a Lava for Coral Caves

Chris Bosse of Laboratory for Visionary Architecture [LAVA] has created a window installation for the famous Italian department store la Rinascente for its Contemporary Christmas Art windows. LAVA’s window installation is an origami coral reef using 1500 recycled and recyclable cardboard molecules that explores the intelligence of natural and architectural systems.

The sculpture plays with space by climbing up walls and arching over to create coral caves. Based on the geometrical structures of sea foam and corals, the colourful reef comes to life through dynamic lighting and sound. Bosse, director of multinational LAVA, is one of seven designers from around the world to be commissioned to create a window – others are Kirsten Hassenfeld, Gyngy Laky, Andrea Mastrovito, Satsuki Oishi, Richard Sweeney, Margherita Marchioni and Tjep.

The store windows are at la Rinascente’s Piazza Duomo store, in the centre of Milan, design capital of the world. This is the first time la Rinascente have commissioned artists to do Christmas windows. The installation shows how a particular module, copied from nature, can generate architectural space, and how the intelligence of the smallest unit dictates the intelligence of the overall system.

Ecosystems such as coral reefs act as a metaphor for an architecture where the individual components interact in symbiosis to create an environment. Bosse says: “In urban terms, the smallest homes, the spaces they create, the energy they use, the heat and moisture they absorb, multiply into a bigger organisational system, whose sustainabilty depends on their intelligence”. Current trends in parametric modeling, digital fabrication and material-science were applied to the space-filling installation.

to Build a Skin, to Harvest Salt

Born from unique environmental conditions, GEOtube is a new kind of urban sculptural tower designed by California-based Faulders Studio. Gravity-sprayed with adjacent Persion Gulf waters, its building skin is entirely grown rather than constructed; is in continual formation rather than fully completed; and is created locally rather than imported. The world’s highest salinity for oceanic water is found in the Persian Gulf (and the Red Sea) – local salt water is supplied to GEOtube via a new 4.62 km buried pipeline and misted onto the tower’s exposed mesh. As the water evaporates and salt deposits aggregate over time, the tower’s appearance transforms from a transparent skin to a highly visible white solid plane. The result is a specialized habitat for wildlife that thrives is this environment, and an accessible surface for the harvesting of crystal salt.

recreating Manhattan

Welcome to Formiscucity, Manhattan’s premier recreational P.A.R.C. tower – where a new way of life is taking shape!

Formiscucity, located just west of Times Square in Manhattan’s new and most contested real estate, occupies a single city block as an uber-special island within the man-made islands of the city’s 200’ x 800’ block grid system. The 50-story tower reaches up 600 feet, with a footprint covering 25% of the site to achieve the super density characteristic of Manhattan. This extreme density promotes diverse interaction as a microcosm of the city itself.

The remainder of the site begins as a horizontal green space on 11th Avenue, continuing up vertically through the tower’s 50 stories. Four core biozones (jungle, arctic, mountain, and desert – each with their characteristic fauna/climate) are utilized as a vertical recreational park space, density generator, and internal climate moderator for energy conservation. For adventurous climbers, the mountain service and structural core additionally provide vertical climbing access to the top.
Surrounding the biozones are 600 privately occupied generic lofts. Lofts may be flexibly inhabited by market-rate and 30% below market-rate housing, commercial/retail, and/or office space as driven by economic demands, such that Formiscucity never ends up as a vacant office tower during an extreme economic downturn.

Whereas typical skyscrapers intensely consume, Formiscucity uses no more energy than the neighboring 6-story brownstones. This is achieved through a double-skin structural façade with solar and waste water collection, a grey water system, geothermal pumps, and organic light emitting diodes that actively re-dress the tower in response to Times Square and Manhattan’s ever-changing imagery.
Formiscucity spatially embodies and psychologically projects the extreme “uber-specialness” of Manhattan’s island density, diversity, and variability to residents, workers, recreation seekers, locals, and tourists. Additionally, effort to formally and programmatically re-conceive Manhattan’s skyscraper typology in response to current city conditions sponsors a tower ecology of community, ecosystems, populations, and behaviors.

Ultimately, Formiscucity aims to simultaneously address Manhattan’s extreme social and political climate of divergent community, developer, resident, and architectural desires through form, program provision, energy consumption, economic sustainability, and quality of life.
Formiscucity… Inhabit Variety!

ethnography in Bangladesh

Bangladesh National Museum, formally inaugurated on 17 November 1983, is one of the largest museums in South Asia. Dhaka Museum, formally inaugurated on 7 August 1913, was its forerunner. Bangladesh National Museum is devoted to archaeology, classical, decorative and contemporary art, history, natural history, ethnography and world civilization. Bangladesh National Museum has splendid collections which range in date from prehistory to the present time. Both in number and uniqueness, the Museum is extremely rich in stone, metal and wooden sculptures, in gold, silver and copper coins, in stone inscriptions and copperplates and in terracottas and other artifacts of archaeological interest. The Museum has one of the largest collections of arms and armour in the Indian subcontinent.

Quite fascinating are its collections of decorative art, especially of woodwork, metalwork and embroidered quilts. It has items of natural history and ethnographic interest. The Museum is noted for its collection of Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin and works of other contemporary artists. The Museum also illustrates the freedom struggle culminating in the liberation of Bangladesh.
 

the Heart of a City

The designer of the “Monument to Civilization” asks you to reconsider what constitutes ‘spectacular.’

Skyscrapers are meant to wow, to impress. But other things within cities are also impressive, the designer says: “New York, for instance: If we put its annual garbage on a area of a typical tower footprint, we’ll get a 1,300 meter high landfill tower, which is about as three times tall as the Empire State Building (450 meters). Isn’t that spectacular?”

As landfill possibilities surrounding growing metropolises disappear and cities fight waste management issues, the power of trash needs to be reconsidered. The accumulation of waste, for example, actually creates potential energy-recycle opportunities, such as when gas is emitted during decomposition. The Monument of Civilization proposal suggests locating trash vertically in a tower and using the energy generated from its decomposition to help power the surrounding city. By locating the tower in the heart of the city, energy is provided in immediate proximity, and money is also saved in transportation costs when garbage no longer needs to be shipped out of town.

It also able to serve there as a loud reminder of society’s wasteful ways: “The ever-growing Monument may evoke the citizens’ introspection and somewhat leads to the entire city’s waste-decreasing and better recycling,” the designer says. Seeing the tower as an “Earth-Friendliness Meter,” the designer says, means the shorter the tower, the friendlier the city, as that means less waste is made and more is recycled. “Perhaps all metropolitan cities would inverse the worldwide competition from being the tallest to the shortest.”

Underneath the structure lie recycling and wastewater processing facilities, gas and power stations, a temporary dump and wasted water tank. The tower consists of a garbage brick wall, gas transmission pipelines, and a solid-waste tank in the center.

to Restore a Mountain

Industrialization and mining are destroying China’s natural settings, especially mountains, which are excavated to the point of destruction in man’s search for minerals. These processes don’t just devistate regions’ ecologies; they also displace whole populations of people, separating them from their homes and also their means of living, as many in these rural areas work as farmers. The “Mountain Band-Aid” project seeks to simultaneously restore the displaced Hmong mountain people to their homes and work as it restores the mountain ecology of the Yunnan mountain range.

This is achieved with a two-layer construction project. The outer layer is a skyscraper that is built into and stretched across the mountain. By building the structure into, and as part of, the mountain, the skyscraper helps the Hmong people recover their original lifestyle. It is organized internally by the villagers to replicate the traditional village design they utilized before they were displaced. The building’s placement on the mountain means that its height is mainly determined by the height of the mountain. The design as a whole is one of “dual recovery:” the Hmong people living on the damaged mountain can keep the unique organization of space in their village, recreating it within the skyscraper, but they won’t be contributing to the mountain’s degradation. Instead, they help the mountain’s environmental restoration by recycling domestic water for mountain irrigation. It is this irrigation system that comprises the project’s inner layer: an irrigation system is constructed to stabilize the mountain’s soil and grow plants.

The skyscraper is constructed in the traditional Chinese Southern building style known as Chuan Dou. Small residential blocks are used as the framework: The blocks are freely organized as they were in the original village, but the framework controls this organization of blocks into different floors, acting as the contour line in traditional Hmong village.

where Tigers live...

When Eléazard Von Wogau dusts off the stuffed bird spider that he keeps on his desk he accidentally damages it, unleashing dozens of baby spiders from its womb, which will wreak havoc on his house in the months to come and this on the day when his housekeeper is leaving him for good. It is a negligible incident, but it is an example of the unintended consequences that abound in Where Tigers Are At Home (Là où les tigres sont chez eux), the kaleidoscopic novel by the French author Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès.

Where Tigers Are At Home tells the story of Eléazard von Wogau, a foreign correspondent in the northern regions of Brazil, who is working on an annotated translation of a 17th century biography of the maverick German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680); his ex-wife Elaine, who is on a jungle expedition in Mato Grosso in search of some rare fossils; his drug-addict daughter Moéma; Moreira the corrupt governor of Maranhao and his alcoholic wife; Loredana, an Italian journalist who ends up befriending Eléazard; Roetgen, a student who falls in love with Moéma; and Nelson, a legless boy from the favelas on a mission to avenge his father’s death.

In alternating chapters and paragraphs we learn of the fortunes and misfortunes of each of the novel's main characters. Much of the novel consists in a retelling of the biography of Athanasius Kircher that Eléazard von Wogau is translating. During his life Kircher was a celebrated scholar who devoted his considerable intellectual energy to everything that aroused his interest, from hieroglyphs to geology, biology and medicine. He was also an inventor of numerous machines and automatons. His attempt to construct a flying machine is one of the motifs that will return in a rather surprising fashion towards the end of the novel.

While Von Wogau is working on his book we learn that the ship on which Elaine and her companions are traveling is attacked by cocaine smugglers. One of the expedition members is killed during the attack and another is mortally wounded. The ship is heavily damaged and the members of the expedition are forced to continue on foot through the jungle looking for help. They are taken hostage by an Indian tribe who recognize the messiah in one of the scientists.

Moéma, in the meantime, descends into an orgy of sex and drugs. Blas de Roblès accurately captures the delusions of an addict who constantly promises herself to get her life back on track but betrays everyone around her to get another dose of cocaine. As a consequence I felt at once empathy and anger with her.

I admit that some of the passages about Athanasius Kircher are a bit hardgoing, also because the storylines about Moéma and the expedition in Mato Grosso are so compelling. Of course, if you want to, you can just skip the parts about Kircher, but then you would miss the parallels that Blas de Roblès has woven into the novel.

Where Tigers Are At Home has won several literary awards in France, including the Prix Medicis. I enjoyed reading it and if you like the work of Umberto Eco and David Mitchell you'll love Where Tigers Are At Home.

We, the People Of...

As a part of the 2012 New Museum Triennial The Ungovernables currently on exhibit is artist Danh Võ’s deconstruction of the Statue of Liberty. WE THE PEOPLE is a gesture of installation using architecture and sculpture as an underpinning for a more unsettled experience. Copper sheets were assembled in an exact replica of the originals weight and scale, placed in sections on the floor in an undetermined state. The panels are hammered using the same technique as the original statue to the same tolerances. Taken from a larger collection of more recognizable pieces the series of parametric copper plates read as though they are part of a contemporary façade or pavilion. The pieces allude formally to modernist sculpture such as the work of Richard Serra, where form and materiality is the subject .

The initial abstraction of the installation gives way to interpretation on the context and value of the gesture. The deconstruction touches upon aspects of formal design, history, and national identity without expressing alliance to any of these qualities. Perhaps the ambiguity is born from Võ’s complex personal past, a child of South Vietnam but raised in Denmark and settled in Germany. The panels could be presented as before final assembly of a reconstructed and renewed Statue. Or Võ’s message can be one of protest to a loss of freedom, an impending disassembly of an ideal. The symbolic gesture, without a guide, adds tension to the presentation, leaving the viewer to assemble the statue and its meaning with their own expectations.

Photos: ©Benoit Pailley
 

into the past of Iranian architectural Models

The project seeks to provide the Benetton Group with a site specific building prototype able to give material consistence to such a renewed model. It is designed by ecoLogicStudio, a firm mostly oriented towards combining new computational technologies with natural principles and ecosystem processes. The initial idea for the project was found in the “recycling” of past Iranian architectural models and prototypes that are still deeply rooted into the culture of the place and are, at the same time, providing solutions that perfectly fit local microclimatic conditions. However the contemporary business models demand an architectural and material reinvention of those traditional models to accommodate the new spatial and per-formative requirements as well as communication/ branding potentials.

The main local models recycled in the project are: the geometric Islamic patterns and ornaments, employed as organizational principles for the plan, facade and structural systems; passive cooling techniques, turned into an innovative system of solar control and screening as well as passive ventilationand ground cooling; thermoregulatory systems using the thermal mass of the building envelope and the ground, reinvented in a new “deep facade” system using water as thermal storage and heat regulator.

The hybridization of this new model into a new proto-system has been achieved by introducing a set of new components/technologies: fully developed parametric and associative modeling of the entire building, allowing a direct real time manipulation of form and internal organization in relationship to microclimatic, structural and programmatic requirements; an innovative approach to materials and systems engineering, where thermal mass, radiation control, cooling and on site carbon sequestration and renewable energy generation has been embedded in the architectural fabric of the building; this has been achieved by introducing the technology of algae farming directly in the facade and partitioning system of the building. This technique allows for real time adaptation of the skin properties; the facade will be an ever changing living system negotiating seasonal weather patterns and interacting with programmatic and socio-economic developments.

between Aggression and Elegance

Life Will Kill You is an installation designed by Molly Hunker and Greg Corso for the Revolve Clothing showroom in West Hollywood. To stand in contrast to the high-fashion clothing of the boutique, an everyday industrial material – the zip tie – is aggregated to create a floating volume that nestles below an existing soffit. The design is intended to explore the edge between aggression and elegance through material sensibility, overall form, and visual effect.

The cloud-like volume is created by a double-sided surface composed of over 100,000 zip ties. The exterior surface of the volume is an aggregation of longer, wider white zip ties while the interior is comprised of shorter and finer colored zip ties. The resulting bulging form offers ever-changing glimpses of blurred yet vivid color combinations as the zip ties layer on top of one another in the predominantly black and white store interior.