tamu aias

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

via designboom

Play: Duoc Antonio Varas 
Location: Antonio Varas 666, Providencia, Santiago, Chile 
Architects: Architects Sabbagh - John P. Sabbagh, Mariana P. Sabbagh, Juan Pedro B. Sabbagh, Philip B. Sabbagh, Marcial B. Olivares 
Contributors: Mario Zamorano V. 
Surface of the Land: 9954 m2 
Surface intervene: 6.256m2 
Surface Cover: 12.000m2

Faced with the commissioning of a building as the headquarters of the Duoc presents four themes which were annexed to the program crucial to the resolution of the project. The first, its location in the courtyard of the headquarters Antonio Varas, a former college German typical building and founding of the neighborhood. The second, the coexistence of a program of functions and activities with specific requirements of surfaces and relationships with the corporate image of a building for an educational institution of the Catholic University of Chile. Thirdly, the permanent change of use of the space, itself an institution in permanent renewal and change. Finally, the need for public space for recreation and expansion for the students.

via plataformaarquitectura

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

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)

Can a building become an instrument? according to David Byrne … yes … and he has convinced me.

David Byrne shows off his recent project, “Playing The Building”.

via wired
 

Wired Science heads to the California Academy of Sciences to check out the living roof, which features 1.2 million native California plant species and a natural ventiltion system.