Next Office covers house near Tehran in a curved concrete facade. Billowing curves sweep across the concrete facade and continue inside this house near Tehran, designed by Iranian studio Next Office (+ slideshow). Kouhsar Villa in Kordan, Iran, was already partly built when the owner approached Next Office to redesign it. His brief was to open the house up by removing an octagonal void in the centre, which offered little connection with the surrounding landscape.
"Because of its shape and size, this void could not give him the wide, bright interior he desired," said Alireza Taghaboni of Next Office. Rather than tear the central void's steel columns down, the redesign has covered them with a continuous curved wall, which extends outside to cover the southern facade. "We realised the only way to revive the project was to take this problem as an opportunity, rather than an obstacle," said Taghaboni. "The facade's surface satisfies the requirements of the plan and inserts a sense of dynamism and fluidity throughout the house," said Taghaboni. March Studio adds thousands of sticks to staircase of Canberra hotel. Lengths of reclaimed timber envelop the grand staircase that Melbourne office March Studio has created at the entrance to Hotel Hotel in Canberra, Australia (+ slideshow). March Studio was commissioned to design the lobby for the Nishi building – a mixed-used development in Canberra's arts and culture precinct New Acton.
The grand staircase links the apartment blocks with the hotel, whose design was developed by 50 artists, designers and makers including Japanese studio Suppose Design Office. The space features thousands of pieces of recycled wood, which are fixed around the walls and ceiling to create irregular patterns around the building's precast concrete pillars. "Freed to scatter up the walls and across the ceiling, the suspended timber filters exterior light and views into and from internal spaces," said March Studio in a statement.
"Spidery, pixellated shadows are cast on the floor and bare walls. " Photography is by Peter Bennetts unless otherwise stated. Nishi & HotelHotel. Glass office with mirrored walls for Soho China by AIM Architecture. Mirrored walls and glass ceilings transform this office interior in Shanghai into a labyrinth of reflected light and imagery (+ slideshow). Shanghai studio Aim Architecture designed the office for Soho China, the property developers behind Zaha Hadid's Galaxy Soho and Wangjing Soho projects, and it occupies a space in the company's Fuxing Plaza complex. The space functions as a showroom, so the architects wanted to show customers the raw condition of the office units available to rent. "As Soho rents out the offices in this building in bare shell state, the main design idea is to show the customers what they are actually getting, and at the same time add a layer of inspiring luxury to it," they said.
Ventilation ducts and other service pipes are visible through a continuous glass ceiling, while glass floors surround individual meeting rooms. Mirrored partitions alternate with glass screens and windows, juxtaposing views between rooms with framed apertures of the Shanghai skyline. Pack Every Inch of Your Balcony with Garden. Four Ways To Make Your Home More Luxurious. Detroit Is Not Dead: Meet Some Of The 701,475 People Who Call The City Home (PHOTOS) After Detroit's landmark bankruptcy filing last week, more eyes than ever have zeroed in on this struggling city.
For Detroiters, it's both a blessing and a curse. While it's a relief that some have started to pay attention to the countless problems that often make daily life an uphill battle, how Detroit is portrayed by outsiders can be disheartening: pictures of abandoned buildings stand in for the people who pass by them each day; headlines blare that the Motor City is out of gas, dead or even hell on earth. We're not trying to say that Detroit isn't in trouble -- no matter what some say, things like startups, a billionaire's investments and community gardens won't "save" the city, which faces abysmal city services, has pervasive crime, continues to lose population and boasts an abandoned city structure for every 10 residents.
But there are still 701,475 people who call Detroit home, more than Seattle, Boston, Las Vegas or DC. Because while Detroit does look like this... Photo by J.D. Bamboo construction for Haiti wins Foster + Partners Prize 2013. News: Architectural Association graduate John Naylor has won this year's Foster + Partners Prize with his proposal to introduce bamboo to the construction industry in Haiti, which is still struggling to recover from the 2010 earthquake. Presented annually to an Architectural Association diploma student who best addresses themes of sustainability and infrastructure, the prize is awarded to John Naylor for his Bamboo Lakou project, which combines a sustainable bamboo-growing infrastructure with the development of the vernacular "Lakou" communal courtyard typology. Naylor explains that Haiti's current construction practices contributed to the massive devastation caused by the earthquake, which caused the collapse of 280,000 buildings and killed 316,000 people, even though a far more powerful quake in Chile caused the deaths of just 525.
"This was a disaster of Haiti's lack of lightweight building materials, working practices, and construction, not nature," he says. John Naylor - Bamboo Lakou. This Is the Best Looking Reusable Grocery Sack You've Ever Seen. Presenting the Scientifically Perfect Pinterest Picture. Wi-Fi-Enabled Windows Change Transparency in Seconds. If you have a killer view from your house but curtains or blinds are cramping your style, installing Wi-Fi-enabled window shades you control with your smartphone could be an option to consider. Northern California startup SONTE has designed a high-tech alternative to traditional window coverings: it's a Wi-Fi-enabled window film you put on existing windows that can switch from clear to opaque via a smartphone app. This means you can enjoy the view through a window when you want and then get privacy when you need it. SONTE film can be retrofitted on your existing windows through a do-it-yourself installation.
You measure your window, cut the film to size and, using the film's self-adhesive, stick it on the glass. You then add special conducting clips on the film and plug it into the Wi-Fi-enabled transformer. After downloading the companion app (iOS and Android), you can control the film's transparency. What do you think of this digital window shade? Thumbnail and images courtesy of SONTE. La cathédrale Seagram de Phyllis Lambert | Yves Schaëffner | Arts. Assise à sa table habituelle au Four Seasons, le chic restaurant-bar au pied du Seagram Building, Phyllis Lambert est évidemment dans son élément. Avec les architectes Ludwig Mies van der Rohe et Philip Johnson, elle est après tout en partie responsable du célèbre gratte-ciel de 38 étages. Décrit comme «le building le plus important du millénaire» par le critique architectural Herbert Muschamp du New York Times, aujourd'hui décédé, le bâtiment sis au 375, Park Avenue «représente une façon unique de construire dans la ville.
Il offre un point de vue respectueux, il est ouvert au public», explique Phyllis Lambert, sobrement vêtue de noir. Évoquant la grande place devant le bâtiment, elle ajoute que la construction «offre une sorte de clairière dans la forêt». L'immense parvis devant cette cathédrale moderne tranche encore majestueusement aujourd'hui avec la pépinière de buildings qu'est Manhattan. Mieux, c'était son premier véritable emploi! «Le dessin était horrible!» nIce Cream - Don't Taste! FeedIndex About Me! Following (11) nIce Cream September 2011ice cream. Meet The Accidental Designer Of The GitHub And Twitter Logos. Simon Oxley was drinking beer and watching TV on his couch (like any good freelancer) when he noticed that a hot new startup called Twitter was using his art as a logo. At first, he thought he was drunk. “I checked the label on the beer I was drinking and called my wife to come see,” he says.
“It was a total, surreal surprise.” Oxley, who is British-born and Tokyo-based, was (and is) a freelance contributor to iStockphoto, one of the web’s most popular resources for stock photos and illustrations. He originally joined the service because Adobe Creative Suite came with a free membership. But since then, he’s become a power user, uploading almost 10,000 images and selling 100,000. He was even asked to design iStockphoto’s own logo, in 2009.
His biggest sales, though, have been from startups like Twitter, who paid “a relatively small amount of money” for a library of images including the bird and the robot, which still appears when you visit a broken link. São Paulo warehouse revamped into Red Bull arts centre by Triptyque. A slender steel awning shades artists from the sun on the rooftop of this creative arts space that French-Brazilian studio Triptyque created for drinks brand Red Bull in a São Paulo warehouse (+ slideshow). Situated on Bandeira Square in the bustling downtown of Brazil's biggest city, The Cultural Centre of the Red Bull Station is a five-storey space renovated by Triptyque for the creation of art, music and culture. Formerly owned by the São Paulo Tramway, Light and Power Company, the 1920s building was once responsible for distributing electricity across the city's tram network.
Triptyque was tasked with restoring the listed facade while creating an interior that combined a music studio, ateliers for artists, an art gallery and a roof terrace. The architects added a black steel staircase down one side of the building, linking its five levels and providing an easy flow of visitor circulation up, down, in and around the building. Next to the main gallery is a self-contained music studio. Property prices are "castrating city life" says Joseph Rykwert. News: the rising cost of property in city centres is causing the "biggest crisis" facing architects and urbanists, according to critic Joseph Rykwert, the recipient of this year's RIBA Royal Gold Medal (+ interview). Speaking to Dezeen the day before being awarded British architecture's most prestigious award, the 87 year-old spoke with concern that the increasing cost of city centre property would make the diversity that makes cities thrive impossible.
"What's happening is that - this is common knowledge - the price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life," he said. Rykwert is known for his large body of work on cities including his seminal 1963 book The Idea of a Town, which his RIBA Gold Medal citation called "the pivotal text on understanding why and how cities were and can be formed". Rykwert was born in Poland in 1926 and moved to London in 1939. Melbourne apartment with a sculptural staircase by Adrian Amore Architects.
A sweeping, sculptural staircase extends through the centre of this monochrome inner-city loft apartment in Melbourne, Australia, by Adrian Amore Architects. Adrian Amore Architects renovated the apartment interior for an investor to create a stark, modern space. The building was originally used as a butter factory and converted into apartments in the 1990s. The architects removed a steel truss through the centre of the space and replaced the roof to make room for additional bedrooms. Adrian Amore told Dezeen the twisted staircase, that is made from steel and covered with plywood and plaster, was constructed and tested on site. "I wanted to dramatise the form of the stair, to give it more movement than a conventional circular stair, almost as though it had been pulled or stretched at its mid point," Amore explained. "This was challenging to build, to distribute the loads evenly, as the stair naturally wanted to flex at at its mid point, and so we were worried about it bouncing," he added.
Tapestry Museum by CVDB Arquitectos with marble walls and vaults. Portuguese studio CVDB Arquitectos has created a tapestry museum with vaulted ceilings, marble walls and funnel-shaped skylights inside a twelfth-century hospital building (photos by Fernando Guerra + slideshow). The Tapestry Museum is located on the edge of a plaza in the small Portuguese town of Arraiolos, which is famed for the embroidered wool rugs and carpets that have been in production there since the Middle Ages.
CVDB Arquitectos planned the interior of the two-storey building so that galleries on both floors surround a double-height atrium with an arched ceiling. Square windows offer views through into the galleries on the two long sides, while a single first-floor balcony at the far end offers a vantage point where visitors can survey the space. A local marble combining shades of grey and white covers the atrium floor and continues through the rest of the ground-level spaces, occasionally wrapping up onto the walls.
Glazed doors reveal a first-floor terrace with a marble bench. Bergen International Festival offices designed to resemble a workshop. One of America's Most Famous Architects Was a Nazi Propagandist. I don't understand people who claim to value freedom of speech, but who want to silence others' (and who use their own freedom to do it.) That's you. Let's say there's no dispute that your personal opinion, that "Philip Johnson was a terrible, hateful human being" is completely factual. Why does that mean that you should want the destruction of what he has contributed to his discipline? If we held that strategy, we'd also want to remove jet airplanes, rockets, and space travel to the list of things to be destroyed, and never used again.
Ironically, what you're promoting here is a sort of fascism all its own breed, Matt. So he's a jerk. He's not suggesting we tear down his buildings and erase all mention of him. Brandon, I'm not sure if at any point Matt urges the destruction of a single Philip Johnson structure. There's no silencing mentioned in Matt's article. Then again everyone who has a cursory knowledge of architectural history already knew of Johnson's Nazi affiliations. Maccreanor Lavington overhauls Amsterdam's Kraaiennest metro station. Laser-cut stainless steel creates an intricately patterned surface on the walls of this upgraded metro station in Amsterdam by architecture firm Maccreanor Lavington (+ slideshow).
Maccreanor Lavington's Rotterdam studio overhauled the 1970s Kraaiennest station in the Bijlmermeer neighbourhood of Amsterdam, increasing its capacity and modernising its facilities. The decorative steel screens surround the new ground-level entrance, allowing natural light to filter inside during the day. After dark, lights glowing from within transform the structure into a glowing beacon that makes it easy for locals to find. "At night time the design allows the station to be a lantern for the local neighbourhood," said the architect in a statement. As well as the laser-cut panels surrounding the base of the station, the opaque upper walls are also made from stainless steel. The upgraded Kraaiennest station is the latest in a series of infrastructure improvements underway in the 1960s neighbourhood. The World's Largest Christian TV Network Has a Lot to Hide.
OMA completes industrial headquarters for G-Star RAW in Amsterdam. Office by Wiel Arets with glass fritted to resemble Barcelona Pavilion. "Architecture is not art," says Patrik Schumacher in biennale rant. Johnston Marklee's Vault House frames beach views through many arches. Détroit de la grandeur à la décadence, symbole d'une amérique en mutation copy by Hugo Flammin.