Why Our Brains Love Curvy Architecture. When the great architect Philip Johnson first visited the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry, he started to cry.
"Architecture is not about words. It's about tears," Johnson reportedly said. Something about the museum's majestic curves moved him at an emotional level. Many others must get a similar feeling, because the building is usually ranked among the most important in modern times. More reasons to stop putting trees on skyscrapers — Per Square Mile. Robert Krulwich, disagreeing with me : Two residential towers, dense with trees, will have their official opening later this year in downtown Milan, Italy, near the Porta Garibaldi railroad station .
(The image is not a photograph, but an architect’s rendering. The towers are built and the trees are going in right now.) I love this. I think these towers are gorgeous. I know I seem like Buzz Killington to a lot of architects—and non-architects, Krulwich included—but that wasn’t my point…entirely. In reality, trees on skyscrapers will likely be anything but sustainable.
The Fountainhead: Everything That’s Wrong with Architecture. Howard Roark, the fictional architect envisioned by Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead, has possibly done more for the profession in the past century than any real architect at all – inspiring hundreds to enter architecture and greatly shaping the public’s perception.
And, according to Lance Hosey, Chief Sustainability Officer at RTKL, that couldn’t be more damaging. In his recent article “The Fountainhead All Over Again,” for Metropolis Magazine, he details why it’s such a problem, going so far as to accuse Ayn Rand’s dictatorial protagonist of committing architectural terrorism. Sustainability Begins at Home. Landscape Urbanism. Industrialism and the Genesis of Modern Architecture. The spatiotemporal properties of architecture that were developed by experiments in abstract art reached their highest expression in the work of Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy.
Stepping back from our analysis of this development, however, we may witness a crucial conjuncture between the realm of abstract art and the other major positive basis for the existence of modernist architecture — industrialism (and more specifically, the machine). This conjuncture occurred on two levels. At one level, leading avant-garde artists and architects began to draw inspiration from the monumental improvements in both factory production and machine technologies, seeing in these an ideal of economy and efficiency.
Frank Baldwin’s Pin-Wheel Machine (1905) Fernand Léger’s Mechanical Elements (1926) Several of the artists affiliated with the movements of abstract painting we already discussed began, during the early 1920s, to grant aesthetic legitimacy to the machine. Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) J.J.P. Evaluation + Tools + Best Practices. Terms and Conditions Only 21 years old and above is eligible for loan application.
To preserve the confidentiality of all information you provide to us we maintain the following Privacy Principles. We only collect personal information that we believe to be relevant and required to understand your financial needs. By clicking "Submit" and providing your personal data, you consent to Credit Hub Capital contacting you via the telephone and email for the loan application purpose. We will only use any information collected as minimally as possible, mainly to assist us in customising and delivering loan packages that are of interest to our customers. We will not make unsolicited requests for customer information through email or the telephone, unless customers initiate contact with us. We have established strict confidentiality standards for safeguarding information on our customers. OpenBuildings / the crowdsourced buildings database.
From Building To Architecture: Of the Conscious Ethics & The Unconscious Evolution of Architecture. Designing cities of the future. India's top architect warns of urban breakdown. "You see the big ads -- 'Buy your house, it's time you moved up in life' -- and it's a horrible project.
Twenty-five identical buildings, some swimming pools somewhere, and the angle is such that you see all 25 of them," he says. "They're the kind of cloned building that used to be done by Stalin and the Russians or in the Bronx that people just hate and dread," adds the celebrated Modernist. The reason, he believes, is that people think tower blocks are "progressive" and "modern" -- a perception derived from cities such as Dubai and Singapore which are visited and admired by India's new elite. "People see that as an image of progress," he told AFP. "For people in Bombay (Mumbai) and Delhi, Dubai is a big source of inspiration. New urbanism the Springfield way. The shape of our cities to come. Some of the world's most innovative and respected thinkers on urbanism and architecture are in Cape Town for the Architecture ZA 2012 Biennial to share their views on the need for, as the conference has put it, "rescripting architecture".
These are challenging times with economies, resources and even governments under threat. Global connectivity and rapid human migration to cities in developing countries is a key factor. An estimated three-quarters of the world's population will be urbanised by 2050; they will require natural resources, education, healthcare, water, electricity, food and other products.
What will these cities of 2050 look like? Morph City. Fighting Crime With Architecture in Medellín, Colombia. FOR some time now, if you asked architects and urban planners for proof of the power of public architecture and public space to remake the fortunes of a city, they’d point here.
Twenty-odd years ago, this was Pablo Escobar’s town, with an annual homicide rate that peaked at 381 per 100,000. In New York City that would add up to an almost inconceivable 32,000 murders a year. But Colombia’s second city has lately become a medical and business center with a population of 3.5 million and a budding tourist industry, its civic pride buoyed by the new public buildings and squares, and exemplified by an efficient and improbably immaculate metro and cable car system.