Steven Holl: Light in the Kiasma Museum

An Excerpt from Steven Holl: The Body in Space where Holl describes the strategy for lighting the interior of the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki Finland; the client explaining her reaction to his watercolours. (One shown below.)

Françoise Bollack's 5 Adaptive Reuse Strategies

In her book Old Buildings, New Forms, Françoise Bollack divides adaptive reuse projects into five categories, and illustrates each with a diagram (from left to right): wraps, weavings, juxtapositions, parasites, and insertions.

Insertion for instance, is exemplified by a 2004 project by FNP Architekten.  A crane dropped a new shell of weather-resistant plywood inside a 200-year-old abandoned pigsty in Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany. The “house within a house” is now used as an occasional showroom and meeting place.

To see examples of the other strategies see the article in ARCHITECT.

Or buy the book.

Image Credits: Monacelli Press

Drawings by Daniel Castor

Castor "created twenty-two drawings of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange that, like x-ray photographs, enable us to look through the building's walls into its inner spaces in a way that one could neither achieve by means of photography nor by viewing the building in person."

The drawings are "magnificently beautiful," the Getty's guide opines. By "gradually peeling away more and more of the exterior wall, like an archaeologist digging through centuries of rubble... Castor shows that the facade is no more than a thin layer around a circulatory space circumscribing the main exchange halls."

From BLDGBLOG.

Sean Griffiths on the American Bar in Vienna by Adolf Loos

"The American Bar is an astonishing interior.

As well as being a very radical piece of early 20th century design, as Europe’s first ever cocktail bar (cocktails are an American invention) it brought a decadent New World experience to an old imperial Europe on the verge of catastrophic dissolution."

More from Sean Griffiths at BD.

Thanks to Níall McLaughlin for mentioning the article.

I-LANDS Installation

I-Lands is an interactive installation that incorporates sound, water, wax, and temperature to explore the chaotic and random individual influences constantly present in climate and landscape formations. Composed and generated by individual visitors that engage with strategically placed 'activators', it is a generator of topographies.  The work acknowledges that individual actions can generate unpredictable processes.

Part of Ines Dantas's *Emospheric Arch-I-pelagos series, it was performed in June 2012 at the Institute for Experimental Architecture, in Innsbruck, Austria.

Pamphlet Architecture 34: Fathoming the Unfathomable

Pamphlet Architecture 34 by architects and educators Perry Kulper and Nat Chard speculates on how architecture might discuss indeterminate conditions of production through a generative agency of representation. Kulper and Chard explore the indeterminacy of architectural research through drawings that exceed traditional drawing space. Located in two different countries, they communicate by shipping each drawing across geographical borders. As a result the drawing acts as a tactical and conversational medium, providing the architects with new opportunities for the confluence of the uncertain.

more at Princeton Architectural Press.

Urs Fischer – You, Gavin Brown’s enterprise (NYC) -2007

"The artist dug a crater on the gallery, removing its concrete level. The architecture of the gallery is altered by cutting, disruption, and destructive transformations. 'You simultaneously attacks and fetishizes the attributes of galleries, the qualities that the critic Brian O’Doherty has described as 'something of the sacredness of churches, the austerity of courtrooms, the mysteriousness of research laboratories, something that, together with stylish designs, makes them unique cultic places of the aesthetic' ', writes Jerry Saltz in the New York Magazine."

from SOCKS.

The work of artist Clay Ketter

"The former carpenter Clay Ketter constructs walls in the space between house-like interiors and modern abstract painting.

Ketter constructs flat sculptures, installations and three-dimensional paintings – or a compound of all three categories. His striking painting-cum-sculpture-cum-installations principally recall interior design. They capture moments in condemnation or rebuilding usually of limited duration but here freeze-framed in art. The walls exist in a permanent limbo between the presence of demolition and the eternity of art." from ARKEN

His earlier works included the Gulf Coast Slabs, a series of overhead photographs taken of structures after the passage of hurricane Katrina in 2006, one of which is shown above.

Thanks to Clay Thompson who spotted Ketter's work via SOCKS.