If it was my home...

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been an important media event for some time now. Whether it's about the inapt measures by either the USA or BP, or the actual effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Basically, the environmental damage is terrifying both in scale and effect.

But, truth be told, even though I knew that the oil spill was big, I never really got my head around how big it actually is. Because, in the long run, it's just another big environmental disaster, and the sheer magnitude doesn't always speak for itself. How much is one million gallons of oil a day? Or how much is 26.000 square kilometer? To me, those figures imply that it's big, but not exactly how big.

That's where the website ifitwasmyhome.com comes in handy. This website enables you to drop the oil spill anywhere on the world map, to give you some reference of the size of it. In the image above, I put the centre of the spill on my home town (Amsterdam). And then, by reference, I start to really comprehend the vast size (and corresponding damage). Sometimes, quite a simple method of reference can give you more insight than numbers ever could...

Stop the chop!

Some advertisements are so powerful in their simplicity that they don't need a slogan or a payoff. The image tells it all. Like in these advertisements from a campaign for the WWF. I doubt it there's anybody out there who doesn't get the message this campaign wants to put forth about deforestation...

How to expand a historical city?

Many cities throughout the world are looking for a viable strategy for growth. In many cases, the answer to "growth" is seen in "expansion": increasingly adding suburban areas to an already sprawling city. The looming problems are ominous: an increase in congestion of traffic, an increase of pollution, a longer distance (both absolute and relative) to a city's vital cultural and recreational functions, risks of segregation and gentrification... the list of potential woes of increased suburbanisation of cities goes on and on.

The solution is obvious: if one is able to increase the density of existing historical city centres, without losing life-quality in those inner-city cores, growth is contained within it's own structure. Thus allowing for a compact city, with smaller distances to travel, proximity to all the lures of the centre, and a more lively centre at that.
Strangely enough, in many cities the exact opposite effect can be seen. For instance, take a look at Rome: in 1951, about 357.000 inhabitants were living in the historical centre of this city. Nowadays, their numbers have dropped to about 100.000.
So whereas it might seem logical to densify (and intensify) the historical city in order to allow the city to grow, there is a big drop in number of inhabitants.

This was the point for the Italian architecture firm IaN+ to start their research project. A case study of the historical centre of Rome serves as an example of a wider phenomenon, which they called the "Re-living the Historic Center".

Their analysis of the reasons for the decrease of inhabitants in the centre is threefold:
1. The financial profit:
downtowns are exclusively transformed according to economic “needs”, seeking mainly the increase of property value; the residential emptying produces the disappearing of the neighborhood structures and dynamics that have always characterized the city's life and complexity.
2. Tourism:
the invasion by the “tourism machine” causes the replacement of residential use with accommodation facilities and the resulting eviction of residents. In various areas of the historic center the daily number of tourists is at least twice the number of inhabitants in the same areas. The tourist-oriented structures are becoming the prevalent program; the downtown commercial fabric, constituted by small businesses, is disappearing, to be replaced by large shopping malls in the outskirts of the city.
3. University:
in Rome there are three large public universities, and the same amount of private universities plus a series of specialized institutes. Since there is not a proper typological response to the student population, students are forced to look into the normal residential market, so that they often replace most of the residents who used to live around university campuses.

These three effects create urban tissues with holes in it. Not physical holes, but holes of practical use. The streets and the facades are important for mass tourism, some building blocks have strong economic value. But for many buildings, only the facade (the way they present themselves to the public) matters: the inside of the building has become out-of-use.

The solution they propose is as simple as it is radical: demolish the under-used buildings in the historical centre. But leave the facade, since this is an important part of the decor for the huge tourist-industry of the city. Behind this empty facade, the social structure of the neighborhoods can be strengthened, by inserting housing facilities in this recycled city structure.
Behind the facades, structures of housing and open space can co-exist, in order to create a second type of structure of the city: next to the tourist economy of the city, a system of inhabitants and ecology.


It might be a bit naive, it might be a bit too simplistic, and their architectual solution might not be the most convincing one: The idea of this project certainly has some fascinating points to it.
A fact is that an increasing number of historical city centres are falling prey to mass tourism. A fact is that there are less and less inhabitants in these historical centres. And a fact is that one needs to devote though to the reclaiming of the city centres to actual city life, and consider alternatives for the continuing de-densification of those centres.

A radical conversion

The German Meixner Schlüter Wendt got a commission for a house in a wealthy residential area near Frankfurt. The thing is: on the site was already an unspectacular, 1930-style house. Most (rationally thinking) architects would've probably suggested to tear down the house. But not the architects of this project: they decided to have a little bit more fun with the house, and went for an approach that seems to be barrowed from Gordon Matta-Clark.

They took the original house and went for a process of transforming the object. But not in the traditional way, but by means of a metamorphosis. The appearingly normal setting of the house in the nature is distorted, but at the same time made more tangible. They built a shell around the old house, creating interesting intermediate spaces between the old and the new. Then they slowly started to cut open the old house. Either to let light in (or to create a stronger relation to the surrounding nature), or to allow for spatially more interesting places. Some other parts (such as the rooftop rooms) were extended to meet the boundaries of the new structure.

It's a paradoxically unnormal house. Or a paradoxically normal house. It depends on the way you look at it. The thing is that the distortion of the existing reality into a blurry, new reality creates a spectacular building that can be read like a house, like a piece of art and like a layering of history, all in one.


Read more on convertible ity.de.

"They drew first blood, not me"

The series of Rambo-movies, starring Sylvester Stallone, could've only be successful by going "bigger" by every sucessive movie. It's just that kind of movie with all that gratuitous violence that needs to be more over the top, every time around. And that's exactly what these statistics prove: every Rambo movie is more violent than the previous one. Strangely enough, Stallone also gotten a bit more "untouchable": in the lastest version, there were only 2 sequences in which he was shot at (without result, of course), which is quite little in relation to the abundance of 38 sequences in part three.

Other than that, it is obvious from these statistics that Sylvester Stallone realized that he's clearly too old to take off his shirt to kill a random bad guy.
So, it appears that even silly action movies are put together based on statistics: there's probably some guy with an excel-sheet somewhere that figured out exactly the right amount of kills and torture scenes for visitor optimalization.

Forgotten architects

In the 1920s and early 1930s, German Jewish architects created some of the greatest modern buildings in Germany, mainly in the capital Berlin. A law issued by the newly elected German National Socialist Government in 1933 banned all of them from practicing architecture in Germany. In the years after 1933, many of them managed to emigrate, while many others were deported or killed under Hitler’s regime. Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects is a survey of 43 of these architects and their groundbreaking work.

That's what written about this on the weblog of Pentagram Papers. And it's a truely fascinating read. Haifa-born architect Myra Warhaftig (who died on March 4th, 2008 at the age of seventy-eight) spent twenty years getting all the stories together about these architects. Of course, it's an interesting read because of the personal stories of the architects involved. But what's more: it also showed that the Nazis effectively dispersed of interesting and possibly important development within the modern movement: almost all the architects in this publication worked along the lines of the international style, and seemed to push the boundaries of the style and ways unseen at that day...

21N 17W - google earth (1)

Where do boats go to die? Well, for years they went to the bay of Nouadhibou in Mauritania. Just take a closer look at the image above: all those funny looking things in the harbour are abandoned boats. All the brownish dots in the sea are rusty boats. And scattered on the shore: even more boats.

The reason is quite simple: apparently it was known all around the globe that the port authority of this place was rather corrupt. In most cities, it costs a load of money to properly discard a ship, but in Nouadhibou they'd look away if you left your decaying boat in their harbour (for some dollars, of course).

There are great things to be found on google earth...

SESC Pompeia - Lina Bo Bardi

In the mid seventies, an old factory for oil drums in Sao Paulo was not in use anymore. The plan was to convert it to a recreational centre. Lina Bo Bardi decided to keep most of the complex the way it was, to preserve the characteristics of the site. About half of the requested program could be placed in the existing structure. Here, her approach was that of freely placing objects in the space, in order not to disturb spatial qualities too much. For instance, a structure of very thin concrete divides the main hall in a library, exposition space and a collective living room (with fireplace and river running through). A smally allyway between different parts of the factory is turned into a lobby by use of a transparent roofing ß giving the complex a feeling of being inside outside and vice versa.

For the other half of the programme, that couldn't be placed in the existing structures, Bo Bardi erected two towers. In the biggest of the two towers (a rather plump looking one), four sporting halls are placed on top of eachother, with a swimming pool underneath. The smaller tower consists of changing rooms, cafetaria and smaller gymnasiums. The two towers are connected with various skybridges, making the two heavy concrete structures a bit more airy looking.

It is said that the centre is one of the most successful public places in the city. Continually, there are people from the area on the site, whether they are there with a specific goal or not. All kinds of people, from all kinds of social classes are mixed in the centre.

Ecological Footprint

Environmental preservation, ecological living, green design, global warming... Concern about the enviroment is graduately getting more and more attention. And rightly so, I must say. And I know I am no saint in living green, but I try to do what I can. But how do you measure whether you're being green or not? Well, the most widely-used method is the so-called ecological footprint. The way it works is that the total amount of gross land and maritime area one person needs to produce, consume and absorb waste is calculated.

In case you are wondering: the world-wide average is 1.8 global hectares. The thing is that, if you take into account the amount of people on the world, there are resources for 1.3 gha per capita.
To give you an example: the average in the USA is roughly 9.5 gha, and China has an average ecological footprint of 1.6 gha.
And then you need to imagine that a country like China is rapidly increasing their level of consumption - aiming to reach the American level of consumption a.s.a.p.. Basically: we are consuming our world to death.

I don't want to be moralizing or anything, just see for yourself what you do with this information (in case you didn't know it already). To get an idea of your own level of consumption - expressed in an ecological footprint: there are numerous websites that can calculate an estimation for you. Myfootprint.org is a good example. And for some more information on ecological footprints, you might check out the Global Footprint Network.

Demolishing bottom-up

There's nothing new under the sun: every once in a while, an old building needs to be demolished to make space for a new one. In this case, an old 1960s tower in London needs to be cleared to make way for Richard Rogers' new tower.

So why did I post this, you might wonder? Well, look closely at the way this building is being destructed: it's being done from the bottom up. This has to do with the method of construction: the floors hang from a beam at the top level, which is supported by the concrete core.

found on worldarchitecturenews.

The old 1960s P&O tower in Leadenhall street is being demolished from the ground up to make way for Richard Rogers’ new 48 storey tower.