Stimuli 0703

Image: Joseph Harrington, The Beck Group

Joseph Harrington from the Beck Group won a mention in the 33rd annual KRob Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition. For some reason the actual winners don't appeal to me as much as this image here. The winners' images are colder, more digital in nature, this one is much warmer, more human. You can see that a person was involved in making this, against a more machined image. The image won an honorable mention in the Professional Digital / Hybrid category. Please be sure to check out the website, where you can find this year's winners along with the honorable mentions.

Kogod Courtyard by Foster

The Smithsonian Institution has opened to the public the new Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard by Sir Norman Foster inside the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, the building is better known as the Patent Office. This is another of the world's repeated solutions, and Foster, in this specific case, has been typecast and become somewhat pedestrian because of his previous Great Court at the British Museum.

This time around the courtyard is sandwiched between sheets of water, the glass canopy ripples and undulates as a liquid surface, and the floor has a curious water feature. The granite floor is darkened by a very thin sheet of water with an imperceptible slope that you can walk on and across. The result is definitely beautiful.

The courtyard's main purpose is to give the Museum a space that it can rent and use for its own activities.


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Jean Nouvel in New York

Yesterday Archinect had a photograph featured on their website that really caught my eye, but couldn't find any more information on it, it was a 3D rendering of a (another) new development by Jean Nouvel in New York. Today the web has exploded with info on this project. Dezeen has an incredibly informative feature about it, and fellow Blogger John Hill of Archidose has a post on it as well.

Jean Nouvel's very successful 40 Mercer Residences in SoHo, catapulted him to his 100 11th Ave. project in Chelsea, next to Gehry's building, making him the most bankable of contemporary architects currently designing in New York City. This new project not only is on a site next to the MoMA (Hines development actually bought the site from MoMA), but is of 75 stories, making it the same height of the Chrysler Building, and in its program is included about 50,000 square feet (5,000 sq mt) of exhibition space on three floors for the Museum next door.

The project is called 53 West 53rd and aside from the MoMA's exhibition space it will include a 100 room Hotel and 120 high end residential condos with commercial spaces at ground level.

Sources:
Dezeen
Atelier Jean Nouvel
A Daily Dose of Architecture
Archinect

Kate Protage

Continuing with my obsession with perception and phenomenology, this post is about the art of Kate Protage, who seems to have studied architecture or urbanism, she seems to perceive the world as an architect does, feeling moments in space-time. This is very apparent partly because she works from blown up photographs that she takes on her travels, she blows them up to ten times its original size and extracts a detail from it. She remembers how a city feels and works, and tries to translate these feeling and perceptual moments into oils on canvas.

This is the kind of work that, if I had an office, I would hang it in the lobby.

Artist's Statement
"I have a love/hate relationship with the cities in which I’ve lived. Everywhere I look, evidence of planning and structure exists simultaneously with chaos and unpredictability. Depending on the time of day, there are two worlds that exist in the same physical space: streets that appear gritty, dirty and depressing by day turn into an environment infused with a strange kind of lush, dark beauty and romance at night. Taking it all in can be both stressful and exciting, and I feel compelled to capture these moments and remember them.

What interests me most is the junction between sensation and fact—the way different objects come together, a combination of colors, lines and geometric shapes working together in a lyrical fashion to form intensely vivid, sometimes quite abstracted compositions. The origin of individual shapes becomes unimportant as color and texture take over, and different emotions emerge.

My paintings are the beginning of a story—a space that is somewhat recognizable and familiar, but leaves room for the story of the viewer’s choosing. Whether it feels magical and beautiful, or oppressive and ominous, that’s up to the viewer; but the plan is to take people to another place, one that’s part memory and part imagination, and provide them with a momentary escape.

I seek visual harmony, order and polish—in a tumultuous world, these are the things that keep me balanced, and they are the tools for my escape. I choose to pursue beauty."

Source:
Kate Protage Studio

Geo Locating

Today I have finally added a feature that I wanted to include from the beginning, geo-tagging. Basically I will include a location map with every project that I post on this blog and that I can find. I have updated the two projects previously posted, coincidentally both museums, and placed at the end of the post the map locating them in their respective country and city. It really helps us architourists.

Renzo Piano's California Academy of Sciences

Image: Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Renzo Piano, who could very well be my favorite architect (I'm very anxious to see the Morgan Library Extension in NY), has just opened (and going on with the same theme as my previous post on the Acropolis Museum by Bernard Tschumi) the building to the curators of the exhibit of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It has been newly renamed the Kimball Natural History Museum, and is scheduled to open in October of 2008, so we can't visit it right now. Although, you can get a pretty good view of the whole building from the free access viewing platform in the tower of the Herzog and de Meuron De young Museum.



The Academy of Sciences commissioned Piano to redo their outdated group of buildings into a "modern facility for exhibition, education, conservation, and research under one roof", which he literally did. Piano demolished most of the 11 buildings on the site, two of them are most prominent in the new design that places a "living roof" of native plants on seven rolling hills of varying sizes that represent the hills of San Francisco, this one roof manges to unify the entire building program while serving as an umbrella for the old buildings and becoming an exhibit in itself. In the center of this roof lies a glass canopy covering a Piazza, while the two larger "hills" are the two more important exhibits. The first one is a large domed simulated tropical ecosystem housing forest and wildlife from Borneo, Costa Rica, Madagascar and the Amazon rainforest's flooded river beds. The second one is the largest planetarium in the country.

The rolling "living roof" cantilevers over the perimeter of the buildings in order to produce shade to the glass facade and to place around 55,000 photo-voltaic cells.

If you want to know a little bit more, you can go to the article that the San Francisco Chronicle printed where they describe a guided walk through the museum's unfinished installations. The article is accompanied by updated photos and a video that's a definite must see, and the website of the California Academy of Science has an entire section dedicated to the new building, with photos, videos, and a time lapsed slideshow of the construction process.


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Sources:
Renzo Piano Building Workshop
San Francisco Chronicle
California Academy of Science

Robert Bruno's Steel House

Eikongraphia has posted information about this house in Texas, as with the previous house in Brazil I posted about this is a labor of love that has taken 23 years (and 110 tons of steel) to this date, and it's still unfinished. It's organic shapes and curves remind me of Expressionistic Architecture like the Einstein Tower Observatory by Erich Mendelsohn, and it definitely reminds of the movie Metropolis by Fritz Lang. Robert Bruno is a sculptor (though I haven't found anything else he has done on the web) who, like Richard Serra, works in what apparently is Corten steel. He has built the entire house out of steel, no concrete, and the only wood I've seen is on the stair treads.

Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"

Apparently he is influenced, or is of a new manifestation of the Expressionistic movement, although Bruno's work appears to be on the optimistic side of expressionism, instead of the pain and suffering that they usually portray.

The house appears to be a small group of steel trees sprouting out of the ground, the seemingly infinite amount of points of view that the interior offers appears to have come out of the mind of M.C. Escher, you could almost confuse up from down. It is built high on the side of of a river valley, so the views through the asymmetrical windows are incredible. There is little information on the house, for example, is the steel structure double layered so it works as a truss? (I would imagine so), how big is it? (it appears to have at least two floors).

Stimuli 0702

lj_scampo - "intricacies"

A Wonderful long exposure by one of our own Flickr Artists, lj_scampo. I find myself trying to identify anything familiar, you know it's a human body, but is male or female, is it light or dark.

BD Online Architects of the Year Awards

Yesterday, BD Online has announced the winners of their annual Architect of the Year Awards for established and young Architects, with Allies and Morrison emerging as the overall winner and Carmody Groarke earning the YAYA (Young Architect of the Year Award).
"Unlike most architectural prizes, the Architect of the Year Award is not given to a single building but to a body of work, with the judges rewarding practices who consistently raise the bar not just with one great project but several, and with more on the way."

The Young Architect of the Year Award (YAYA), "now in its 10th year, which is a reminder to more established firms that there is a wealth of talent coming up behind."

The list of the winners is:
Young Architect of the Year Award - Carmody Groarke
Leisure / Sports Architect - Arup
Affordable Housing Architect - Peter Barber Architects
Single Dwelling Architect - Seth Stein Architects
Private Housing Architects - BDP
Masterplanning Architects - Allies and Morrison
Education Building Architecs - van Heyningen and Haward
Interior Designer - Project Orange
Industrial Architect - 3D Reid
Retail Building Architect - John McAslan and Partners
Health Building Architect - Penoyre & Prasad
Public Building Architect - Allies and Morrison
World Architect - Foster & Partners
Office Architects - Lifschutz Davidson Sandiland
Richard Feilden Architect of The Year - Allies and Morrison

I still haven't had the chance to check them all, but definitely will in the very near future. Especially the unknowns, I am always craving for new information.

New Acropolis Museum

"Situated at the foot of the southern slopes of the Acropolis, the new €94 million complex will provide a central unifying focus for the archaeological sites clustered around the monument."

Bernard Tschumi won this international competition in 2001; this year has seen the completion of the building itself and has marked the start of the curatorial process for the exhibitions. Although parts of it are already in place, during excavations for the supports a small town called Makriyianni was found as "the excavations unearthed important ruins, including private houses of the early Christian era (400-600AD), and more than 50,000 portable antiquities".

The new museum is what Tschumi calls an anti-Bilbao museum. It does not intend to attract visitors with fascinating architectural shapes that resemble abstract sculpture. Maybe the reason is that it had, what probably is, the greatest competition, the already considered perfect Acropolis Complex of buildings and temples. Tschumi rather decides to retract from his usual dramatic architecture, and created the museum that the Acropolis needed, delivering a "heart-stopping sense of space and light."

"How to make an architectural statement at the foot of one of the most influential buildings of all time; how to design a building on a site already occupied by extensive archaeological excavations and in an earthquake-prone region; and how to design a museum to contain an important collection of classical Greek sculptures and a singular masterpiece, the Parthenon frieze, currently still housed in the British Museum."

Bernard Tschumi

The museum is built on top of the 2,500 square meter archaeological site of the town Makriyianni, levitating atop slender columns, respecting the past. And as you come into the building, you walk on the glass floors that allow you to view the ruins of the excavated town.

Transcribed from Bernard Tschumi's website:
"Three concepts turn the constraints of the site into an architectural opportunity, offering a simple and precise museum with the mathematical and conceptual clarity of ancient Greece.

A concept of light
More than in any type of museum, the conditions animating the New Acropolis Museum revolve around light. Not only does daylight in Athens differ from light in London, Berlin or Bilbao; light for the exhibition of sculpture differs from that involved in displaying drawing or paintings. The N.A.M. could be described as an anti-Bilbao. It is first and foremost a museum of natural light, concerned with the presentation of sculptural objects within it.

A movement concept
The visitor's route forms a clear three-dimensional loop. affording an architectural promenade with a rich spatial experience extending from the archaeological excavations to the Parthenon marbles and back through the Roman period.

Movement in and through time is a crucial dimension of architecture, and of this museum in particular. With over 10,000 visitors daily, the sequence of movement through the museum artifacts is conceived to be of utmost clarity.

A tectonic and programmatic concept
The base of the museum design contains an entrance lobby overlooking the Makriyianni excavations as well as temporary exhibition spaces, retail, and all support facilities.

The middle is a large, double-height trapezoidal plate that accommodates all galleries from the Archaic period to the Roman empire, with complete flexibilty. A mezzanine welcomes a bar and restaurant with views towards the Acropolis, and a multimedia auditorium.

The top is the rectangular Parthenon Gallery around an outdoor court. The characteristics of its glass enclosure provide ideal light for sculpture, in direct view to and from the reference point of the Acropolis. The Parthenon Marbles will be visible from the Acropolis above. The enclosure is designed so as to protect the sculptures and visitors against excess heat and light. The orientation of the Marbles, which will be exactly as at the Parthenon, and their siting will provide an appropriate context for understanding the accomplishments of the Parthenon Complex itself."


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Sources:
The New York Times
http://www.tschumi.com/
The Tommy Flynn Index

Bitfall and the Water Pavilion

As most of you know that an Expo with water and conservation as a theme is on the works for 2008, it's called Expo Zaragoza 2008. Well... a couple of months ago there were publications all over the web covering the design of the Expo's Water Pavilion designed by a group of architects and students over at MIT with dozens of partners. I found the building utterly fascinating including the possibilities that it opened.



This morning I found via Dezeen a video of what I assume to be the technology that's going to be used in order to use water as a graphic element, water printing I think they call it. Apparently the technology has been around for quite a while (I seem to remember having read somewhere that it started in '92), traveling all around Europe, like on the Nuits Blanches in Paris. And has even been featured in a commercial of the Brazilian flip flop brand Ipanema with Gisele Bundchen.

Enjoy the mini documentary on the German artist responsible for several installations around Europe using this technology, his name is Julius Popp. His installations are a combination of technology and art, technology used to inspire feelings in visitors and people who experience his works, which happen to be immersive.