Dezeen Watch Store: we’re excited to announce that we’ll be taking our augmented reality watch store to Texas as part of Hackney House Austin, during the SXSW festival from 7 to 10 March. Read the full story on the Dezeen Watch Store blog »
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A metal-clad roof designed to reference local barns follows the stepped profile of this house in the American state of Arkansas by deMx architecture (+ slideshow).
Round Mountain House was designed by local office deMx architecture for a plot near the crown of a hill in the Ozark Mountains region of Arkansas, where it overlooks the surrounding rural landscape.
“Referencing local precedents, the Round Mountain House combines modernist ideals with vernacular strategies and a linear plan to integrate seamlessly into the Ozark landscape,” said the architects.
The galvanised steel roof structure wraps around the rear facade and rises over a second storey section at one end, before dropping back down to ground with two supporting columns.
Concrete foundation walls support a steel framework which is covered with structural insulated panels that form the walls and ceilings.
The property is separated into two sections, with the main part housing the living area, guest bedrooms, garage, and an outdoor breezeway.
The breezeway area comprises a sheltered outdoor space containing furniture for casual dining and a fireplace.
Bedrooms, bathrooms, closets and laundry rooms are contained in an adjoining structure tacked onto the rear of the house.
The roof structure rises at the western end of the building to accommodate the guest loft and creates a sheltered space below, which is occupied by a large balcony.
The overhanging loft space limits the amount of harsh western sunlight that enters the main living areas, which feature low windows on the north and high windows on the eastern walls.
Exposed I-beams in the living space are echoed by cantilevered joists, from which mosaic pendants above the kitchen island and a chandelier over the dining table are suspended.
Photography is by Timothy Hursley.
Here’s a project description from the architects:
Round Mountain House
Referencing local precedents, the Round Mountain House combines modernist ideals with vernacular strategies and a linear plan to integrate seamlessly into the Ozark landscape.
The form of the house is treated as two pieces. The “main frame” consists of primarily public spaces: the carport, outdoor breezeway, the guest loft, and main living area; the “lean-to” or “saddle bag” contains primarily private spaces: the bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, and laundry.
The main frame is constructed of a steel frame on concrete foundation walls. To create the finished form, energy-efficient SIPS (Structurally Insulated Panel System) wrap around the steel frame and roof of both the main frame and the lean-to. In addition to the SIPS, the house uses other active and passive sustainable technologies. The main spaces contain low windows on the north and high windows on the east. These operable windows allow for passive cooling through cross ventilation.
The second floor loft space creates a covered balcony on the main floor. The balcony is located on the west side of the house and its overhang shelters the living space windows from the harsh western light.
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Thom Mayne’s Los Angeles firm Morphosis has completed a new Hollywood campus for arts school Emerson College where a rectangular frame surrounds a curvaceous cluster of classrooms (+ slideshow).
Situated in the heart of the entertainment industry on Sunset Boulevard, Emerson College Los Angeles will accommodate over 200 undergraduate students from the renowned creative arts and communication school based in Boston, Massachusetts.
The building’s frame-like outer volume accommodates ten storeys of student housing, while the curving central sections contain teaching facilities and staff administration, amidst a series of terraces and connecting bridges.
“The building is designed to expand the interactive, social aspect of education,” said Thom Mayne. “We focused on creating with the broader community in mind – both in terms of public space and sustainable design.”
The east and west-facing sides of the building feature glazed curtain walls and are screened by an intelligent shading system where horizontal fins angle open or closed to suit changes in light, temperature and the angle of the sun.
Rigging and audio-visual equipment are also incorporated into the facade’s metal framework, accommodating various outdoor performances and events.
“The entire building becomes a stage set for student films, screenings and industry events, with the Hollywood sign, the city of Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean in the distance providing added scenery,” said the design team.
Teaching areas and workspaces within the facility include video-editing suites, computer laboratories, a film screening room, sound mixing suites, and live performance spaces. There’s also a green wall at the north-west corner.
Photography is by Iwan Baan.
Here’s a design statement from Morphosis:
Emerson College Los Angeles
Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Emerson is renowned for its communication and arts curriculum. Located in the heart of Hollywood, Emerson College Los Angeles (ELA) defines the college’s identity in the centre of the entertainment industry and the second largest city in the United States. The new facility establishes a permanent home on Sunset Boulevard for Emerson College’s existing undergraduate internship program that will extend the ELA experience to students studying in any of the seven disciplines that are offered through the School of Communication and the School of the Arts. Additionally, ELA will offer post-graduate, certificate, and professional study programs. The new facility will also host workshops, lectures, and other events to engage with alumni and the LA community.
Bringing student housing, instructional facilities, and administrative offices to one location, ELA condenses the diversity of a college campus into an urban site. Evoking the concentrated energy of East-Coast metropolitan centres in an iconic Los Angeles setting, a rich dialogue emerges between students’ educational background and their professional futures.
Fundamental to the Emerson Los Angeles experience, student living circumstances give structure to the overall building. Housing up to 217 students, the domestic zones frame a dynamic core dedicated to creativity, learning, and social interaction. Composed of two slender residential towers connected by a helistop, the 10-storey square frame encloses a central open volume to create a flexible outdoor “room”.
A sculpted form housing classrooms and administrative offices weaves through the void, defining multi-level terraces and active interstitial spaces that foster informal social activity and creative cross-pollination. Looking out onto the multi-level terrace, exterior corridors to student suites and common rooms are shaded by an undulating, textured metal scrim spanning the full height of the towers’ interior face.
Looking to the local context, the centre finds a provocative precedent in the interiority of Hollywood film studios, where outwardly regular facades house flexible, fantastical spaces within. With rigging for screens, media connections, sound, and lighting incorporated into the facade’s metal framework, this dynamic visual backdrop also serves as a flexible armature for outdoor performances. The entire building becomes a stage set for student films, screenings, and industry events, with the Hollywood sign, the city of Los Angeles, and the Pacific Ocean in the distance providing added scenery.
Anticipated to achieve a LEED Gold rating, the new centre champions Emerson’s commitment to both sustainable design and community responsibility. Wrapping the building’s northwest corner, a green wall underscores the towers’ actively changing exterior skin. Connected to weather stations that track the local climate, temperature, and sun angle, the automated sunshade system opens and closes horizontal fins outside the high-performance glass curtain-wall to minimise heat gain while maximising daylight and views. Further green initiatives include the use of recycled and rapidly renewable building materials, installation of efficient fixtures to reduce water use by 40%, energy savings in heating and cooling through a passive valence system, and a building management and commissioning infrastructure to monitor and optimise efficiency of all systems.
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Le photographe Renaud Julian nous fait découvrir New York à travers cette série de photos dédiées à cette ville emblématique. L’artiste nous offre des ambiances mystérieuses, de magnifiques couleurs, et des lumières époustouflantes de la ville. Un voyage à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.
News: Dutch firm Mecanoo has won the competition to renovate Mies van der Rohe‘s Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library in Washington DC.
Mecanoo, who recently completed the largest public library in Europe, teamed up with local firm Martinez and Johnson Architecture to plan the $150 million overhaul of the city library, which was Mies van der Rohe’s last building and was completed three years after his death in 1972.
The brief asked designers to explore two options for the building: to retain it as a stand-alone library or to extend upwards and convert it into a mixed-use complex. The architects will now work together with library staff to decide the best approach.
“My dream is that people will start to love this building so much that they even bring their books from home to read in the library,” said Mecanoo principal Francine Houben, during the design presentation.
She continued: “We will pay respect to Mies van der Rohe and research what is possible to prepare this building for the library of the future. But most important is bringing out the values of Martin Luther King. My dream is to make this building to reflect his ideals.”
Ten architects were originally shortlisted for the project, including OMA and SOM, and the list was whittled down to three at the end of 2013.
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This all-black house in the Yucca Valley desert was designed by Los Angeles office Oller & Pejic to look “like a shadow” (+ slideshow).
Located within the borders of the Joshua Tree National Park, where sunlight is often painfully harsh, Desert House was designed by husband and wife architects Monica Oller and Tom Pejic as a volume that would be easy to rest the eyes on.
They explained: “Our client had given us a brief but compelling instruction at the start of the process – to build a house like a shadow.”
Despite its remote rural location, the house was constructed on a site that had been flattened in the 1960s. This meant the building couldn’t be staggered down the slope and was instead designed with a mostly level floorplate that ends at the edge of a precipice.
“The house would replace the missing mountain that was scraped away, but not as a mountain, but a shadow or negative of the rock,” said the architects, explaining how they imagined the design early on in the process.
The two wings of the house sprawl out across the site, framing various outdoor spaces. A courtyard is sandwiched between the bedrooms and living spaces, while a swimming pool sits in the south-east corner and a sheltered triangular patio points northwards.
“We wanted the experience of navigating the house to remind one of traversing the site outside,” added Oller and Pejic.
The open-plan living room and kitchen forms the the largest space of the house. Floor-to-ceiling windows open the space out to the courtyard and offer panoramic views of the vast desert landscape.
Both this space and the adjoining bedroom wing feature black walls inside as well as out, intended to create a “cave-like feeling”.
“During the day, the interior of the house recedes and the views are more pronounced. At night the house completely dematerialises and the muted lighting and stars outside blend to form an infinite backdrop for contemplation,” said the architects.
Here’s a project description from Oller & Pejic:
Black Desert House
Oller & Pejic Architecture is a husband and wife architecture partnership located in Los Angeles, California.
This project began with an e-mail and a meeting in fall of 2008 for a house in Yucca Valley, which is located near Palm Springs, east of Los Angeles in the high desert near the Joshua Tree National Park.
We had completed two projects in Yucca Valley and occasionally received inquiries about projects in the desert. In the midst of the economic downturn typically these inquiring led nowhere. We had just had our second child and things were looking rather uncertain. We decided to meet with Marc and Michele Atlan to see if their project was a reality. Even from the first communications, Marc’s enthusiasm was noticeable.
After the first meeting, we found that we shared a common aesthetic and process and after seeing the property we knew this was a project like nothing else we had done, really almost a once in a lifetime opportunity. There was no looking back, we immediately began work on the house.
Beyond the technical and regulatory challenges of building on the site – several previous owners had tried and given up – there was the challenge of how to build appropriately on such a sublime and pristine site. It is akin to building a house in a natural cathedral.
Our client had given us a brief but compelling instruction at the start of the process – to build a house like a shadow. This had a very specific relevance to the desert area where the sunlight is often so bright that the eye’s only resting place is the shadows.
Unfortunately, the site had been graded in the 1960s when the area was first subdivided for development. A small flat pad had been created by flattening several rock outcroppings and filing in a saddle between the outcroppings. To try to reverse this scar would have been cost prohibitive and ultimately impossible. It would be a further challenge to try to address this in the design of the new house. The house would be located on a precipice with almost 360 degree views to the horizon and a large boulder blocking views back to the road.
A long process of research began with the clients showing us images of houses they found intriguing – mostly contemporary houses that showed a more aggressive formal and spatial language than the mid-century modern homes that have become the de-facto style of the desert southwest.
We looked back at precedents for how architects have dealt with houses located in similar topography and found that generally they either sought to integrate the built work into the landscape, as in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and later Rudolf Shindler or to hold the architecture aloof from the landscape as in the European modernist tradition of Mies van der Rohe. While on a completely virgin site, the lightly treading minimalist approach would be preferred, here we decided that the Western American tradition of Land Art would serve as a better starting point, marrying the two tendencies in a tense relationship with the house clawing the ground for purchase while maintaining its otherness.
The house would replace the missing mountain that was scraped away, but not as a mountain, but a shadow or negative of the rock; what was found once the rock was removed, a hard glinting obsidian shard.
Concept in place, we began fleshing out the spaces and movement through the house. We wanted the experience of navigating the house to remind one of traversing the site outside. The rooms are arranged in a linear sequence from living room to bedrooms with the kitchen and dining in the middle, all wrapping around a inner courtyard which adds a crucial intermediate space in the entry sequence and a protected exterior space in the harsh climate.
The living room was summed up succinctly by Marc as a chic sleeping bag. The space, recessed into the hillside with a solid earthen wall to lean your back against as you survey the horizon is a literal campsite which finds its precedent in the native cliff dwellings of the south west.
The dark colour of the house interior adds to the primordial cave-like feeling. During the day, the interior of the house recedes and the views are more pronounced. At night the house completely dematerialises and the muted lighting and stars outside blend to form an infinite backdrop for contemplation.
The project would never have come about without the continued efforts of the entire team. The design was a collaborative effort between Marc and Michele and the architects. The patience and dedication of the builder, Avian Rogers and her subcontractors was crucial to the success of the project. Everyone who worked on the project knew it was something out of the ordinary and put forth incredible effort to see it completed.
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Faceted concrete staircases connect a string of social spaces inside this SOM-designed campus building for The New School in New York, visible outside the building through huge diagonal windows (+ slideshow).
The University Center was designed by architecture firm SOM to provide 35,000 square-metres of teaching facilities and student housing for The New School, allowing the university to pull its activities away from sites around the city and consolidate them onto its Greenwich Village campus.
Conceived as “a campus within a building”, the 16-storey building contains student housing in its nine upper floors, while the seven lower levels accommodate multi-purpose classrooms, design studios, laboratories, an 800-seat auditorium and the main university library.
Social areas, dubbed “sky quads”, are interspersed throughout the building to provide areas where can staff and students can interact, whether relaxing between classes or working on group projects.
Broad staircases create leisurely routes between these spaces. Clad with glass-fibre-reinforced concrete panels, these structures alternate between straight and diagonal trajectories, and some integrate seating areas.
“The University Center transforms the traditional university environment,” said SOM design partner Roger Duffy. “Rather than compartmentalising living and learning spaces, we strategically stacked these functions to create a vertical campus that supports the kind of interdisciplinary learning that has defined The New School since its founding.”
Exterior walls are clad with hand-finished brass shingles, intended to fit in with both the cast-iron facades of the Ladies’ Mile Historic District to the north and the brownstones of the Greenwich Village Historic District to the south and west. These panels also provide solar shading for windows during the daytime.
In addition to the staircases that stretch through the building, SOM added fire-safe staircases that students can use to move quickly between floors. The architects also installed skip-stop elevators that miss out floors during peak hours to speed up movement.
Three dining areas are located on different floors. Other features include bike storage rooms and showers for students and residents, which the university hopes will encourage cycling.
The student housing floors provide accommodation for approximately 600 students and can be accessed via a dedicated entrance on Fifth Avenue. Residents have access to a series of communal facilities in the basement, including a gym, a common room, study areas, art studios, a mailroom and a laundry room.
Photography is by James Ewing.
Here’s a project description from SOM:
University Centre, The New School
For nearly a century, The New School has been at the forefront of progressive education, with design and social research driving approaches to studying the issues of our time, from democracy and urbanisation, to technology, sustainability, and globalization. Over the past 15 years, The New School has built on this legacy to grow into a major degree-granting university, with nearly 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students. But, in recent years, as the school outgrew its longtime home in New York’s Greenwich Village and found its real estate holdings spread across the city, from the Financial District to the Upper West Side, this pedagogical model proved challenging to maintain without the physical plant to support it. The University Center both supports and furthers this model through its innovative design and responds to the school’s increasing demand for state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary spaces.
The University Center adds 375,000 square feet of academic and student space to The New School’s Greenwich Village campus. The 16-storey centre houses design studios, laboratories, interdisciplinary classrooms, the main university library, a nine-floor student residence, an 800-seat auditorium, a café, and flexible academic and social spaces for student activity.
Conceived as a campus within a building, the University Center transforms the traditional university environment. Rather than compartmentalise learning, living, dining, and socialising spaces, these functions are situated in a vertical configuration, creating strategic adjacencies and heightening the university’s commitment to interdisciplinary learning. Connections between classrooms, studios, library, cafés, auditorium, and student residences take the form of stacked staircases and “sky quads” that facilitate the chance encounters vital to the cultivation of discussion and debate at The New School.
This innovative interior organisation isexpressed in the exterior of the building. Tightly woven, purpose-built spaces clad in hand-finished brass shingles contrast with the open connective tissue of the stairs and quads visible through a glazed skin. The exterior mediates between the cast-iron facades of the Ladies’ Mile Historic District to the north and the brownstones of the Greenwich Village Historic District to the south and west. Located at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, the University Center broadcasts the experimental nature of the school’s new home, creating a dialogue between the campus community, the local neighbourhood, and the city.
A New Kind of Urban Campus
With its 230,000-square-foot, seven-storey campus centre (located in the building’s base) and 130,000-square-foot residential tower, the University Center reimagines the organising elements of a traditional campus, from quads to classrooms and living quarters. Vertical, horizontal, and diagonal campus pathways work together to facilitate movement through the building, while increasing opportunities for interaction among students and faculty from across the university. Academic spaces are flexible and easily adaptable, and can be renovated or reconfigured with no impact on power, data, or lighting to meet changing needs.
Raw finishes and an exposed mechanical system further ensure flexibility in the academic spaces. To bring light into the 30,000-square-foot academic floor plates, clerestory windows line both walls of the main corridor. Horizontal windows and light shelves naturally illuminate classroom ceilings, reducing lighting loads.
Pathways to Discussion and Debate
The University Center’s system of double stairways plays a critical role in the life of the building; it works in conjunction with skip-stop elevators to move large numbers of students vertically through the building. Stacked one above the other, the fire stair is designed for quick circulation, while the broader, open “communicating stair” allows for travel between floors at a more leisurely pace. With faceted walls clad in glass-fibre-reinforced concrete panels, the high-use stairways are a place for chance meetings between students and faculty, and encourage social interaction and interdisciplinary exchange.
Circulation paths that weave vertically, horizontally and diagonally through the building lead into and activate sky quads – interactive spaces that also orient users due to their adjacency to stairways and corridors. Like the “local” and “express” stairs that link them, the sky quads are intended to perform as social spaces, promoting formal and informal encounters between students and faculty, as well as supporting academic and leisure activities. These interactive spaces include student lounge areas, student resource centres with adjacent meeting rooms, study areas, cafés, and pin up spaces for design studios.
To avoid crowded conditions and delays during class-change times in this vertical campus, peak elevator demand is mitigated through the combination of the intuitive system of stairways and a skip-stop elevator system. During peak times, the elevators stop at floors one, four, and six, and stairs are utilised to access the intermediate floors, while at off-peak times, the elevators stop at all floors.
A Commitment to Sustainability and Energy Efficiency
Designed to meet LEED Gold certification from the US Green Building Council, the University Center sets the New York City standard for green technology and building practices with super-efficient LED lights, occupancy sensors, a 265-kilowatt cogeneration plant, and sustainably sourced materials.
Envisioned as a model of energy efficiency, carbon reduction, and sustainability, the building anticipates 31 percent energy savings over a code-compliant school. Both passive and high-tech solutions increase energy efficiency. The envelope of the building is limited to 35 percent glass, which decreases solar heat gain while optimising interior daylighting. The shingled cladding shades the windows up to 20 percent during daylight hours. An ice-storage system, located in the second basement, uses electricity from the power grid during off-peak times to freeze water in a series of chambers; the ice melts during the day, reducing consumption during peak times. Heat recovery wheels recover heat from exhaust air and help heat supply air, saving energy. A green roof, funded in part by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, mitigates the heat-island effect, as well as storm-water runoff, capturing water for both gray-and black-water treatment facilities in the building. Waterless urinals contribute to potable-water conservation. Composting is employed with an in-vessel composter in the cafeteria.
The building serves as a living element of the curriculum, providing on-site training to the next generation of green leaders to students in environmental studies, sustainability management, and urban design. Design elements that demonstrate architectural, structural, mechanical and green building strategies are visible through signage and working exhibits. Back-of-the-house systems have been transformed into instructional spaces for New School students and facilities staff, as well as for professional organisations and unions, who are expected to use the building for hands-on training.
Active Design Features
A central stair is the principle design feature in the University Center – a focal point both inside and outside the building. These stairs are intended as the principal means of circulation through the building for the physically able. Through the use of clerestory windows in hallways and on the façade, the University Center provides for daylighting along paths of travel, and the design is organised to encourage walking between destinations, as well as spaces for social interaction. The building provides bike storage rooms and showers to encourage cycling, walking, and running between home and school. The building was recognised by Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a model of the successful implementation of the “active design” strategies that are part of New York City’s anti-obesity and health initiatives.
Student Resources
A co-ed residential tower for more than 600 students occupies floors 8-16 of the University Center. An amenity space on the lower level is accessible only by residents and consists of a large common room, art studios, an exercise facility with gym equipment, soundproof music practice rooms, a study hall, bicycle storage area, mailroom, and laundry room. The University Center has three dining areas: a 280-seat cafeteria on the second floor, an 80-seat library café on the seventh floor, and a 60-seat event café on the lower level off the entrance lobby and auditorium.
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News: New York studio The Living has won this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program competition with plans to cultivate bio-bricks from corn stalks and mushrooms, and use them to build a tower in the courtyard of the New York gallery (+ slideshow).
The Living principal David Benjamin proposed a cluster of circular towers made entirely from natural materials for his entry to the Young Architects Program (YAP) contest, which each year invites emerging architects to propose a temporary structure that will host the summer events of the MoMA Ps1 gallery in Queens.
Named Hy-Fi, the structure will be constructed entirely from recyclable materials. The Living will collaborate with sustainable building firm Ecovative to grow the bricks that will form the base of the tower, using a combination of agricultural byproducts and mushroom mycelium – a kind of natural digestive glue.
The upper section of the structure will be made from reflective bricks produced using a specially developed mirror film. Initially these will be used as growing trays for the organic bricks, but will later be installed at the top of the tower to help to bounce light down inside.
Gaps in the brickwork will help to naturally ventilate interior spaces using the stack effect, drawing cool air in at the bottom and pushing hot air out at the top.
MoMA curator Pedro Gadanho said: “This year’s YAP winning project bears no small feat. It is the first sizeable structure to claim near-zero carbon emissions in its construction process and, beyond recycling, it presents itself as being 100 percent compostable.”
“Recurring to the latest developments in biotech, it reinvents the most basic component of architecture – the brick – as both a material of the future and a classic trigger for open-ended design possibilities,” he added.
Set to open in June, Hy-Fi will be accessible to MoMA Ps1 visitors during the 2014 Warm Up summer music series.
Here’s the full announcement from MoMA:
The Living selected as winner of the 2014 Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1 in New York
The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 announce The Living (David Benjamin) as the winner of the annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York. Now in its 15th edition, the Young Architects Program at MoMA and MoMA PS1 has been committed to offering emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects, challenging each year’s winners to develop creative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. The architects must also work within guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling. The Living, drawn from among five finalists, will design a temporary urban landscape for the 2014 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard.
The winning project, Hy-Fi, opens at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City in late June. Using biological technologies combined with cutting-edge computation and engineering to create new building materials, The Living will use a new method of bio-design, resulting in a structure that is 100% organic material. The structure temporarily diverts the natural carbon cycle to produce a building that grows out of nothing but earth and returns to nothing but earth – with almost no waste, no energy needs, and no carbon emissions. This approach offers a new vision for society’s approach to physical objects and the built environment. It also offers a new definition of local materials, and a direct relationship to New York State agriculture and innovation culture, New York City artists and non-profits, and Queens community gardens.
Hy-Fi is a circular tower of organic and reflective bricks, which were designed to combine the unique properties of two new materials. The organic bricks are produced through an innovative combination of corn stalks (that otherwise have no value) and specially-developed living root structures, a process that was invented by Ecovative, an innovative company that The Living is collaborating with. The reflective bricks are produced through the custom-forming of a new daylighting mirror film invented by 3M. The reflective bricks are used as growing trays for the organic bricks, and then they are incorporated into the final construction before being shipped back to 3M for use in further research.
The organic bricks are arranged at the bottom of the structure and the reflective bricks are arranged at the top to bounce light down on the towers and the ground. The structure inverts the logic of load-bearing brick construction and creates a gravity-defying effect – instead of being thick and dense at the bottom, it is thin and porous at the bottom. The structure is calibrated to create a cool micro-climate in the summer by drawing in cool air at the bottom and pushing out hot air at the top. The structure creates mesmerising light effects on its interior walls through reflected caustic patterns. Hy-Fi offers a familiar – yet completely new – structure in the context of the glass towers of the New York City skyline and the brick construction of the MoMA PS1 building. And overall, the structure offers shade, colour, light, views, and a future-oriented experience that is designed to be refreshing, thought-provoking, and full of wonder and optimism.
“This year’s YAP winning project bears no small feat. It is the first sizeable structure to claim near-zero carbon emissions in its construction process and, beyond recycling, it presents itself as being 100% compostable,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Recurring to the latest developments in biotech, it reinvents the most basic component of architecture – the brick – as both a material of the future and a classic trigger for open-ended design possibilities. At MoMA PS1, The Living’s project will be showcased as a sensuous, primeval background for the Warm-Up sessions; the ideas and research behind it, however, will live on to fulfil ever new uses and purposes.”
Klaus Biesenbach, MoMA PS1 Director and MoMA Chief Curator at Large, adds, “After dedicating the whole building and satellite programs of MoMA PS1 to ecological awareness and climate change last year with EXPO 1: New York, we continue in 2014 with Hy-Fi, a nearly zero carbon footprint construction by The Living.”
The other finalists for this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program were Collective-LOK (Jon Lott, William O’Brien Jr., and Michael Kubo), LAMAS (Wei-Han Vivian Lee and James Macgillivray), Pita + Bloom (Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom), and Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau). An exhibition of the five finalists’ proposed projects will be on view at MoMA over the summer, organized by Pedro Gadanho, Curator, with Leah Barreras, Department Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA.
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A twisting chain-link and barbed-wire fence installed by French artist and architect Didier Faustino at an exhibition in Cincinnati determines the path taken by visitors through the gallery space.
Faustino‘s installation is called Point Break and creates a barrier running diagonally across one of the galleries at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center.
Made from a material commonly used to define international borders and property limits within urban environments, the fence is edge with barbed wire to create a feeling of danger that evokes the risks involved in illegal immigration.
“When you cross borders there is always this feeling of guilt, where you feel afraid and in danger, and for me the idea of the piece is to recreate this feeling inside the gallery,” Faustino told Dezeen.
As it bisects the space the fence rotates 180 degrees and rises above the ground to define a passage that visitors follow to cross from the entrance to the exit.
The title of the work refers to the 1991 movie starring Patrick Swayze as an anarchic bank-robbing surfer.
The spiralling form of the fence resembles the tunnel created beneath a breaking wave.
The Point Break installation is an evolution of a previous work that Faustino created for experimental New York exhibition space Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2008.
The original version was called (G)host in the (S)hell and transformed the front of the urban gallery by weaving a fence through openings in the facade.
Point Break is part of a group exhibition called Buildering: Misbehaving the City, which features work by 27 artists who explore the idea of creative misuse of buildings and urban spaces.
In another gallery, Faustino has installed a version of his Home Suit Home artwork comprising a hollow suit made from standard carpet, which was previously exhibited at Galerie Michel Rein in Paris. For the Cincinnati exhibition, Faustino covered the gallery floor in carpet from which the net shape used to create the suit was cut in one piece and folded into shape.
“When carpet – this basic material of architecture – is transformed into the Home Suit Home it becomes a kind of protective element like a real home,” explained Faustino.
Both pieces are part of Fautino’s continuing experiments into the relationship between the body and architecture, which he says are “about experiencing fragility, provoking instability in space and showing how architecture creates a shelter that protects the body at its centre.”
Photography of the Point Break exhibition is by Kelly Barrie.
Here’s some more information from the artist:
Didier Faustino: “Buildering: Misbehaving the City” at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
At the heart of the exhibition ‘Buildering: Misbehaving the City’ at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, two of Didier Faustino’s works help to redefine urban and physical borders, to express his transgressive vision of architecture and the misuse of codes regarding housing, thus exploring limits to physical and psychological freedom.
Crossing the space diagonally, the Point Break installation reflects on the materiality of metal fencing and the use of it in towns and American suburbs. It provides a formal criticism, misappropriating this commonplace material to create a passage. The barriers refer to private property, fundamental in the USA, and the passage that they provide here remains extremely dangerous, requiring visitors to take a physical risk connecting them to illegal immigration and to the notion of border. Changing the exhibition space into an ambiguous territory, Point Break expands as if to delineate space, raising social, political as well as psychological questions.
With Home Suit Home, Didier Faustino invites us to enter a disturbing world, strangely resembling ours but haunted by another ‘us’ in customised armour in the most banal domestic material. The artwork draws on signs from our familiar environment but endeavours to turn it inside out, literally, like a glove, projecting the visitor into an unstable world. It plays with elements representing hindrance, displacement and inversion and takes on bodily characteristics consisting of poor materials from our standardized homes.
Unusually concerned in front of our apartments and offices that have suddenly become unwelcoming, we are drawn to think about the lives that animate our familiar environments and the fictional borders that claim to separate art from our lives, political decisions from our aesthetic models. Reversibility characterises this installation, where the home is in turns designated like a compartment to be occupied and an impossible destination, where the anthropomorphic figure forms an interior as well as an exterior, a container and contents.
Our housing models, our way of organising and accommodating our bodies, our spectacular buildings, the constraints opposing our flesh are in question here. Didier Faustino’s ploy radicalises the architectural intention, to the point of formulating a resolute criticism of future planning for households.
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Faustino at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center appeared first on Dezeen.
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our interview with Craig Robins, the Miami property developer explains how bringing back furniture showrooms was the catalyst for transforming the city’s derelict Design District into the thriving luxury shopping destination it is today.
After the successful redevelopment of South Beach in the 1980s and 1990s, Robins began acquiring properties in Miami’s historical Design District, an area so named because of the proliferation of furniture companies that congregated there in the 1920s.
“It became a centre for furniture design in Miami,” Robins explains. “But by the mid-eighties, as places became more and more mallified in America, the Design District fell into disrepair.”
Robins says the key to redeveloping the Design District was to encourage furniture companies away from the malls and back onto the streets.
“What we did initially was to bring back the furniture design,” he says. “[American designer] Holly Hunt was one of our first tenants. That began the process and now you can walk around the Design District and see all the great furniture design.”
In 2005, collectible design show Design Miami launched in the Design District. Architect Zaha Hadid was named Design Miami Designer of the Year and Robins commissioned her to create a sculpture called Elastika in the atrium of the Moore Building, one of the area’s original 1920s furniture showrooms.
“Theodore Moore built the first furniture showroom in the neighbourhood in the 1920s,” Robins says. “It’s still an unbelievable structure. Zaha Hadid was commissioned to do a really magnificent installation inside the historical space.”
Other high-profile designers have left their mark on the Design District. Design Miami’s 2006 Designer of the Year Marc Newson created a white, undulating fence for the neighbourhood’s Design Architecture Senior High school (DASH).
Once the cultural and economic centre of the Design District was restored, Robins says it wasn’t long before restaurants and galleries started to open too, which in turn helped him to lure other lucrative businesses to the area.
“We had a cultural presence,” he says. “Restaurants were starting to open, galleries. It was then that I realised that the final ingredient to really catapult this neighbourhood into another level of creative offering would be if we could bring the fashion industry here.”
Hermès, Céline and Christian Louboutin were some of the early brands to set up stores in the district, and others soon followed: “Louis Vouiton, Christian Dior, Prada,” Robins lists. “I think we have a chance to be the most interesting neighbourhood in the world that has this balanced concentration of art, design, fashion and food.”
He continues: “The idea of synergies is that they start feeding each other and that the sum of those parts becomes so much greater than the whole, there’s this explosion that happens. Of course, I don’t think one can ever be arrogant, and despite our success, we have a lot of work to do. The goal, though, is just to make [the Design District] a great place: a great place to shop; a great place to find furniture; a great place to just walk around.”
We drove around Miami Design District in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Jewels by Zequals. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.
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