Honestly, when I first saw this I got really excited because I thought that OMA devised a way for these huge towers to float by using magnets for stabilization. This whole exciting thought process happened in like .1 second when I saw the rendering. I’m a huge fan of magnets. You can quote me on that. Seriously, how kool would that be if the units that are attached to the side of the core here (sadly, the magnets are nowhere to be found) and could rise and fall as desired? I suppose that may detract from the intentional placement of the towers for views… And imagine it. If the side units were completely autonomous from the core ( with respect to their position vertically ) then this core could be raised to twice the height, the already present units move on up, and construct a few more around the base! this is a good one to think about… imagine a whole slew of these together all corbu “radiant city” style … 

The design strategically maneuvers within the highly regulated building environment to maximize the full potential of the site: Four individual apartment towers are vertically offset from one another and suspended from a central core. The skyline of floating towers directly relates to the surrounding building volumes and explores the most attractive views towards the city center and an extensive green zone to the north. The lifted apartment towers reduce the building’s footprint to a minimum; the liberated ground level provides communal leisure activities embedded in the tropical landscape. 

via world architecture news

A tour denoting a resurgence of Modern-style homes in Dallas includes a residence designed by Bentley Tibbs, who earned his graduate and undergraduate degrees from the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M.

Tibbs told the Dallas Morning News that he refers to his work as Southern modernism and described the home he designed as a “very, very casual house with a formal shape. It still reads modern in its sensibilities, but it’s not necessarily using the modern vocabulary.”

story via archone.update

more pictures here

Dallas morning news article here

Project developed from public tender organized by the DIBAM, which envisaged the empowerment of a reading room and exhibition spaces in the lounge Founders of the National Library, along with the acoustic conditioning and lighting of space.

    

The proposal understands the need to build and consolidate the various programmatic areas that currently live in Founders Hall. On the one hand the need for this part of the national library to offer the public a place to house in a free and free to its users and in turn to reinforce this salon as a place of exhibitions at both the permanent and temporary.

via plataformaarquitectura < ( more pictures )

Malaysia is no stranger to iconic buildings. Two of the tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers, are located in Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital. So it comes as no surprise to us that a stunning new residential development is planned for the Putrajaya waterfront known as Precinct 4, just 30km south of Kuala Lumpur. The design, however, is a refreshing and original with unique, marine-inspired structures – which also draw from traditional Islamic designs – arranged in a permeable, radiating block of bioclimatic architecture. 

via inhabitat

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.

It’s a perfect metaphor for the teetering global real-estate market: Capital Gate, the glassy tower at the center of Abu Dhabi’s $2.2 billion Capital Centre development, has just been submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s most inclined building,” according to the press release. (I prefer “leaningest.”)

Capital Gate practically swoons with a queasy 18-degree westward tilt, easily besting Pisa’s paltry 3.9 degrees. (The more famous building’s accidental declivity comes from a shoddy foundation and loose soil, problems that Capital Gate’s architect, RMJM, expects to stave off with a steel diagrid structure and hundred-foot-deep piles.)

The 35-story tower, which includes a five-star Hyatt hotel, should be completed next fall, but given the tanking world economy, I’m not sure the developers have fully realized its symbolic potential. Why not, for example, tie the building’s angle to the stock markets’ sinking fortunes and turn Capitol Gate into a a huge art-installation-cum-roller-coaster?

recap: +4X more tilted than the Leaning Tower at Pisa, 8 story deep piles, 35 stories tall, steel diagrid

via metropolis mag

This summer, Jerusalem inaugurated a new bridge by Santiago Calatrava that will be the centerpiece of a planned light-rail system connecting the Old City to the sprawling neighborhoods just over its walls. The serpentine, cable-stayed structure is a stone’s throw away from the Central Bus Station in a dusty, car-clogged intersection, where its gleaming white “strings” (it is meant to evoke a harp) and glass-and-basalt walkway make an odd juxtaposition with the dismal surroundings. The angled mast, which rises 387 feet into the air—making it among the most prominent features of the skyline—has been a particular point of contention, with many Israelis calling it overscaled and out of place.

The city maintains that the $70 million bridge, which is expected to open in 2010 along with the first rail line, will help ease perennial traffic jams, aid tourists traveling into the Old City, and provide Jerusalem with a sparkling new symbolic entrance. At the opening ceremony (where a taped message from Ehud Olmert, the transit system’s main backer and now Israel’s outgoing Prime Minister, was greeted with jeers), the city’s current mayor, Uri Lupolianski, compared grumbling over the project to early mixed reviews of the Eiffel Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge. The next morning, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I spoke to Calatrava about designing a high-profile project in an ancient city, the criticism of the bridge, and why New York City needs to build “grandiose infrastructure.”

read rest of metropolismag.com article :interview with Calatrava

About this talk

Architect Thom Mayne has never been one to take the easy option, and this whistle-stop tour of the buildings he’s created makes you glad for it. These are big ideas cast in material form.

About Thom Mayne

Founder of the influential studio Morphosis, and co-founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne marries conceptual ideas with form,… Full bio and more links  »

via archinect ideomeia

Working out of the Box is a series of features presenting architects who have applied their architecture backgrounds to alternative career paths. Are you an architect working out of the box? Do you know of someone that has changed careers and has an interesting story to share? If you would like to suggest an (ex-)architect, please send us a message.

archinect: Where did you study architecture?

Peter: Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, E’cole DE’Beaux Arts – Tours France, and the University of Adelaide in South Australia. I must admit that my interests while studying were very broad, from photography to supercomputing and robotics as well.

Eric: I have a Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon, with a minor in Business Administration and Marketing.

Eugene: I studied Industrial Design and Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ashwan: I have a Bachelor of Architecture from Sushant School of Art & Architecture in New Delhi, India and an MS in Informatics & Architecture from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York.

At what point in your life did you decide to pursue architecture?

Peter: My junior year of High School, while I was taking a class that incorporated bridge building. It didn’t seem like enough to just build a bridge that held up, I wanted it to make sense and provide some aesthetic benefit to whoever might see it someday. The arts were always important to me all along the way, music, fine art, and design – my father was always a great sketch artist and my uncle builds stringed instruments for a living [an amazing talent and not an easy thing to do] so they both influenced my decision to be involved with the arts.

Eric: Pretty early on – around the ninth grade. Being good at both art and math and sciences, I was told by several people at the time that architecture was a logical career path. I took a class in architecture, a real studio class, while I was in high school and a 10-week summer session at Carnegie Mellon before my senior year in high school, so I was pretty sure.

Eugene: Never… Well ok since we are being truthful there was a brief moment back when I was in school and I saw this show called Seinfeld. Anyway since I am sure that you probably have not seen it as it was not that popular I will explain the situation. There is this character named George who was having a tough time picking up the ladies. So in all his infinite wisdom he decided that when he was out and a woman asked him what he did for a living he would simply say that he was an architect. The next scene was of him waking up in bed with the woman. I thought to myself if this guy could get lucky by claiming to be an architect then what would happen if I was an architect. So I signed up and quickly realized the error of my ways when I suddenly had an additional year of school to complete the degree and spent the whole time in the studio without sight of a woman.

Ashwan: In high school I was very interested in design and technology and around the same time I was involved in a small construction project. Meeting with the architects and being on the site really helped me in deciding my future career path. I decided to take on Mechanical Drawing as a subject in senior high school with additional focus on science and computer technology as well. To be really sure, I did get into an economics program after finishing school, but that didn’t last very long. I was very happy when I moved into the architecture program.

When did you decide to stop pursuing architecture? Why?

Peter: It didn’t come as part of a plan or anything calculated, I engaged the architecture profession whole heartedly and worked with some great people right out of school. Cambridge 7 was a fascinating place to work, talents like Peter Chermayeff and Peter Sollogub while I was there were amazing conceptual designers- though what I really took away from working with them was more of their entrepreneurial spirit, something that I can’t see myself ever letting go of. Moving to New York was amazing, changed my whole perspective on the profession. I worked with Chris Choa at HLW International, another entrepreneur at heart– after he left the country following his global aspirations; I decided it was time for me to do my thing as well. My education was amazing, the people I worked for were truly inspirational, and in 1997 the profession wasn’t developing that quickly within digital communications, so I took the opportunity to start IOMEDIA and try to make a change. I had the opportunity to marry the two things I enjoyed most as a professional – the arts, and technology.

Eric: While I was pretty certain that I was going to be an architect – there was no doubt in my mind really – by the time I finished my first year at Carnegie Mellon, I’d already had the equivalent of 4 semesters of freshman architecture studio. So, that’s pretty much what my perception, at that early age, of what the profession was based on these experiences – problem solving exercises based upon relatively short design charrettes and the visual representation of that design solution. As things got more “real” – about half way through the 5 year program, I started losing interest. I also felt that while the curriculum was meant to be very well rounded, it was also very confining and because of all the required classes, it left little room for exploring other interests, which I felt was key to developing my identity as a designer and keeping things interesting. I also felt it was completely irresponsible that it wasn’t until our 5th year that we had a “profession practice” class – where we learned what architecture, the practice of versus the study of, was all about. This only after 4 years of study and half of the class had already dropped out . . .

I did however practice for 3 full years after graduating, hoping that architecture practice might hold something for me that in the end architectural study didn’t. Unfortunately, as a junior architect, what I found instead were stair details, exiting diagrams, redlines and lots of AutoCAD – so not exactly what I was looking for in order to sustain my interest. I’ve always had a somewhat short attention span and really just didn’t have the patience for projects that lasted years (after 3 years, nothing that I worked on was built, which I now know is not uncommon). Maybe if I’d gotten over the initial hump of being a junior designer, but probably not. At IOMEDIA, most projects last a few weeks to a few months, although in some cases we are involved periodically or off and on throughout the project’s life-cycle. With computer visualization there is just much more immediate feedback and (relatively) instant feedback.

At Carnegie Mellon, I did get a very solid and early exposure to computer visualization and from day 1 through my 3 years in practice I actively pursued 3d Viz until I felt I couldn’t go any further within a conventional firm (at least not one at that time). I spent all of my free time honing my 3d skills and learning everything I could about the industry as well as immersing myself in film and animation. Right before I left architecture, I took an intensive class in 3d graphics at NYU’s Center for Advanced Digital Applications.

I don’t however regret for a minute having studied architecture or where I studied it as it definitely gave me the tools to do what I’m doing today and there was really no course of study for design visualization, so I wouldn’t have done anything differently.

Eugene: See previous answer.

Ashwan: After finishing my five year course in Architecture, I worked for about a year as an architecture intern, working on design, drawings and construction as well. Though I found this somewhat fun, it did not really satisfy my technology bug. Around the same time I started ‘dabbling’ in architectural visualization which helped fulfilling that void to a great extent. I wanted to pursue a stronger relationship between computer technologies and architecture, looking around I found RPI was offering a Masters program that was exactly that. I applied for the course, got accepted, packed my bags, embarked on my first trip to the US and moved to Troy, New York from New Delhi. At RPI, I found the program exactly what I was expecting, it was set within the Architecture school and the focus was advanced computer technologies; ranging from visualization to developing software programs that helped design processes. I decided to research the field of soft computational technologies such genetic algorithms and neural networks and their applications to urban design. As RPI had a strong computer science department, I was able to pick up concepts in programming and write code. Finally, I was able to effectively work on design and computer technology at the same time! … read full article

About this talk

Architect Joshua Prince-Ramus takes the audience on dazzling, dizzying virtual tours of three recent projects: the Central Library in Seattle, the Museum Plaza in Louisville and the Charles Wyly Theater in Dallas.

About Joshua Prince-Ramus

Joshua Prince-Ramus is best known as architect of the Seattle Central Library, already being hailed as a masterpiece of contemporary culture. Prince-Ramus was US Partner of Rem Koolhaas’ Office… Full bio and more links  »