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Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron give each other lie detector tests. Which Canadian does Seth think is nicer, Ryan Reynolds or Ryan Gosling? Is Seth upset he’s never been a cast member on SNL? Did his mom drive him to his first standup show? Have they smoked weed together? Is Charlize a vampire? Where does she keep her Oscar? Does Charlize think Seth would be a good Oscar host? Find out all that and more in this video…(Read…)

Why Berlin’s 15 Year-Old Airport has Never Had a Flight..(Read…)

Red bricks and corrugated metal form this dormitory at a school in an Andean village, which was designed and built by Berlin architecture students and German architect Ralf Pasel.

The Bella Vista Boarding School is located in a village near the town of Cochabamba, which sits in a valley ringed by the Andes Mountains. Ralf Pasel, cofounder of German studio Pasel Kuenzel Architects, designed the project with 40 students from the Institute of Architecture at Technical University Berlin.

The 270-square-metre boarding house is part of the growing Bella Vista Agronomy Campus, which aims to offer “a perspective to juveniles from extremely poor families in Bolivia that goes beyond the common subsistence level of agriculture”.

The campus opened in 2015 with the completion of an educational building, also designed by Pasel and a group of students. The new boarding facility provides housing and other amenities for pupils and faculty.

“The new boarding school constitutes the programmatic extension of the agricultural zone and sets up a broadly and large-scale agronomy campus,” the team said.

The building takes cues from the academic building, which consists of a trio of large, brick-clad volumes with shed roofs. The boarding house is largely rectangular in plan, with an enclosed patio jutting off to one side. Together, the school and boarding house form an L-shaped plan.

The boarding house walls are composed of reddish bricks that were made by hand using local clay. A double-shed roof wrapped in corrugated steel sits atop the building. In one area, the team incorporated bamboo screens to provide shade and privacy.

The building contains a student dormitory, a room for a lecturer, a kitchen, a multipurpose room for dining and study, and several individual bathrooms. Interior spaces feature concrete flooring, exposed timber beams and tall glass doors that pivot open and close.

In addition to the patio, an additional terrace runs along the back side of the building. Both outdoor spaces provide “spaces for encounter and rest” – one of the design team’s main goals.

The project is part of the Technical University Berlin’s construction and design programme, called CODE. The programme seeks to “develop local solutions against poverty, as well as finding solutions to global issues such as increasing urbanisation and rural depopulation”.

The Bella Vista Boarding School project was undertaken in cooperation with several stakeholders and the nonprofit group Fundación Cristo Vive Bolivia, which works to alleviate poverty in Latin America.

Design-build projects have long been a part of a student’s architectural education. In recent years, many have place a strong emphasis on serving those in need. These projects include an affordable duplex for low-income tenants that was designed by Kansas students, and a community library in an Alabama town that was created by students in the Rural Studio programme.

Photography is by Cristóbal Palma.

The post Ralf Pasel and students use handmade bricks for boarding house at Bolivia school appeared first on Dezeen.

Match Art to Artist..(Read…)

As VR and AR rapidly become more commonly integrated into the design process, design schools are beginning to see the need for adjusting to the rising desire of mixed reality experiences in the real world. In an effort to accommodate this new need, many schools are creating programs and dedicated spaces for students to explore these growing and ever-evolving mediums.

All images via SCAD

One such school is SCAD, who recently unveiled The Shed on their Savannah, GA campus, which now serves as the home of their new program in immersive reality. The massive building houses around 20 classrooms, including fully equipped VR/AR rooms as well as additional workspaces for various design programs such as industrial design, service design, user experience design and creative business leadership.

Some of the more specialized spaces the building has to offer include two studio labs for robotics and prototyping electronics, a special project shop for 3-D model making, two computer labs for virtual and augmented reality, and a user-testing lab with double-sided mirrors for studying user behavior. When visiting The Shed in person, we were particularly impressed to learn that the scale of the main studio lab is able to accommodate some pretty large prototypes, including full scale motorcycles.

The Shed was recently reopened for student use, but in true SCAD fashion, it isn’t an entirely new building. Since SCAD was founded 40 years ago, the university has preserved and revitalized more than 100 buildings, including (but not limited to) a British magistracy building in Hong Kong, decommissioned public school buildings in Savannah and medieval ruins in Lacoste. The finished buildings preserved by SCAD, mostly located in Savannah, are turned into academic buildings for the school, ranging from classrooms to museums.

SCAD’s The Shed is a think tank where many forms of design and STEM collide, promoting collaboration across a wide variety of majors and projects. “Our legacy and expertise in preservation design and adaptive reuse allows SCAD to support the continued growth of our preeminent academic programs, namely our digital programs, and our highest enrollment yet,” says a representative from SCAD. It will be interesting to see how schools continue to adapt to the growing demand for immersive reality in education and out in the real world, but right now, SCAD’s The Shed is a promising start.