tamu aias

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

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 BLDGBLOG

… more on the film festival post from earlier today. BLDGBLOG has a great post on the whole thing. It’s really worth checking out … makes me think i should be sketching more, even if ( or especially if ) it’s stuff like this …

images via ben procter

via marc goerner

via wired

Amazing architecture blogger Geoff Manaugh has organized a live event in Pasadena, CA (on may with four mavens of science fiction art. Ryan Church, James Clyne, Mark Goerner, and Ben Procter — who’ve worked on conceptual art for everything from Star Wars to Minority Report — will be presenting their work and talking about the aesthetics and business of speculative design. The event takes place in a converted wind tunnel at the Art Center College of Design, itself an example of speculative architecture. 

This is great. These images, architecturally speaking, are an incredible showing of what can be created and also stand as a stark contrast to many of the buildings we are surrounded by every day. I would personally love to see something like this on the Texas A&M campus. Not all over the place, because these things don’t belong everywhere. But a few would not hurt. (because the campus in some parts is horrible.)

more from the flicker page

via bldgblog

Like an inhabitable billboard, the Single Hauz – by Poland’s front architects – proposes cantilevering domestic living space from a central mast. The house can then be installed above a variety of ground conditions, from the middle of a meadow to an urban core.
Personally… I’d put it in a lake.

via nytimes

Cell structure
In Tokyo, where land can be prohibitively expensive and plots unbelievably small, flexible space and multipurpose rooms are not just design preferences but also survival techniques. In designing Cell Brick, a house for a woman in her 50’s, the architect Yasuhiro Yamashita pushed this idea to a new extreme by merging the client’s bedroom and kitchen. read full article