Hasta La Ideas

Here are some photos of Viamala Raststätte Thusis, an alpine service station designed by young Swiss studio Iseppi/Kurath. (more…)

There will be no more secrets hidden behind I.M. Pei walls and tinted windows at MIT‘s famous Media Lab, as this past Friday marked the opening of the school’s new building for the storied program. The new structure was designed by Pritzker-winning architect Fumihiko Maki and features wide-open, airy spaces full of floor-to-ceiling glass and, as follows, lots of natural light. A big departure from the building they’d been in, Pei’s aforementioned Wiesner Building. And because this new structure has been in the works for the past twelve years, one could argue that this could be former Media Lab director John Maeda‘s final contribution to the program. Here’s a bit of description:

Influences on the building’s design included the artists Piet Mondrian and George Seurat, as well as the art of Japanese paper lanterns. The white, glass, and aluminum building includes touches of the primary colors red, blue, and yellow, which are often found in Mondrian’s paintings.

The MIT Media Lab Complex design, which MIT had originally requested consist entirely of glass walls, had to be tempered to fit Cambridge energy requirements that restrict the use of glass construction in buildings. To accommodate the codes, Maki and his team integrated translucent aluminum screens over the building’s many glass and solid walls.

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We told you back in January that the firm founded by World Trade Center designer Minoru Yamasaki had succumb to the pressures put upon it by the global financial collapse and would be closing their doors immediately. What we didn’t know was that the state of Michigan, and more specifically, its Historic Preservation Office, was acting fast to save all of Yamasaki’s records before everything in the now-shuttered office was set to be thrown out. Fortunately, thanks to a team effort across several different preservation group, they got there just in time and were able to pack up as much relevant, historically-important documents as they possibly could, thus maintaining Yamasaki’s legacy. Here’s a bit of the story of the scramble:

When the closing of the office precipitated the imminent destruction of records, a phone call between friends started an eleventh-hour effort to salvage and preserve Yamasaki’s papers. Pauline Saliga, executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians in Chicago, then contacted Michigan’s State Historic Preservation Officer Brian Conway, who in turn alerted State Archivist Mark Harvey of the Department of Natural Resources that the papers were to be destroyed the following morning. The Michigan History Foundation supplied a moving van and two movers, and Harvey made arrangements to be at the offices first thing the next morning. There he and two members of the preservation office and one archives staff member spent the day assessing and packing the available materials. Presentation drawings, original drawings and materials related to Century Plaza, as well as Yamasaki’s personal library from which he drew inspiration are among the items now in the state’s care.

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We’ve teamed up with publishers Merrel to offer our readers the chance to win one of five copies of New Architecture in Japan by Yuki Sumner and Naomi Pollock with David Littlefield, featuring photography by Edmund Sumner. (more…)

Steven Holl Architects have completed a building conceived as a “horizontal skyscraper”, supported over a landscaped garden in Shenzhen, China. (more…)