A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Hearing the word "bunker," one most likely thinks of the Cold War, of protecting oneself and one's valuables from destruction, specifically nuclear destruction. Cold War bunkers ranged from individual shelters buried in one's suburban backyard to the US government's many real or mythological subterranean vaults for the storage of everything from arms to money. With the Cold War long over and the term bunker taking on purely historical connotations, the transformation of those facilities, and the revitalization of the idea of subterranean fortifications for other purposes, is leading to a plethora of what I'm calling New Wave Bunkers. The Federal Reserve Communications and Records Center (Mt. Pony) in Culpeper, Virginia is one such government bunker, a facility for the storage of currency in the case of a mass catastrophe on US soil. It also housed the "central switching station of the Federal Reserve's Fedwire electronic funds transfer system...in ...

The idea of a "folding facade" is not entirely new. Shuttered exteriors have traditionally been used in various locales for protection from the elements, from New Orleans to New England in the United States, and in most other parts of the globe. What separates the newfound use of a folding perimeter to the traditional use is extent and purpose. [Carabanchel Housing | photo by Francisco Andeyro Garcia and Alejandro Garcia Gonzalez] The Carabanchel Housing in Madrid, Spain by Foreign Office Architects strongly illustrates how the 20th-century shift to frame structures has made folding screens encompass the whole facade, as opposed to covering punched openings in load-bearing walls. This enables the character of the facade to be seen as ever-changing, as each occupant modifies their space to suit. [Carabanchel Housing | photo by Francisco Andeyro Garcia and Alejandro Garcia Gonzalez] In this design the folding facade is created from small bamboo rods in a metal frame. T...

One product of the two main components of sprawl -- dispersed living patterns and the high-speed roads that allow access to them -- is all too often relegated to engineers and manufacturers instead of designers, and therefore is all too often an eyesore. I'm talking about highway noise barriers, those walls erected along the sides of highways where development occurs, and where those in the development do not want to hear (or see) the cars speeding by. Here's an example of a barrier frequently found along North American highways, basically steel piers with precast infill, the latter in this case treated to resemble a stone wall: [A small portion of the 7 million square feet of noise barriers installed by Durisol | image source ] This wall surely won't be winning any design awards, but it will continue to be installed by developers and jurisdictions that don't want to pay too much for what's becoming more and more required, as highways and dwellings creep ever...

Being back in the world of architectural practice after the brief graduate school respite, I find myself spending more and more time looking for and at materials and products and their applications. For me the last is the most important, as context is an overriding consideration for how certain pieces come together into a design. So when it came time to find a way to bridge this time spent into material for this blog, I decided to present certain findings as "architectural elements;" by which I don't mean the usual (columns, porticoes, canopies, balconies, etc.) but the atypical, the apparent threads I see across designs responding to new urban, social, environmental and other conditions. The idea is that other designers can find inspiration in the work of others, but also that the definition of architectural element can embrace the contemporary as well as the traditional. To begin this new series that will present two or three projects per post (read: not exhaustive) ...