the Capital HIM

[Ay]Architecture is an international design studio committed to cutting edge research and experimentation, across scales. It engages with multidisciplinary fields from fashion design, architecture to landscape urbanism, in both theoretical and professional praxis.

The Capital HIM project is inspired by Nicola Formichetti’s stylistic work through Lady Gaga’s and Rick Genest’s fashion personas. The emerging esthetics in fashion is translated into a spatial condition, retaining the main qualities; it is alienated, urban, volumetric and at times vulgarly carnal (no pun intended). The network of theoretical connections meshed with the space of the given site (Walker Street, NY) generating the three-dimensional spatial condition per se. This allowed a series of control points and lines that would parameter the starting point to the physical substance. An actual morphology is created by narrowing down the possibilities of physical connections. The organic appearance of the project and its arbitrariness reflect the whimsical nature of the fashion at hand, robust and sensual at the same time.

The designer’s pop-up store proposal starts to perform as a multi-tasking machine embedded with a myriad of performances. Its protuberances behave as clothes hanging devices while the tattoo skin-like surfaces operate as multi-layered apparel devices. The whole project transforms onto a catwalk scene or launching parties for Nicola’s clientele and friends.

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an ArtificiAL island

Designed by architect Aleksander Krasinski, the project is a floating habitable structure which would be able to endure future changes of global climate. The idea for the building could be interpreted as an answer to the problems closely related to globalization and the human impact on the environment, as well as continuity in the perdition of human rights in connection with the growing process to create a global bank and corporate influence on the shaping of international law.

It is an artificial island with adequate infrastructure, establishing itself as an independent state with its own government and economic policy. 1000 meters in height, as well as in diameter, the building has 48 floors with the maximum number of inhabitants of 52,096 persons.  It facilitates an internal sea port with ocean-going vessels dock, an airport passenger handling helicopters, a public garden, office spaces, administrative, governmental and academic centers, etc. The inner atrium of the building is surrounded by recreational and commercial services.
The planned locations for the Island include United Arab Emirates, Japan, Netherlands and the United States. on this urbanistic island it’s possible to create a whole new state with a powerful eco-system, own legislation and an advanced policy of economic structure.

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an Art of Tower

Designed by James Law Cybertecture, the Tower is to be located in the heart of Mumbai, facilitating a wide range of businesses, including the India movie industry. To accentuate the inspirational references, the building facades are installed with LED screens for film and graphic projections.

The concept of the building is derived from the movie industry, assuming a futuristic appearance and dominating the city skyline. The metallic folding wall design of the lobby is inspired by imaginative sci-fi movie setting. The red LED light fills the lobby with energy. This vigorous form floating above the office floors on the top is an auditorium and restaurant space dedicated to the celebrities. The flexibility of the space can cater for activities such as premieres and private party.

The west facing facade of auditorium is installed with large glazing which offers the guests a chance to look at the breathtaking view of Mumbai.

Integration is an important factor in movie production and creative industries. The facade design of Parinee Tower is an integration of four different facade zones which offer diverse spatial experiences from both inside and outside. A unique combination of glazing, LED, louver and sky garden zones create a unique and iconic building profile.

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Le Mannequin... as an Iconic

The competition challenge consisted in designing a 100 meters high tower-museum, containing exhibition areas of 20th century fashion history and becoming a landmark for Tokyo. For this purpose, the site was located at Omotesando Street, since this avenue gathers the world’s most important fashion houses, at their maximum magnificence. Cre8 Architecture’s proposal reacts to both the specific nature of the site, as well as the visual impact of the building.

Le Mannequin stands as a new landmark on this iconic promenade. The alabaster facade draped in a black concrete robe unveils itself to its audience – invites the visitor to cross a bottom lit cat-walk within a large entrance atrium space that respects the scale of the existing Omotesando Street buildings. The 20’s – 60’s exhibition spaces tumble over each other allowing glimpses into and from adjoining genres. The runway space articulates the building form between the 60’s and 70’s spaces and provides an exhilarating skyline to the street. The crimson spine – zipping the fabric of the building together allows visitors to meander between spaces whilst high speed 3D dynamic lifts whisk you up to the rooftop Japanese garden and sky bar.

A New Zealand Canvas

Gretchen Albrecht has exhibited in New Zealand and internationally for more than 35 years. Recent work has appeared in Valencia, Spain as part of the exhibition Ultramarte at the Casa Museo Benlliure, and throughout New Zealand in the group exhibition Diaspora: Pluralism and Singularity and the survey exhibition Returning, initiated by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

R o s a  -  R a d i a n c e ,   2009
140 x 250 cm,  acrylic and oil on canvas.
Since the 1970s, Albrecht's work has evolved from the poured acrylic 'stained canvases' for which she first gained widespread recognition, into a pair of signature 'shaped-canvas' formats: the hemisphere (half circle) & the oval. These are shapes that Albrecht associates with particular meanings & states of mind. In the shaped-canvas paintings she has been producing since the early 1980s, resonant combinations of colour and geometry create images with a clear poetic impulse, in which references to landscape, family and the cosmos act as emotional points of departure.

R o s e  G a r d e n  ( F a n t i n  L a t o u r ) ,    2008
94 x 183 cm,  acrylic and oil on canvas.

The past five years have seen Albrecht's artistic horizons broaden to encompass large-scale, stainless steel sculpture and have witnessed the inception of a new series of multi-panelled rectangular paintings featuring a rectangular 'threshold' motif. This motif has also been a key presence in recent oval works. In 2009, Albrecht began working on a new series of rectangular paintings, featuring oval-shaped vortices of colour and slender horizontal geometric figures . The first of these paintings were recently exhibited at Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington and Nadene Milne Gallery, Arrowtown.

Byzantinists

Το Εικοστό δεύτερο Διεθνές Συνέδριο Βυζαντινών Σπουδών (22nd International Congress of Byzantine Studies), με θέμα "Byzantium Without Borders", θα διεξαχθεί στις 22-27 Αυγούστου 2011 στο Πανεπιστήμιο της Σόφιας “St. Kliment Ohridski”. Διοργάνωση: Bulgarian Association of Byzantinists and Medievists.

Για περισσότερες πληροφορίες:
http://22byzantinecongress.org/

a Part of Art

The Grasp Pendulum is part of a permanent exibition in Berlin’s Medical Technology Science Center, elaborating on the human body and its motor functions.  By combining virtual and real movements, the Grasp Pendulum establishes a creative dialogue between visitors and science, the mechanical forces that generate movement and digital inputs used by the authors. The eight-meter high kinetic sculpture is visible through the glass façade of the building. Its movements and ever-changing appearance attract the visitors and connect the building’s interior with the surrounding public space.

It consists of three pendulum arms suspended in parallel, each of which carries 12 inward and outward-facing monitors. The kinetic sculpture is based on real-time control of the motors. The system registers the virtual hand movements on the screens and directly transposes these into real movements, precisely synchronizing the image and the swinging of the pendulum. This principle also enables direct visitor engagement. A light box interface facilitates two modes of interaction: A live silhouette of the visitor’s hand is relayed onto one of the screens. Suddenly, the shadow freezes, and the focus shifts to the next display. All the screens are sequentially filled with the visitor’s expressive hand gestures. Once complete, by wiping their hands across the interface, visitors can influence the movement of the pendulum.

The installation focuses on three different types of grip: the spherical grip for grasping and holding round objects; the hooked grip that angles the hand, enabling us to hold long, narrow objects, and the cylindrical grip with which we hold objects of cylindrical shape. The quality and complexity of grasping is transposed into the realm of contemporary art, using technological advances.

a Pearl in the Desert

The Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art named after I.V. Savitsky - also known, simply, as the Nukus Museum - hosts the world's second largest collection of Russian avant garde art (after the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg). It is also home to one of the largest collections of archeological objects and folk, applied and contemporary art originating from Central Asia.

Igor Savitsky (1915-84), a Russian born in Kiev and the Museum's founder, first went to Karakalpakstan in 1950 as the artist in the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition led by the world famous scientist, Sergei P. Tolstov. Fascinated by the culture and people of the steppe, he stayed on after the dig (1950-57), methodically collecting Karakalpak carpets, costumes, jewelry, and other works of art. At the same time, he began collecting the drawings and paintings of artists linked to Central Asia, including those of the Uzbek school, and, during the late-1950s/early-1960s, those of the Russian avant garde which the Soviet authorities were then banishing and destroying. Today, the Museum houses a collection totaling about 90,000 items, including graphics, paintings and sculptures, as well as thousands of artifacts, textiles and jewelry, ranging from the antiquities of Khorezm’s ancient civilization to the works of contemporary Uzbek and Karakalpak artists.

Perhaps the most remarkable, indeed unique features of the Savitsky Collection are the paradoxes surrounding its existence. For example, Karakalpakstan - the remote northwestern region of Uzbekistan where the Museum was founded - was, and remains one of the poorest of the entire former Soviet Union. On the other hand, despite its poor economic prospects, Karakalpakstan’s culture has been preserved and provided the intellectual raison d'être and nourishment for the Museum’s creation in 1966.

Second, the Museum may be one of the few places in the world where Russian avant garde art hangs alongside that of Socialist Realism - the former slandered by the Soviet State, the latter glorified by it.

Third, the Museum’s collection of Russian avant garde is the only one that was initially condemned officially by the Soviet Union and, at the same time, financed partly by it, albeit unwittingly. Evidently, Nukus’ status as a ‘closed’ city and, especially, Savitsky’s good relations with the Karakalpak regional authorities enabled this to happen.

Finally, Savitsky, the European, trained the Karakalpaks, his Asian counterparts, in the value of their own culture and the importance of preserving it. His approach and sensitivity instilled trust not only in the older generations of Karakalpaks who sold him their textiles and jewelry, but also in the local government which played a large role in the Museum’s foundation and continued existence. It was this mutual affection and trust that has ensured the renaissance of both a forgotten nation and a neglected generation of artists and their work.

This pearl in the desert - or, as the French magazine Télérama recently called it, 'Le Louvre des steppes' - is located in Nukus, the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan in northwest Uzbekistan at the southern base of the now dying Aral Sea, which until the mid-1960s was world's fourth largest inland lake.  Although the ancient Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva may be better known, the Nukus Museum is in fact the fourth splendor of Uzbekistan. Indeed, the Savitsky Collection has been called "one of the most outstanding museums of the world" by the UK's Guardian newspaper.

a Solar, a Farm, a Window

London farm tower designed by Brandon Martella rests on the south bank of the Thames River overlooking Potter’s Field. Like a tree the tower collects rainwater and solar energy to maintain survival. Wind is harvested through vertical axis turbines that align the perimeter structure. The residential programmed floors take advantage of cross ventilation through the use of operable windows and louvers while the hydroponic floors are a continual hydronic system recycling the humid green house air content by collecting condensated water on the inside of the ETFE pillows and letting gravity bring the water down through the hydroponic racks.

Each farming level contains an open steel grating allowing the tower to function as a cooling stack between the residential and agricultural program. At night the tower will glow as a beacon of new life, ironic to the historical burial grounds of Potter’s Field, creating a new opportunity for social sustainability, utilizing uv lighting to maintain 24/7 growing efficiencies.  With one million cubic feet of growable volume the tower can produce an average of 36.6 lbs of a wide variety of fruit and vegetable type per 100 sq ft to annually produce 1.5 million lbs of fresh fruit and vegetables, ultimately feeding 20% of London.

 

of Angled Panel...

The design is a result of collaboration between an international practice Asensio_Mah and students from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. It welcomes the visitors of Reford Garden Metis International Garden Festival, framing the view of the Festival’s entry sequence. It revisits the garden wall, giving it a modern expression.

It assumes the form of angled panel structure, designed more as a dynamic sculpture than as a conventional wall, intended to separate two distinct spaces. With that in mind, the authors decided to change the wall’s basic function and give it a new purpose. The wall is gradually transformed from a seating structure to ground plane, acting as an interactive site. Its framework holds together a volume of moss as it meanders at the entry of the gardens. The honeycomb structure is embedded with experimental moss surfaces, creating a vertically positioned vegetation strip, with different orientation and establishing various microclimates.

Thanks to the university’s digital fabrication facilities, a majority of the construction components to be produced before reaching the site. After rapid assembly, a moss garden extending beyond the segmented unit was planted.

The wall, a symbol that has been a consistent expressive element within the history of gardening, is turned into a surface that produces new associations and gestures through computational design.

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