Monthly Archive for December, 2010

Harvest City: Floating Islands to Bring Agriculture and Industry to Haiti

Published on December 30, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Yuka Yoneda at inhabitat…

It’s been almost a year now since Haiti was ravaged by a horrific earthquake, and while its citizens are still picking up the pieces, the good news is that there is no shortage of creative ideas about how to rebuild an even better, more sustainable infrastructure for the country. One of these ideas comes from architect E. Kevin Schopfer and Tangram 3DS, who envision the new Haiti to have a floating city on which people could produce food and promote industry. Called Harvest City, the collection of islands would be a fully functioning community of 30,000 residents based on the principle of Arcology (a mix of architecture and ecology), and could be a key player in Haiti’s recovery. More…

Home to Tea House Transformation

Published on December 22, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Dwell…

A theater is crafted to quite literally hold center stage. From its grand proscenium that frames the performance platform to its scale that signifies its monumentality, a classic theater clearly states its streetscape presence. When Waechter (who designed the Z-Haus, a sustainably designed duplex in Portland, Oregon, featured in our September 2010 issue) was tasked with transforming an existing single-family home into a sales space for J-Tea International, the biggest challenge was that the building was not big at all.

The first of three trasformations, as Waechter calls them, was adding a canopy. Having been used as a home, despite its location in a commercially zoned area, the house shrunk back from the street. The new canopy does just the opposite: “It engages pedestrian and vehicular traffic,” Waechter says. And as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown showed us in Learning from Las Vegas, if you want to be noticed at 35 miles an hour, you need to be a duck, a decorated shed. In the case of J-Tea, the white, powder-coated, aluminum louvers create a hanging cloud floating over the entrance. More…

A Garden In Shigar

Published on December 10, 2010 in News. 1 Comment

A Garden in Shigar from Mahera Omar on Vimeo.

Heygate Abstracted by Simon Kennedy

Published on December 6, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Dezeen…

The Heygate Estate in South London was completed in 1974. The estate now stands empty and awaiting demolition.

Simon Kennedy’s photographs of the Heygate Estate prompt us to contemplate not the failure of modernism, but the failure of the failure of modernism, and the possibilities for reclaiming a mode of utopian urban thinking. In doing so they provide a visual elaboration of a prominent theme in contemporary architectural debate.

At a time of acute shortage of affordable housing, the photographs make us question the validity of the decision by Southwark Council to demolish these buildings—are they essentially and irretrievably a failure?

In their guide to the architecture of south London Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner struggle to make sense of the estate, built between 1968 and 1974. Clearly impressed by the visual impact of its slabs and the gargantuan social ambition of the London Borough of Southwark Architects’ scheme, they also categorise the Heygate as one of ‘the most notorious products of industrialised building’. More…