Design Stuff

For many parents-to-be the excitement and nervousness is often difficult to contain. For Kyle Piechucki, the wait was decidedly boring.

Piechucki, now a father of two who lives in Oyster Bay, N.Y., is no deadbeat he was ecstatic over the births of each of his children but simply grew tired of interminable waits at doctors’ offices. The boredom led Piechucki, 35, to develop a computer for those trapped in the purgatory of the waiting room.

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Source : abcnews 

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If you been dreaming of picking up roots, living on the edge, or literally going out on a limb in terms of eco-lifestyle possibilities, then  Finca Bellavista: A Sustainable Rainforest Community might be just the thing for you. Located on the base of an almost 6,000 foot primary rainforest mountain on the South Pacific Coast of Costa Rica - not far from the Pan American Highway, Finca Bellavista was created with the sole purpose of preserving 300 acres of local rainforest by offering a unique opportunity for ecologically minded property owners to live sustainably in and steward a managed rainforest environment.

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Read more : inhabitat 

Herzog & de Meuron partner Jacques Herzog has selected 100 up-and-coming architects from around the world to design 100 homes in 100 days for one of the most remote corners of the globe.

The groundbreaking scheme, in Ordos in Chinese Inner Mongolia, aims to foster architectural diversity but features only one British architect, Simon Conder.

The list of young emerging talent, drawn up by RIBA Gold Medal winner Herzog on behalf of a Chinese developer, is dominated by the US with 22 practices and Switzerland with 14 — all bar one from Herzog & de Meuron’s home town of Basle — Mexico with nine and France with seven. Eyal Weizman, an Israeli designer who works as a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths College, is also representing Britain.

Although the territory is part of China, no Chinese architects are involved.

Elias Redstone, curator of the Architecture Foundation, described the selection as a “wake-up call” for British designers: “The UK produces great architects. While [the list] does not necessarily reflect the breadth of talent here, we have to take into account what is happening overseas.”

Conder expressed surprise at the lack of home talent involved and said he was “very surprised” to learn Herzog was aware of his firm, Simon Conder Associates. “It’s really surreal… a wonderful step into the unknown,” he said. “All we’ve had so far is an email last summer from Jacques Herzog asking if we’d be interested in designing a house in Mongolia. Then just after Christmas we got an email with the contract.”

Herzog’s involvement has come about through his connection with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who is co-ordinating the project for client Ordos Jiang Yuan Water Supplies.

The project is divided into two groups of 50 architects, with the first batch already in China. Conder’s group is due to begin work in May.

Conder added: “We just got this Google Earth reference which is a dot in the middle of the China- Mongolia land mass. It’s really remote, although in China that doesn’t mean it won’t be a big city.”

Ordos city has a population of 1.4 million but the 197ha site is in an emerging residential district which “mainly consists of sand dunes, sparsely populated by wetlands”, according to official maps of the area.

Herzog refused to comment, but a spokeswoman said: “Ai Weiwei initiated the contact and

Herzog & de Meuron accepted the role of adviser. The final decision about the selection process is entirely up to the developer, so Herzog & de Meuron cannot comment on any practices currently on the list.”

The houses are scheduled to be completed by the end of this year.

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Source : bdonline 

A brownfield in Norway will be going green, literally, thanks to a new master plan that calls for a rolling green roof to shelter a cultural center. The Danish architecture firm 3XN beat out Henning Larsen Architects, Niels Torp, L2 Arkitekter, and IN’BY LPO Arlitektur and Design in an invited competition to redevelop a former industrial waterfront known as Nedre Malmø, in the town of Mandal.

A green roof will shelter the “Buen” cultural building in 3XN’s waterfront redevelopment in Mandal, Norway (top).  Row housing will flank the Buen building (middle). The Buen, or Arch, rises 46 feet at its highest point, creating space for performance halls and other elements below (above).
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The $30 million complex, developed by a municipal organization, will stand on the eastern bank of the River Mandal. The architects divided the 6-acre site into sections containing a cultural hall, housing, and a hotel. In plan, the dividing lines produce a shape that resembles “a flower coming out towards the water,” says Kim Herforth Nielsen, 3XN’s founding architect. “We cut up the first lines for the cultural building, and moved it up like a carpet, and created this space [underneath].”

Called the “Buen,” or Arch, the cultural center creates a rise in the landscape that reaches 46 feet at its highest point. The two-story, 48,500-square foot building includes a public library, concert and theater halls, cinema, gallery, and a music school. Compared to the curvier, more sensuously designed exterior, the interior layout will be “fairly regular,” Nielsen says. “When you’re working with a concert hall, theater hall, for the acoustics, they want a shoe box.”

The master plan also includes 80 housing units in rows of four-story buildings, a 150-room luxury hotel, and a pedestrian- and bike-friendly road system. The long, continuous rooflines and varying slopes and angles of the housing rooflines bring to mind a or but they come from 3XN’s reworking of the local vernacular. “The wooden houses in Mandal have just normal roofs,” Nielsen says. “So we took this up and tried to twist it a little bit to make a reference to the old house but in a new way, and to put in windows in quite a different way, so it’s more an abstract reference to the old houses.”

A new 525-foot-long bridge, also designed by 3XN, will link the redevelopment site to the town center on the opposite river bank. Construction on the complex is expected to begin in early 2009 and finish by 2011.

source : archrecord 

 “Anything that makes Lacma more of a centerpiece of L.A.’s cultural life is a great thing, and this is a real milestone in its development as an encyclopedic museum," said Elizabeth H. Ondaatje, a former RAND Corporation researcher and an author of its 2007 report “A Vision for the Arts in Los Angeles.” “The challenge now is that it needs to get up to the next level.”

The quandary faced by the museum in both celebrating and exhibiting its independence from a prominent donor is evident when its charismatic director, Michael Govan, who took over in 2006, dismisses the importance of Mr. Broad’s decision while simultaneously admitting that he hopes he will relent to some degree.

“He has 2,000 works, so there’s plenty to go around,” Mr. Govan said recently. Both he and Mr. Broad (whose name rhymes with road) say the museum still has first choice of the most desirable pieces in Mr. Broad’s art trove: works by luminaries like Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg.

And on a recent tour of the new building, Mr. Govan also revealed his continued hope that once Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, see the public’s reaction to the completed addition, they will turn their current loans to the new building into permanent gifts.

“This is the first step, I think,” he said.

Mr. Govan acknowledges that the museum’s identity as encyclopedic has shifted in recent years, particularly since Mr. Broad’s largess put contemporary art at the center of its geography. While it is most often described as a comprehensive museum in the vein of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, it enjoys depth in certain areas — Korean art, for example — yet has limited resources in others.

“It was never contemplated that contemporary art would be such a strong center of the museum,” Mr. Govan said. “It has added immeasurably to the identity of the institution as well as to its collection.”

That devotion to contemporary art is destined only to grow under Mr. Govan. The museum’s plans for a second and third phase of its transformation call for contemporary outdoor sculptures to dominate the grounds, with a proposed sculpture of a locomotive by Mr. Koons suspended from a crane high above the entrance.

Read more : County Museum

Leading the architecture - especially about Lounge - maybe the right word for Architonic. The exotic touching design of Tobias Wallisser and Chris Bosse inspired by arctic slabs of ice and provided the setting for a party to celebrate architectural materials Architonic’s fifth birthday. The Lounge has been created in international cooperation with the firms of SIX INCH, Belgium, Global Membrane Designs (Australia) and Bertrandt AG, Germany. The decoration style taking of arctic glacier landscape and it’s sharp edges in a darkly gleaming sea of ice. The atmospheric project of this design is suitable for the company that want invite their customer excited

Source :  Modern and Futuristic Lounge Design by Tobias Wallisser and Chris Bosse

It’s the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, where the world’s 22nd largest skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that way … forever.

A picture doesn’t lie — the one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of Cinderella’s castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the official government photos of the North Korean capital — the hotel is such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up, airbrushing it to make it look like it’s open — or Photoshopping or cropping it out of pictures completely.

Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn’t the just the worst designed building in the world — it’s the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.

More : worst hotel 

Call it a “top 10” list, of sorts. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) today announced the names of 10 individuals that it is recognizing with its 2008 Young Architects Award. These honors go to architects who have made significant contributions to the profession early in their careers; professionals who have been licensed 10 years or less, regardless of their age, are eligible. The names of each recipient, along with the AIA’s brief biographies of them, follow below. The AIA will bestow the awards at its National Convention and Design Exposition in Boston this May. The Boston Society of Architects nominated five of this year’s 10 winners.

More : 2008 architects award 

We hadn’t actually planned a Moorman lodge.However after the Moormann company acquired a plot of land adjacent to our base with the intention of building a warehouse, a dilapidated, listed historical building came as part and parcel. The construction – dating back to 1671 as home to the ‚Village bakery’, later became the Court bakery for the castle residents and delivered to the neighbouring Castle on the mountain, and later still became a guest house and following that a youth hostel– was so in need of repair that it wouldn’t have
 survived the imminent, mountainous winter conditions without emergency roof repairs.

This promised to be the start of a new project: A new roof only makes sense when the attic is in sound condition. An attic requires storeys, which can support its weight and so on and so on. Firstly the historical structure had to be ascertained and exposed, while ensuring that as much of the original
substance of the building as possible remains intact. The rebuilding unearthed numerous container loads of building rubble. Light is a major factor,
proportions and materials. For example clay panelling, made simply of straw and clay, is used for the interior walls and provides a natural room temperature.

The boss fiddles about with the crew and workmen on every detail and it is not out of the question that a wall is rebuilt three times just for a difference of a few centimetres. The end result will be 13 holiday apartments/rooms for Moormann guests and for all those interested in Design. It should be a meeting place, in the ‚Main chamber’ there’s room for 25, seated around the table or cooking at the stove.

It has an uncomplicated air, like a lodge with ‚a few knocks’. With the number of books on offer (in all rooms and in the library – the ‚Literary chamber ’), there is plenty of chance to lose oneself in the „near silence’ . No TV, there is a large selection of CDs. One room is for back packers (‚Mountain pad’) with 6 sleeping cells – there are little kitchens for self-catering in all other holiday apartments. The building is progressing rapidly and with each step we attempt to retrieve the building’s original energy and dignity.

Designer: Nils Holger Moormann
Location: South Germany next to the factory of Moormann