Corpus Intra Muros

I'm intrigued but a little baffled by architect Stefan Hitthaler's Corpus Intra Morus, spotted over at Arch Daily.


[Photo: Harald Wisthaler]

Simply put, it is a cover and frame over an old building, "the gunpowder tower" in Bruneck, in South Tyrol’s Puster Valley.

[Photo: Christof Theurer]

If the tower looks a little odd – shinier in some places – it is because it was refashioned from its before state (image via Google Street View):


According to Hitthaler and Ulrich Leitner, Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft Universität Innsbruck, who apparently worked on the project as well:

The tower has become the conduit of a two-sided exploration of the relationship between the human being & the wall: on the one hand an architectural structure permits the merging of human beings with the tower, captured as they are in photographic representations and blown up into a large format on a substrate. Simultaneously, a scientific search is being undertaken to detect the traces of the trails of bodies and their objects in the given spaces. Art and science thus blur the boundaries between human beings and matter, to the point of shifting it completely into the narrative form.

Baffling, but nevertheless a pretty cool melding of architecture, art and history.

Read More

Today's archidose #848

Here are some photos of Arquipélago - Centro de Artes Contemporâneas (2014) in Azores, Portugal, by Menos é Mais Arquitectos Associados and João Mendes Ribeiro Arquitecto, photographed by José Carlos Melo Dias.















To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool

To contribute your Instagram images for consideration, just:

:: Tag your photos #archidose

Read More

ChiDesign

In addition to the Currencies of Architecture competition recently announced by the Chicago Architectural Club, there is another competition center in Chicago that is happening this summer. ChiDesign is "an open international ideas competition, adjudicated by a distinguished jury of design and education professionals, [in which] competitors will propose a facility that includes the new headquarters, visitor center and exhibition spaces of the Chicago Architecture Foundation; a new headquarters for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH); a design and allied arts high school; and flexible learning spaces for out-of-school-time youth programs." Click here or the image below to learn more about the ChiDesign competition.

Read More

Summer 2015 Architectural Walking Tours

I've got a couple architectural walking tours this summer, both coming up this month. Click on the links below to purchase tickets from the 92Y.

Saturday, July 18, 11am - 1:30pm
The High Line and Its Environs
Trek the High Line taking in the park and the surrounding buildings and step off to get a closer look at select buildings.


Saturday, July 25, 11am - 2:30pm
Brooklyn G Train Tour
Hop on and off the G train from Carroll Gardens to Clinton Hill and Williamsburg, taking in townhouses, campus facilities and other buildings along the way.

Read More

Currencies of Architecture

The Chicago Architecture Club's 2015 Burnham Prize Competition isn't a building, a landscape or an installation – it's an image. Specifically, "the iconic image that defines or challenges the state of architecture today." Read on for more information on Currencies of Architecture.


[All images courtesy of Chicago Architecture Club]

Throughout the history of architecture, iconic images have demarcated, defined, represented or challenged the state of architecture. The crystalline form of the Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper, developed in 1921 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, inspired and spoke of an imminent future. Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp’s cinematic 1972 rendering The City of the Captive Globe encompassed ideas of ideological pluralism forever altering our conception of the city. Stanley Tigerman’s 1978 photomontage The Titanic depicted Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Crown Hall sinking into Lake Michigan, challenging the perceived norm in architecture during a period that saw the postmodern movement becoming an opposition to the established modernist legacy in Chicago.

These images represent but a few examples of definitive moments in the history of architecture. They were able to not only capture the Zeitgeist of a period but were laden with meaning that suggested possible new directions forward. They remain provocative and polemical artifacts. What would the iconic image that defines or challenges the state of architecture today look like?

Inspired by the title of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial—The State of the Art of Architecture— the Chicago Architectural Club’s 2015 Burnham Prize challenges participants to develop a single image that represents a strong point of view that explores the question: What is the State of the Art of Architecture today? The competition allows the CAC to champion the work of a new generation of architects and seeks contributions that foster vigorous debates on the fundamental issues of the state of the art of architecture.

More information is available at the Chicago Architectural Club website.

Read More

Ten Big Buildings in Google Maps

Just a fun little mid-week diversion: While doing some virtual globetrotting I noticed that many buildings I was looking for have modeled footprints in Google Maps. Below is a sampling of ten of the most interesting ones, all roughly at the same scale and sorted from big to bigger to huge. Click on each map to "visit" the building in Google Maps.

J. Mayer H.'s Metropol Parasol in Seville, Spain:


Herzog & de Meuron's de Young Museum in San Francisco, California:


Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany:


EMBT's Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, Scotland:


SANAA's Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland:


Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain:


Charles Correa's Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur, India:


Renzo Piano's Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia:


BIG's 8 House in Copenhagen:


Louis Kahn's National Parliament House in Bangladesh:


Any good ones I missed? Please comment below and maybe I'll add them.

Read More

Exhibition of the Moment: Foreground

I wish I could make it out to Los Angeles to see the Center for Land Use Interpretation's (CLUI) current exhibition, Foreground: The Landscape of Golf in America. Alas, these couple photos and description will have to do. (If anybody makes it out to the exhibition and snaps photos or does a write-up, please let me know and I'll add a link here.)


[Photos: CLUI]

Description from CLUI:

Most sports are played on rectangles of consistent dimensions, and can be pursued almost anywhere, even indoors. Golf’s field of play is irregular in form, and defined by features of the outdoors, such as grass, trees, sand, mounds, and water. Golf is a sport played on, and with, a landscape.

Golf courses are romantic, evoking notions of a pastoral sublime. They are also site-specific, distilling scenic qualities of the place where they are. In this way golf is a celebration of the diversity of the American landscape.

Primarily, though, golf is a landscape reduced to a functional stage, a simplified vista, serving the needs of the sport. Golf is an assertion that nature can be thoroughly tamed, sculpted, and placed under control, so long as we can maintain it.

Exhibit on display at CLUI Los Angeles through September 21, 2015.

Read More