Hasta La Ideas

Reporting by Joey Zeledón and Jóse Gamboa

Costa Rica is quickly becoming one of Central America’s hubs for all things design. There are a growing number of design education initiatives that have seemed to gain some momentum in the past few years by the local creative community.

This year, Costa Rican designers have launched a national sketching workshop in their home country. They call it Sketching Lab Costa Rica. It’s a 3-day, intensive workshop that focuses on the development of rapid visualization and the most effective ways to visually communicate your ideas as a creative. The workshop follows the principles of the sketch aerobics that uses music and the very basic elements in drawing to promote learning by doing.

The 3-day workshop kicked off at the end of August and brought in 70+ participants. The event was led by Costa Rican designers Jóse Gamboa of Slingshot Product Development Group and Joey Zeledón of Smart Design and was organized by Mario Ramírez and David Melendez of Plex Studio.

The first day of the event was focused on rudimentary form development and drawing in perspective. It was held at the National Museum of Gold “Museo del Oro” in San José, Costa Rica. The museums exhibit features many ancient artifacts and objects from the pre-Columbian era that gave the participants inspiration during sketching breakout sessions.

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News: Dutch architect Wiel Arets (above), the new dean of the architecture college at the Illinois Institute of Technology, has set out his vision for the school, rejecting fashionable form-making in favour of greater concern for the public realm.

In an interview with Chicago Business, Arets expressed concern over the signature architecture of recent years. “What we saw [during the boom] was that people first made a shape and then said, ‘What can we do with it?’ ” he told the publication. “That worries me. There should always be a relationship between form, concept, programmatic forces and sustainability. Form should not be autonomous. It should not be a fashionable thing.”

Arets was appointed dean of the IIT College of Architecture in August and is the first non-American to head the school since Mies van der Rohe, who ran the institution in the 40s and 50s and also designed the university’s South Side Campus.

However in recent years the school has lost influence and Arets is promising to shake up the curriculum to reflect the changing world in which architects operate.

“Architecture in the next few years will be much more of an interdisciplinary discipline,” he said in the interview. “A city is not only about this or that building. It’s a conglomerate, a total ensemble. As architects, we have to [be concerned with] the public condition, the public realm. The world is becoming one big metropolis with a lot of neighborhoods. How these changes will look I have no clue, but I think a school like this should try to think about it.”

“For me, theory is always important,” he added. “I’m looking forward to seeing how the structure of the school, the curriculum, can change.”

Referring to his illustrious predecessor, Arets said: “What [Mies] did was [to create] this methodical, step-by-step approach to design where everything is thought out down to the last tenth of an inch. You have to make choices. You cannot do everything. And the things you do undertake you have to do as well as possible.”

See all our stories about Wiel Arets »

The post Signature architecture “worries me” – new
IIT architecture dean Wiel Arets appeared first on Dezeen.

A grid of red sandstone panels dominates every side of this university library in Katowice, Poland, by architects HS99 (+ slideshow).

Architects Dariusz Herman, Piotr Smierzewski and Wojciech Subalski arranged the rectangular panels in a brickwork-style pattern to ”relate to the raw clay bricks on the neighbouring buildings,” but used a different scale.

Gaps between the panels create hundreds of narrow windows, which become slivers of light all over the facade after dark.

HS99 won a competition back in 2002 to design the library, which houses a series of scientific and economic collections for the University of Silesia and is the first stage in a campus-wide redevelopment.

Three large floors form the main volume of the library, matching the scale of the neighbouring university campus buildings, while three upper floors with a smaller footprint create a slab-like tower at the north-east corner.

The architects planned this taller block as a visual marker for students, directing them towards the public square that lines the edge of the building.

Students enter the library through a three-storey-high atrium, which leads to reading rooms, group study areas, conference rooms and individual workspaces amongst the bookshelves.

Above: photograph is by Tomasz Zakrzewski

“The interiors are zoned to respond to the many ways in which research and study can take place,” Smierzewski told Dezeen. “We’ve create a wide variety of environments ranging from social to intimate.”

Above: photograph is by Tomasz Zakrzewski

Precast concrete panels cover the interior walls, while grated ceilings offer glimpses of the mechanical systems behind them. ”The utilitarian materiality and finishing alludes to the Silesian region’s heritage rooted in mining and other forms of heavy industry,” said Smierzewski.

Other libraries on Dezeen include a glass pyramid by MVRDV and a golden library by COBE and Transform.

See more stories about libraries »

Photography is by Jakub Certowicz, apart from otherwise stated.

Here’s some more information from HS99:

Katowice – CINiBA (The Scientific Information Centre and Academic Library)

In 2002 a competition was launched by the University of Silesia for the design of a new library that would provide a world-class didactic facility for scientific research. The flexibility the winning proposal offered proved to be its major strength when, after securing a building permit, the program was modified to also include the collections of the University of Economics with no changes to the exterior form.

The Scientific Information Centre and Academic Library (Polish acronym: CINiBA) anchors the new campus redevelopment plan to be implemented in the coming years.

Located at the intersection of the east-west axis that forms the spine of the campus, and the north-south axis which connects the recreational grounds by the river to land set aside for further university expansion, the library reinforces the axial organization which has so far been poorly articulated. A central university square at the foot of the library, the FORUM, generates a civic gathering place that opens onto the library’s grand three storey atrium.

The height of the library has been determined by the average height of buildings on the university campus. The north elevation surpassing this height is directed towards the FORUM and houses the library’s closed stacks. This elevation emphasizes the rank and function of the FORUM and is in dialogue with the existing tall buildings which close the east-west axis.

The facades, clad in a repetitious fabric of rich kahan red sandstone, relate to the raw clay bricks on the neighbouring buildings without the connotation of scale inherent to a singular brick element. The exterior treatment abstracts the building’s function of organized book storing while introducing a notion of mystery inseparably connected to books.

Site plan – click for larger image

The lack of discernible scale produces a monolith when seen from afar that is gradually familiarized. Details such as the decreasing proportions of the façade tiling, the irregular cut of the sandstone slabs, as well as the windows carefully nested inside become visible.

Ground floor plan – click for larger image

The fenestration projects a stunning patchwork of light onto the FORUM at night, yet in the daytime allows diffused light to permeate into the library’s reading rooms. The resulting strongly introverted interior composition of the library floors focuses one’s attention onto the books while calming the space. Partial isolation from the external world not only influences the atmosphere within but also introduces a flow of time detached from the pulse of the surrounding city.

First floor plan – click for larger image

Location: Katowice, ul. Bankowa 11a
Client: Consortium of the University of Silesia and University of Economics in Katowice
Design: SARP Competition No. 924: 12.2002 (1st prize)
Building Permit Secured: 2004

Second floor plan – click for larger image

Construction: 2009-2011
Building Footprint: 2 910 m2
Total Floor Area: 10562 m2

Longitudinal section – click for larger image

Volume: 62 560 m3
Net Floor Area: 12 273 m2
Gross Floor Area: 13 260 m2

Cross section – click for larger image

Maximum Volume Storage: 2 000 000 books
Volumes Currently Held: 340 000 books (open collection); 460 000 books (closed collection)

North elevation – click for larger image

Team: HS99, Dariusz Herman, Piotr Smierzewski, Wojciech Subalski,
Cooperation: Rafal Sobieraj, Adam Kulesza, Jacek Moczała, Wojciech Słupczyński
Structural Design: Jan Filipkowski, Joanna Jacoszek, Jerzy Rawski, Mariusz Staszewski

West elevation – click for larger image

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and Academic Library by HS99 appeared first on Dezeen.

“The social challenge of designing a laboratory is almost as demanding as the technical challenge,” Stanton Williams‘ Alan Stanton told Dezeen at the 2012 RIBA Stirling Prize award ceremony this weekend, where his firm picked up the big prize for their design of the Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge, England (+ audio).

Located in the botanic gardens of Cambridge University, the laboratory is a centre for plant research and Stanton explained how they designed spaces that would encourage interaction between researchers. “You’re trying to get scientists to talk to one another, to share their experiences and talk about the research they’re doing, because science then produces accidental discoveries,” he said, before explaining how even the location of the coffee machine can be critical to innovation.

Stanton also talked about how the laboratory has a special relationship with nineteenth-century plant scientist Charles Darwin, as not only did his tutor at Cambridge plan the surrounding gardens, but there is also a collection of Darwin’s plants within the building. ”It’s the past and the future of plant science,” he said.

Find out more about the Sainsbury Laboratory in our earlier story, or see more stories about Stanton Williams.

Photography is by Hufton + Crow.

The post Interview: Alan Stanton on the
Stirling Prize-winning Sainsbury Laboratory appeared first on Dezeen.

This week saw the emergence of the first International UN Day of the Girl Child, which is intended to promote the empowerment of young girls around the world. One obvious way to do this is to encourage their access to education. Because of this, we thought it was only fitting to celebrate the development of a toy that is meant to promote the education of girls and more specifically, their learning in science and math.

Debbie Sterling was discouraged by the stereotypes that suggested that boys should play with Bob the Builder while girls were left to dress up Barbie. With 89% of male engineers in her program at Stanford, it was obvious that there was a gender gap in the field. But more notably, Sterling was aware that there was a significant gap in the formative space of play. Because of this, she was motivated to spend a year of research with over 100 children in order to develop GoldieBlox: a construction toy for girls.

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