WOHA 'Breathing Architecture' Lecture: Room 421 Tuesday October 23, 2012

Tatzu Nishi – “Discovering Columbus” In New York City

Interior View of Installation

The new project by Tatzu Nishi, mentioned recently on the blog in this post, is a faux living room around the iconic statue of Christopher Columbus that is situated in the middle of Columbus Circle in Manhattan.

Exterior View of Installation

View of Columbus Circle without installation

Japanese Architect Kumiko Inui on Sketching

Nendo Mimicry Chairs, London Design Festival 2012

This year as part of London Design Festival’s Landmark Projects Japanese design studioNendo have installed Mimicry Chairs, a series of sporadically placed chairs, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Rising stars of Japanese design, Nendo have already exhibited in Madrid, Milan, Paris, Tokyo and New York. 

More about Nendo here.

Maya Lin Lecture at the Tate Modern: Monday 15 October 2012

American Artist Lecture Series: Maya Lin

Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium

Monday 15 October 2012, 18.30 – 20.00

student tickets £9

Maya Lin
2 x 4 Landscape 2006

© The artist Photo: Colleen Chartier

Maya Lin has maintained a careful balance between art and architecture throughout her career, creating a remarkable body of work that encompasses large-scale site specific installations, intimate studio artworks, architectural works and memorials. She draws inspiration from the landscape, interpreting the world through a twenty-first century lens, merging rational order with notions of beauty and the transcendental. Her work asks the viewer to reconsider nature and the environment at a time when it is crucial to do so.

More info and booking here.

Cassia Coop Training Centre by TYIN Tegnestue Architects

Located in Sungai Penuh, Kerinchi, Sumatra, Indonesia, the main idea behind the project is the classic consept of a light wooden construction on a base of heavy brick and concrete. The wooden construction gives a feeling of being within a cinnamon forest. Cassia Coop Training Centre is built around a pair of mighty durian trees, with a scenic view of the beautiful Kerinci-lake in the front and with its back towards lush cinnamon forest. A major challenge has been to create a naturally ventilated climate beneath a roof surface of no less than 600 square meters. Knowledge and experience gained in former projects have greatly aided us in achieving this, through the use of thermal mass, reduction of sunrays and maximized eaves.

from archdaily.

VOLA 2012 Exhibition

The Westminster/VOLA 2012 Exhibition is on at the VOLA showroom at 32-36 Great Portland Street London until October 19th 2012.  The Exhibition shows work from all of the 2012 VOLA Prize Nominees from Interior Architecture BA Honours Course.

Thanks to the installation team including recent graduates Charlie Fish, Rasa Povilanskiate, Nura Idris, Harpreet Lota, Ksenija Zizina, as well as current students Abdi Ali, Nadja Jeppson, Abdul Haji Dheere, and Sonia Chahal.

Thanks to recent graduate Olivia Dunin for the photographs of the private view, above.

Philip Beesley's Hylozoic Series

Hylozoic Ground, by Philip Beesley

This work is a growing, touring artwork that suggests a new kind of responsive architecture.
It can now be found at the Sydney Biennale (september 2012).

The Hylozoic environment can be described as a suspended geotextile that gradually accumulates hybrid soil from ingredients drawn from its surroundings. Akin to the functions of a living system, embedded machine intelligence allows human interaction to trigger breathing, caressing, and swallowing motions and hybrid metabolic exchanges. These empathic motions ripple out from hives of kinetic valves and pores in peristaltic waves, creating a diffuse pumping that pulls air, moisture and stray organic matter through the filtering Hylozoic membranes. 'Living' chemical exchanges are conceived as the first stages of self-renewing functions that might take root within this architecture.

(Excerpt from the press release for his installation at the Canadian Pavilion at Architecture Biennale Venice 2010 ).

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v86B9Nz_LVU
for an excellent explanation of its layers by its designer, Philip Beesley.

walk-on ceramic installation by nathan craven

Sculptor nathan craven has created a series of ceramic artwork entitled 'footing'. the interactive artwork
is built from a vast collection of uniquely-shaped ceramic components which have been placed upon the floor to form each multifaceted unit. Craven both hand-forms, glazes and paints each uniquely shaped ceramic brick featuring in 'footing'. the various components join together in a mat-like structure, awaiting the closer inspection by the gallery goer achieved by stepping atop the bright surface to better examine each unequal unit.

from designboom.

BLDBLOG

A plug for BLDBLOG


Researching Smout Allen's work for the British entry to the Venice Biennale 2012,
I went to this blog:

http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/landscapemp3-interview-with-smout-allen.html.

AA has already made a link to it from here. 
It's a seemingly inexhaustible resource: try it!

Ofunato Civic Center and Library by Chiaki Arai Urban and Architecture Design

Located in Ofunato, a town on the distinctive Sanriku Kaigan coastline of Iwate prefecture in northeastern Japan, Ofunato Civic Center and Library is a cultural building complex.

A few of the designer's sketches for the project are shown above; more can be found at archdaily.

Tokyo-Berlin_Berlin-Tokyo by Florian Busch Architects

Tokyo-Berlin/Berlin-Tokyo was an exhibition showing the 150-year-long history of mutual exchange in painting, architecture, graphic, photography, film, video, and performance. The exhibition comprised over 530 works showing how movements of influencing each other shifted between these two cities and culminated in the upper hall of the New National Gallery with the works of living artists from Tokyo and Berlin.

Finished in 1968, the New National Gallery is Mies van der Rohe’s last and arguably most modernist work. Rather than building walls following or working against this grid,  Florian Busch Architects proposed an exhibition design which would not be a top-down implant but translate Mies’s Cartesian grid into an undulating layer, gradually evolving in response to negotiations between the artists, the curators, and the designers.

more at archdaily.