A new home

Well, it's been a while. Ok, to be completely honest: it's been terribly long since I've last posted here. And no, this is not a post to mention the next reanimation of this blog. However, on the new and improved website studio-also.eu, the studio for my design and research projects, I've integrated a blog. Some of the posts from this blog will be recycled over there. Same, same - but different. So, for future reference, please see the Studio Also website.

How much space does one family need?

I'm pretty sure that the family of Mukesh Ambani will never complain that they "need more space", since their new house has been built in Mumbai.
The house has 27 stories, a height of 173 metres and about 37.000 square metres of floor space. Among others, it contains a car park for 160 vehicles, a cinema with 50 places, a ballroom, at least one swimming pool, several helicopter landing pads, a health club, a dance studio... and many more rooms.

But size isn't everything: it also hosts a staff of 600, that keep everything running smoothly around there. And that's all for a family of five...

In many ways, this entire project is insane and slightly off-putting. But at the other hand: it's not just a showy building but also a load of jobs. And since it's so clearly present in the city of Mumbai (unlike the multi-million dollar mansions of Bill Gates and the likes), it might even draw a bit more attention to architecture and design in this city. Even if you think the project is ludicrous. Even if you think it's shameless to flaunt your wealth so publicly in a city with so many poor people. Even if you think the design by the Chicago-based architects Perkins and Will is unelegant.

Similarly: it might be stupidly oversized, but the prize isn't that shocking: apparently, the house costed about 44 million pounds in construction (about 55 million euros) to build, according to the Guardian. And that's a lot, but at the same time it's not THAT much. What could you buy in your city for that price? Likely not nearly as much, probably partially due to cheap labor in India, of course.
Luckily (for mr. Ambani, at least), the house is worth much more now. Apparently, due to land and property prices in downtown Mumbai, it's worth an estimated 750 million euros (!)

Liricas Analas

I like architecture. And I like slightly crappy hip-hop music. When the two collide, it's even better: like in this music video for the song called "Siemis", where the Swiss rappers of Liricas Analas rap their way through the world famous Therme Vals by Peter Zumthor.

Other than a slightly weird video, Liricas Analas (from the Graubünden region in Switzerland) is also quite remarkable because they rap in the Romansh language, the fourth official language of Switzerland (spoken by 0,8% of the Swiss population - only by a couple thousand of people). This, in combination with the display of a famous (and very Swiss) architectural icon whows a certain regional (or national) pride. Since I'm not one of the few that speak Romansh, I have no clue what their lyrics are about. So if it's offensive for any of the Romansh-speaking people out there, don't blame me...

Minimalist house

For many designers, the words by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe still ring true: they design by the adagium "Less is more". Mostly, I'd prefer to use Mae West as my source, and design with the thought "Too much of a good thing is wonderful" in my mind.

That does not mean that I cannot value the clean simplicity of a minimalistic approach. Take the Minimalist house by Shinichi Ogawa & Associates, for instance.

The plot for this house in Okinawa (Japan) is surrounded by a wall, and divided lengthways into three strips. One is a courtyard, the other two - divided from the courtyard by means of a strip of glass - make up the living space. The stip closest to the courtyard contains a bedroom, living space and workspace in a single space. The third zone contains the more enclosed rooms such as bathroom, utility room and kitchen.



The entire house is laid out on a 3 meter-grid, in three dimensions.


The subdivision of the living space is conceived by means of a wall-like piece of furniture completely clad in corian, giving more privacy where needed. This organisation and smart layout enables a continuous space, without any obtrusions or subdivisions. It's simple it's elegant: how can you not love a house like that, and admire the future inhabitants for being able to live this way?





I found this project on dezeen.com.

Infinity is way up there...

If there's something like the ultimate infinity pool, I'm pretty sure it's located at the Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore. The hotel in itself is already quite bizarre: it's the most expensive hotel in the world at about 5,2 billion pounds (which is about double of the former record-breaking hotel, the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi).



The Marina Bay Sands has 2,560 rooms, costing from $500 a night upwards. That's quite impressive. Then, it has a casino, a museum, a theatre, a convention centre and indoor canals. Even more so impressive.
But the most impressive part of the hotel is, in my eyes, the so-called skypool, spanning the top of the three towers of the hotel, at the 55th floor. The pool itself is about three times as long as an olympic size pool, and seems to end in the air. That's because the water flows over the edge into a catchment, situated a bit lower. It's pretty spectacular to be able to swim on the 55th floor, with the skyline of Singapore in the back, and not to have a (visible) edge between you and the surrounding.

The complex is designed by Moshe Safdie, and I found it via the Daily Mail website.

Architecture books

Books where the theme of yesterdays' post, and books are the theme of todays' post. This time, an online book store. Even though nothing beats spending hours and hours browsing through a bookstore, finding more and more amazing books. It's even more lovely to look through a really specialized bookstore and find really specific, hard to find books.

But not everybody has such a great bookstore close to where they are located, and not everybody has the time to visit those stores during opening hours. So that's why it's great that there are specialized online bookstores. As much as I like amazon.com, nothing beats specialists. In this case: specialists in architecture books. It's easier to find what you want, it's more useful to find more in-depth items and it has more power to surprise. That's what makes architecturebooks.eu such a nice webstore.

The only thing that is lacking from an online architecture bookstore is, ironically enough, good architecture. Like one of the nicest examples I've seen thus far: Academia Bookstore in Helsinki, by Alvar Aalto, on the image above.

Solids

The question of flexible spaces has always been a difficult one. Mainly, flexibility was defined by constraints. An architect, developer, city planner of someone else defined either a function, the size or the partitioning.
There have been quite some developments around the theme of flexibility, but none of them have been as radical as the concept of solids in Amsterdam.

Solids are about complete freedom, and complete flexibility. Tennants are free to decide the amount of square meters they want to rent - with a minimum of 90 m2. So far, nothing radical. However, tennants can also freely decide what they want to do with those square metres. If they'd like to use it to live in, it's just as good an option to start an office in the building. Pretty much everything goes, as long it doesn't cause disturbance for the neighbors (be it noise, pollution or whatnot).

That's what makes the concept of Solids so interesting: the building gives way to a mixture of functions, even if it isn't completely planned in advance. The buildings live, change and are adaptable to whatever the users would like. This also means that the spaces are completely empty and free of any interior obstacles. There's a front door, a wall and a facade and electrics, gas and water. All the interior walls, bathrooms, and furnishing can be decided by the tennant, and changed at will.
This way, the chance that the building becomes obsolete within some years of construction is pretty small. If there's a bigger market for dwellings, more of the casco spaces will be used as appartments.

A lot can be said about the currently planned Solids - about their facades, about their location in the city and what that means for the possible programming, the connection with the urban tissue, etcetera: but that's not quite the most fascinating part of this concept. The thing is: the appearance of the facade is literally only skin-deep. What makes the concept fascinating is it's flexibility in all senses. Even the rental price is to be decided by the tennants (within some reasonable ranges, of course)!

The concept of Solids is developed by Stadsgenoot, by the way.

Inspired by the Past

The Hwangryongsa temple, a 9-story pagoda, was built in 645 AD by Silla (one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea), but was demolished in 1238 during the Mongol invasion of Korea.

That building itself would already be worth a post on this blog, but what if you'd want to pay architectural tribute to this building? What if you'd like to make a contemporary statement out of it? Of course, the sheer reconstruction of it would make no sense. It's faking the past, and not doing something that is also connected to the present.


So, the Gyeongyu Tower makes complete sense, doesn't it? The contours of the Hwangryongsa temple pagoda have been carved out of a solid shape, in order to create this building. It shows the historic form in a contemporary way. Mission achieved, I would say. The building is great in it's weirdness, it's so kitchy that I'm really loving it for it's boldness. It's all that's good and evil at the same time, architectonically speaking.

Temporary materiality

The materialization of temporary structures mainly has a certain genericness. For instance, for the construction of a temporary restaurant (called Studio East Dining) on the top of a construction site overlooking the construction of the 2012 Olympic Park in London the office Carmody Groarke used materials that could be considered pretty standard for a temporary structure. They used scaffolding and boards, borrowed from the construction site, and covered the lot with recyclable plastic.

Using pretty mundane materials doesn't make this a standard or boring building. And that's not just because of the spectacular views over the construction of the Olympic Park. No, it's also because the temporary building itself is rather elegant. A pavillion with no front or back, with a slick and playful form, gives space to a delicate interior. Too bad the restaurant only remains in place until the 4th of July...


I found this project via dezeen.com

Maison Eco-rce

The architect Cyril-Emmanuel Issanchou challenges all the preconceived ideas of what a timber house means. Wood isn't necessarily a material to make archetypical houses, but it can also be a material to make contemporary buildings. Like in this case, a house that looks like no other.
You could say that this project is a means of showing france that timber isn't necessarily less sturdy than stone, for houses. Or as a way of showing how a house can connect to the surroundings. Or a attempt to merge a seemingly random pattern to the functional division of the house. Anyway: a nice image doesn't necessarily need a extensive description and explanation...

Roll it

There has been many a quest for a small container to live in. In the past there have been concepts like the Suitaloon by Mike Webb, or the Nagakin Capsule Tower by Kisho Kurokawa, and now students at the University of Karlsruhe developed Roll It, a small, tubular building, of which the function and effect can be changed by simply rolling it over on its side. Hence the name.

The idea in itself sounds almost too easy to produce anything even remotely interesting, but in this case it produced a smart conceptual research into space-efficiency. And at the same time, it produced a interesting built form. For more information, check out the project at detail.de.

Archigram archives

Even though the work of Archigram is mainly unbuilt, there's no doubt that they've been extremely influential. There have been loads exhibitions, books and magazine articles on their work; presumably every school of architecture has had at least one lecture series or seminar on them; they've received a RIBA gold medal in 2002 (28 years posthumously); and a vast number of famous (and slightly less famous) architects claimed their influence on their work.

Now there's a comprehensive guide on their work, which you can browse from the comfort of your home. EXP, the Research Centre for Experimental Practice at the University of Westminster, set up a website called the Archigram Archive Project. And the amount of information to be found on the site is huge! You can see the contents of the legendary magazine or read up on the people behind archigram. But, most importantly: there are over 200 projects by Archigram on the site, organized by year.

So if you are only slightly fascinated by Archigram, this website is worth checking out. And if you are avid appreciator on the kooky retro-futuristic, conceptually smart projects by this team, you can litereally spend hours on this site. Like I did...

people or no people, that's the question...

Recently, I saw some images of the completed "La Llotja" project by Mecanoo. I'm not going into details about what I think about this project, because it triggered a whole different subject: I recalled seeing renderings that looked pretty similar to the final result not that long ago. But something was different. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, until I checked the renderings again. Then, the difference became quite clear...


Look at this image (the render), and look at the image above (the photograph), and think about the role people play in the images. It's not just about this example by Mecanoo, but it happens in virtually every project lately: the renderings are filled to the brim with smiling, happy people, whilst the final photographs are completely devoid of any people. It makes me think what the reasoning behind this logic would be.

Is it because the target audience is different? A rendering is aimed at a laymens' audience, whom architects try to sell an "atmosphere". But for the final photos, the target audience are the architectural magazines, for whom people are mere annoying clutter. Or is there something else at play? I'd be curious to know the reasoning behind this selective (re)presentation of people in architectural imagery...

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.

Beer goggles?

It's nothing new to build pavilions out of beer crates. For instance, Atelier Kempe Thill designed and built a mobile pavillion out of translucent beer crates, called the Light Building.
However, the (unknown/unnamed) designers/builders of the Pavilion Du Bonheur Provisiore in Brussels (Belgium) must have thought that here's always something more extravagant that can be done. And they designed this cathedral out of Jupiler crates. This pavilion is an extension of the exhibition about the 1958 expo, and is situated near the Atomium, and it took 19 builders a total of 3900 hours to build this.

In case you are wondering about the name of the building: "the pavilion of temporary happiness" (the official name of the pavillion) might be a joyful play on the function of the former contents of the crate - or a contemplation on the short joyous life of the pavilion, which is probably just temporary.

Dreamspaces

You don't have to be a car buff to enjoy the television show "Top Gear". They just have a way of presenting things that gives it a bit of a twist in comparison to other television programmes.

Well, just recently, I've discovered the architectural equivalent of Top Gear: A TV-show called Dreamscapes. It has the same kind of quality - I can only imagine that people are just not that much into architecture would thoroughly enjoy this show. And at the same time architecture geeks would probably love the show, too. It was a simply irresistable combination of architectural freakshow and travel guide, hosted by David Adjaye, Justine Frischmann and Charlie Luxton.

However, the sad thing is that this BBC 3-programme only existed for the duration of one season of twelve episodes, some years ago. But just today, I came across a post on idents.tv, inluding download links to 11 of the 12 episodes.

Oh, and in case you wonder why the famous drawing of the "Walking City" by Archigram's Ron Herron is placed with this post? Just because I wanted a sexy architectural image - and there's a report about "The Beatles of Architecture" in episode 10...

Treehouses

There are many architects that specialize themselves at one time or another in their carreers. And there are many specializations for architects to choose, be it dwelling, infrastructure, office buildings, public space or whatnot. But some specializations are just too insane to be true. Really, who'd ever imagine an architect that only does treehouses? Really, think about it: designing treehouses, and nothing else. Wouldn't that be a child's dream come true for many architects? Just think about it - isn't the treehouse the typical kind of dreamy, crazy building - but also with a strong engineering side.

Really, how great would it be if you could just earn your living doing what Andreas Wenning, of Baumraum does in Bremen? Truth be told, not all treehouses he designs are "real" treehouses (some are supported on stilts instead of on the actual trees themselves), and not all treehouses are equally attractive, but in essence it's just great to see an office that solely does treehouses. I cannot imagine anybody doing that ever going to work in a bad mood...

Wearing a new building like a hat

Even though one wouldn't guess so at first glance, the Faculty of Mathematics by Bevk Perović in Ljubljana (Slovenia) is actually an extension of an old edifice. On top of an existing, two story building, the new structure was placed - with a completely different programme. At a second glance, one could still see the old building shining through on the ground floor, retaining it's own identity whilst being absorbed into the new building.

Since the new building does not have a ground floor per se, the architects went for a different approach to create public spaces in the building: these large, transparent rooms are carved out of the building mass. By doing so, the second floor becomes what normally the ground floor would be: the public realm of the building. It consists of the lecture halls and the two larger communal areas of the faculty, with all the other programme of the school on the higher floors.


I found this through archdaily.com

Kunst-haas

Combine an iconic image (the one from the Obama elections, for instance), and combine that with a reluctant star. And what do you get? An installation called Kunst-haas at the Harvard GSD.

And, in case you are wondering what mr. Koolhaas himself would think of his iconic stardom as a posterboy for architecture:

Nordic Watercolour Museum Ateliers

Nomen est omen, is what the proverb proclaims. Or, in this case: the program is the image. I mean, doesnt this image look a lot like a watercolour painting? These are the ateliers of the Nordic Watercolour Museum, in Skärhamm (Sweden), designed by Niels Bruun & Henrik Corfitsen arkitekter. As a play on the type of the local buildings, they are combining land with water, being attached neither of the two completely. Each of the units is relatively simple, about 60 square metres of atelier and bedroom spaces, but the look of the entire structure, in combination with the landscape, is just wonderful.