Hasta La Ideas

World Architecture Festival 2012: Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI National Museum of the XXI Century Arts is the focus of our next movie about the World Architecture Festival, as programme director Paul Finch explains why the jury unanimously voted for it to win the festival’s World Building of the Year award in 2010.

The museum was one of the first prominent buildings in Rome to be designed by a female architect and the jury were impressed with how its plan flowed into the existing fabric of the city, as well as the strength of the competition-winning design that required few changes during construction.

MAXXI was also the winner of the RIBA Stirling Prize for the greatest contribution to British architecture in 2010, although its future currently hangs in the balance after its funding was severely cut by the Italian government last month.

This year’s World Architecture Festival will take place in Singapore from 3-5 October and will be the event’s fifth year.

Dezeen is media partner for World Architecture Festival 2012 and readers can save 25% on the early rate cost of entering the WAF awards. Simply enter MPVOUCH25 in the VIP code box when registering to enter online (see voucher above for more details).

Here’s some info about WAF:

World Architecture Festival is the world’s largest live architecture festival and awards programme.

Now in its fifth year, the World Architecture Festival has attracted over 8000 attendees to date. 2012 is a landmark year for the Festival, heralding our relocation to the Asian gateway and design hub, Singapore. WAF’s move brings with it unparalleled opportunities for east to meet west and for you to obtain inspiration, develop your global network and plan new exciting projects.

In 2011 over 400 architects from across the globe were shortlisted and battled for a WAF award. The festival saw over 30 international practices become winners of a revered WAF yellow W trophy.

To be at the centre of all WAF has to offer, and that includes global PR, doors opening, new connections and a celebration of your fervour for the power of life changing architecture, you need to enter the projects that you want to shout to the world about. You have less than six weeks to enter, so start yours today.

The World Architecture Festival Awards offers you multiple opportunities to showcase your best work and most exciting ideas to the world, including the most influential names in the design and development community. All you have to do is decide which projects will be representing your practice at the world’s largest, live architectural awards programme and festival.

There are 30 categories to choose from and projects can be completed buildings, future projects, landscape projects, masterplans or interiors. You can enter a project into more than one category (which will of course increase your chances of walking away with that rather handsome WAF award).

With 35 awards and prizes covering 100+ different building types, World Architecture Festival is your opportunity to promote your latest completed building, interior, landscape or masterplan globally.

How to enter the WAF Awards:

Entering the World Architecture Festival awards is easy. All entries must be submitted through our website www.worldarchitecturefestival.com

Just follow these simple steps:

»Open your WAF account or if you have entered WAF previously just log onto your existing account – log in here.
»Choose the section and category that you want to enter – remember you can enter a project into more than one category.
»Tell us what project you are entering
»Pay for your entry
»Create your online entry by adding images for the project, your details, a description and any professional credits – all entries must be completed by 30th June 2012.

TOKEN‘s founder’s Emrys Berkower and Will Kavesh have a massive workshop on the ground floor of an old factory on the water in Red Hook, Brooklyn where they’re set up to work with glass, metal and wood. They can draw up plans for a chair, for example, and walk into the next room to build it. In other words, it’s a furniture maker’s dream. A few weeks ago they were nice enough to set some time aside from their busy preparations for ICFF to talk about how they grew their studio, what they’re working on now and what makes a good ‘hangover chair.’ Scroll through all the photos below to see a sneak peek of the new pieces they’ll be exhibiting this weekend.

Origins
After Will and Emrys met at Alfred University in the mid 90s, they moved to New York where Emrys settled into the glass blowing community and Will began building furniture for Rogan. When Will needed some help he’d call up Emrys, and the two worked like this, collaborating on lighting and furniture projects until they decided to strike out on their own. They continue to handle Rogan’s Objects line, but after doing custom design-build jobs, beginning with their first gig converting an NYU classroom, they needed their own space and so they made the move out to a spacious studio in Red Hook.

Even though custom jobs for clients took up most of their time, their goal was always to start their own line of furniture. “After two years of prototyping we finally just said, we’re not going to do it unless we just start making it ourselves and building it,” said Emrys. That was in 2009, when they officially began the TOKENnyc product line.

They still take on design-build jobs because, as Emrys explained, “Those custom projects are challenging and inform your own work because you’re problem solving and coming up with different production or manufacturing systems to build something.”
“It’s like still being in school, in a way,” Will added.

Ethos
Will and Emrys describe their designs as promoting purposeful and considered living. “It’s about living with objects that have a real task in mind,” said Will. “TOKEN would never design a really super fluffy down chair or couch that you want to be inside of when you’re recovering from a hangover – we would never design something like that.”
“Although,” Emrys is quick to add, “there’s a place in the world for that. But that’s not what we want to promote. We would promote something that’s more active and engaged.”

Take, for example, the TOKEN Lounge Chair. “If you sit in that chair it’s definitely a relaxed pose,” said Emrys. “It’s definitely a comfortable chair, but you don’t want to curl up and watch a movie in that chair. You feel a relaxed engagement. You might want to read a book and not fall asleep reading it.” That very purposeful aesthetic is evident in all aspects of their work, right down to the joints, which Will describes using the the industry term “work holding, a structural solution that would be used while making something, but we’ve adopted that vocabulary.”

(more…)

Gloria GoldfinchBritish bird and LEGO enthusiast Thomas Poulsom created a series of gorgeous local birds in LEGO blocks. Pictured here is Gloria Goldfinch, but he’s also done a puffin, a woodpecker, a kingfisher, a robin, and a blue tit. 

Thanks to the LEGO site Cuusoo, amateur designs like this actually have a chance of being made into official LEGO products, if they get 10,000 supporters on the site. Poulsom’s birds still have a very long way to go, but they are very deserving with their lovely simplicity. 

via Make.

At the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland (US) there is a large south facing wall that looks like it might be a piece of abstract public art. Made from 2,352 different samples of stone it is in fact a testing wall where the effects of the weather on building materials are measured…

The wall was built in 1948 in Washington, DC, before being moved to the NIST site in Gaithersburg in 1977. It contains stone from 47 US states and 16 other countries – from varieties of basalt and bluestone, to marble, limestone, sandstone and tuff.

I was led to read up on the NIST Test Wall and its steadfast research into the effects of weathering (as you do) after photographer Thom Atkinson sent over some of his recent pictures of English pavements, or rather of pavement repairs. Perhaps as ordinary a subject matter as you’re likely to find.

But the aged asphalt in his photographs shows the recognisable signs of deterioration and the subsequent fixes made over the years. The use of new materials, usually in a much brighter, blacker hue than that of the existing well-trodden pavement, mean that the flooring takes on that familiar urban scarring, with the cracks, cuts, fill-ins and repairs building up across one another.

Simple as they are, Atkinson’s images record the imperfections of the streets, the marks of things being dug up and replaced; of electrics being tinkered with, water and gas pipes changed. They reveal that something even as robust as the surface of the street is never stable: when they’re not being bashed up by the weather, like that pixellated wall in Maryland, we’re busy taking them apart ourselves.

The series English Pavement Repairs is on Atkinson’s blog at thomatkinson.tumblr.com. His main website is thomatkinson.com.

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The last post in this week’s series written by Christina Crook.

One can conclude that the best way to treat the Internet is like an exacto knife. Take it out of the toolbox, get the job done, then tuck it away for next time.

While for many the Web is a substantive source of inspiration, Karen, Paul, Valerie and Samantha agree that before you approach the keyboard it’s important to have a task in mind.

It’s better to get lost in the making than lost in the web.

Jean Arp wrote: “Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation…tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.”  

Each time we access the Internet we are offered a shot of adrenaline: a like! a share! a purchase! Our egos are bolstered, our nervous energy absorbed.

But ideas come from wide open spaces. Face-to-face conversations, extended hours lost in a project, sketches in our source books, all over deep bowls of espresso and gulps of really good wine.

Cultivating an off-line existence is fundamental to our life-long development as artists.

Look outside. The world has outlived the web. Its this great wide world, and your imagination, whose possibilities are truly endless.

Christina Crook is a magazine writer partial to snail mail, typewriters and traveling on foot. Her articles on culture, technology and religion have appeared in UPPERCASE, Geez and the Literary Review of Canada. This January she stepped off-line for 31 days, chronicling the journey with a type-written letter a day. Her Letters from a Luddite project was featured on CBC’s Spark and is now a book available at Blurb.com.