Legalize Hempcrete: The Growing Eco-Movement to Build Homes Out of Hemp - Design The notion of California dreamin' is poised to reach a whole new level with the state's first home made out of hemp. The owners of the ruins of Knapp's Castle in Santa Barbara plan to begin building a home out of a sustainable construction material called Hempcrete, a mixture of hemp, lime, and water. Hemp makes a good building material because it's extremely energy-efficient, non-toxic, and resistant to mold, insects, and fire. Plus, it absorbs carbon dioxide, making it good for the environment. "We got started about 3 years ago and I was looking for sustainable building products. The one major hurdle standing between Madera and the dream of entire neighborhoods made of hemp? While Madera admits gaining approval from local officials has been far from easy, he's confident that the benefits of hemp building will win out in the end.
Vitra Unveils Its Stunning New Museum [UPDATED WITH 3-D TOUR] | Fast Company - StumbleUpon The Vitra campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, is already a mecca for contemporary architecture, featuring a design museum by Frank Gehry, a conference center by Tadao Ando, and another building on the way by SANAA. And they've just finished what might be the greatest of them of them all: a new building, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, to showcase the company's home-furniture collection. UPDATE: Vitra has now thrown up an amazing series of 3-D images of the museum, offering you the next-best thing to actually visiting the building. A couple screen-caps: Herzog & de Meuron--who made a global splash in 2008 with their "Bird's Nest" stadium for the Beijing Olympics--conceived of the building as an "ur-house." The individual volumes take the form of generic, A-frame houses, which are then stacked on top of each--creating an architectural symbol of Vitra's actual business, selling high-design through mass production. There are 12 houses in all, and the stacking of them
How to Architect | Learn about architecture | Become an architect | Design like an architect Winners of the eVolo Skyscraper Competition 2012 eVolo Magazine has unveiled the winners of its 2012 Skyscraper Competition. The first place was awarded to Zhi Zheng, Hongchuan Zhao and Dongbai Song from China for their project "Himalaya Water Tower." The proposal is a skyscraper located high in the Himalayan mountain range that stores water and helps regulate its dispersal to the land below as the mountains' natural supplies dry up. The skyscraper, which can be replicated en masse, will collect water in the rainy season, purify it, freeze it into ice and store it for future use. The second place was awarded to Yiting Shen, Nanjue Wang, Ji Xia, and Zihan Wang from China for their project "Mountain Band-Aid", a design that seeks to simultaneously return the displaced Hmong mountain people to their homes and work as it restores the ecology of the Yunnan mountain range. Sponsored Links
Architectural drawing An architectural drawing or architect's drawing is a technical drawing of a building (or building project) that falls within the definition of architecture. Architectural drawings are used by architects and others for a number of purposes: to develop a design idea into a coherent proposal, to communicate ideas and concepts, to convince clients of the merits of a design, to enable a building contractor to construct it, as a record of the completed work, and to make a record of a building that already exists. The development of the computer had a major impact on the methods used to design and create technical drawings,[1] making manual drawing almost obsolete, and opening up new possibilities of form using organic shapes and complex geometry. Today the vast majority of drawings are created using CAD software.[2] Size and scale[edit] Architectural drawings are drawn to scale, so that relative sizes are correctly represented. Standard views used in architects' drawings. Floor plan[edit]
Lofted Forest Home: Organic Curves & Natural Materials | Designs &Ideas on Dornob - StumbleUpon Good things come to those who wait – particularly in a work of uniquely detailed and highly curved architecture. Nearly a decade in the making, this structure by Robert Harvey Oshatz is much like a tree house – lofted toward the top of the canopy around it – only bigger, grander, more complex and curved than most any tree house in the world. The perimeter of the structure is pushed out into the forest around it, curving in and out to create views as well as a sense of intimacy with the coniferous and deciduous tree cover. The curved, organic mix of materials continues to the interior of this elevated forest home – a conceptual play on the fluidity and complexity of music (the source of inspiration for the architect and client in the design).
learning architecture Amazing Places To Experience Around The Globe (Part 1) - StumbleUpon Preachers Rock, Preikestolen, Norway Blue Caves - Zakynthos Island, Greece Skaftafeli - Iceland Plitvice Lakes – Croatia Crystalline Turquoise Lake, Jiuzhaigou National Park, China Four Seasons Hotel - Bora Bora Ice skating on Paterswoldse Meer, a lake just South of the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. Marble Caves, Chile Chico, Chile The Gardens at Marqueyssac Ice Canyon - Greenland Capilano Suspension Bridge, Vancouver, British Columbia Valley of the Ten Peaks, Moraine Lake, Alberta, Canada Multnomah Falls, Oregon Seljalandsfoss Waterfall on the South Coast of Iceland Petra - Jordan (at night) Verdon, Provence, France Wineglass Bay, Freycinet National Park, Tasmania, Australia Norway Alesund Birdseye of City Benteng Chittorgarh, India Riomaggiore, Italy Keukenhof Gardens - Netherlands. Sky Lantern Festival - Taiwan. Mount Roraima - Venezuela. Seychelles East Iceland. Lucca, Tuscany, Italy. New York City. See also
Free Online Course Materials | Architecture ZAHA HADID: THE FIRST GREAT FEMALE ARCHITECT | More Intelligent Life - StumbleUpon This weekend Tokyo won the bid for the 2020 Olympics—more good news for Zaha Hadid, who is designing the new national stadium. Five years ago, we published a profile by Jonathan Meades saying, "The world is waking up to her" From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008 ZAHA HADID'S PRACTICE occupies a former school in Clerkenwell, an area of London that still bears the scent of Dickens. It's an 1870s building designed by the London School Board architect E.R. Robson, who, typically of his profession, was unquestionably formulaic. "What is exciting," says Zaha, "is the link between computing and fabrication. "The computer is a tool," I agree. "No. What then? The workers on the factory floor--my way of putting it, not hers--are, she says "connected by digital knowledge...They have very different interests from 20 years ago." Sure. TEN MINUTES' WALK from the practice is Hadid's apartment—austerely elegant, a sort of gallery of her painting and spectacularly lissom furniture. "How large? "No.
Twisted Architecture I didn’t set out to tie knots in Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower or wrinkle his Gherkin, but I got carried away. It’s one of the occupational hazards of working with Mathematica. It started with an innocent experiment in lofting, a technique also known as “skinning” that originated in boat-building. I wanted to explore some three-dimensional forms, and a basic lofting function seemed like a quick ticket to results. I dashed off the function Loft, which takes a stack of three-dimensional contours and covers it with a skin of polygons. Loft uses Mathematica‘s GraphicsComplex primitive to factor out the geometries of the polygons from their topologies. I tried out Loft by embedding it in a Manipulate, and was happily on my way discovering some interesting new forms. Even this trivial parameterization of a scaled and twisted half-sphere yields an amazing variety of forms, each of which suggests interesting avenues to explore. I wondered how convincingly I could model the Gherkin in Mathematica.
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