These images by Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers document a series of ruined World War Two monuments dotted across the landscape of the former Yugoslavian territories.
Constructed during the 1960s and 70s by Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito, the concrete structures were designed by numerous architects and sculptors to demonstrate the strength of the socialist republic throughout the Balkan hills and valleys.
After the dissolution of Yugoslavia many of the monuments were destroyed, but others lay forgotten and deserted, prompting Jan Kempenaers to make them the subject of his Spomenik photography series.
Kempenaers spent four years photographing the sculptures, completing the series in 2009. They go on show at London’s Breese Little gallery next month as part of the photographer’s first solo exhibition in the UK.
Breese Little is delighted to announce Jan Kempenaers’ first solo exhibition in London. The show will present a selection of Kempenaers’ architectural and island studies in tandem with the renowned Spomenik series charting World War Two memorials built in the 1960s and ’70s across The Balkans in the former Yugoslavia.
Over the last decade, the Antwerp-based photographer has developed a heightened and conscientious aesthetic. Gradual metamorphosis is charted with shared inevitability in both the natural world and in response to mankind’s intervention.
Spatial arrangement is privileged across abandoned utopian visions and cumulative urban sprawl. These images draw focus to the temporality of modernist ambitions, which nevertheless maintain their monumentality, an attraction of their natural counterparts.
Kempenaers’ architectural arrangements are counter-balanced with expansive seascapes in the exhibition, captured with an interchangeable formal awareness, characteristic of his practise.
Uniformly overcast skies suggest parallels across these scenes and suburbia, proposing the alternative conditions of visual interest in a post-industrial age.
Nevertheless, Kempenaers’ disinterested eye engenders a strict geometric awareness, distancing emotion from his subjects, which remain devoid of people.
In New York City there are plenty of places to get drunk, starting with my kitchen. But most crave a more glamorous experience, and in a city of millions, glamor is often equated with exclusivity and secrecy. Faux speakeasys have become as much of a cliché as drunken fistfights in the Meatpacking District. Yet for a brief period earlier this year, a group of artists ran a true speakeasy in the most unusual of locations: A water tower atop an abandoned building in Chelsea.
The area on this map, called Madla-Revheim, is the main developmental edge of Stavanger, Norway for which MVRDV and Space Group seek to implement 4000 housing units on the 780 acres site. The sector focuses housing, transportation systems and public spaces around a green center for cultivation and livestock raising. Situated at the point where urban meets rural, the area aims to be one of the first modern models for sustainable growth within metropolitan areas.
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (Urban Green Zone was originally posted on Yanko Design)
News: architecture firm dRMM will install 20 interlocking wooden staircases outside St Paul’s Cathedral for the London Design Festival in September.
Unveiled this morning at the London Design Festival 2013 press preview, the design comprises a complex configuration of steps to be made from 44 cubic metres of tulipwood. Visitors will be invited to climb the structure and use it as a viewpoint towards the River Thames, Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern.
“Endless Stair is a three-dimensional exercise in composition, structure and scale,” said dRMM co-founder Alex de Rijke. “The Escher-like game of perception and circulation in timber playfully contrasts with the religious and corporate environment of stone and glass in the city.”
The structure will be made of cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels, which are usually created by layering up softwoods to form cheap and stable panels for fast construction. This installation will instead use a sustainable hardwood – tulipwood – to form lighter and stronger hardwood CLT panels for the first time.
The Endless Stair will be created in association with the American Hardwood Export Council and engineered by Arup. A lighting scheme for the spot will be developed by London studio Seam Design using products from LED company Lumenpulse.
The London Design Festival 2013 takes place from 14 to 22 September. See more design events taking place throughout the year on our World Design Guide.
Mies van der Rohe designed this golf clubhouse in 1930 for the countryside surrounding Krefeld, Germany, but it’s only just been constructed (+ slideshow).
Built by Belgian studio Robbrecht en Daem to a series of sketched plans and perspectives discovered in the Mies van der Rohe Archive of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the pavilion respects the original design for the clubhouse that, due to the Great Depression, was never built.
Architects Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem conceived the structure as a full-size model rather than a building. “It is a life-size model revealing the essence of Mies’s architecture through its abstraction,” they explain.
The pavilion is located on the site it was originally planned for near Krefeld, where Mies van der Rohe also completed the residences Haus Esters and Haus Lange. “The pavilion is temporarily enriching the architectural heritage of a city that is known for being home to two of Mies’s other remarkable buildings,” say the architects.
The structure primarily comprises an open-plan space that is loosely partitioned by timber screens and stainless-steel columns. Offices, changing rooms and staff rooms are positioned along the eastern side of the plan, alongside a canopy that projects out towards the landscape.
1:1 Modell Golfclubhaus opens to the public this weekend and will remain in place until the end of October.
Robbrecht en Daem also recently received critical acclaim, after the firm’s market hall in Ghent was one of the five finalists for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2013.
Here’s some more information from Robbrecht en Daem:
Mies van der Rohe – 1:1 Modell Golfclubhaus
Robbrecht en Daem architecten are building a life-size model to a 1930 design by Mies van der Rohe.
In the rolling landscape around the former industrial German city of Krefeld, Robbrecht en Daem architecten realized a striking temporary pavilion based on a design for a golf course clubhouse by Mies van der Rohe dating from 1930, which was never built. Christiane Lange, art historian and curator for Projekt MIK, invited the Belgian architectural firm of Robbrecht en Daem architecten to create a temporary objet d’architecture using the series of historical sketches of the project that were discovered during research into the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. The temporary installation by Robbrecht en Daem architecten is open for viewing from 27 May to 31 October 2013 at the original location of the project. The installation of 84 by 87 m is built primarily of wood. It is being conceived as a life-size model whose abstraction brings out the essence of Mies’s architecture and spatial concepts. Along with the two other famous Mies projects in Krefeld – Haus Esters and Haus Lange, characterised by their brick volumetries and classical plan – the pavilion serves as a lovely illustration of the evolution that Mies brought to Modernism.
Krefeld, an industrial city on the edge of the Ruhr area, already housed two masterpieces from the early European career of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: the twin project consisting of Haus Esters and Haus Lange, which date from 1927-1930. Those two projects, along with a handful of other project from Mies’s hand, an extensive collection of furniture, several exhibition scenographies and the corporate building Verseidag bear witness to the good contacts that Mies had with the textile industry in Krefeld in the inter-bellum period.
Art historian Christiane Lange – granddaughter of textile manufacturer Hermann Lange, for whom Mies built Haus Lange – has been heading up a research and art project into the creations that Mies did for Krefeld.
The research project ‘Mies in Krefeld (Projekt MIK)’ has already seen two publications, an exhibitions and a documentary film around the theme. During research into the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, Lange stumbled upon a series of sketches that Mies had made in 1930 for a pavilion at the golf course close to Krefeld, that had never been built.
The unique archive material for the clubhouse includes sketched plans and perspectives that, in spite of being only few in number, manage to give a good impression of Mies’s ambitions for the project. The design was to be part of a series of experiments into the spatial principles of the plan libre. The sketches show a spacious roof surface on slender columns, combined with a strongly rhythmical floor design and a few well positioned dividing walls that encapsulate the space. Along with the Esters villa and the Lange villa, known for their brick volumes and their open, yet classical plan, the clubhouse would have served as the perfect illustration for the evolution that Mies brought to Modernism.
For Christiane Lange, the unique archive material was the inspiration to curate an artistic project linking her historical interest in the persistent relation of Mies with the Krefeld based silk industry and its protagonists, with the broader question into the significance of Mies’s architecture for contemporary architectural practice. She challenged the Belgian Robbrecht en Daem architecten to develop a new interpretation of Mies’s design and to create an objet d’architecture to scale at the original site of the project.
by LinYee Yuan Taxiing planes and a buzz of runway activity at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s new Terminal 4 serve as a dramatic backdrop for interior designer Thom Filicia and );…
This family house in Mexico City by local architect Paul Cremoux conceals a three-storey wall of plants behind its slate-clad facade.
Concerned about the lack of sustainable construction in the country, Paul Cremoux Studio designed a building that uses plants to moderate its own internal temperature, whilst giving residents an indoor garden.
“Making sustainable eco-effective design in Mexico is pretty hard. Many clients do not yet realise the importance of changing the design strategy,” says architect Paul Cremoux.
He explains: “We would like to think about vegetation not only as a practical temperature-humidity comfort control device, or as a beautiful energetic view, but also as an element that acts like a light curtain.”
The green wall flanks a courtyard terrace, which occupies the middle floor and is open to the sky on one side. Meanwhile, most the rooms of the house are positioned on the levels above and below.
A driveway for two cars is located beneath the terrace and leads through to the dining and kitchen areas. A living room and three bedrooms occupy the second floor and can be accessed via a staircase tucked away in the corner.
The dark slate panels that clad the exterior also line some of the walls around the courtyard, contrasting with the light wood finishes applied elsewhere.
Here’s a project description from Paul Cremoux studio:
Casa CorManca
On a 12 metres by 13 metres (39ft by 42ft) plot of land, a monolithic volume is transformed in order to attain luminous indoor spaces. Slate stone at the exterior facades is contrasted with the soft beech-like wood finish, achieving great definition and space discovery.
Built in a small plot of land 176 m2, (1894 sqft), the construction rises looking south to the vertical vegetation garden wall. It is a three-storey-high assembly where the main terrace is to be found at the second level, follow by a small lecture studio.
This area is intent to transform radically the notion of “open patio garden” since there is not really space to ensure a ground courtyard, the main terrace plays a social definitive roll.
Recyclable content materials, VOC paint, cross ventilations highly used and passive energy-temperature control strategies are bound into the core design. Three heat exhaustion chimney work as main devices to control hot temperature at bedrooms areas.
Vertical garden is a mayor air quality and humidity creator, where before there was any plant, now we have planted over 4000.
Design Architect: Paul Cremoux W. Project Team: Anna Giribets Martin Structural Engineering: Arch. Ricardo Camacho Equipment Engineering, Sustainability Consultant and vertical garden: Ing. José Antonio Lino Mina, DIA General Contractor: Fermín Espinosa, Alfredo Galván, Factor Eficiencia
While Amazon had already received City Hall approval to build a new HQ in Seattle, apparently they’ve had a change of heart with the design, perhaps inspired by the forthcoming Facebook West and the Apple Spaceship. The skyscraper part of Amazon’s multi-building plan remains the same, but they’re looking to switch up one of their low-rise structures for something a bit more eye-catching. Here’s the previously-approved, now-scuttled building design:
Focus sur Dusit Thani, un magnifique hôtel situé aux Maldives – plus précisément sur Mudhdhoo Island dans Baa Atoll. Inauguré en septembre 2012, ces structures exotiques de grande qualité se marient à la perfection avec le paysage paradisiaque. Plus d’images de ce lieu dans la suite de l’article.
This rural house in Switzerland by local studio Architetti Pedrozzi e Diaz Saravia is raised off the hillside on a pair of gigantic concrete columns (+ slideshow).
The single-storey House in Sonvico is constructed on a 20-metre long concrete slab, which is elevated above the ground on one side to line up with the highest level of the site.
“We and the clients both wanted to create a single-storey house,” architect Martino Pedrozzi told Dezeen. “Because of the slope, we invented a level section.”
Rather than create an entrance at the point where the building meets the ground, Architetti Pedrozzi e Diaz Saravia designed the house with a hollow centre so that residents climb up from underneath to enter. This arrangement also creates a terrace beneath the building with a swimming pool alongside.
Timber-framed windows sit within the houses’s chunky concrete frame. White ceramic tiles clad any walls between and feature a mixture of polished and matte finishes.
The rooms of the house are arranged in sequence around the perimeter, while a corridor runs around the inside. There are also circular rooms inside the columns and one contains a staircases so it can double up as a second entrance.
Here’s a project description from Architetti Pedrozzi e Diaz Saravia:
House in Sonvico
A one storey house on a quite steep slope. That was the challenge imposed by topography and client. A most welcome challenge of course: to us one storey architecture is the best condition for good architecture. Its solution stays in the section of the project: a big horizontal prestressed slab of fifteen by twenty metres sitting on the natural land on one hand and laying on two gigantic round pillars on the opposite site. Above twenty pillars sustain the roof. Under a main space is created for outdoor living.
The house structure is external and integrally made in concrete. None of its parts penetrate the internal insulated spaces that are organised around a central void, between slab and roof. Ceramic white tiles, shiny and opaque defining a graphic pattern, contrast with concrete and enclose the indoor living spaces.
Where the house lays on the ground, there is the access. Descending upstream the slope a big porch introduces the house main door. Inside, the square-shaped ground floor is divided between public and private spaces. Public spaces like entrance hall, living room, dining room and studio are placed in the middle of the sides. Private spaces like bedrooms and kitchen find their place in the corners and when it is necessary can be isolated from the rest.
The central void makes the connection between indoor and outdoor living spaces. A staircase leads down to a paved and partially covered surface integrating a swimming pool, a laying and a dining area, surrounded by an impressive natural environment.
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