News: a complex of Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg designed by Hitler’s favourite architect will undergo repairs costing €70 million (£60 million) to prevent the crumbling structures endangering tourists.
Around 200,000 visitors flock to the site in Nuremberg, southern Germany, each year but the monuments, designed by Nazi architect Albert Speer to last as long as Roman structures, have been gradually deteriorating since the end of the Second World War and are in danger of collapsing.
Nuremberg mayor Ulrich Maly told German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung that the only other available choices are to fence off the grounds, which would “certainly not be an appealing story for the city”, or to renovate the site and prevent future accidents.
Some parts have previously been demolished, but Maly says this is no longer an option as the site is now listed as a historically significant memorial.
“It’s not about prettying up the city” he said. “We won’t be searching for true to original sandstone.”
The six-square-mile site featured as a backdrop for Nazi propaganda movie Triumph of the Will and includes 24 towers and a “Zeppelin Tribune”. It was used to host six Nazi party rallies between 1933 and 1938.
The first section of repairs are set to include a structural examination of the Zeppelin Tribune, including the mosaic-lined “Golden Hall” that the Fuehrer used for private audiences. It is understood that graffiti left on the walls by Allied soldiers after the war will be left intact.
Speer designed the buildings of the Reich to outlast the regime and used materials like granite and marble instead of steel and concrete in the hope that they would prove as enduring as classical monuments. In his “Theory of Ruin Value”, Speer wrote: “By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models.”
Movie: Designer Konstantin Grcic tells Dezeen that American furniture company Emeco had to industrialise its production methods to produce his new Parrish chair in this video interview filmed in Milan.
Parrish chairs and tables at the Parrish Art Museum
In the movie, Grcic explains that he approached Emeco to produce the chair because of its experience of working in aluminium, most famously with the iconic Navy Chair, which Emeco has produced since 1944.
Emeco’s Navy Chair
“I felt we needed a company to support the development of the project,” says Grcic.
“Emeco stands for chairs in aluminium and aluminium was the perfect material for the chair that we had in mind because the [Parrish Art Museum] is very open [to the elements].”
Parrish chairs at the Parrish Art Museum
Unlike the Navy Chair, in which each piece is welded together by hand, the legs, armrests and backrest of the Parrish chair are all locked together by a single joint under the seat.
“Everything is mechanically joined to a central core, a piece of die-cast aluminium, which is really the heart of the chair,” Grcic explains.
“So we have one moulded piece that solves all of the structure of the chair and the seat is exchangeable. You can have an upholstered seat, a plastic seat or a wooden seat.”
Grcic says that he deliberately wanted to move Emeco away from the time-intensive production methods involved in producing the Navy Chair.
“I felt we should actually change the way [Emeco] makes chairs,” he says. “Industrialise it, simplify it, eliminate all the dirty work, all the hand labour. That’s what really informed the concept of the chair.”
He concludes: “Emeco will always produce the Navy Chair in the way they produce it, but I think now we’ve established another form of production inside their company.”
News: Rafael Viñoly’s Walkie Talkie skyscraper in London is reflecting a beam of light intense enough to melt cars, according to a series of recent reports.
Claims surfaced over the weekend that the glare from the curvaceous glass facade of the 37-storey tower – currently under construction at 20 Fenchurch Street – have caused vehicle paintwork to melt and bodywork to distort.
Engineer Eddie Cannon, who parked his Vauxhall Vevaro beneath the building, told local newspaper City AM: “The van looks a total mess – every bit of plastic on the left hand side and everything on the dashboard has melted, including a bottle of Lucozade that looks like it has been baked.”
Tiling company director Martin Lindsay suffered a similar fate, claiming that the panels surrounding his Jaguar XJ had been warped. Attacking property developer Land Securities, he said: “They’re going to have to think of something. I’m gutted. How can they let this continue?”
Land Securities has acknowledged the claims and is promising to look into the matter. “As a precautionary measure, the City of London has agreed to suspend three parking bays in the area which may be affected while we investigate the situation further,” said a spokesperson.
The skyscraper, nicknamed the Walkie Talkie due to its distinctive profile, is set to be the first London building completed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly, who is based in New York. This recent controversy has prompted critics to rebrand the building “Walkie Scorchie”.
The skyscraper is scheduled to complete in 2014 and will feature an elevated garden and observation deck that will be open to the public.
Here’s a movie we filmed with designer Daan Roosegaarde about his concepts for glow-in-the-dark roads and responsive street lamps to make highways safer, one of five projects honoured at last week’s INDEX: Award.
The concepts proposed by his studio to make road infrastructure safer and more energy efficient include photo-luminescent paint to mark out traffic lanes, temperature-responsive road paint to warn drivers of icy conditions and interactive street lamps that come on as vehicles approach then dim as they pass. Find out more about the project in our previous story.
Announced at a ceremony in Denmark last Thursday, the INDEX: Awards are presented annually to projects that address world challenges.
The Smart Highway project was one of two recipients in the community category, along with a climate adaptation plan for Copenhagen.
Other winners across the four other categories include spice-infused paper to keep fruits and vegetables ripe, a tiny computer to teach young people about computer programming and a birth simulation learning kit in a ruck sack. Read more about this year’s winners here.
Dutch office UNStudio has developed a concept for a giant Ferris wheel in Japan that could rival the London Eye and the Singapore Flyer.
Proposed for an as-yet undisclosed location, UNStudio’s Nippon Moon will combine the familiar design of an observation wheel with a network of virtual interfaces that will allow visitors to create their own augmented realities.
Each of the wheel’s 32 capsules will offer a different theme. After downloading a dedicated app for smartphones and tablets, users will be able to introduce animations and sounds that enhance this theme, or initiate virtual realities within the glazed outer walls.
Studio founder Ben van Berkel told Dezeen: “The technology and engineering involved in observation wheels will always at first sight appear similar, however for the Nippon Moon we have not only introduced double-decker capsules for the first time, but have also concentrated on providing heightened engagement levels and a novel user-experience.”
Other functions of the app will include a queuing system, removing the need for visitors to wait in line before boarding, and a communications network that will permit interaction between different capsules. Visitors will also be able to share their images of the experience using a digital “hall of fame”.
“The latest technology is incorporated in the capsules to create integrated augmented reality that creates new levels of engagement – both in terms of the surrounding views and through communication and interaction between users,” said Van Berkel. “Through this, the Nippon Moon becomes not just an observation platform, but a platform for heightened observation and the stimulation of the imagination.”
UNStudio are working alongside user-experience designers Experientia to develop the interactive aspects of the project, while engineers Arup and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries are collaborating on the technical specifications.
Since the completion of the London Eye in 2000, observation wheels have been proposed for various cities around the world. The Singapore Flyer became the tallest in 2008, taking over from the Star of Nanchang in China, while others are proposed for New York, Dubai and Las Vegas.
In 2012 UNStudio was invited by Ferris Wheel Investment to formulate a vision for the design of a Giant Observation Wheel in Japan. Due to the popularity of Ferris Wheels in Japanese culture and a potential flow of millions of tourists from South-East Asia, the project was required to have an international impact and differ substantially from all existing wheels of its kind.
Structural constraints defined by Arup and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries – two of the world’s most specialised wheel engineers – left little room for manoeuvre due to the location and the size of the GOW. The challenge for UNStudio however was to find a typical language for the architectural design which would characterise the overall idea behind the function of the Observation Wheel. Essential to this approach was the creation of a coherent design strategy which could capture the full scope of the user-experience offered by the Observation Wheel. In order to individually suit this experience to the visitors, UNStudio partnered with Experientia to research how behaviour could influence user-experience.
UNStudio’s ‘Nippon Moon’ is a new cultural blockbuster in the broadest sense. It has been designed to create a journey in which learning about the environment, culture and one’s individual part in this is central. Four key elements define the logics of the socio-architectural design; enhancement of the senses, interactivity, experience and romanticism. Through the integration of interactive design elements it was possible to extend the design far beyond both the moment you physically become part of the wheel and long after you disembark. In order to achieve this, a virtual world was created in which the visitor becomes part of the social network which revolves around the GOW. Discovery, the Ride and the Return are three chapters of the design which contribute to attracting visitors and to the stimulation of the imagination.
The journey begins with the optional online purchase of tickets and the downloading of the Nippon Moon app. Visitors can not only chose the time of their ride, but can also choose the theme of their experience, as each of the single and double-decker capsules on the wheel focus on a different theme. Upon entering the visitor centre guests are greeted by the ‘Hall of Fame’, a dynamic installation of digital photographs taken by visitors during their ride. These photographs can be uploaded instantly to the Hall of Fame during the ride and discovered on display in the installation upon leaving. From the ticket pick-up point and cloakroom facilities on the ground floor, the visitor follows a circular ramp, along which retail, food & beverage and exhibition pockets are anchored. Due to a system of ‘Active Queuing’ which notifies the visitor of the time remaining until boarding, standing in line for extended periods of time is eradicated, leaving the visitor free to make use of all the facilities until it is their time to board their pre-selected capsule.
The Nippon moon app is designed as a strategy for a user-experience interface that can be installed on smartphones and tablets. During the ride, this accessible software makes it possible to communicate with people in the other capsules, who are otherwise physically and visually separated from you and whose capsule follows a different theme to your own. In addition the possibility to enhance the senses through the incorporation of augmented animations or sounds helps to focus the experience of the visitor. The app also allows the visitor to switch from reality to digitally altered views from the capsules, which are created through augmented reality techniques in the transparent skin of the capsules.
Interactivity is used to develop a greater sense and understanding of the surrounding reality and results in an active rather than a passive visitor. The experience mediates between the real and the virtual, bringing about a significantly different moment in time and creating a memory or ‘after image’.
Upon leaving the wheel, the visitor follows a second circular ramp with further facility pockets, eventually returning to the cloakroom area on the ground floor.
Romanticism is an integral part of the vision to ensure that the design and engineering of the wheel can become embedded in history as a new development in engineering and an integral part of modern Japanese culture. The concept of the observation wheel itself is not new, however the idea to merge the robustly designed and engineered physical wheel with a fully integrated virtual world creates the unique character of the Nippon Moon GOW.
Client: Ferris wheel Investment Co.,Ltd Location: Japan Building surface: Terminal and platform 7.200 m2 Building volume: Terminal and platform 90.000 m3 Capsules: 32 Building site: 18.000 m2 Programme: Giant Observation Wheel Status: design
UNStudio: Ben van Berkel, Gerard Loozekoot with Frans van Vuure, Filippo Lodi and Harlen Miller, Jan Kokol, Wendy van der Knijff, Todd Ebeltoft, Tina Kortmann, Patrik Noome, Jeroen den Hertog, Iain Jamieson
Engineer: Arup Tokyo + Melbourne Interactive design: Experientia, Italy Animation: Submarine, Amsterdam Visualisation: MIR
This brick courtyard house by Auckland studio Glamuzina Paterson Architects sits at the foot of a mountain in New Zealand’s Otago region (+ slideshow).
Lake Hawea Courtyard House was designed by Glamuzina Paterson Architects as a rural home for a retired couple, who requested a building that “sits on the ground with weight and permanence”.
Photograph by Patrick Reynolds
Occupying a square plot, the single-storey house has an L-shaped plan that folds around the north and east sides of a secluded central courtyard, allowing morning and afternoon sunlight to penetrate the interior spaces.
Photograph by Patrick Reynolds
The walls are constructed from uneven bricks, giving a bumpy texture to the outer surfaces, and large recesses are infilled with a mixture of timber panels and glazing.
“The house is an enquiry into where a site begins and ends,” said the architects. “The use of rusticated bricks creates a material relationship with the site and anchors it firmly to the ground, along with a textural palette that allows for a constantly shifting interpretation of scale.”
Alongside the usual living, dining and bedroom spaces, the architects added a music room and a quiet room, designed to accommodate the residents’ various hobbies.
Entrances to the house lead in through the courtyard, plus a garage in the site’s south-west corner offers parking spaces for a pair of cars.
Photography is by Samuel Hartnett, apart from where otherwise stated.
Read on for a description from Glamuzina Paterson Architects:
The Lake Hawea Courtyard House
The Lake Hawea Courtyard House is grounded in rural land at the foot of Mount Maude in the Otago region. The house is an enquiry into where a site begins and ends – how to define the edges of the project and the way that landscape may be inhabited.
Firmly dug into the earth, its low form and simple square plan recalls the modest language of early settler buildings in the region that utilise low slung, stone construction to deal with the extreme environment.
This idea of a singular form clad with simple materials, drove the exploration into the material and formal qualities of the house.
In their written brief the clients requested “a building not built on a domestic scale, that might have been part of a bigger building that sits on the ground with weight and permanence”.
Photograph by Patrick Reynolds
The couple planned to retire to the house so spaces were described by unusual titles, such as the quiet room and the music room that represented their respective hobbies.
The brick amour of the Courtyard facade wraps the house and large central courtyard, framing views to the lofty mountains and low plains.
Living, dining and sleeping spaces occupy the northern and eastern edges, favouring the predominant direction of the sun, while niches and overhangs in the building envelope protect it from the hot, dry summers and harsh winters.
The courtyard bunkered in the landscape responds to the immediate context within which it is placed and allows the building to address continuous enclosure and protection from the prevailing north-east wind. The use of rusticated bricks creates a material relationship with the site, and anchors it firmly to the ground, along with a textural palette that allows for a constantly shifting interpretation of scale. The strategies of shifting roof planes and concrete floor plates enables the house to articulate the relationship of form to land, this in turn is mediated by a plinth that is expressed as a low recessed wall wrapping around the building connecting the mass to the ground and acting as an organisational tool for apertures.
As Ted McCoy once commented: “The good thing about isolation [is that] one had to learn for oneself, by looking at surroundings.” The courtyard house reflects these values.
Product news: these lamps by Joost van Bleiswijk with stands that looks to be built from a child’s construction toy will be launched by Dutch design brand Moooi this week.
Construction Lamp was created by Dutch designer Joost van Bleiswijk for Moooi, based on vintage building toys.
The four-sided stand tapers upward towards the light source like a telegraph pylon.
Each round joint is exaggerated, fixed with large prominent screws.
All elements are the same tone on the black version, except the screws and the inside of the cylindrical shade that are both coloured gold.
On the white model, the corner legs match the shade while wood is used for the horizontal and diagonal bracing.
Two sizes are available, the first is a floor lamp while the second is small enough to also be raised on a table.
This bright white house in Toyokawa, Japan, was designed by architects Studio Velocity with a squashed diamond shape to maximise space without overlooking the neighbours (+ slideshow).
Named Forest House in the City, the residence appears to have been stretched across its rectangular site in a way that allows space for small gardens filled with trees beside each wall.
“The site is abutted on three sides by houses, all with windows facing the site,” said Studio Velocity architect Miho Iwatsuki. “Responding to this, we created a forest-like outdoor space that radiates from the site’s four corners like ripples on a pond.”
The architect also compares the curving shape of the house to the organic growth of trees: “Plants make decisions about where to unfurl leaves and extend branches according to the presence and position of plants and other objects in their environment,” he said. “We were interested in designing architecture that exhibits a similar quality.”
A hair salon occupies the ground floor of the two-storey building. A simple spiral staircase winds up to the level above, where the rooms of an open-plan family home are arranged around the perimeter of a central bathroom.
Two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen form the four corners of the floor and feature sharply pointing windows. There’s also a circular balony that sticks out over the west-facing garden.
Creating architecture shaped by the environment plants
Plants make decisions about where to unfurl leaves and extend branches according to the presence and position of plants and other objects in their environment. We were interested in designing architecture that exhibits a similar quality.
Section one
In this project, we carefully investigated the site and its surroundings, allowing these to shape our building. The site is abutted on three sides by houses, all with windows facing the site. Responding to this, we created a forest-like outdoor space that radiates from site’s four corners like ripples on a pond.
Section two
The diamond-shaped space remaining at the centre of the site became the house’s interior. Viewed from the street and neighbouring buildings, the house and its outdoor space – both derived from relationships within the site – resemble a forest, suggesting a new architectural ideal.
Section three
Location: Toyokawa-city, Aichi Principal use: private residence, shop Site area: 245.30 sqm Building area: 72.00 sqm Total floor area: 137.80 sqm Structure: steel frame Number of storeys: 2 storeys
Product News: Note Design Studio of Stockholm has created a set of wire candle holders that look different depending on where you stand.
The candleholders by Note Design Studio for Danish brand Menu are called POV in reference to the filming technique of framing a shot as though through the eyes of one of the characters.
“Depending on that point of view, things will change – settings, stories and the way we interpret things,” said the designers, likening the effect to the way their product appears to change when seen from different sides.
“From some angles it seems like a flat graphical drawing – move around it and suddenly the graphic lines floats in mid air,” they said. “Shadows and shapes change, making it a fun object to interact with.”
The pieces are made of powder-coated steel wire and come in a wall-mounted version for tea lights or a table-top version for tall candles. They’re available in white, black, grey, turquoise or terracotta and can be displayed singly or mounted in groups.
Exposed brickwork, pegboards and adaptable wooden display units feature in this Dublin clothing store by Irish studio Designgoat (+ slideshow).
Designgoat exposed the structural layers of a four-storey building to create the industrial interior for clothing and accessories brand Indigo & Cloth.
The main retail space is located on the ground floor and houses clothing, accessories and a coffee bar over a raw concrete floor.
Exposed brickwork lines the interior walls, while an adaptable shelving and display system enables the shop owners to customise the way they display products.
“The shelving on the ground floor was designed by us and built to be flexible,” Designgoat director Ahmad Fakhry told Dezeen. Each shelf can sit flat for displaying shoes and products, or at an angle to display magazines.
A long wooden display counter stretches along the centre of the space and doubles up as a coffee bar. The counter, benches and stools are all made from solid white ash and glass, and feature custom-made steel sockets for their powder-coated white legs.
On the back wall of the store, two pine pegboards are used for displaying accessories such as hats, shoes and bags.
The store extends to the first floor, where black painted steel and oak clothing rails display more clothing and products.
The second floor accommodates an office with customised light fittings and desks, while the top floor is being refurbished to create a photography studio, meeting space and storage area.
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