Buildings & Design
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“Eco-Pak” expands on shipping container houses
Thanks to their size, strength and ease of transport, shipping containers have been embraced by architects who have turned them into everything from restaurants and off-grid homes , to school classrooms and modular, portable hotels . The “Eco-Pak” home doesn’t just renovate the inside of a shipping container, but uses a shipping container as an integral part of a larger building, with all the structural components contained within it so it can be delivered just about anywhere in one convenient package. The “Eco-Pak” home is the brainchild of aircraft structural engineer James Green of Building Container LLC, who was recently granted a U.S. patent for the concept, with international patents also pending.
In a world where millions of people are forced from their houses every year because of natural disasters, there is an ongoing need for huge numbers of decent mid- to long-term temporary housing units that can be swiftly delivered to the affected area. The Reaction Housing System has been developed to make the wait as short as possible. Six months after Hurricane Katrina, just over 15 percent of the 92,000 temporary housing units required (the infamous Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers) had been supplied to displaced Louisiana citizens.
Reaction system promises versatile, cost effective emergency housing
12 Most Amazing Secluded Houses
6/10/2012 under Cool Places - by Grace Murano - Really lonely house on one of the isles of Vestmannaeyjar. Shot through a plane window.
Today’s collection is going to be a mix of amazing exterior and interior architecture designs. For most of us villas featured are out of reach .) but at least we may admire the creativity and luxury. And of course, we always may get inspired, right?! .)
Creative Architecture Ideas | Cruzine
William Pryce WITH THE GRAIN, AGAINST THE GRAIN At the nine-story Graphite Apartments in London, structural elements involve many layers of spruce fused together. But it’s what’s underneath this cladding that makes the 29-unit building truly different. From the second floor up, it is constructed entirely of wood, making it one of the tallest wooden residential buildings in the world. It was built three years ago using laminated spruce panels, up to half a foot thick and 30 feet long, that were fabricated to precise specifications in Austria, shipped across the English Channel and bolted together on site to form the exterior and interior walls, floors and roof.
Lofty Ambitions for Cross-Laminated Timber Panels
Architectural Canopy Shines in Battery Park City
Richard Perry/The New York Times The canopy designed by Preston Scott Cohen covers North End Way, a pedestrian alley in Battery Park City. The angular glass canopy, commissioned by Goldman Sachs for its headquarters, elevates a gap between two buildings into something almost as inspired as the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Designed by Preston Scott Cohen, the canopy covers 11,000 square feet of an easement in Battery Park City; effectively, North End Way is a north-south passageway or alley, lined with shops and restaurants. Part of what makes this a notable public space is the quality of construction: the granite sidewalk, the lighting, the stainless-steel and glass storefronts, the street furniture. Goldman Sachs, whose headquarters at 200 West Street backs onto North End Way, owns and developed the arcade, which is zoned for public use.Forget Big-Box Stores. How About A Big-Box House?
The architecture firm HyBrid, which specializes in designing buildings from recycled shipping containers, created this solar-powered house for Sunset Magazine . Amy Eastwood When it comes to architecture, sustainability and affordability can mean many things: Salvaged wood becomes new flooring, old newspapers are shredded into insulation. But a few architects are taking green building one step further: creating entire homes and businesses out of discarded shipping containers — an approach some have dubbed "cargotecture." Approximately a quarter-million shipping containers pass through Oregon's Port of Portland each year. These are big boxes — 40 feet long and weighing thousands of pounds.
My other bicycle club has a velodrome for a roof
In a move likely to inflict a sudden pang of inadequacy in bicycle clubs the world over, NL Architects has cooked up a concept both radical and supremely simple: a bicycle club with a velodrome on the roof Image Gallery (11 images) In a move likely to inflict a sudden pang of inadequacy in bicycle clubs the world over, NL Architects has cooked up a concept both radical and supremely simple: a bicycle club with a velodrome on the roof. Architects are under increasing pressure, it seems, to come up with innovative uses for the roofs of the buildings they design.10 Weirdest and Uniquely Shaped Buildings
5/25/2012 under Cool Places - by Grace Murano - TAGS: buildings with shape, shape buildings The Hashtag Tower (Seoul, Korea) Now this is something to talk about: Danish architects BIG have designed an apartment tower complex that looks like a hashtag.
Look up this project on the website of its architects, ACXT, and you will find that it goes by the rather understated name of 242 Affordable Housing Units in Salburúa (Salburúa being a neighborhood in the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz). In many ways the downplaying of the name is in keeping with ACXT's quiet approaches to sustainable design. Though there may be no obvious green bells and whistles such as wind turbines or photovoltaics, passive architectural methods combined with on-site generation contribute to what ACXT claims is a "considerable reduction" in the building's carbon dioxide emissions. Though largely a residential development the building, completed in 2011, incorporates nine shops at ground level. From there, it's social housing all the way up: between four and seven stories for the horseshoe-shaped block that forms the building's footprint, rising to 21 stories for the tower that rises above one end of that horseshoe.
Tall, red and green: Social housing scheme sells energy back to the grid
Office buildings have traditionally been so staid that whimsical departures from the norm still trigger a strong response, both good and bad. The latest member of the avant-garde architecture club, the estimated US$1.08 billion, 44-floor, 768 ft (234 m) CCTV headquarters building in Beijing (already so iconic it's part of a board game for architecture groupies) is now finally complete - after nearly eight years of construction. With its five million square feet plus (473,000 sq m) of floor space, the voluminous OMA -designed China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters is comprised of two leaning towers connected by an innovative 246 ft (75m) cantilever that appears to defy physics to form what is essentially a linear loop.