Designed for the Luminale 2012 in Frankfurt, Germany, Kollision’s Photophore installation is a five storey veil of light that is operated by a smart phone. In order to make the veil act as if it being pushed, pulled or thrown in, the people on street can use an application: by scanning a QR code mounted on the façade, the users are brought to a website which invites them to swipe their finger across the touch screen of their smart phones. Read the rest of this entry »
Photophore Installation is a 3D Responsive Veil Operated By a Smart Phone
Snøhetta Wins Busan Opera House Competition
Inspired by the dramatic coastal landscape of Busan, the Norwegian design firm Snøhetta has won the competition to realize the city’s opera house. The new Busan Opera House will be located by the port, and, as with the Opera House in Oslo, it will allow the public to walk on the roof. The house will have about the same size at its counterpart in Oslo, only exceeding it by a slightly bigger main hall with the planned capacity of receiving an audience of 1800 people. According to the architects, the main guideline in the design process was the creation of an accessible and democratic space, turning the static into dynamic. The Opera is an interactive open stage that transforms the contemporary cultural spaces from elitist monuments into democratic arenas. Read the rest of this entry »
Studio Fuksas Completes The Tbilisi Public Service Hall
Studio Fuksas have completed the Tbilisi Public Service Hall in Tbilisi, Georgia. Conceived as the largest social service center in the world, the landmark, which is located on Tbilisi’s waterfront, pairs an innovative program with flamboyant architecture. A giant corolla of eleven white petals covers the building, adorning the banks of the Kura River with a symbolic bloom.
Description from the designers:
The Tbilisi Public Service Hall is situated in the central area of the city and it overlooks the Kura River.
The building is 28.000 mq. It is made up of 7 volumes that contain offices (each volume is made up of 4 floors located on different levels). These volumes are placed around a ”central public square”, which is the core of the project, where there is the front office services. Offices are connected to each other by internal footbridges that stretch on different levels. Read the rest of this entry »
League of Shadows Pavilion / PATTERNS
Designed by Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, the League of Shadows Pavilion has been declared winner of an architectural design competition for a 1,200-seat outdoor pavilion at SCI-Arc. The pavilion would accommodate graduation ceremonies, lectures, symposia and other cultural events. The pavilion will be located in the school’s parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. It is set to be completed spring 2013. Read the rest of this entry »
Crumpled Metal Tables – The Crush Collection / Fredrikson Stallard
The Crush Collection, designed by Fredrikson Stallard, features a series of low tables and chaises inspired by the sensuous form of crumpled metal sheet. These include an extended chaise created from black painted steel rods and upholstered in a sleek ultra-suede skin; glass unit tables containing polished metal sheet in black, gold and silver which creates tantalizing reflections of the surrounding space; and low tables draped with a sheet of polished metal that spills luxuriously on to the floor. Read the rest of this entry »
Kiriake Miniature Water Park / Takao Shiotsuka
The three “Kikuchi” public parks are carefully weaved into the neighborhood of Kikuchi, a city in Kumamoto, Japan. Designed by Japanese architect Takao Shiotsuka, they are a good example of an alternative approach to pocket parks. According to Shiotsuka, the goal of these three parks is not to add greenery, but to revitalize an old area of the city with “a new stream of people.” Read the rest of this entry »
Phyllon Lamp Mimics Leaf Structure
The Phýllon lamp designed by Nikolay Hristov Ivanov was inspired by the complexity of a leaf’s veins system. A novel process that employs computer simulation is used to generate a design that operates close to a micro-scale. It started as a research design-investigation based on the distribution of the veins of a single leaf blade. The goal was not to mimic the leaf’s pattern of veins, but rather to have a new reading towards using a speculative data set and reconnecting it within certain logic – establish direct connections – more like covered with a spider net, creating complexity via the quantity of the elements, rather than the elements themselves. Via exploring a numerous configurations of points and diverse connection logics of growth, it crystallized as extremely fragile, elegant or even precious single object design. Read the rest of this entry »
GTeam: One Step Closer to the Digital Era
Over the last decade or so we have heard the buzz of parametric design and experimented with the physical possibilities that come with digital fabrication. There is no question that our primary push forward lies in research labs and institutes synthesizing new materials and scripting new algorithms for generative or morphogenetic design. We have dipped our feet into the sea of what digital architecture can be, but we are still in the experimental phase. Currently, monumental architecture is left to the big named-architects, leaving the rest of the world’s architecture firms in shy efforts to making such bold moves. However, like most other cases in history, technological innovation plays a part in leveling the playing field. Some have understood the key ingredient to making the wildest schematic designs a constructed reality: innovative technological thinking.
Frank Gehry amazed the world with his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. When there was no software that could translate his gestural drawings to a 3D model, he figured out a way. The solution came as a 3D modeling software called Digital Project, which contributed to the birth of Gehry Technologies, a company with bestselling project delivery service. In only 10 years since their establishment, Gehry Technologies has already assisted some of the world’s most complex architecture projects through various consulting and modeling services as well as licensing Digital Project to other teams. An alternative to ArchiCad, Microstation, and Revit, Digital Project (based on CATIA from Dassault Systemes) is widely favored for its design-to-fabrication feature and complex parametric modeling tools. Digital Project has been instrumental in assisting engineering and production management of some recently popular projects like the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, Beijing National Stadium, and Louvre Abu Dhabi. With the mission to “provide the most cutting edge technology, improve the spirit of collaboration, and support the realization of inspirational work for the build environment” Gehry Technologies has gained a reputation for embarking on monumental projects all over the world. Now with a decade of experience leading and assisting large-scale construction projects, Gehry Technologies addresses an issue that has for a long time been a project of its own to handle in the construction process: project collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »
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Anisotropic Sheet Morphologies – Pavilion at Beijing’s Design Week
Ban is the latest pavilion by architects Orproject which has been constructed for the Beijing Design Week 2012. The Chinese title refers to floral petals, and similar to the way that the shape of a flower is created by its bent petals, Ban is constructed from bent polymer sheets which form a self-supporting structure and create shapes and volume from a multitude of leaves. Read the rest of this entry »