Diego Velazquez, along with Goya, is one of my favorite classical painters. they both had a surreal and very stylized idea of what a work of art should be.
image taken from the architect's website
A very justified distraction from the search for self identity is this interesting document that Designboom has put together about airport design. Most of them have been designed in the last decade, which I agree has been very prolific for good airport design.
Self-explanatory category... This one is to study complete buildings that I deem important to learn from.
In this one it's going to be just a part of a building that's going to be studied. Sometimes the whole building is characterized or can be summed up with one element of their design.
This is where I'll put the art, as painting, photography, or graphic design, that inspires me to work, draw ideas from, or just plain like.
I'm an easily distracted person, so Aural Pleasures is the place I immerse when I'm in need of isolation, so I can get on a roll with working on my ideas.
One of the important things that I really love is traveling. Architourism and Geo-Positioning works of architecture is a really large part of what I like.
Since I get distracted easily, I will from time to time post something unrelated to architecture or my work, being posted here will be justifiable.
In the Online Events section of the Tate Modern Museum's website there is a really incredible hour and twenty minutes long lecture done by Jacques Herzog on the Beijing Olympics National Stadium, or Bird's Nest. The lecture is one of a series called Real Architecture done in Spring of 2008.
BD Online has released their annual list of the best 100 architecture firms in the world in their last issue. And most of the starchitects didn't even make the top 100 since this list has to do more with size and income than with good architecture, if the list were to be about architecture instead of revenue, the list would be much longer, and probably piss a lot of people along the way.
According to history, Le Corbusier created the open floor plan in his Five Points of Architecture created during the 1920's, and epitomized in the Villa Savoye finished in 1931. The Casa Mila, with a very similar concept behind it was finished in 1910, 20 years before Le Corbusier published his Five Points. It is surely conceivable that, since Le Corbusier and Gaudi were contemporaries, they had met and talked about architecture over coffee, or that good ol' Corbu had studied Gaudi's work.
The location towards the booming eastern side of the island, between The town of San Pedro de Macoris and the already recognized Casa de Campo complex.
The complex lies on 1,400 hectares (14 million square meters or 3,459.5 acres) of land on the coast, and consists "of more than 3,000 luxury villas, 3 hotels, 4 golf courses and a marina, providing a place to enjoy a variety of water sports, tennis and ecotourism". These ideas of luxury and ecology bundled together are unprecedented on this scale in the Dom. Rep.
"The main idea was to create a settlement of high environmental quality and low density, which incorporates native vegetation. The landscape design follows a contemporary style that embraces the houses, scattered on a stair pattern, softening the impact of their presence and creating a dynamic appearance to the whole."
I can't help but wonder how a firm from Madrid can successfully design a project in the Caribbean, I surely hope that they have a tropical architect on their staff. Although they are on the right track, natural ventilation, a lot of open spaces, less use of glass exposed to sunlight, and lots of water to reduce temperatures and increase the "cool feeling" factor.
The extensive use of natural materials, of local craftsmanship, and tropical plant species helps reduce the impact of the project on the land.
Aside from the news article on WAN and the news feed on A-Cero's website, I haven't found anything else on this project on the web. So I have no info on pricing or exact location, and I understand that there are a lot of properties in Cumayasa that are having legal problems regarding titles and speculation, I'm assuming that this project is not included in that bunch.
Romanticism flagship store in Hangzhou, China, by SAKO Architects. The architects "dressed" the building in a white organic net that flows to the interior creating all inside spaces by narrowing and widening.
