I House

Japanese Architects have been doing wonders with small projects and small sites. This one is no different. Katsufumi Kubota of Kubota Architect Atelier took this harbor site of merely 2,500 or square feet and designed this 1,100 square foot house.


A white concrete slab rises from the site to block the views from the street blocking intrusive glances, at the same time it bends towards the ocean welcoming it and giving every space in the house wonderful views of the harbor. This is where the beauty of this house lies, in its surroundings. I think the rows inside the background waters are seaweed crops, they look remarkably like the hops fields for beer you find in eastern Europe.


Enjoy the simple but dramatic shapes Kubota managed to give in order that we could learn a little bit more...


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Casa Mila 2.0

Continuing with my Gaudi research, I have found a couple of interesting videos on Gaudi. I'm posting the first one here... although it might be a little difficult for non-catalonian speakers. But it has beautiful grainy black and white images from the 20's and 30's, and video fragments from who knows when. Anybody that speaks Spanish will make out about 80% of it, knowing French helps a little bit more.

Casa Mila

Image from wikipedia.org

The Casa Mila, better known as "La Pedrera" in its native Barcelona, is a building that has fascinated me long before I studied Architecture. I remember my dad brought me several books on Gaudi from a trip he made to Spain, he thought I would like them, he was right. He probably knew long before myself that I would become something like an architect, with my long hours spent playing with my legos (I still have some of those). I digress...

The thing is that as I learn more and more about Gaudi's architecture, I learn more about his genius. The Casa Mila, contrary to the standard of the time, has no bearing walls, only columns hold it up from the basement to the top floor. This was so for the simple reason that it allowed him to build curved walls, in plan and in section. So this, as far as I know, is the first free plan house.

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.

It is certainly something to think about... Gaudi is definitely a prophetic architect, and his architecture is definitely a premonition of modernity and Modern Architecture.

Stimuli 0802

Public Records Building in Basel, Switzerland, by EM2N.

Stimuli 0801

Father's House by MADA s.p.a.m. in the Chinese province of Xi'an. Found on the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition "China Design Now".

Muxtape

I have just discovered Muxtape... It's an amazing website where you can upload mp3's on a playlist, much as the way we used to create mixed tapes on cassettes. You can email the link to friends and loved ones, and other people can stumble upon your mixed music playlist. The downside is that you can't search the site to find music, you just refresh the homepage to get a new set of mixed playlists that you can click on. The idea is that you find new music that you haven't heard before. I've already found some pretty cool stuff... like jessicalouise's mix of 80's electropop and other eclectic sounds.

Expect the unexpected... enjoy some new adventures in music...

Brian Dettmer - Book Autopsies

Finally something I can say I like from the Explorations in Media Modifications or Altered Books world. Brian Dettmer's probably been around for quite a while, but just now I've started to discover him.


It's surreal, chaotic and organized like the flow of ideas, like my own imagination creating images from within the pages and the words of the books I read. I love, or maybe need (I am a visual kind of guy) to create these kinds of magical images in my head drawn from reading, that's why it takes so long for me to finish reading something. Multiple layers of overlapping imagery, sometimes I have to drop the book to be able to assimilate what I just read.


Congratulation to Brian for evoking and reminding...

Piel - Skin

Found this wonderful link over at MoCo Loco, and made me wish it was a little more extensive. Piel.Skin is an online publication about buildings skins and their evolution from facade to an actual skin, capable of much more than just covering up a structure and being beautiful. It also includes Google Maps links to all of the projects featured in the publication, a dream come true for us architectural tourists, I wonder if all these buildings are in MiMoA's database...

Zumthor's Vals Thermal Baths in Switzerland

I still haven't met anyone that doesn't love Peter Zumthor, his published books have the largest resale value of any architecture book I have ever seen. I love his work simply because his views on architecture are so similar to mine, phenomenologically speaking of course. He overloads your senses, not only with light, texture, and sound, but gives his buildings a personality, an ego, a history, that makes them feel almost organic, as if it was an organism that was here to learn a become better than when it was created.

I don't know who made these videos, but Offensive77 is hosting them in his You Tube page, along with many other architecture videos. Enjoy these, I sure did.

Cumayasa Project

On Monday a new project on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic was announced. As far as I know it is the first proposal within the tourism real estate industry that uses a globally recognized contemporary language for its architecture.

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.


Joaquin Torres at A-Cero Estudio de Arquitectura claims that the project is to be green as this text taken from the World Architecture News website, and translated from A-Cero's own website says:

"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.

Putting aside the secrecy and blurry areas I think that the designs put together by A-Cero are damn sensual, it could come out to be a nice Tropical Architecture example if they play their cards right.