tamu aias

Professor Culp may teach you how to do it via LEED skills  - but why not just turn off your lights? …

via designboom

Monday, November 10th, 5:00 p.m. Geren Auditorium

Hernan Diaz Alonso is the principal and founder of Xefirotarch, a Los Angeles-based design firm working in architecture, products, and digital motion. For the last several years he has been a thesis coordinator and professor in studio design and visual studies at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. He is also a design studio professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He worked for several years as a senior designer at Eisenman Architects in New York and has lectured around the world.

Hernan Diaz Alonso is hailed as an architect who pushes boundaries and breaks the rules. His recent winning design for the Lexington Courthouse Plaza (though not the design being built)is a close-to-home example of the tension between cutting-edge design and the inertia of the expected.

Alonso, who has also worked with both Enric Miralles and Peter Eisenman, is uniquely primed to contribute to our current cultural discourse. He continues to challenge with each project, such as the Aqua Center in Denmark and the Queens Museum of Art in New York. The PSI competition. etc.

Alonso received his professional degree in architecture in Argentina, his M.Arch at Columbia University.

“Imagine Learning from Las Vegas as illustrated by Chris Ware, and you’ll get a sense of François Blanciak’s marvelously inventive new book, Siteless: 1001 Building Forms (The MIT Press, 2008).

“Blanciak, a French architect who has worked alongside Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and the Danish provocateur Bjarke Ingels, now lives in Japan, where he is a research fellow at the University of Tokyo. In Siteless, his first book, he displays an equal gift for playfulness and rigor, drawing by hand 1001 building types—fanciful and sometimes impossible—with no thought paid to site, program, or budget….”

via wired

So I may have been on a surrealist/conceptual/somewhat-gravity-defying architecture kick lately … but it never fails to amaze the mind and question our most rooted notions of what architecture is, what space is, and how time and society are effect each. 

via BLDGBLOG

Seattle-based concept artist Daniel Dociu is Chief Art Director for ArenaNet, the North American wing of NCSoft, an online game developer with headquarters in Seoul. Most notably, Dociu heads up the production of game environments forGuild Wars – to which GameSpot gave 9.2 out of 10, specifically citing the game’s “gorgeous graphics” and its “richly detailed and shockingly gigantic” world. 
Dociu has previously worked with Electronic Arts; he has an M.A. in industrial design; and he won both Gold and Silver medals for Concept Art at this year’sSpectrum awards. 

To date, BLDGBLOG has spoken with novelists, film editors, musicians, architects, photographers, historians, and urban theorists, among others, to see how architecture and the built environment have been used, understood, or completely reimagined from within those disciplines – but coverage of game design is something in which this site has fallen woefully short. (go to bldgblog to read the complete article)

via coolhunter

i’m impressed with this one because at first the room seemed cavernous (the interior shots) then i saw that it was a single caravan camper … reminds me a bit of John Fairey’s cube project … so for those of you who have him and wonder what that project will ever ammount to – heres your answer!

This is a book that students of architecture will want to keep in the studio and in their backpacks. It is also a book they may want to keep out of view of their professors, for it expresses in clear and simple language things that tend to be murky and abstruse in the classroom. These 101 concise lessons in design, drawing, the creative process, and presentation—from the basics of “How to Draw a Line” to the complexities of color theory—provide a much-needed primer in architectural literacy, making concrete what too often is left nebulous or open-ended in the architecture curriculum. Each lesson utilizes a two-page format, with a brief explanation and an illustration that can range from diagrammatic to whimsical. The lesson on “How to Draw a Line” is illustrated by examples of good and bad lines; a lesson on the dangers of awkward floor level changes shows the television actor Dick Van Dyke in the midst of a pratfall; a discussion of the proportional differences between traditional and modern buildings features a drawing of a building split neatly in half between the two. Written by an architect and instructor who remembers well the fog of his own student days, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School provides valuable guideposts for navigating the design studio and other classes in the architecture curriculum. Architecture graduates—from young designers to experienced practitioners—will turn to the book as well, for inspiration and a guide back to basics when solving a complex design problem.

via swissmiss

MIMOA.eu is a user generated online guide to Modern Architecture in Europe, providing exact addresses and interactive maps. MIMOA is a personal architecture guide for buildings, interiors, squares, parks and bridges. Going to London, St. Petersburg, Tirana or Bilbao? Every city- or architecture visit is planned within a few mouse clicks.