May 18, 2012, 7:33 pm
Rendering for the Yinchuan Art Museum, designed by We Architech Anonymous.
Yesterday, fairgoers at ART HK 2012 were treated to a first peek of a sprawling new arts center to be built in Northwest China. The Yellow River Arts Centre unveiled designs for its 15,000 square-meter Yinchuan Art Museum and announced plans for a dedicated outdoor sculpture grounds, an “art history park” filled with high quality reproductions, and an artists’ village to host residency programs, all within a vast riverfront estate in Yinchuan. The Centre is part of an even larger infrastructure-building project known as “River Origins,” for which 10 cities along the banks of the Yellow River have invested $4.76 billion to bolster the area with architecture promoting culture, tourism, ecology, and sustainability.
The Yinchuan Art Museum will be the first project to be built within the new arts center. Slated to open in Spring 2014, the museum announced a curatorial agenda that will mix historic and contemporary art to encourage dialogue between the two. The building itself is designed by We Architech Anonymous, a small international design firm based in China but chartered by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). As the preliminary renderings revealed, three floors of exhibition space, classrooms, a library-café and a theater will be housed within a façade of glass-reinforced concrete, generated by technologies never before seen in China on such a large scale. The texture and massing of the building is “inspired by the undulations and distortions of sedimentary layers of the eroded river bank,” as explained in a press statement. The museum has the appearance of pulled taffy, as if its massive overlapping forms were visibly imprinted with forces of motion.
The Yellow River Arts Centre will be a monumental contemporary addition to one of China’s most famous historic and cultural cities. Yinchuan is the capital city of Ningxia, one of China’s autonomous regions, and home to remnants of the Great Wall, the Western Xia tombs, as well as fifth-century pagodas and ancient rock carvings. More than a quarter of the population in Yinchuan is Muslim, making for a distinctive architectural landscape. Now Yinchuan must brace itself for a brand new set of monuments.
- Kelly Chan
May 18, 2012, 6:05 pm
London’s Olympic Velodrome, inspired by an addictive potato crisp?
Pringles, Gherkins, Cheese Graters, oh my! Do you know the iconic buildings of the world well enough to address them on a nickname basis? Can you chuckle at Beijing’s Big Boxer Shorts, and do you immediately think “sponges” when you hear the name Steven Holl? Fear not, Condé Nast’s Daily Traveler has dished out a list of Top 13 Nicknames for Iconic Buildings, perfect for a quick tongue-in-cheek lesson in contemporary architecture and even better for a free association poetry jam. [Daily Traveler]
Shigeru Ban’s Centre Pompidou-Metz shades museum-goers like a ‘Chinese hat’
- Kelly Chan
May 18, 2012, 5:30 pm
The BuBees Beehive, designed by Steve Steere. Image via Los Angeles Times.
So you’re looking to do some urban farming, but you live in a California modernist beach house. I suppose your options shouldn’t be too limited, but beekeeping has never seemed like a more fitting hobby. Designer Steve Steere, a graduate of the Art Center College of Design, is channeling the Malibu spirit with a bespoke line of beehives that capture the chic horizontals of California modernism to battle Colony Collapse Disorder and encourage home-grown honey.
Steere’s BuBees beehives are designed to streamline the urban beekeeping process. According to the L.A. Times, the hive provides a spacious 36-by-18 inch living space, where bees can build their combs on a carefully spaced set of 24 bars. Steere’s design allows beekeepers to adjust the space of the hive to comfortably accommodate both small and large colonies. In true modernist style, beekeepers can survey the whole honey-making process through an elegant strip window. When the time is ripe, they can then harvest the sugary gold by lifting the hive’s top bar and snipping off pieces of honeycomb.
For those hesitant to spend the $300 for one of Steere’s colorful conversation pieces, be it known that Steere has salvaged almost all of the wood for manufacture from local construction projects, and the finite supply will only produce a series of 100 hives. The designer seems to really have California’s environmental health in mind, encouraging prospective buyers to learn more about the striped pollinators and source their swarms from local, organic beekeepers. Lest we forget, the BuBees hives are painted in eye-catching nontoxic milk paints, with delectable names, no less, including pumpkin, salmon and mustard. Though all this is starting to sound like a Portlandia skit, these Malibu bee houses are indisputably Californian.
- Kelly Chan
May 17, 2012, 9:28 pm
Foster + Partners rendering of the future Musée de la Romanitée Narbonne on the Canal du Midi
Norman Foster is best known for his futuristic aesthetic — think the spaceship-like disc he designed for Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, or the actual spaceport he designed for Virgin Galactic in New Mexico — which is why Foster + Partners is such an interesting choice to design the home of a museum of ancient Roman artifacts. After winning an international competition, they’ve been chosen by the city of Narbonne, a former major port of the Roman empire in the south of France, to envision the Musée de la Romanitée Narbonne, the future home of more than 1,000 ancient stone reliefs.
While there are always hopes that a starchitect-designed museum will put a relatively unknown city on the map, Narbonne itself is already rich ancient architectural sites. It makes us wonder how well Foster’s work is going to fit in; the proposed building is a simple white rectilinear structure, a far cry from the stone and stained glass of the city’s current main draw, the unfinished Narbonne Cathedral, the construction of which began in 1272. Rather than finish the architectural masterpiece they already have, it seems Narbonne thinks it’s a better option to start a new one from scratch.
The Narbonne Cathedral
— Janelle Zara
May 17, 2012, 8:13 pm
Taliesin West: primitive, iconic, elegant, and now on your iPad. Following the success of its Fallingwater App, Planet Architecture has just released a mobile app of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Arizona winter home, studio, and lab.
Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's Scottsdale winter home
As digital apps become increasingly integral parts of our daily lives, this Taliesin app takes on two roles: virtual tour and digital monograph. While Taliesin West happily receives more than 100,000 visitors each year, the app offers you a glimpse of the storied home through photography and virtual panoramas, to peruse at your own pace. And although the $9.99 tag seems pricey for an app, it’s a fraction one would pay for a similar tome to sit on a coffee table — as well as a fraction of the weight. While the main contention between books and apps is the clear tactile advantage of handling paper — an intimacy pixels simply can’t replicate, one would allege — it’s worth pondering whether there’s an emotional connection that forms when your fingers are the ones guiding your tour. With every swipe a new door opens, a scene zooms in, one’s perspective moves from left to right, a video begins to play, and an interviewed expert starts to speak. Coffee table books are ideal for displaying and sharing, but the app takes you in a different direction: It’s a selfish, solo experience, one where you’re at the helm. It’s your own private Wright, to revisit as many times as you please.
See a demonstration of the Fallingwater app below.
— Janelle Zara
May 17, 2012, 3:16 pm
The Zaha Hadid-designed London Aquatics Center
You give ‘em eight years of your life, and this is the thanks you get?
This isn’t the exact wording of Zaha Hadid’s interview ES Magazine, but that’s the gist of it. Although the architect designed the London Aquatics Center for the 2012 Olympics, she hasn’t been invited to the opening or closing ceremonies, and she isn’t happy about it.
“I think it is just rude,” she told the Evening Standard. “When you’ve designed a building like this you want to see how it’s used.”
She may have the reputation of a diva, but the comment sounds fair. Eight years, £269 million ($438 million dollars), and more than 3,000 tons of structural steel went into building the center, one of the games’ most distinctive venues. The parabolic roof evokes the curves of a wave and has been nicknamed the Stingray for its wing-like eaves. Dotted with leaf-shaped skylights, it floods the interior with natural light. This summer, the building will hold 17,500 spectators.
Despite her disappointment, Hadid still expressed an excitement about the upcoming games. LOCOG, the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games’, advice? “The best way for anybody to get tickets is through the public application process.” At least we can say they’re being democratic about it. I wonder if Hopkins Architects had better luck getting seats in the Velodrome.
— Janelle Zara
May 16, 2012, 8:42 pm
Dinosaur Designs, the SoHo outpost of Australian handmade, statement accessories, just unveiled “Earth,” the latest in its line of unique collections of jewelry and house wares. Founders and metal and resin mavens Stephen Ormandy and Louise Olsen pulled their palette from where the name would suggest: the natural slates, greys, and beiges of rock formations, accented with silver and bronze. “We feel there is something in the nature of rock formation that relates very strongly to the human body,” says Ormandy. “We are made from minerals, and we too change over time.”
They’ve cast resin into 35 new styles of jewelry, some of which has been molded to resemble elegant clusters of actual stones. Very Holly Golightly meets caveman chic, if you ask us. (Which got us thinking, is that how they came up with Wilma Flintstone?)
Temple Servers
Lava Bangles
Lava Cluster Choker
Catch the “Earth” on display with photographer Martyn Thompson’s handmade sculptures at 211 Elizabeth Street.
— Janelle Zara
May 16, 2012, 8:21 pm
In school, every plea to “have class outside” on a nice day was also a request to suspend all attempts at formal classroom learning. Whether the subject of discussion had been times tables or Heidigger, spending class hours outdoors always meant spacing out and inadvertently pulling grass and threading daisy chains until the instructor’s own attention span had been exhausted. But could our inability to be productive thinkers when we leave the great indoors be attributed to the lack of operative outdoor furniture systems? This is the question posed by designer Jonathan Olivares.
For the past three years, Olivares has been researching the possibilities of outdoor workspaces. The designer hypothesized that rather than inhibiting our cerebral capabilities, being outdoors can actually facilitate them. Moreover, the advent of mobile devices has already toppled traditional cubicle configurations and desk arrangements by enabling us to work virtually anywhere. So why not go outside?
Olivares’s culminating project, The Outdoor Office, presents architectural and furniture prototypes designed to take the conditions of privacy, community, order and adaptability distinct to the office and export them outdoors. As the designer told Fast Co. Design, “The office itself plays a crucial and central role to the culture and life of a business or organization, and the Outdoor Office is envisioned as a natural and healthy extension of that indoor environment.”
Currently on show at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Outdoor Office exhibits research gleaned from television, film and real-life workspace scenarios. The design aspect of the project relies on simple interventions, often with an environmentally friendly angle: Olivares proposes recycled rubber flooring and simple tents to house workspaces illuminated by natural daylight. Can these slightly surreal images of brainstorming sessions in the open air and meetings in the park begin to institutionalize a new way to work? If that is the case, I hope Olivares slips in an outdoor grill somewhere.
[All images via Co.Design]
- Kelly Chan
May 16, 2012, 5:48 pm
The China Central Television Headquarters, Beijing. Image via chan.beau’s flickr.
Believe it or not, eight years after breaking ground, Beijing’s OMA-designed China Central Television Headquarters was completed yesterday and is now ready for occupation. Nestled in the capital city’s central business district, Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s monument to media has stretched the very limits of what architecture can do without ever having opened its doors.
Ten years ago, when OMA proposed the project, renderings of the iconic two-legged structure immediately attracted praise and disgust. The world wondered if this was the kind of architecture to expect from China as the country began flexing its architectural muscles for the 2008 Olympics. Once the exterior was complete in 2008, the steel biped became a foremost—or possibly the most—iconic image of contemporary architecture. Thousands of construction shots and Internet memes later, the image of Beijing’s rising “boxer shorts” was burned into our retinas.
Then, in 2009, some real burning took place: an illegal Lunar New Year fireworks display engulfed the tower’s glass and steel shell in flames and sent 20 people to prison. Controversy surrounding the building has yet to fade, as the final price tag for construction remains a guarded secret to this day.
Chief architect Ole Scheeren knows very well that within the past eight years, his brainchild has become much more than a building: “One thing this building has done is it has asked a lot of questions. It has questioned what is architecture, what can architecture be, what can it do,” Scheeren told The Associated Press. “This question can be answered far more deeply and interestingly now that the building will start to live and will start to be utilized.” True, the building has yet to prove its capacity to perform. But even if it does perform, will CCTV staff start raving about the palpable “interconnectivity” of their new workspace? Probably not. Judging by the trickle of news coverage surrounding the completion of construction, it’s likely that the CCTV Headquarters has exhausted most of its capacity to ask questions.
- Kelly Chan
May 16, 2012, 4:48 pm
Frank Gehry's revised plans for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC
After months of heavy criticism from the Eisenhower family, Frank Gehry submitted his revisions of the forthcoming Washington D.C. Eisenhower Memorial via letter yesterday to the monument’s commission.
Giving in to the family’s complaints that his designs wrongly emphasize Ike’s rural Kansas roots over his military and presidential accomplishments, Gehry replaced his original bas reliefs with nine-foot-tall statues depicting Gen. Eisenhower with the 101st Airborne Division of soldiers before the D-Day invasion of Normandy, and also as president with his hand on a globe, inspired by photographer Yousuf Karsh’s “The Elder Statesman.” “After careful consideration, I believe that the sculptures bring the story to life in a more powerful and accessible way than the bas reliefs were able to do,” Gehry wrote.
Yousuf Karsh's "The Elder Statesmen"
But the architect refused to budge on two things. The life-size sculpture Eisenhower as a boy remains the center of the memorial, despite the Eisenhowers’ contention it was too “Horatio Alger.” ”The Eisenhower our nation wants to celebrate is not a dreamy boy but a real man who faced unthinkable choices,” granddaughter Susan Eisenhower stated before congress in March. But in his letter, Gehry insisted the statue would serve as an inspiration to the children who saw it, including those coming out of the nearby Air and Space Museum. Also to remain are his 80-foot metal tapestries, which Susan Eisenhower likened to the fences of holocaust concentration camps. Gehry shared that some of his family had died in the holocaust and has kept that aspect of the design, which would be covered in images of Eisenhower’s childhood landscape. ”Eisenhower was so proud to grow up in Kansas — leaving out this imagery would mean omitting an important part of his story,” Gehry wrote.
For the most part, the members of the memorial commission expressed approval, although they vote officially at a later date. Susan Eisenhower, wanting to consult the rest of her family first, declined to comment. Despite all the rancor and opposition, Gehry has managed to keep a respectful, if not reverent manner throughout the proceedings. “How do you represent a man of such towering achievement whose modesty was one of his core values?” he wrote. “I would be proud to wear an ‘I Like Ike’ button every day for the rest of my life. He represents what we should all try to be.”
— Janelle Zara
Rendering for the Yinchuan Art Museum, designed by We Architech Anonymous.
