Hasta La Ideas

Architect Filipe Balestra of Urban Nouveau has sent us his proposal for a series of towers built in the swamps surrounding Mumbai, sketched out on a napkin.

Balestra’s idea is to allow expansion of the city without displacing the rubbish dump, recycling centre and homes at the city’s centre.

Urban Nouveau previously developed a proposal for sensitively revitalising slums, which was featured in the Dezeen Book of Ideas – on sale now for just £12.

Here’s some text about the concept from Urban Nouveau:

Bombay – maximum city, surrounded by water – is just in time to pick up an evolutionary strategy for the benefit of all. Dharavi – in the heart of Bombay – is one of the world’s largest urban villages. It contains the city’s garbage recycling centre and is the home of the cleaners, the taxi drivers and the people without whom the current urban processes are unfeasible.

What if, instead of moving the people of Dharavi to the outskirts of the city and using that land to build new housing, offices and leisure… all the necessary program would be built inside towers which rise from the shallow swamps that surround the city, branding Bombay with a new perspective: from the water. Existing Bombay remains as it is, and is incremented naturally. Pressure withdraws from the city centre. Dharavi stays.

Boats and bridges connect the shore with the new islands. The islands are easy to build because the water level is low. The respect for local flora and fauna is the starting point of this environmental and socially sustainable process.

Urban Nouveau is an interdisciplinary platform which supports an open network of human beings solving problems of everyday life. Urban Nouveau declares itself elastic to bridge formal-informal, legal-illegal, city-countryside in order to achieve appropriate balance in every challenge. Combining improvisation and intuition with research and expertise while performing on local and global issues, Urban Nouveau thrives on collective evolution.

I’m digging the Dual Cut chair/ottoman combo designed by Kitmen Keung. Global citizen Keung, who’s lived in Hong Kong, Canada and Italy, designed the piece for Belgian manufacturer Sixinch.

Splitting a raw rectangular foam block with only two L-shaped cut lines, Dual Cut is a transformable furniture piece that employs the simplest production processes true to the materials in use with minimal wastage. It features two ergonomically comfortable seat back angle options of 6° and 23°, and the multi-formation ability to form a one seater with a side table, a chaise lounge or a corner table. It also easily forms a neat, compact parcel for convenient storage and transportation.

(more…)

BYB is a Brooklyn based company that designs pillows featuring original photography of buildings, including apartment buildings and businesses. The id..

When architect Santiago Calatrava announced that he was walking away from the project to massively redevelop Denver’s airport, and after information was slowly let out about how the collaboration fell apart, we were expecting the fight to get a bit ugly (and therefore, fun to write about) over who exactly owned the rights to Calatrava’s original plans, which the city intended to move forward on, with or without him. Instead, the whole issue has been solved fairly cleanly and quietly. The Denver Post reports that the city will pay Calatrava’s final invoices (coming in at over half a million dollars) and pay a $250,000 licensing fee to keep using his plans. Not a bad payout at all for the architect, whose firm, the paper approximates, has earned just shy of $14 million from working on the project over the past two years. However, as seemingly amicable as this official split is, the city isn’t going to walk away with everything the famous architect had originally envisioned:

Designs that the agreement deems as proprietary to Calatrava and off-limits to DIA include some white architectural elements on the upper exterior of the hotel and some Calatrava-designed columns,” [DIA manager Kim Day] said.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Share this:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Email