stash pocket

Move like a cat, talk like a rat, sting like a bee.

Goodnight :*

In 1932, the Dutch architect Richard Neutra built this villa in Sliver Lake, LA, California. After some years a garden and a solarium were added along with two new floors on the existing prefab basement structure. The house is in its 70’s now and a campaign is being raised by Cal Poly Pomona College of Environmental Design, The VDL Advisory Board and Dr. Raymond Neutra to help fund the renovation of the building. It is threatened to be closed, possibly sold to a private party and lost for any educational or public cause. Best of luck to the fund raisers.

slideshow: click

official page: click 

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(via: Archinect)

Sir Richard Rogers wrote an article at The Guardian on modern urbanism. This caught my attention: ”…all too often public space has been an afterthought - literally the space left over after planning.” Instead of patching small weird empety places with bushes and small trees, why not just incorporate the idea of adding real greenery to the plan in the firts place? You know you’re leaving the annoying task of fixing the badly designed space to your children. A lot of architects just do the building. And it should never be just about the building, your responsibilities are always greater.

/read his article at The Guardian

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(via: Archinect)

These posters by LETMAN represent the final works of students at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Awesomeness overload.

This may come as a shock to you but slavery is over and you should sit down and take some notes from Jacques Herzog. I coulnd’t find an intern definition that would explain it as a form of charity. There is not an excuse in the world that makes unpaid interns OK and the mere fact that ”you had to do it so we have to do it” is banal, unethical and blunt. But then again, it takes two to tango, and so it goes…

/read the article (and the comments for that matter) at Eikonographia

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(via: Archinect)

I wrote about Abu Dhabi before and since they’re going absolutely nuts over sustainable building, they diserve yet another post. Masdar headquarters is getting a new building designed by AS+GG Architecture that will be the first  energy positive building in the world. How? The roof is entirely covered by solar panels. And I’m not talking about a few square meters of panels- the roof covering a 1,4 million square feet (=130000 m2) building is absolutely gigantic. The building will also have integrated wind turbines, solar-driven cooling and de-humidification will consumpt 70% less water than other building of its size. They even decided to make the building process as green as possible by building the solar roof first - that way it alone will produce enough energy to power the rest of the construction. It’s very encouraging to see progress like this in the sustainable building field but I find it hard to believe that other countries will be able to follow its example - the building will cost over $300 million. Ugh. It’s somehow funny to see all the oil giants building green buildings, it’s nice, just funny. That, and steam must be coming out of Coop Himmelblau’s ears for the design (BMW Welt, wink wink).

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animation: click

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(via: Eco Geek)