Monthly Archive for June, 2010

The London Festival of Architecture will be a city-wide celebration of architecture in the capital. As London gears up for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games we look at ways that planners, architects and local communities play their part in the development of ‘The Welcoming City’. For more…

From Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow at The Boston Globe…

Buildings, in many ways, represent the opposite of nature. From a modest suburban house to the most majestic skyscraper, a building signals the presence of people in a place, differentiating human spaces from their surroundings. The built environment consists of organized, inert structures that contrast with the wildness, vitality, and constant change of the natural world.

Buildings clash with nature in another sense, too — constructing and occupying them takes a substantial toll on the environment. In the United States, the construction industry is responsible for much of the waste that ends up in landfills. The use of buildings — consider the lights, the elevators, the air conditioning — accounts for a healthy fraction of the country’s electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.

In recent years, lower impact “green buildings” have crept up in popularity. But a new movement believes that these measures have not gone nearly far enough — that even today’s ecoconscious apartments and offices produce waste and greenhouse gases, while merely scaling back the damage. What we need to do, according to the architects and scientists driving this movement, is fundamentally rethink the concept of a building. More…

From Dezeen…

Michigan designer Andrew Kline has designed a compact unit for transforming disused industrial spaces into temporary homes. Called Interior Living Unit, the project comprises a kitchen, bathroom, bed and storage that all fold away into a cubic red box. When folded away the surrounding room could be used as a work space or for public functions. The cube breaks down into nine pieces for easy transportation to a new space.

The Interior Living Unit is composed of 9 pieces, sized to fit through standard doorways and be combined in the space within. Centralizing the program requirements of a home, The Unit allows the surround space to be used for other purposes, such as workspace. The Unit folds (closed) and unfolds (open) to reveal different functions when needed: a wardrobe, bed, kitchen, and bathroom. When the Unit is folded the private program requirements of a home are removed and the surrounding space can be transformed for public uses. For example: a yoga instructor could live in the same space in which he or she teaches. These Units, utilized in vacant buildings, can build communities in hollow urban areas of post industrial cities, such as Detroit. More…

From Dezeen…

The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which preserves and maintains Fallingwater, will build the cottages on the grounds of the 5,000-acre Bear Run Nature Reserve that surrounds Fallingwater, some distance from the house itself. The design competition is the first that Fallingwater has sponsored for construction of new buildings on-site.

The new cottages will serve an important outreach goal by expanding lodging capacity for participants in Fallingwater Institute’s diverse educational programs. These unique, immersive educational offerings are tailored to broad age levels and interests – and to people from the Western Pennsylvania region and beyond.

“When Edgar Kaufmann, jr. entrusted Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, he envisioned education as a critical component of Fallingwater’s new role as a public resource. More…