Hasta La Ideas

World Architecture Festival 2012: here’s a slideshow of the winner in the villa category at the World Architecture Festival, which is a house on a working sheep farm on North Bruny Island, Tasmania, by John Wardle Architects. 

Clad in galvanised, corrugated iron, Shearer’s Quarters is positioned on the site of an old shearing shed alongside a timber-clad cottage.

Pine lines the interior walls, where an open-plan living room and three bedrooms provide enough room to accommodate guests that include sheep shearers and friends on tree-planting weekends.

Bedroom walls are covered with recycled apple crates that the architects sourced from nearby orchards.

We’ve now announced winners for all the awards, including World Building of the Year, Future Project of the Year and Landscape of the Year, as well as all the category winners from day one and day two.

Dezeen is media partner for the World Architecture Festival, which took place at the Marina Bay Sands hotel and conference centre in Singapore. You can follow all our coverage of the event here, including a series of movies we filmed with programme director Paul Finch.

We’re also filming movies with some of the winners, which we’ll be featuring on Dezeen soon.

The post Slideshow: Shearer’s Quarters
by John Wardle Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Ce dôme impressionnant imaginé par les architectes danois Kristoffer Tejlgaard et Benny Jepsen est un lieu de rencontres mis en place à Bornholm au Danemark pour lancer des débats sur l’avenir du logement. Cette structure est une vraie réussite architecturale à découvrir dans la suite.

Photos via Save the Wright House unless otherwise noted.

The architecture and design community exhaled a collective sigh of relief earlier this week as an exceptional private residence narrowly escaped oblivion at the hands of a ruthless real estate developer—for the time being. The demolition of the house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his son David, was pushed back a month at the eleventh hour by the City of Phoenix, which hopes to rectify a complex legal situation in a state known for its aggressive real estate development policies. This much is clear from critic Michael Kimmelman’s clarion call to save the house in the Paper of Record.

So too is Kimmelman’s description of the house—which is distinguished by its spiral shape, like a certain concurrently-designed landmark on Manhattan’s Museum Mile—rather more vivid than the video tour (after the jump). Indeed, the home has never been open to the public despite its proximity to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, headquartered about a dozen miles away at Taliesin West.

I’ll defer to architectural historian and Harvard professor Neil Levine for a summary of the significance of the David Wright House:

One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most innovative, unusual and personal works of architecture. Built in 1950–52, it is the only residence by the world-famous architect that is based on the circular spiral plan of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, whose construction followed it by six years. When the house was first published in 1953, it was stated that no other Wright house since Fallingwater was as praiseworthy and remarkable. Since then its reputation has only increased and several architectural historians and architecture critics consider it to be among the 20 most significant Wright buildings. The spatial design, the processional movement through the patio and along the spiral ramp, the custom-designed concrete-block detailing, and the total interior design all give this house a spectacular expression especially appropriate to the desert environment.

Credit: The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York); via NYTimes.com

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News: a Chinese company plans to build the world’s tallest skyscraper in just seven months using pre-fabricated components slotted together like a Meccano toy.

Construction firm Broad Sustainable Building has already successfully demonstrated its approach on a smaller scale by constructing a 30-storey tower in 15 days, but now the company has set its sights on erecting a 220-storey tower in just seven months.

Above: Broad’s 30-storey tower during construction last year

On completion, the skyscraper would be taller than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and include schools, a hospital, 17 helipads and apartments for over 30,000 people. The foundation is scheduled to be laid in November with a completion date set for March 2013.

Traditional building methods waste both time and materials, Broad’s CEO Zhang Yue argues. His pre-fabricated towers are designed with a different load-bearing structure, which uses less concrete and steel and can be produced in the safe confines of the factory, ensuring consistent quality.

Above: workers constructing Broad’s 30-storey tower last year

Zhang made his estimated $1.2 billion fortune on air conditioning systems before turning his attentions to construction. A passionate environmentalist, he intends to help China build a future of clean air and sustainable living. Even Broad’s employees must comply with his vision, abiding by strict guidelines laid out in a manual issued by Zhang that include tips on conserving energy and brushing your teeth.

Perhaps not content with plans to construct the world’s tallest building, the company already has its sights on an even more audacious project – a two-kilometre high skyscraper with 636 floors.

We recently reported that nine of the 20 tallest buildings under construction in the world are located in China.

See all our stories about skyscrapers »
See all our stories about China »

The post World’s tallest skyscraper to be built
with ready-made ‘Meccano’ pieces appeared first on Dezeen.

Our roots in the rusty husk that is Motown make us suckers for the boom in photo projects that document the city’s fading glory [cue “(Nothing But) Flowers“]. Leading the pack, in our view, is Julia Reyes Taubman‘s Detroit: 138 Square Miles, published last December by the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAD), but for a perspective that tends more toward the hauntingly gorgeous and immersive, no one does it better than Andrew Moore. His 2008-2009 “Detroit Disassembled” photo series is the subject of an exhibition on view through February 13, 2013 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (running concurrently is “Detroit Is No Dry Bones,” a show of photos Camilo José Vergara). In this photo, Moore captures the Surrealist afterlife of a clock that once measured the days of students at Detroit’s Cass Tech High School.

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