High-Speed Architecture: 72-Hour Architectural Design
By Adam Nowek
What are you up to this July? Want to design and create a piece of architecture over the course of 72 hours? The 72 Hour Urban Action allows you to do just that. Self-dubbed as the “world’s first real-time architecture competition,” teams have a mere 72 hours to design and construct interventions into a hotly [...]
Read more →Neighborland: Crowd-Sourcing Community Development
By Adam Nowek
We love a good crowd-sourcing initiative, whether it’s helping determine what neighbourhoods are safe or unsafe or establishing a do-it-yourself framework for urbanism. We aren’t living in closed cities (well, except for these folks) and societies, and crowd-sourcing prompts us all to interact just a little bit more to make sure our increasingly hectic and [...]
Read more →Forget SimCity, Try The Augmented City
By Adam Nowek
Complex urban forms require complex modelling tools in order to represent them digitally. But this is just neat: over at the Barlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London, they’ve been playing around with ways to digitally represent our cities. CityEngine is a 3D content producer that allows architects, designers, and planners to [...]
Read more →Paper Faith: Shigeru Ban’s Cardboard Cathedral
By Adam Nowek
Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is well-known for his works with a limited temporal scope: we mentioned in last week’s article on the Snoozebox Hotel that he used shipping containers for disaster relief housing in Miyagi, and he has a considerable portfolio of disaster relief works made of paper products, including houses, schools, churches, and concert [...]
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Plug + Play: Rethinking Service Stations
By Adam Nowek
Rising fuel prices are forcing car-dependent societies to rethink not only our sense of mobility, but also how we power that mobility. Old gas stations need to be somehow repurposed (like this conversion of Mies van der Rohe’s famous Montréal gas station into a community space), new stations need to be structurally flexible (like this [...]
Read more →The Temporary Royal Snooze: A Hotel With No Fixed Address
By Adam Nowek
As we wrote recently, shipping containers are all the rage. They’ve been used to create a pretty diverse collection of buildings, including temporary housing for earthquake victims in Miyagi, an elementary school near Cape Town, a mobile office space prototype, a sports hall in South London, a grocery store in Seattle, and even a pirate radio tower in Melbourne. As architects and designers continue to explore the possibilities of repurposing structures, container urbanism is definitely a useful strategy going forward.
Read more →Instaprint Prints Instagram Snaps Directly On The Spot
Instagram and many other mobile imaging applications have brought back the nostalgia of the aesthetics of retro photography to our smartphones over the last couple of years. However, as the digital image has become more immediate and networked, we could say that ‘print never went out of style’. New modes of printing — of what is usually refered to as ‘the Polaroid snapshot’ — could not have stayed out.
Read more →Tape And Tape: A Cocoon Fit For A Church
By Adam Nowek
Numen/For Use are at it again. This certainly isn’t the first time that they’ve created a cocoon out of adhesive tape. But while Tape Melbourne was a project that filled an outdoor public space, Tuft Pula is a little more reserved. Currently installed in a former church in Pula, Croatia, the cocoon dangles almost precariously [...]
Read more →A Fragile Shelter In The Woods Of Hokkaido
By Joop de Boer
Small cabins in the middle of nowhere gain popularity. Not only to semi-permanently live in, or as a part of a decentralized hotel, but also as event spaces. The Japanese architecture firm Hidemi Nishida Studio has created this so-called Fragile Shelter, a temporary construction in the Sapporo Art Forest in Hokkaido, Japan. Hidemi Nishida Studio is specialized in feather-light constructions with plastic as a main construction material. Great examples are this Fragile Shelter but also their piece of inflatable architecture called Occupied.
Read more →Buy Yourself A Piece Of Architecture At The Cityscapes Gallery
By Joop de Boer
How much would you pay for an original model by Rem Koolhaas or a signed sketch of a building designed by MVRDV? The Cityscapes Gallery is a platform that sells original architectural models and sketches as artworks. So it’s possible to buy yourself a little piece of architecture here!
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