A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

A couple years ago I posted briefly about Ponte City , a 1970s high-rise with a distinct cylindrical shape and hollow core. Located in Johannesburg, South Africa, the building is undergoing a transformation from... to... Yes folks, it's New Ponte ! While gussying up the concrete core with color and some balconies does little to betray the building's qualities, the exterior rendering below resembles a mediocre development in Chicago, New York, Vancouver, or some other North American city. The design and the marketing make me wonder how much else the South African development borrows from American precedents. From a brief look at New Ponte's web page, it looks like a lot, from the amenities package to the focus on "luxury" living and open floor plans. Given the fact that Ponte City was a rough and tumble place that happened to have a unique design, the transformation is impossible to dismiss outright, though I'd contend that a development geared at a mix of inco...

Rooftop louver mock-ups for Art Institute addition, Renzo Piano , originally uploaded by Atelier FLIR . Mock-up of the rooftop louvers for the Art Institute of Chicago addition by Renzo Piano Building Workshop . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Courtyard House in Los Angeles, California by Ripple Design The following text and images are courtesy Ripple Design , for their Courtyard House project in Los Angeles, California. What does it mean, in a big city, to be home? With this courtyard house, designer Thomas Robertson integrates these two seemingly contradictory experiences. The urban experience is filtered into the house while an intimate sense of privacy is preserved. Proceeding through the house, the courtyard reveals itself as a kind of plaza on a micro-urban scale ideal for relaxing or entertaining. Utilizing passive strategies of climatic control not only offers financial benefits to the client and a reduced ecological footprint to the community, it also folds in a premium quality of life for its inhabitants. Just one example of this is the courtyard doors. When opened, the outside becomes the inside of the house. Various combinations of these doors opened and closed can ...

The following text and images are courtesy vision division , a young Swedish architecture firm with a penchant for the clever. "If you want to build something in Sweden, you have to neglect your architectural aspirations and desires, and build something comprehensible and conventional to please the Swedish building regulations with their obsessed traditional values." "So at a first glance this sauna may appear to be an anonymous wooden cabin, with no architectural features or ambition. The front façade is windowless; a water proof drape covers the façade on the other side. The sauna has a pointed traditional roof as well, to accomplish this intriguing scam." "The front façade is actually a door, and when it is opened, the cabin changes its appearance completely." "Now you have a magnificent view over the archipelago, and the door/wall creates an intimate space with the guest hut next to the sauna." "The wall prevents the neighbors from peaki...

Part of the Urban Design program at City College last year was a class on the anthropology of space and place. Taught by Setha Low , the class was equal parts theory and practice; readings about the subject followed by research and field observations for a public space in the city. The team of which I was a part looked at Jacob Javits Plaza in Lower Manhattan's Civic Center area. Designed by Martha Schwartz, the plaza is known as being the site of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc , a curved wall of Cor-ten steel that bisected the space and was removed only eight years after its supposedly permanent installation. I'd written critically about the plaza design in the past, though this class gave me the opportunity to look at the success (or lack thereof) of the design from the point of view of use, in relation to design. This weekend I decided to reformat the final paper for the web and post it on my web site. So I give you Jacob Javits Plaza: Reconsidering Intentions . It'...

Ordrupgaard Museum Extension - Copenhagen (Denmark) , originally uploaded by dod: . Ordrupgaard Museum Extension in Copenhagen, Denmark by Zaha Hadid . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

On the left is a (modified) aerial of Kramer Junction (Google Earth link) solar electric generating station in Southern California; on the right is an aerial of Central Park (GE link, again) in Manhattan. According to Nova's " Saved by the Sun ," Kramer Junction powers approximately 150,000 homes, or the equivalent of just under two Central Parks at Manhattan's population density of 66,940 people per square mile. Or to put it another way, turning Central Park into a solar electric generating station, like Kramer Junction (assuming, magically, the same solar conditions as the Mojave Desert), would power approximately 8-10% of Manhattan's households. While I don't think this comparison deflates the solar potential, it helps illustrate the enormous areas required, with current technologies, to achieve a more suitable way of creating energy than burning fossil fuels. Of course, this comparison also ignores demand (what I see as a -- if not the -- key to the cur...

wave , originally uploaded by base_gee . Block 16 in Almere, Netherlands by René van Zuuk Architekten . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Even without being the fan of Japanese super-duo Atelier Bow-Wow that I am, I still would have been blown away after perusing the drawings in their latest book, Graphic Anatomy , at a bookstore a couple weeks ago. The thorough mix of working drawing, perspective drawing, and entourage is a novel combination of well-established drawing conventions. They're beautiful in their own right. While I resisted purchasing the book (how much longer I can, I'm not sure), it was great to find some super-large-scale images from the book on yusunkwon 's Flickr page. Below are some strips from those images. Click the image to be taken to see the overall images, impressive even at a lower resolution. (For those not versed in navigating Flickr, click on the "all sizes" button above the image on the Flickr page to see the full, hi-res image.)

Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago's 1933-34 World's Fair by Lisa D. Schrenk, published by University of Minnesota Press , 2007. ( Amazon ) In the realm of history, the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago overshadows the Century of Progress held forty years later in the same city. Where the former is both loved and hated for its classically-inspired architecture that influenced both architecture and town planning in the years following the immensely popular event, the latter looked to the future, and in turn perhaps sealed its fate for a country that more than not embeds its technological progress in historical forms. As author Lisa D. Schrenk points out in this...

Termas Géometricas in Villarrica, Chile by Germán del Sol Just south of the volcanic Villarrica in the Patagonia region of Chile is the Termas Géometricas , "17 slate covered pools of natural hot springs waters that flow in plenty along a mountain stream, in the midst of the native forest of the Villarrica National Park." While visitors may have a difficult time reaching the pools, once there they find comfort via wooden pavilions and paths designed by Germán del Sol . To speak of the architecture of Termas Géometricas is to start with the natural features, primarily the path of the stream and the natural "rooms" in which the structures sit. The steep and tall "walls" of the stream and the lush vegetation are embracing, increasing the ease pleasure that one derives from the hot springs...

Yesterday saw the opening of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas. Designed by Kyu Sung Woo Architects, the museum is a part of the Johnson County Community College and is built as an addition to the school's Regnier Center, giving the museum a prominent location on the campus's northeast corner. The view above shows the building apparently reaching out beyond the campus, to the community beyond, as a sort of symbolic connection between the two. According to the architect's web page, the museum "provides amenities for the entire campus. A café is provided in the atrium and a large multi purpose Lecture Hall serves the museum, campus educational needs, and has additional conferencing capabilities. Galleries are provided for both the permanent collections and for temporary and changing exhibitions." The simple stone and glass exterior illustrates these functions, the more public facilities, such as the café, occupying the transparent groun...

After seeing these images at Dezeen of Richard Meier 's artwork now on display at the Louise T Blouin Foundation in London, I couldn't help but think about how they relate to his buildings. Where what he's known for are geometrically crisp, white and light-filled, his art is geometrically chaotic, black and dingy. The images also made me wonder what the art would look like in some of his spaces. So here's some "mash-ups" I made of the possible interaction of the two. Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt, Germany Original image by darrell godliman Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt, Germany Original image by Gabó High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia Original image by Wizum Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, Italy Original image by DarkFrame

gas natural , originally uploaded by MaLóL . Gas Natural's New HQ in Barcelona, Spain by EMBT . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

"Gaudi did for architecture what Lautréamont did for poetry: he put it through the bath of madness." "He pushed the Baroque as far as it would go, but he did not do so on the basis of accepted doctrines or categorizations." "As locus of risible consecration, one which makes a mockery of the sacred, the Sagrada Familia causes modern space and the archaic space of nature to corrupt one another." "The flouting of established spatial codes and the eruption of natural and cosmic fertility generate an extraordinary and dizzying 'infinitization' of meaning." "Somewhere short of accepted symbolisms, but beyond everyday meanings, a sanctifying power comes into play which is neither that of the state, nor that of the Church, nor that of the artist, nor that of theological divinity, but rather that of a naturalness boldly identified with divine transcendence." Excerpt by Henri Lefebvre, from The Production of Space , translated by Donald...