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. Whether or not Johnson and Gehry realized it, the Bilbao and its swirling façade tapped into a primal human emotional network.
Recently neuroscientists have shown that this affection for curves isn't just a matter of personal taste; it's hard-wired into the brain. Others had a rectilinear form, like this: Vartanian and collaborators slid people into a brain imaging machine, showed them these pictures, and asked them to label each room as "beautiful" or "not beautiful. " It's worth noting this isn't a men-love-curves thing; twice as many women as men took part in the study. 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. Milan is a very polluted town; these trees will cleanse the air, pumping out oxygen and greening the cityscape. 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. Bosco Verticale, the oft, and often only, cited example of a tower to be built with trees on top, is expected to cost $85 million . Then there’s the ecological value of each. A real forest, on the other hand, can replace itself. Sources: Roman, Lara. 2006. Gorte, Ross W. 2009. Illustration of Bosco Verticale.
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. It came out in 1943, exactly 70 years ago this summer. In the movie version a few years later, Gary Cooper played Howard Roark, the character famously modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright. Consider the plot. Today, they say the Fountainhead is dead, but everywhere you look architects are portrayed as if they’re strange and special beings, somehow more than mortal. The F*heads know best—or think they do.
Move the table. 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. Worldchanging | 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 | What future urban living. 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. Dubai -- Correa has written in one of his many essays on architecture -- is inspired by the imagery of Houston, the sprawling US oil town that impressed the sheikhs of the Middle East. "What should I do? The future "They (India's cities) are mostly getting worse, but the good thing is that they are a system of cities. 'Not in Delhi or Bombay' New urbanism the Springfield way. The shape of our cities to come | Opinion. 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? Will they be slums with pockets of defended enclaves for the wealthy? Cities are the most fertile fields of economic, social and cultural exchange, and creativity. By this definition, South African cities are not real cities. Pre-colonial ancestors On these four conditions, our cities rank dismally low. We would not be the first to do this. 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.
Linking rich with poor neighborhoods, spurring private development, the metro, notwithstanding shrieks elsewhere in Colombia over its questionable construction cost, is for residents of Medellín a shared symbol of democratic renewal. But the city’s transformation established roots before Mr. Mr. Progress is hard. Mr. Mr.