As any architect who has played with LEGO can tell you (which, let’s face it, is nearly all of us), one of the most exciting yet struggling steps is just starting off on that tabula rasa of the standard, flat LEGO base. But for anyone looking to build something within the context of their environment, you were flat out of luck. Now, that all may be changing, thanks to a new LEGO-compatible tape, currently being funded on Indiegogo.
Called Nimuno Loops, the tape roll is lined with LEGO block-friendly bumps on one side, and a mild-strength adhesive on the other, giving you the ability to start building on any surface the tape sticks to. The flexible strips can be cut and pulled around corners, into curves, and even onto other objects to turn them into custom LEGO bases. The strength and stickiness of the tape is still a question, but from the teaser video, it certainly seems more than capable of suspending rather large LEGO structures even from 90 degree angles.
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via Nimuno
The campaign has already reached its goal, but it’s not too late to snag some of the tape for yourself; estimated delivery on the product is expected for this upcoming summer.
The design of this collection gets its inspiration from natural stone, characterized by its vibrancy but without being garish.
Reims 31,5×100
Its wide variety of aesthetic possibilities makes it ideal for any architectural project aiming to create a backdrop of clean, modern lines, whether in a private home or a public building.
The Reims range available in 31.5 x 100cm format is available in Ivory, Grey and White and is rounded off with a wide variety of decorative pieces:
Nimes, Beziers and Jacquard provide texture and depth to the base design; the Narbonne and Robine decors impress with their beauty and depths that rise and fall from the base, creating a series of geometrical shapes, and furthermore, the Robine boasts a metallic finish where the lights and reflections seemingly become a part of the piece; the mesh-mounted Amiens with its clean lines, and Chartres with a metalized finish and eye-catching patina, add a touch of class and elegance to the whole range.
Interior View of the Vessel. Image Courtesy of Forbes Massie-Heatherwick Studio
Thomas Heatherwick is bringing a new public monument to New York City. Today, Heatherwick Studiorevealed the first renderings of “Vessel,” a 15-story tall occupiable sculpture comprised of 154 intricately interconnecting flights of stairs that will serve as the centerpiece of the new Hudson Yards development in west Manhattan.
View of the Public Square and Gardens Looking South from 33rd St.. Image Courtesy of Forbes Massie-Heatherwick Studio
Inspired by the mesmerizing geometries of Indian stepwells, Vessel’s lattice calls to mind a beehive or jungle gym – and will indeed offer a workout to visitors game enough to climb the almost 2,500 individual steps within the structure, nearly a mile’s worth of vertical pathways.
The object’s form takes on a conical shape, widening from 50 feet at the base to 150 feet at the top. And if the geometries alone weren’t eye catching enough, the steel structural frame has been clad in a polished copper-colored steel skin, which will provide warped reflections of the plaza below.
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Upper Level View Through the Vessel. Image Courtesy of Forbes Massie-Heatherwick Studio
“We had to think of what could act as the role of a landmarker,” said Thomas Heatherwick. “Something that could help give character and particularity to the space.”
The structure will be located in the central plaza of Hudson Yards, where it will be surrounded by native perennial gardens and a canopy of native trees, as well as a variety of seating options where visitors to the nearby Culture Shed or High Line can rest their feet.
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View of the Special Events Plaza. Image Courtesy of VisualHouse-NelsonByrdWoltz
The plaza platform itself constitutes quite the technical innovation, as it acts as a ventilating cover for the rail yards while also serving as a reservoir for site drainage and storm-water management.
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View of the Pavilion Grove. Image Courtesy of VisualHouse-NelsonByrdWoltz
The cost of “Vessel” is estimated at $150 million, double the original budget of $75 million.
Courtesy of Selyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Seongyen Hwang, and Wonyang Architecture
The collaboration of Selyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Seongyen Hwang, and Wonyang Architecture has won second place in the International Ideas Competition for Establishing Busan Station as The Cub of Creative Economy in Busan, Korea. The competition sought out proposals to revitalize the original downtown area, Busan Station is the starting point for a larger Busan North Port redevelopment project.
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Courtesy of Selyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Seongyen Hwang, and Wonyang Architecture
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Courtesy of Selyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Seongyen Hwang, and Wonyang Architecture
The second place proposal aims to reprogram the existing plaza of Busan Station Square with adaptive reuse, in order to create a new public space, including many activities centered on film.
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Courtesy of Selyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Seongyen Hwang, and Wonyang Architecture
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Courtesy of Selyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Seongyen Hwang, and Wonyang Architecture
By converting the existing structure into a film-based space, the proposal seeks to cultivate a place for culture and fun, which additionally creates jobs, all without compromising the existing plaza.
The creative process for this project was approached with the intention of achieving a new image that could adapt and reestablish a new dialogue with its context.
We took advantage of the site characteristics as well as the materials of the brand with the goal of enlarged them by embellishing the restaurant under a series of elegant and subtle interventions.
Architectural Record has released the latest edition of its annual list of the “Top 300 Architecture Firms” in the United States, based on architectural revenue from the previous year (2015). Gensler, which became the first firm to surpass $1 billion in revenue in 2014, held on to the top spot with earnings of $1,181,030,000 in 2015. Los Angeles-based AECOM maintained its number 2 position after a revenue increase of more than 30 percent, making it the largest publicly traded company in the LA area.Perkins+Will continued their steady climb up the list, finishing at number 3.
French architect Patterlini Benoit has imagined a mixed-use building to be wrapped around one half of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Completed in 1836 as a memorial to the victories of the French armies under Napoleon, Paris’ triumphal arch is one of the most iconic and visited landmarks in France and the world over. But Benoit argues that its status as a tourist destination has removed it from the authentic cityscape that is used by everyday Parisians. His proposal attempts to reclaim the monument for the city by dividing the arch with an enormous mirrored plane – visually competing the monument from one perspective and providing new function from another. In this way, Benoit claims, the structure can be “brought into modernity without denying history.”
The proposal consists of a series of stacked glass boxes, bracketed around the monument and connected via a glass elevator. The boxes would have their own independent structure, so they can float around the Arch without compromising the memorial. Each box would contain different programmatic elements: a museum to French history and nationalism, an art gallery, a panoramic restaurant, and a cafe-style lounge, where tourists and locals could interact.
Benoit also addresses the issue of accessibility to the site. Located in the center of the world’s most famous roundabout, the Place Charles de Gaulle, access to the monument currently demands navigating across 12 lanes of traffic or walking through an underground tunnel. Benoit’s proposal calls for a new landscaped bridge connecting the monument to the neighborhood of Neuilly. The bridge would accommodate both pedestrian and bike traffic, becoming a new green corridor of the city.
The remaining half of the Arch would remain undisturbed, with the large mirrored surface visually completing the symmetrical structure. On the other side of the mirrored wall, a digital billboard would be erected to announce events and Parisian news.
Obviously speculative, the project’s true goal is in in questioning whether our landmarks and icons can contribute to the public realm in more pragmatic ways.
A small boutique hotel as a part of urban pedestrian city …Its started from a closed competition. The clients brief were simple, because of the site location is in the heart of the city, and near the batu cityhall (alun-alun batu), they wants to have a hotel that can be unique and can reflect of the location. They want a simple budget hotel but can easy remembered for the city…
Located at 700 to 1,700 metre above sea level, the temperature in Batu City of East Java range between 17 oC to 27 oC. Humidity that is approximately at 77-86%, coupled with wind velocity at 6.06 km/h have made the city experience a very little difference in terms of weather in dry and rainy season. Batu and the surrounding area became a perfect place for relaxing and tourism, supported by the soothing climate, mountainous topography, and natural beauty of the place.
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Plan 1
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Plan 2
This hotel was designed with site respect approach. The natural potentials were maximised through the application of passive cooling, especially in ground floor lobby and hotel rooms. Building masses are porous, employing window openings in different wall side to enable cross ventilation. (However, during operational time, recently the hotel management decided to add air conditioning unit in each room as an optional feature).
Instead of one big massive and bulky building block that sits in the middle of the site, this hotel building comes in several smaller masses, allowing them to look slimmer, creating different sequences and more spatial experiences as in a kampung, the indigenous settlement. The block of masses also draw on imaginations of temples, an intuitive experiment.
This idea is reinforced by utilizing ramps for vertical circulation as a replacement to stairs and elevators. Ramp is considerably accommodating to disabled, children, luggage trolley, and also will enrich the spatial experience of the guests.
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Section
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Section
The building sets back (16 m) away from the street, the front area contributes to urban space and blends in with the pedestrian way to perform the nodes of the pedestrian city. The open space is used as commercial area with wide walkways, sitting and outdoor dining area. This space is restricted for motor vehicle, but accessible for everyone in addition to hotel guests. This area also acts as transitional space and as buffer from the heavy traffic in front.
Unlike the common hotel typology where the rooms were lined in a train-like layout resulting in poor natural lighting and ventilation especially in the room’s toilet, this hotel applied a different strategy. It applies ‘coupled’ concept; each two rooms form a mass so that every room (especially the bathroom), benefits from the gap in between the masses, gets good daylight and outdoor fresh air. All corridors are open at the end, creating an airy feels and more breathing space.
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Elevation
There are no sophisticated technology. They are all use conventional method. All the material are locally produced. Especially for all the brick finishing, they were built manurally on site. Start from mixing, colouring, printing, until drying. A Homemade brick, using the surrounding local materials.
Colour schemes are inspired from nature; of woods, stones, exposed Portland cements, which establish a compound of building and the surrounding environment. All materials (bricks, sands, natural colourings) are locally sourced and manually produced. The colour-mixing process, moulding and drying were done within the project site. Minimising footprint with less energy, less transportation cost, and less pollution. Site respect.
NANJING GREEN LIGHT HOUSE (NANJING, PRC 2012-15). We would all like to produce more ‘green’ buildings with lower energy consumption or low carbon emission.. The challenge is at the same time to make this necessary new buildings even more attractive than buildings of today and not just making engineering technology driven machines. With this lighthouse we aim for no less than this.
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Courtesy of Archiland International
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Diagram
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Courtesy of Archiland International
The driver for the design has been to create a park, then a building and then an interior design, which stands out as one connected design focussed on creating a great environment for people celebrating the daylight. Light House is one of the first of ZERO CARBON buildings to be done in mainland China, hence it will host state of the art technology to achieve an energy consumption below 25 KwH/m2/year and the remaining energy load will be offset by Photo Voltaic panels. BUT a mayor reason for the achievement has been the ability to achieve a 200 LUX natural daylight level for all permanent working areas through sophisticated façade design. The building will celebrate the natural daylight and indoor climate in general and increase the well-being and productivity of the users. With the assistance of a multidisciplinary team and 3D tools optimized areas of window and skylight has been calculated to achieve maximum efficiency with minimum use of high performance façade openings.
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Courtesy of Archiland International
A combination of efforts; the circular building with the meandering façade turning window openings away from the direct heat of sun, the daylight horizontal reflectors on windows, an inner atrium receiving daylight from the carefully orientated skylights etc. all sums up to a softly lighted interior. Natural ventilation, interior greenery, open transparent interiors and natural bright materials compliments a work place as living exhibition enjoyed everyday by the users.
Arquitectonica has released the plans for Pierce Boston—its first building in Boston—a luxury residential condominium in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. With the recent large-scale real estate boom, the Fenway area is undergoing a massive transformation, with Pierce Boston to become the first building of its caliber in the neighborhood.
In an effort to balance new luxury with the existing iconic fabric of the area, the building is designed in simplicity with contemporary materials, so as to modernize the building against its context. Glass and metal will panel the façade, with the metal paneling patterned down to the scale and texture of a more traditional masonry brownstone. “As the building comes to grade and its opacity increases, it more closely reflects the history of the neighborhoods within which it rises” explained the architect in a press release.
Overall, the mixed-use tower will feature 109 condominium units, 240 rental units, and over 20,000 square feet of street-level retail space. With a curtain wall and floor-to-ceiling windows, the building is designed to maximize 360-degree views of Boston, Cambridge, the Charles River, and the Emerald Necklace.
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Archy Naija 