and Loan, future home of the Palm Springs Architecture and Design Center (Julius Shulman)
Another weekend, another Modernism Week. One of our favorites: a look inside the Palm Springs Art Museum’s future Architecture and Design Center, located inside E. Stewart Williams’ sleek Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan (1960). The International Style building is being renovated by Marmol Radziner, who also worked on Richard Neutra’s nearby Kaufmann House. The museum has already raised more than $4 million to buy and renovate the building, and is now just $1 million shy of what’s needed to get work underway. The organizers hope to break ground in the next few months and open the center by fall 2014. But for now, its interior is still lots of quirky fun, including a chance to walk inside the old bank vaults, check out the old drive through teller, and explore the old kitchens and mechanical systems.
All barn jokes aside, this is great news for the Louisville firm of De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop. They received one of the AIA’s Institute Honor Awards for Architecture, allegedly the first Kentucky project to do so since Michael Grave’s cash register, the Humana Building. The barn is an operations facility for Mason Lane Farm and it’s really kind of amazing. Let’s hope that this becomes a rags to riches design story and that we see bigger, more amazing projects coming from De Leon & Primmer. Now that Museum Plaza was knocked off the drawing board, there’s room for a new iconic tower in Louisville. (Photo: Courtesy De Leon & Primmer)
Slideshow> New York Subway Construction Creates Enormous Cathedrals of Transit
Manhattan’s East Side Access Tunnel will connect the Long Island Railroad with Grand Central Terminal. (Courtesy MTA / Patrick Cashin)
There’s plenty of tunneling going on underneath the streets of Manhattan. On the west side, digging through the city’s bedrock has given way to interior station fit-ups for the Dattner-designed 7 line subway stations connecting Times Square to Hudson Yards as early as 2014. To the east, sandhogs continue to carve through solid rock for the $4.5 billion Second Avenue Subway Line while other crews outfit the tunnels with concrete and rebar.
Between the two, more massive caverns are being opened up beneath Grand Central Terminal, which turned 100 this month, that will extend the Long Island Railroad to the famed station from Sunnyside, Queens in 2019. The $8.24 billion East Side Access Project will allow commuters to bypass Penn Station and enter Manhattan 12-stories below Grand Central. Now, the MTA has released a dramatic set of photos from inside the 3.5-mile-long tunnel, revealing enormous cathedral-like spaces connected by perfectly cylindrical tunnels. Take a look.
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