Posts tagged with architecture
Today, the NYTimes featured an incredibly popular article, Can We Build in a Brighter Shade of Green?, on a new home being constructed to Passive House standards outside of Boston. A great read and a great introduction to this incredibly efficient building and design method
This is not the first Passive-House-minded project in Boston however, as a previous retrofit project, featured here, sought certification recently.
Speaking for themselves, on the St. Giles Mixed Use Development, Renzo Piano Building Workshop:
Located in Camden, the project is part of a complex urban patchwork of medieval streets, modern buildings and traditional urban blocks. This environment had a dramatic impact on the design of the project.
The scheme is composed of complex volumes, which are characteristically chiselled, fragmented, and reduced in scale to match the surrounding buildings. These chiselled volumes make St-Giles an impressive architectural sculpture characterized by a combination of shimmering facets.
Each facet is unique, differing in height, orientation, colour, and relationship to natural light. Glass, steel and ceramic are the primary elements of the skin. In each facet the ceramic is used in different shades and colours that respond to the surrounding building, thus helping to integrate the scheme in the immediate urban environment.
A critique of Renzo Piano on context and function:
Renzo Piano’s Central St Giles project has put commercial architecture on the media map for the first time in many years – not since Sir James Stirling’s No 1 Poultry in the City have we encountered such a wilfully vivid mixed-use building. Yet there is a risk that Central St Giles will convey a false sense of worth by suggesting that the design of so-called rent slabs is all about dramatic, “because you’re worth it” architectural implants.
Architects, developers and planners will serve our towns and cities better if they face up to the fact that commercial architecture need not be predicated on glib non-ideas about the hearts and souls of forgotten places. They must instead address what Eric Parry describes so elegantly as “the finesse of the relationship between the mercantile world and very brave architecture”. That is the real challenge. And gift-wrapping buildings isn’t the answer. (The Independent 6/3/10)
As I was walking home today, I was beginning to step across a street when I heard someone playing the violin. It caught my attention even amongst the cop’s siren and a loud lunch-rush jamming the parking lot.
I was leaving my house later that day and was greeted, when stepping outside of the door, by the same violinist I had heard trolling the streets earlier. She was across the street, carrying on without regard for her audience. I was struck by the way this simple gesture completely changed the character of the street and the neighborhood around the lone violinist. It was a melody that fit perfectly into the breezy, cloudy, Oregon atmosphere of February, reminding me of the blooming crocus I’ve noticed along the sidewalk each morning. The wonderful thing about this whole scene was the backdrop. There was a 15′ tall, 100′ long gray wall punctuated with street trees, and she walked along a sidewalk that undulated with the bulk of the tree roots pushing up beneath it.
We’re all conditioned to think so linearly about improving urban environments : there are lots of buildings in cities, so the solution must be in the form of a building (or in the form of no building), we think. But that mentality will just lead to a state of constant building and development, rebuilding and redevelopment, when in fact a more simple alternative may exist.
Our built environment is calling for musical accompaniment.
One caveat though: in my mind, accompaniment means live music (no loudspeakers, thank you).
A subdued, but fresh comparison of the nation’s largest public transit systems from our friends at GOOD. From left to right New York City Transit (NYCT), Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), and Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA):
What should come next is a comparison based not upon raw size of the public transit system, but of the relative size. These numbers have a slightly misleading character to them, in that the amount of people and area of land that the system covers is only hinted at in the “miles per trip (avg)” metric.
Take Portland, for example. They boast quite an impressive public transit system that serves an ever-expanding suburban periphery and provides it service for free within the city’s downtown. As well, Portland and its surrounding areas are the subject of a reinvigorated movement (well, semi-new) in development known as Transit-Oriented-Development (TOD). The goal is to fully integrate every new development (and further integrate existing ones) to the larger Portland area through the public transit system, resulting in suburban communities that are more walkable and a larger metropolitan area that is truly the sum of its parts.
For more on TOD and ongoing research check out the Sustainable Cities Initiative.
Spray-on, ultra thin, inert, non-toxic, liquid glass. Read more here.
While the article from the Independent points to manufacturing, health care and agriculture as beneficiaries of this new technology, the thing that comes to my mind first is solar panels and other architectural elements designed to make efficient use of the sun. The constant problem with PV panels (photovoltaic cells) is that they accumulate dust over time and their efficiency drops significantly. This would apparently solve that dilemma in one spray-on application, keeping the surface clean of dirt, dust and other environmental pollutants. As well, the spray-on coating would help improve efficiency and upkeep of passive solar systems like trombe walls and double skin envelopes, which are plagued by years of dust and dirt in very hard to reach places. As well, those windows may not need to be cleaned so vigorously ever again!
Big payoff though:
The liquid glass is composed of almost pure silicon dioxide, the chemical constituent of quartz or silica, the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust. It is quite inert and has no known harmful impact on the environment, unlike many of the domestic and industrial cleaning products its use could help to reduce.
Not to mention how hard this advance would kick the volatile chemical producers at Clorox in the nuts!
Photos: Iwan Baan
From the NY Times all-important Arts section, a profile of architecture photographer Iwan Baan.
“Mr. Baan’s conjuring of real life may be ideally suited to a time when architects like Mr. Koolhaas are creating buildings meant to absorb and reflect the messiness of 21st-century cities.”
Anything worthwhile in architecture today is context-rich. These photos represent something essential about the space captured, something more true to how architecture exists outside of high design magazines.
“For decades magazine editors, developers and architects themselves favored a static style of photography that framed buildings as pristine objects. Mr. Baan’s work, while still showing architecture in flattering lights and from carefully chosen angles, does away with the old feeling of chilly perfection. In its place he offers untidiness, of the kind that comes from real people moving though buildings and real cities massing around them.”
People still seem to recoil at the mention of modern architecture, in all its form-first, ego driven glory. The way modern architecture is represented in photography typically speaks volumes to a certain character of the resulting space. Compare these two photos of supposedly worthwhile spaces and decide which one you’d like to spend an hour in :
Photo: Christopher Sturman, Dwell Nov 09 Photo: Iwan Baan
…and everything in between
