your daily fix
image: www.identitythroughart.com
There is not much we can do but please take a minute to sign the Avaaz petition in case you haven’t done it yet. If there is as much as a glimpse of hope that this might help Tibet, it is well worth doing. If you’d like you can also read this post by Pia Jane Bijkerk.
Well well, what do you know. I always found mr. Starck to be a wee bit cocky but I get his point here. Die Zeit wrote an article recently in which the french designer apologizes for the things he’s done. “I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact.Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years’ time. I want to do something else, but I don’t know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression…. In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.” Starck said the only objects that he still felt attached to were “a pillow perhaps and a good mattress.” But the thing one needs most, he added, was the “ability to love”.
Oh wait… things have been proclaimed ‘dead’ over and over again. See - over and over again. You cannot make a statement with such certainty, unless it’s about your personal life/work. Therefore design is by far not dead. Luxury items, however are, and he knows that’s his ship sinking.
Also, check out his talk at TED called ”Why design?” here.
This is a Norman Foster talk done in Munich in January 2007 and was just posted now, over a year ago, but nevertheless is important. ”The green agenda isn’t about fashion, it’s about survival.” Hopefully more big studios will take on the sustainable design because it truly is not just another trend. Click on the image above to view the video.
(TED)
Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine of BêkaFilms made a film called Koolhaas Houselife on the iconic Maison à Bordeaux private residence built back in 1998. They didn’t want the film to be yet another movie about architecture so they left out all the explaining of the building and introduced a new way of presenting architectural projects - more pictures and sounds.
”The work of Bêka and Lemoine offers us a portrait of the real and changing vitality of one of those monuments that we believe are immortal. This is realized through the stories and daily chores of Guadalupe Acedo, the home’s caretaker and housekeeper, and the other people who look after the building. Following and interacting with Guadalupe, blooms an unusual and unpredictable look at the spaces and structure of the building.”
In their Living Architecture series are also films about Richard Meiers Jubilee Church near Rome and Herzog & de Meuron’s Pomerol winery.
Trailers: Maison à Bordeaux 1 | Maison à Bordeaux 2 (scroll down)
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(via: Archidose)
Studio Nicoletti Associati and Hijjas Kasturi Associates won a recent contest for the Precinct 4 sustainable housing masterplan design in Putrajaya, Malaysia, 30km south of Kuala Lumpur. The city has a very unique shape. Water and land form a dynamic terrain that determined the serpentine course on which the buildings are positioned. The idea for the buildings came from a fleet of ships and blends splendidly with the tropical, Islamic environment. Green space is integrated within the buildings, there is plenty of natural ventilation, shading suitable for the extreme conditions and the complex will source from alternative energy. I love projects like this, it’s really refreshing to see a different design. It reminds me of the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center by Renzo Piano Building Workshop in New Caledonia, one of my favorite architecture projects ever built. I wish more projects today would connect with the cultural landscape like this.
Slideshow: click
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(via: Metaefficient)
End racism now.
Goodnight :*
Omotesandō in a trendy, upscale shopping street in Tokyo filled with over the top architecture designed by, almost exlusively, big names. It stretches from Harajuku to Takeshita and Aoyama-dori, which probably means nothing to you, so here’s a really cool Google map. The people over at PinkMag made a guide of Omotesandō architecture covering all the major buildings and that’s bootyshakingly awesome. I’ll try to upload slideshows of all the buildings throughout the day so edits will follow.
(via: PingMag)
My inner vandal enjoys explosions and demolitions of old buildings. If there’s anything I love more it’s not building them in the first place. Here are some videos of sudden death scenarios, something I hope your projects will never have to go through.
/videos after the jump
(via: WebUrbanist, thanks to Andrej the ruthless destroyer)
OK in my defence, I didn’t have a blog in 2007 when this building was completed. Having that said =) here’s a little something about the apartment building designed by the Slovenian studio OFIS Arhitekti now, better later than never. It’s a social housing project in the center of Ljubljana located by a busy city road which represented a problem to be solved as far as noise was concerned. The way they came about this problem was by designing the facade as fish gills, automatically turning and protecting the apartment openings from the road towards the South. The apartment sizes vary from 30m2 studio flats to 103m2 3-bedroom apartments; all of the units are equipped wity quality materials such as granite tiles in the bathrooms, oak hardwood flooring and external metal blinds. The outer structural walls are protected by plaster and the loggias are wrapped in precast panels of different colours. The square footage of the whole complex is 5000m2 and the price per square meter was 1300€.
slideshow: click
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(via: NoticiasArquitectura)
I’m so scared now. It has no head.
Goodnight :*
