The Beautiful and The Horrific

The Concert hall designed by Isaïe Bloch / Eragatory balances on a fine line between sculptural architectural objects and functional monuments, between meaning and use and between the beautiful and the horrific. While the architectonic aesthetic may seem to revolve around a straightforward gimmick, the work is much richer than that. The more you look, the more you realize how many levels it operates on, from its allusions of architectural ruïnification/collapse as in the romantic era to its connections to our current culture of remixes and mash-ups.

Each successive component of the design layers the pragmatic with an evocative spatial experience obtained by degeneration of architectural primitives in stead of the aggregation of complex freeform geometries, which would lead to very linear repetitive spatial experiences. It reorients the visitor toward a new architectural perspective and circulational/functional logics.

A way of entering into the subject of the exclusive high class Vieanese theatre spectator or his opposite looking for a free platform to spread his word. While this “fictional” concert hall is visually divorced from reality, it gives a sly commentary on the current state of architecture. After leaving this page and stepping back into the build environment, it shocks how much the building across from you, with its cheap-looking touches of faux masonry or abundant technical supplies, starts to evoke similarities with this so called “horrific, dystopian, retro past aesthetic” concert hall.

blue Curacao

Supported by the Curacao authorities nad their entrepreneurs, the project for a major touristic attractor was designed by Rotterdam-based ONL Studio. It is supposed to host the future operator for Galactic Travels and offer a venue for international scientific space ressearch. The landmark building will be built as a spaceship, applying maritime and aviation techniques on the building body.

The shape and material of the building evoke the power of rocket engines, along with lightness of the Spaceship glider swirling down to Earth. The visitor experience is articulated so it resembles the one of astronauts, making the 100 km trip into outer space. The public trajectory leads downwards, swirling down like the Spaceship glider does. The levels grow bigger each step, relating the Experience of space travels to always larger environmental and universal subjects: from the International Space Station to Spaceship II, from the Earth’s atmosphere and global climate change to the expanding Universe, and finally down to themes related to the deep sea space.

The Spaceport is designed to attract both the scientific community and tourists. The design and the styling of the SXC spaceship is intentionally related to state-of-the-art developments in automotive, naval, aerospace and environmental design.

a Silk Network

Italian architectural studio OFL architecture received the first prize in the international competition “New Silk Road Map” that aims for the recovery, reinterpretation, and reconfiguration of the Silk Road – a network of commercial, cultural, and religious paths that connected the Eastern and Western civilizations for more than 2000 years.

OFL’s project description:

Silk Road Map Evolution (SRME) is a project born out of the will to revive and regenerate the current layout of the silk road. This is to be accomplished by means of a social, economic, political and architectonic redevelopment of the historic stretch of the road that once belonged to Marco Polo.

The project deeply integrates infrastructure with architecture and by means of a new railway system functioning on gravitational platforms follows the trail from Venice to Xian, Shanghai and Tokyo, extending its “arms” to create new infrastructures, commercial services and residences. A wiry MOTOR CITY extends itself to help out urban realities and struggling economies. The (linearly) diffused city runs into other micro-cities in such a way that the greater entity hooks onto the smaller ones to help them survive and, like an economic pump, extends life from the greater nodes to the smaller and poorer extremities. The 15,000 km of the silk road shall be broken up by bionic towers which will represent the centers of new urban sprawls. The new silk road line will also serve as the GENERATOR of other paths that will branch off of the main course of the road to develop a larger economic armature.

a Fantasy Mermaid

A young girl learns she’s half mermaid and plunges into a scheme to reunite with her father in this entrancing, satisfying tale that beckons readers far below the waves.

For as long as she can remember, twelve-year-old Emily Windsnap has lived on a boat. And, oddly enough, for just as long, her mother has seemed anxious to keep Emily away from the water. But when Mom finally agrees to let her take swimming lessons, Emily makes a startling discovery — about her own identity, the mysterious father she’s never met, and the thrilling possibilities and perils shimmering deep below the water’s surface. With a sure sense of suspense and richly imaginative details, first-time author Liz Kessler lures us into a glorious undersea world where mermaids study shipwrecks at school and Neptune rules with an iron trident — an enchanting fantasy about family secrets, loyal friendship, and the convention-defying power of love.

Annotation
After finally convincing her mother that she should take swimming lessons, twelve-year-old Emily discovers a terrible and wonderful secret about herself that opens up a whole new world. .

the MIT is the Passageway

VoltaDom is an installation created for MIT’s 150th Anniversary Celebration and FAST Arts Festival. It populates the passageway between Buildings 56 and 66 on MIT’s campus. Designed by a multidisciplinary research based practice SJET, founded by Skylar Tibbits in 2007, the project is one of the firm’s recent experiments in computational design. The project revisits a historically paramount structural element-the vault, attempting to find its contemporary equivalent through various assembly and fabrication techniques. This reference allows one to appreciate the installation both as a sculpture and a research in materiality and digital fabrication.

The installation lines the concrete and glass hallway with hundreds of vaults, reminiscent of the great vaulted ceilings of historical cathedrals.It can be seen from inside and outside, creating spectacular views. The vaults provide a thickened surface articulation and a spectrum of oculi that penetrate the hallway and surrounding area with views and light. VoltaDom attempts to expand the notion of the architectural “surface panel,” by intensifying the depth of a doubly-curved vaulted surface, while maintaining relative ease in assembly and fabrication.  This is made possible by transforming complex curved vaults to developable strips, one that likens the assembly to that of simply rolling a strip of material.

 

memorabilia Generation

Designed by Fletcher Priest Architects, the tower is intended to celebrate the cosmopolitan, urban and global character of New York City. It is a high-rise monument located at the tip of Manhattan on a pier projecting from Battery Park. While revitalizing the immediate surrounding and integrating it with the existing urban tissue, the Tower Museum also functions as an architectural landmark, terminating the north-south axis that extends to uptown Manhattan. The building would facilitate various exhibitions, with the emphasis on the 1970’s memorabilia: personal effects, souvenirs and photos of a new generation of immigrants who arrived after 1960.

“The Tower rises at an incline towards the Statue of Liberty, the symbolic gateway to New York, gesturing as an outstretched arm and welcoming hand about one hundred meter high. The external structure reads as a complex layering of muscle with a layered sinuous form. Internally, a central spine rises as a vast spiral stair through a void and is approached through a fluid entry sequence to a glazed wall facing the water. Lifts and stairs climb through this vertical void to the museum, library and rooftop restaurant that has a panoramic view over the city and the outlying boroughs.”

emergent Porosity

This project by Joseph A. Sarafian from the University of Southern California imagines a future in which billions of genetic algorithms act not only as the mediator between man and reality, but shape his existence through their very interactions. It explores a functionality beyond the carrying out of human desires, but of the prediction of human behavior. These ideas manifest in the design of the Bach Multidisciplinary Research Institute. Derived from notions of how Johann Sebastian Bach wove together voices in his fugues, this design is a synthesis of various flows of information, creating an effect larger than the sum of its parts. To achieve this goal, the building acts as an organism, reacting to its environment in such a way that it automatically controls its porosity through a network of advanced algorithms. Thus the facade is a continually fluctuating network of openings.

Instead of merely controlling the light conditions of the interiors, the aperture system is designed to close off and filter pollution from the adjacent freeway as part of the research of the facility. Thus by engaging with its environment the building acts as a testing instrument as much as an enclosure. Acoustical considerations are addressed on a local level as spaces that require varying levels of insulation are opened or closed automatically and in relation to human occupancy.

The research institute is designed to engage various fields of study, from music and the visual arts to biology and mathematics. This diversity promotes a common wealth of knowledge and facilitates interdisciplinary learning. Advancements in one field will have ripple effects in others and this synergy will promote a culture of recombinatory knowledge.
Flanked by Grand Avenue and an off-ramp of the 101 Freeway in Downtown Los Angeles, this site poses a unique set of challenges. Noise and car pollution are controlled through the pyramidal apertures that can close off sound, light, air, or all three depending on which layer of the double skin system is closed. This building envelope is comprised of carbon-fiber panels that enclose a shell of glass apertures. The glass is actually an assembly of two thin glass sheets with a membrane of translucent Aerogel insulation that adds to its acoustical and thermal insulation abilities. This enclosure system functions as the mediator between interior and exterior, and is controlled by an individual, agent based system. Each occupant has his own algorithm of light preferences and thus controls the system locally, contributing to the movement of the array as a whole when the needs of many are seen acting as an amalgamation.

The building form and structure is generated by an agent-based flocking algorithm in which agents from various locations on the site create paths following those of structural loads, determining the location of primary and secondary structural members. Special thanks to my instructor, Roland Wahlroos-Ritter and friends Erick Prins and Michael Sun for their help.

a Complex Landscape

The project is located in Xiaguan District, Nanjing, China. The site is on the south side of Jianning Road, in this urban area which is traditional and historical. The architects are required to design a big complexity including entertaining, sport, commercial and administration offices. Hence the major concern of the design is how to merge this “huge complex” into the existing beautiful nature landscape scenery and get a brilliantly transitional connection with the landscape there.

The distribution of architectural volumes in this design follows the idea of traditional Chinese Gardens, which transforming the elements of water, stones, hills, bridges and flowers into significant urban shapes animating and vitalizing the daily life of the entire district. As the site is in the traditional area, which is very sensitive to avant-garde architecture, this drives us to control the upground mass of the highrise. The proposal therefore lifts up the ground surface and transforms it into a flexible and lively vertical highrise with landscape integrating all the service and leisure facilities to provide an attractive and continuously active support for this traditional and cultural site.

To the open space, the idea is through “bottom elevated” to broaden the horizons, enhance ventilation, expand public space, and promote community interaction. Meanwhile by setting up “roof garden” to increase the accessibility and integration between the inner and outer space. Thus, an outstanding public space which allows citizens to have an unique and great spatial experience can be realized.

Besides, considering the different climate in Nanjing, this requires to pay a special attention on the facade during design period. In the podium part, the façade is in form of compound “green skin“. The continuity of the urban environment is a necessary urban ecological factor.

Team Members: Xinyu Wan, Dingliang Yang, Keming Wang, Jialong Lai, Jie Li

minority Women

Over the past two years, Lili Almog has photographed minority women in the countryside, small cities, and villages of China. In her second powerHouse monograph, The Other Half of the Sky, Almog examines these women at a time when the demands of rapid growth and a sweeping desire for modernity is encroaching upon the traditions and values that have sustained their cultures as intact microcosms in the larger picture of China for centuries. Almog focuses on minority women, with an emphasis on the extraordinary situation of Muslim women in China, as well as the Mosuo women, a unique ethnic minority living within the boundaries of western China and one of the last matriarchal societies existing in the world.

The images in The Other Half of the Sky reflect how the communist revolution, with its vision of the nobility of physical labor and emphasis on gender equality, left its mark on women's and personal identity in a changing China. The book tells the story of the women of today’s China, of their individualism in their domestic and work environments, and of minority women that have only recently been exposed to modernity. Given the nature of today's Chinese society and the conflict between the private self and society, The Other Half of the Sky presents a portrait of the public female representation as a challenge to express the dignity and heroism of the private, intimate female self.

at Bosphorus Valley

An interesting Studio Project program was introduced for the spring semester 2011 at University of Applied Arts Vienna, titled-Vertical Mass, Neither One nor Many. The idea was to propose large scale urban developments as an alternative to a collection of towers resting on a retail and public plinth.  The designs would have to reinterpret notions of skyline voids and spaces within masses, putting the emphasis on the urban void instead of a tower of any kind.

Designed by Joseph Hofmarcher, Rangel Karaivanov, Jürgen Strohmayer and Siim Tuksam, the Levent Vertical Mass sits at a high point of the Bosphorus Valley, integrating the high velocity axes of the highways and contextualizing views of the old city towards the southwest. The building is a commercial high-rise facilitating hotels, offices, condominiums and public plazas and gardens. The vertical garden occupies one of the landed masses and spills into the plaza meeting semi-programmed surfaces (open air theatres, parks) triggered by the civic program in the two other masses that touch the ground. The structure is made of a torus-shaped voids and supple forms, with the adjacent program and circulation pulled around the torus into the central mixed space. Multiplicity is created by organizing program and surfaces into irreducible forms negotiating organic internal logics with the urban concept of the project.