Architecture

[neko]

No, you're not likely missing anything about it.

 

I lack the local knowledge and understanding of the site, so I really can't say much except I thought the exterior looked somewhat interesting (cladding / circulation) and the few interior shots looked quite nice (especially when uncluttered by people and things).

 

Like I said, I look forward to hearing how successful it really is.

 

I do agree that it doesn't appear to sit well with its context - but that's not always a bad thing.

[Karl_b]

A long article with photos so I'll just link to it:

 

Museum of Liverpool – review | Art and design | The Observer

 

The opinion seems to be that it's not completed to the full intention of 3XN's designs, which is a shame. I found the 3XN book I have but the section about the museum is about 20 pages long so I won't type it all out. Sorry!

[neko]

A long article with photos so I'll just link to it:

 

Museum of Liverpool – review | Art and design | The Observer

 

The opinion seems to be that it's not completed to the full intention of 3XN's designs, which is a shame. I found the 3XN book I have but the section about the museum is about 20 pages long so I won't type it all out. Sorry!

 

I've never heard of 3XN, but I'm going to change that right now, with the help of the internetz.

[neko]

Friends of mine from university, who now live in Arizona, designed this house recently.

 

me likey....

 

Barrio Historico House by HK Associates Inc | HomeDSGN, a daily source for inspiration and fresh ideas on interior design and home decoration.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

I don't think I could live in a house with such clean lines. I'm too much of a scruff.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

No, you're not likely missing anything about it.

 

I lack the local knowledge and understanding of the site, so I really can't say much except I thought the exterior looked somewhat interesting (cladding / circulation) and the few interior shots looked quite nice (especially when uncluttered by people and things).

 

Like I said, I look forward to hearing how successful it really is.

 

I do agree that it doesn't appear to sit well with its context - but that's not always a bad thing.

 

I wasn't sure at first, but I'm a convert. It actually sits remarkably well with its context - the polished black granite of the new apartment blocks, the views across to the curvy One Park West and the monumental red brick of the Albert Dock. It's superb. The cladding is fantastic: even up close it still seems to be an artist's impression. Bizarre and brilliant.

[Karl_b]

Oooh, first time anything I've designed has made it anywhere other than the company website!

 

4th image in at the top and the 4th down with description in the main text.

 

Forgotten Spaces Sheffield 2011: Proposals C – F | The Critics | Architects Journal

 

It was only an entry for the RIBA's Forgotten Spaces competition I worked on with another guy in the office (his visual) but we were really pleased with it. We took an under-used piece of space in Sheffield's 'Cultural Industries Quarter' and turned it into a market/art gallery/meeting space with a series of interlocking boxes set to a grid across the site.

[Karl_b]

Hadid fascinates and infuriates me at the same time. I love Russian Suprematism and Constructivism and her thesis on Malevich's Tektonik along with the paintings, drawings and proposals she produced at the time are stunning pieces of work. However, I completely agree with the notion that she should "turn her computer off" and think about what she designs (or her practice). It's all very samey and clearly defined by the limitations/capabilities of the computer software with a distinct lack of humanity and is very much style over substance.

 

The Evelyn Grace Academy is held up as some wonderful piece of education design in the UK but it's no better than a lot of other awful PFI schemes across the country.

 

She's one of the architects I loved as an under-graduate when my course was very much focused on architecture as "art"; where the process of designing a building was to create an object and then fit the building's programme around it. During my post-grad I went down a totally different route, my tutor there pushed me very much away from my previous studies and I'm glad he did.

 

Ha, it only went and won the Stirling Prize! Can't help but feel they were trying to score points over the Tories (not that I'm against that) by showing how standard school designs will never result in successful places. Having seen and read more about it recently I think I was overly harsh in declaring it to be no better than other PFI schools, but I still don't think it's great.

[neko]

Congrats Karl, but do you have any other images or drawings ?

 

It's a little hard to get a feel for it from the postage stamp images on that site.

[Karl_b]

Congrats Karl, but do you have any other images or drawings ?

 

It's a little hard to get a feel for it from the postage stamp images on that site.

 

Only on our company website, where we have a couple of images (PM'd).

 

My love of Suprematism/Constructivism manifested itself in the 'gates' to the site.

[Section_31]

Fucking top class Karl, well in mate!

[Karl_b]

I'm definitely going to see this exhibition at the Royal Academy on Soviet art and architecture:

 

Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 at Royal Academy of Arts - Art museums & institutions - Time Out London

 

And a couple of related articles:

 

Eastern blocks: Soviet architecture on display – in pictures | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

 

Russia's aesthetic revolution: How Soviet building still influences today's architects - Architecture, Arts & Entertainment - The Independent

 

More excited about this than any exhibition I've been to before. It's as though they curated it straight out from my head.

[neko]

I like this house - mostly for the colour and the site.

 

Red House by JVA | HomeDSGN, a daily source for inspiration and fresh ideas on interior design and home decoration.

 

 

[Karl_b]

Oscar Niemeyer, architect of Brazil's capital, dies aged 104 | Art and design | The Guardian

 

Oscar Niemeyer, architect of Brazil's capital, dies aged 104

 

The architect known for his distinctive and frequently curvy style designed the main buildings of capital city Brasilia

 

Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect who helped to shape the 20th century and mankind's vision of the future, died on Wednesday aged 104, according to Brazilian media.

 

Niemeyer died of respiratory failure in Botafogo hospital in Rio de Janeiro, the city where he was born in 1907, studied architecture and that he helped to shape with famous landmarks, such as the Sambadrome, notoriously modelled - like much of his work - on the body of a woman. But his influence spread much further to the design of the capital Brasília and many of its landmarks including the cathedral and Congress building. Overseas, he designed the United Nations secretariat in New York, the Communist party headquarters in Paris and Serpentine gallery summer pavilion in Hyde Park, London.

 

Brazil's biggest newspaper group announced the death at the top of its website with a photograph of the country's celebrated intellectual and two articles lauding him as "the concrete poet", "the pessimist who loved life" and the "traditionalist for tomorrow." Other stories recalled his nickname as the "Picasso of concrete".

 

Veja magazine also led its news coverage with obituaries for Niemeyer under the headline "The great name of Brazilian architecture" and photographs of some of his greatest works. The domestic media have devoted considerable coverage to the architect since he was hospitalised on 2 November.

 

One of the pioneers of modernist architecture, Niemeyer was hugely influential with his designs of buildings and urban landscapes from the 1930s onwards. Much of his work still looks futuristic today. He is said to have influenced numerous architects in subsequent generations, including Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito, Tadao Ando and Christian de Portzamparc.

 

Though some critics said some of his later work was inferior, few doubt his reputation as one of the 20th century's great architects will endure.

 

"The work of Oscar Niemeyer is a celebration of technological knowledge that poetically transcends the everyday," wrote Lauro Cavalcanti, the director of Rio's Imperial Palace and author of a book on the architect. "His architecture introduces today the tradition of tomorrow."

 

Niemeyer leaves more than reinforced concrete. The 104-year-old had one daughter, five grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and seven great-great grandchildren. After his first wife, Annita Baldo, died, he remarried at the age of 99.

 

In works from Brasília's crown-shaped cathedral to the undulating French Communist party building in Paris, Niemeyer shunned the steel-box structures of many modernist architects, finding inspiration in nature's crescents and spirals. His hallmarks include much of the UN complex in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Niterói, which is perched like a flying saucer across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro.

 

"Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man," he wrote in his 1998 memoir, The Curves of Time. "What attracts me are free and sensual curves. The curves we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love."

 

His curves give sweep and grace to Brasília, the city that opened up Brazil's vast interior in the 1960s and moved the nation's capital from coastal Rio.

 

Niemeyer designed most of the city's important buildings, while French-born, avant-garde architect Lucio Costa crafted its distinctive aeroplane-like layout. Niemeyer left his mark in the flowing concrete of the cabinet ministries and the monumental dome of the national museum. As the city's population grew to 2 million people, critics said it lacked "soul", "a utopian horror," in the words of art critic Robert Hughes. Niemeyer shrugged off the criticism. "If you go to Brasilia you might not like it, say there's something better, but there's nothing just like it," he said to O Globo newspaper in 2006 at age 98. "I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness."

 

After a 1964 coup plunged Brazil into a 21-year military dictatorship, Niemeyer, a lifelong communist, decided to spend more time in Europe. While living in France in 1965, he designed the headquarters of the French Communist party. During the dictatorship he also designed the centre of the Mondadori publishing house in Italy, Constantine University in Algeria and other projects in Israel, Lebanon, Germany and Portugal.

 

He won the gold medal from the American Institute of Architecture in 1970, the Pritzker architecture prize from Chicago's Hyatt Foundation in 1988 and the gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1998.

 

 

Hard to judge having never visited any of his buildings but it seems to me he produced some spectacular pieces of architecture as well as some abject failures. I'd love to visit Brasilia one day to see what it's all about.

[Karl_b]

I also want to add that the inexperience and naivety in some of my earlier posts in this thread make me cringe!

[Karl_b]

Whilst in Copenhagen this summer we went to the Louisiana Museum where they had a New Nordic - Architecture & Identity exhibition on that was very inspiring. I've always had a thing for Scandinavian/Nordic design (clichéd much), I love the apparent simplicity which comes from an understanding of place, form and materials and this exhibition was full of examples, from the 5 follies that had been designed by an architect from each of the Nordic countries and the projects on show down to the elegant building it was housed in. The book was a bit of a let down as it didn't have much of the accompanying text with the photos but for architect nerds it's worth a look.

 

The Russian exhibition I mentioned above was pretty good too.

[neko]

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Some towers.

 

http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2010/09/27/solar-powered-towers-13-super-sunny-skyscrapers/

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Snuck out under cover of Ronnie Corbett, but Zaha Hadid died the other day.

 

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/31/architecture/zaha-hadid-appreciation/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[AngryOfTuebrook]

 

[neko]

I'm going to be a bit insensitive and controversial and say that she was a vastly over-rated architect and embodied much of what is wrong with modern architecture.

 

There, I said it.

[Trumo]

I'm going to be a bit insensitive and controversial and say that she was a vastly over-rated architect and embodied much of what is wrong with modern architecture.

 

There, I said it.

 

I agree with you there. People say she was being creative and thinking outside the box but most of the time it just sounds like the sort of pretentious guff spoken by 'artists' when talking about their work. That's not to say that everything she was involved in looks terrible because a lot of it actually does look good. It's whether it will look dated not so long from now. An example of terrible work is her commissioned design for Tokyo's 2020 Olympic Stadium which would have been ridiculously expensive to build, had too many engineering challenges for its intended purpose, and looked like a bicycle helmet. The Japanese jibbed her off in favour of something more affordable and orthodox.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

I'm going to be a bit insensitive and controversial and say that she was a vastly over-rated architect and embodied much of what is wrong with modern architecture.

 

There, I said it.

Can't say I knew much about her at all, but that building in Baku looks a bit special.

 

 

 

 

[AngryOfTuebrook]

I agree with you there. People say she was being creative and thinking outside the box but most of the time it just sounds like the sort of pretentious guff spoken by 'artists' when talking about their work. That's not to say that everything she was involved in looks terrible because a lot of it actually does look good. It's whether it will look dated not so long from now. An example of terrible work is her commissioned design for Tokyo's 2020 Olympic Stadium which would have been ridiculously expensive to build, had too many engineering challenges for its intended purpose, and looked like a bicycle helmet. The Japanese jibbed her off in favour of something more affordable and orthodox.

But it takes a special kind of genius to put FIFA's showpiece under a massive cunt.

 

[Sugar Ape]

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/new-boutique-hotel-adventure-golf-16639401#ICID=ios_EchoNewsApp_AppShare_Click_Other

 

New boutique hotel and adventure golf course could transform Allerton Manor

 

Those behind it hope to turn Allerton Manor into the 'region's premier public golf destination'