The blue city

"Jodhpur is the second largest city in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It was formerly the seat of a princely state of the same name, it was the capital of the kingdom known as Marwar. Jodhpur is a popular tourist destination, featuring many palaces, forts and temples, set in the stark landscape of the Thar desert."
At least, that's what wikipedia says.

But there's one thing that's remarkable enough in itself to draw huge crowds into town: large parts of the buildings around Mehrangarh Fort in the city are coloured in a bright blue. The city makes for quite an intriguing view, with the indigo colouration of the buildings in the desertous landscape.

At this point, you might be pondering "why on earth did they colour the place blue"? And surely, you are not alone in this. There's no conchise reason that is clearly stated, but there are plenty of theories, some of which are more believeable than others.
1) It is claimed to have started with blue as a symbol of a Brahmin living in that particular house. (makes me wonder: how many Brahmins could one city possible entail?)
2) It is claimed that blue works charms against mosquitos and other buggering bugs.
3) It is claimed that blue absorbs rather little of the heat of the sun.

I don't know which of this is true, and to be honest, I don't really mind too much. The thing is, it just looks spectacular, a blue city within the earth-coloured surroundings...



In case you want to see more images, the Boston Globe has a nice feature on Jodhpur.

Inside / Outside

What if an outside wall of a house would be more than a stringent division between inside and outside? What if a house would be able to intermingle the inside and the outside?

Well, that's exactly what Sou Fujimoto achieved in their House N in Oita (Japan). In this project, parts of the outside are integrated in the building, creating a weird mix-up that's neither inside or outside. Or both, at the same time.

The basic idea behind this is the concept of stepped privacy, by nesting three cubic volumes in eachother. This makes the space of the building a continuous whole with different parts.

It might even be a bit like a traditional Japanese house. These normally consist of a ornamental garden, a transitional area and the living area. The last one is always the really private space with a exeptional position in the whole.
However, the way the walls are punctured has nothing to do with traditional Japanese houses - where the walls are mainly layers of translucent sliding doors on top of eachother. The wall openings of the House N are more like traditional western windows - whether or not the frames are filled with glass. The only way these resemble the traditional Japanese wall is by means of the roller blind, that can close the window opening to vary the privacy of the spaces of the house.

Ningbo historic museum - Amateur architecture studio

It might be a bit kitschy: to imitate the aged and appearance of a weathered stone wall (with pieces of different stones representing fill-ins, repairments and strata of change over time). Especially if it is used as a skin for a historic museum - like in Ningbo (China) in this project by Wang Shu (Amateur architecture studio).

But still, the look it brings is really nice. It could've ended up looking like a historical version of Disneyland - completely fake - but this building actually looks like it's been there forever, fitting into the surroundings. At the same time it stands out in the surrounding environment, and looks very contemporary.
And the material also really fits with the architecture of the museum: it looks solid, monolithic and heavy. This materialization of the facade gives it more tactility and texture in it's massiveness - giving the building a bit if a Chinese Zumthor-like feel. Too bad the interior seems a bit less poignant, in comparison (in as far one can judge from a couple of photos on the internet, that is)...
The images come from archdaily.com, by the way.

Inside cartoons

For whatever reason Michael Paulus decided to take a bunch of iconic cartoon figures, and dissect their anatomy - in the way science does, or in the vein of the classic anatomical images.

Cartoon icons are mostly exaggarated distortions of human figures, and thus Paulus had to figure out what kind of distorted skeleton they would have.
It's slightly disturbing that someone actually had the idea to do this, but at the same time it's highly fascinating to look at these images. I'd like to have seen a skeleton for Barbapapa, though...

A house in the garden

Green facades are by no means a new feature in architecture. Over the last couple of years, they have been popping up everywhere, largely due to the highly influential projects of Patrick Blanc. And even though the most remarkable feature of this private laboratory in Paris is, in fact, a green facade. But R&Sie(n) took a slightly different approach with their greenery.

Normally, the "green" of a green facade is attached directly to the facade itself. In this case, the architects put a facade of 1200 ferns on the outside of the building, with some space in between. This has some advantages as far as the growth of plants goes, I presume, but the main advantage is architectural. The facade material (the ferns, in this case) can be placed in front of windows, thus completely camouflaging the building behind the plants. Because of the space between the window and the green facade, there is also a pleasant effect from the interior.



To get the (diffuse) light into the laboratory, a cunning system of blown glass beakers is used. By strategically placing these in between the ferns, light can be reflected to intrude into the building. That's not the only purpose of the beakers, however: rain water is collected in them, and they are used to grow the ferns soil-less. And the combination of these hand-crafted pieces of grass with the lucious green ferns works like a charm: both from the exterior as for the interior. Inside the laboratory, you don't have the experience of being enclosed in a Parisian court, but it gives you the experience of being enclosed in your private little hideway in nature. And the neighbors don't look upon yet another extension of the existing building block, but they see a lovely (albeit slightly wild) green garden. That's a win-win situation, isn't it?



I found this project on arch daily.

Dotted and etched

Partially, the attention on Marc, tattoo artist of Swastika Freakshop, a tattoo parlour in the south of Germany, has to do with the "Swastika" in the name of the shop. It has to do with the argument for (or against) the use of swastikas: an argument that typically devolves into one side claiming that the symbol is offensive and should be abolished, with the other naming historical precedents of the swastika being used as a sign of peace, and that this current usage is indeed a means of reclaiming a valuable piece of history from the tyranny of the Nazis. (quoted from BME zine).

Even though there are arguments for both sides, I want to leave the entire controverse aside. Simply because I want to focus on his work. I like the originality of the tattoos he produces. It looks like he produces actual sketches on skin. Some bigger pieces of one colour appear to be consisting out of a collection of lines (like the way people hatch hand sketches), and other gray patches are made up of dots. It's definitely something different and it's probably very time consuming. But it looks really spectacular to me...



BME Zine


Since the website of Swastika Freakshop has been under construction for a long time, Some other places to see the work by Marc:
BME Zine
BME Ink

Oh, and for the architecture freaks that are thinking this post doesn't have too much to do with architecture: that guy in the last picture has a golden ratio tattoo on his arm...

Maximilian's Schell - Ball-Nogues Studio

Maximilian Schell was an actor, who played the role of Dr. Hans Reinhardt in the sci-fi adventure movie "The Black Hole" (1979). The character of Dr. Reinhardt is on a quest to conquer the unknown forces of black holes, and actually wants to steer a spacecraft through a black hole. The movie is (and probably rightfully so) almost forgotten, but the name of Maximilian Schell lives on, as namegiver of an outdoor installation in Los Angeles, by the architects of Ball-Nogues studio, called "Maximilian's Schell".

The installation looked like a rendition of a vortex. It creates an outdoor space to inhabit, by means of a swirling canopy made out of tinted Mylar panels. As the designers themselves write on their website "During the day as the sun passed overhead, the canopy cast colored fractal light patterns onto the ground. When standing in the center or "singularity" of the piece and gazing upward, the visitor could see only infinite sky. In the evening when viewed from the exterior, the vortex glowed warmly while both obscuring and allowing glimpses of the building behind it."

And while this background story of black holes, vortexes and whatnot is somewhat entertaining, and while the spatial effect was indeed stunning (as far as one can judge by looking at the images), the most fascinating part about this structure is the amalgamation of "skin" and "structure". The installation is a contemporary version of the work of Frei Otto in the fifties and sixties, in the sense that it is a behaved as a so-called "minimal surface": a prestressed form which is always in tension but still is definable mathematically.
Membrane engineer Dieter Strobel did an awesome job transforming hand-sketches and computer models by the architects into a digital model that actually worked the way it should, fysically. The interaction between architect and engineer created the form as such. This gave the canopy the smooth look, whilst giving space for creating it out of the Mylar panels, which give the space the lovely spatial and lighting patterns it has on the interior.

A house made out of lace?

It might be typical Japanese to use paper-like walls on a building to seperate spaces (inside or outside), without them being too rigid. A wall is, in traditional sense, more like a membrane that filters the stimuli.

Mount Fuji Architects Studio used this old principle for a house in Tokyo, but without doing so in a traditional sense. The architect himself compares the aim with that of, for instance, the famous Glass House by Philip Johnson: it questions the traditional needs and goals of a house, because of the site. But alas, there are not that many forests available in downtown Tokyo. So they had to come up with something different, and cladded the building with sheets, in which a pattern of cherry blossom trees is perforated. This creates a pristine effect, almost as if the building is dressed in lingerie: you can see something of the interor, but not quite, it's more a hint of the promise that an actual revealing. At the same time, it also creates a sense of privacy in the interior, by filtering out the city surroundings.

By using this type of skin for this building, the architects manage to create a sense of openness and freedom, but at the same time they made an enclosed, private house in a dense, hyperactive city.

Weingut Gantenbein - Bearth & Deplazes

Brick is mostly considered to be a traditional building material. Granted, the material's been around for ages, and in certain cases it certainly plays on a nostalgic feeling of recognition, but there are other ways of dealing with this material. As the Swiss architects Bearth & Deplazes have shown in their Weingut (winery) Gantenbein.

For an expansion of the existing winery near the village of Fläsch, they chose to go for a concrete skeleton with a brick infill pretty early on in the design process. But instead of limiting themselves to the traditional brick-laying methods, they decided to opt for something rather more contemporary. They really treated the brickwork as a skin of the building, and decided to have it "tattooed" by an image made out of bricks, by using patterns of bricks and seams.

And traditional methods didn't suffice. Laying bricks by hand wouldn't be precise enough, let alone massively expensive. So they teamed up with the people from the chair for Digital Fabrication from the ETH Zürich, who were already working on a bricklaying robot. In the end it all worked out rather splendidly: a robot was created, which was programmed to position every single brick in exactly a certain position - in order to create a really sexy, modern skin out of a classic material.

Park Entrance - Polidura & Talhouk

Metal cages filled with rocks can be a brilliant material for construction. For instance in the famous Dominius Winery by Herzog & De Meuron in Napa Valley is a prime example of the tectonic qualities of the material. The only thing is: the material looks heavy and "earthy". In that respect, the Accesso Parque Metropolitan Sur (Metropolitan Park Entrance) by Antonio Polidura and Pablo Talhouk in Chile is a surprise. The materials are used for a strong shaped building, with a spectacular cantilever. I don't know too much about it, to be honest (since my Spanish isn't that good that I can read info about it), but I think the images speak for themselves in this case. Gorgeous stuff.

An alien intervention

At a first glance, it looks as though a giant sculpture by Richard Serra accidentally landed on this square in Schaarbeek, near Brussels. Closer inspection learns that it is in fact a building. Even more so: it is building with rental appartments.
The architect Mario Garzaniti used this oddly wedge-shaped site (with a footprint of about 50 square metres) to redefine the corner between the Koninginnelaan and the Liedtsplein.
In contrast with all the dynamic morphological limits of the surrounding buildings, this social housing block looks rather monolithic. The cladding plays an important role in this aspect: the corten steel is used as facade, wall covering and roof, as well as part of replacable shutters for the windows.

The thing is: the building looks really great. But that's probably the architect in me talking. I appreciate the fact that Mario Garzaniti didn't make any compromises, I appreciate the detailling, I appreciate the look of the weathered corten-steel...
But I just cannot imagine that the building is really appreciated by the target audience for this social housing. Or am I condensending about this? I cannot make up my mind about this building - I'm in doubt between the beautiful architecture and the contextual response to its surroundings...

If you want to read or see more about this project, you might check out this article on A+ (in Dutch), or this thread at pushpullbar (in English).

Architecture and fashion

I think that nobody will deny that there is a connection between architecture and fashion. The Guardian came up with a nice way to illustrate that: Hadley Freeman discussed nine architects, with a focus on the relation between the clothes they wear and the kind of buildings they design. As far as style goes: I really dig the casual, but decidous professor look that he's sporting. And he actually always looks like this...

Fantasy architecture league

New York Magazine has remodeled itself into the client that most architects dream of: the one that doesn't pose any restrictions, but gives the designer freedom to do whatever they'd like to.

Well, that's almost true: they invited four architects to make plans for an empty lot in downtown New York. The rules were simple, and I quote "We required only that the result include a residential component and that it more or less meet zoning requirements."

It's nice to see the different approaches the invited architects took. Flank, for instance, came up with a concept to make affordable, middle class housing in this area - a type of dwellings that is not that well represented in the urban tissue of the area. Flank came up with a design, in which a corporate logo is integrated into the facade of the building. But it's not just a building with a billboard on the side of it - the billboard is fragmented to ensure that it's highly visible from a little distance, without interfering with the quality of the appartment as such.

But, if I were to decide which design should be built (if any of it would actually be built in the future), I'd definitely go with the proposal of Work AC, called The Locavore Fantasia. They went for a snazzy appartment building, with anurban farm on top. The whole is stretched to get a potential for maximizing farmland in the city - creating shorter lines of transportation, closer contact with nature, and all the other advantages of urban agriculture. The building is devised to have different crops on each floor. It might not only be urban agriculture, the building would also have potential for more recreational used green sites, such as golf courses, for instance. Also, art in the public realm is included in the proposal: the columns supporting the building (and leaning it to face towards the sun) are commisioned by artists. In the rather cute, Sim City-styled presentation drawing, they used a Brancusi to support the entire building...

[C]space

For the 10th anniversary of the AA's Design Research Laboratory, a competition was held for a small pavillion to be erected on Bedford Square in London. The competition was open to all students and graduates of the DRL - and more or less the only given was that the competitors should make innovative use of Fibre C (glass fibre reinforced concrete).

And the design that won the competition (designed by the architects Alan Dempsey and Alvin Huang) does just what one would expect from a competition entry by someone from the AA: it's all computer graphics, double curved, and smooth rendered elegant shape. Sure, there's a bit more to it, but I could never really been bothered with this kind of spectacular architecture for the sake of it. It means nothing, it just looks good...

I couldn't be bothered until I saw that the project is actually under construction. The two designers set up a blog about the project, on which they document the entire production. And I must say: in reality it looks amazing. It's still just showing off, but it's really beautifully done - one can just see that the architects pushed themselves as far as they could to realize the qualities of the virtual image. Just lovely.

Photoshop disasters

I think it happened to the best of us at one time another: a fluky photoshop. Becasue of the time pressure of a deadline, or just a lack of concentration, things might go wrong in an image that you are working on in photoshop. Most of the times it goes unnoticed, but every once in a while a small error pops into prominent view.

And now: there's a weblog to have some fun with those mistakes, aptly called "Photoshop Disasters". And it has some nice examples of Playboy magazine went all out on a frenzy with the cloning tool... and made the poor girls' bellybutton dissapear...

Urban camouflage

When you think of camouflage, what do you think of? Quite likely, you'll be thinking of the classic army look, with different brownish spots. Or about animal camouflage: tiger stripes, cameleons and such.
But how does one camouflage himself in a more urban context? This is exactly what artist Desiree Palmen seems to pose as a question: how can people dissapear against a more "contemporary" background? Well, the answer is: by means of manipulated clothing. It can be a suit painted as a perspective of a bookshelf, or a shirt that is transformed into a heap of papers lying on a table. As a viewer, you just have to imagine: what would happen if you'd move one step away from the perfect perspective from which the camouflage is correct?

Likely, Palmen tries to express her fear for the ever-increasing camera control, monitoring, cross-medialization of the public domain and such with her work. Is it subversive? Not that much - but it's a means to get people to start thinking about what they take for granted: we are all under continual control...

I found this project on boingboing.net

Caixa Forum - Herzog & De Meuron

It's more than likely that the Caixa Forum building in Madrid will get extensive coverage just about average. It's probably even better to say that the project already has had more than it's fair share of publication - even before it was actually finished. Really, there has been an almost constant stream of images and such. Mostly about the exterior of the complex. And honestly, it looks great. Whether it's the vertical garden (courtesy of the almighty Patric Blanc), or the perforated weathering copper (or is it steel after all, I'm not sure?). Or the way these new materializations relate to the old, existing structure. The interior, thus far, has been a bit less exposed - which is logical considering the fact that the building wasn't open yet. But since the cultural complex (consisting gallery spaces, auditorium and the lot) has been opened recently, a steady stream of photos has been seeing the light of day. For instance, these images that I found on flickr. They show the fantastic entrance zone, one of the spectacular staircases and the subtle way the light penetrates the perforated skin. This is defenitely a building that gets a high position on the "must see" list...

An interactive facade in Vienna

On the facade of the Uniqa Tower in Vienna (Austria), 160.000 led lights (making 40.000 pixels) have been applied. By programming these, a virtually unlimited number of patterns is achieveable. Surely, there are tons of other ways of making facades interactive (some more sophisticated than others), but to me this light installation by Holger Mader, Alexander Stublic and Heike Wiermann takes the geometrics of the building as a starting point, and builds a whole new set of virtual geometries based on the building as such.

Reverse Graffiti

In most places, graffiti is illegal. No matter what reasons for laws against it, or if you agree or not: it simply is illegal.
But cleaning isn't. So there are some artists that are creative cleaners. For instance, it might be known that cars tend to leave loads of dirt on tunnel walls. And through partially removing the dirt, a piece of reverse graffiti (or grime writing) can come into existence. The example above is done by the Braziliaan Alexandre Orion in a tunnel in Sao Paulo. So there's really no paint involved, just clean water and a sponge.

Stadtlounge St. Gallen

In early 2005, construction workers finished work on the building on the Schreinerstrasse 6 in the Swiss town of St. Gallen. With this, the end of the building for the Raiffeisen-group was finished. What was left was an attractive re-design of the public space of the area. To get the best solution for the area, a competition was held. The goal was simple: to create a urban coherent area. To cut a long story short: the competition was won by the artists Pipilotti Rist and Carlos Martinez with a radical proposal, called Stadtlounge (city lounge).

To unify all the different segments of the rather clustered public space, they came up with a carpet that covers the area. With this, the area is formed like a living room, with various different themes, all dealing with interaction and meeting people in different ways - there are cafes, business-lounges, relax-lounges etcetera. And the designers took the concept to its extreme: the lights are designed just as lamps in a living room (instead of being street furniture), and all normal street-elements are "swept under the carpet"...