[RE] Engaged Architecture Symposium

Mark your calendars: March 28 is the [RE] Engaged Architecture Symposium: Celebrating 20 years of Studio 804. Details on the symposium, and the events taking place the day before and after, are below.


[The Forum at Marvin Hall, Studio 804's 2014 project]

[RE] Engaged Architecture Symposium: Celebrating 20 years of Studio 804

Saturday, March 28, 2015
8:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
The East Hills Construction Innovation Laboratory, 3813 Greenway Dr., Lawrence, KS 66046

Overview

This symposium celebrates Studio 804’s 20th Anniversary and its contribution to architecture culture at KU’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning.

The [Re]Engaged Architecture Symposium welcomes speakers of international stature to discuss projects and processes that embody this resistance, and to reflect upon the body of work created by Studio 804, headed by Distinguished Professor Dan Rockhill over the past 20 years. Studio 804 is an internationally recognized design/build program that engages design, craft, practice, and community to build healthy communities through the power of design.

Schedule

Friday, March 27

3:00 - 5:00 Ceremonial Ribbon-Cutting of the Forum
6:00 - 8:00 Studio 804 Alumni Lectures: Distinguished Studio 804 Alumni, many who are beginning to make a significant mark on the profession, are invited back for a Pecha Kucha-style event with faculty and students.

Saturday, March 28

(With remarks by Susan Szenasy, Editor, Metropolis magazine, and Prof. Dan Rockhill, Director, Studio 804)

8:30 - 9:00 Opening Reception
9:00 - 9:30 Opening Remarks
9:30 - 10:30 Frank Harmon
10:45 - 11:45 Brigitte Shim
12:00 - 1:15 Brian MacKay-Lyons
1:30 - 2:30 Andrew Freear
2:45 - 3:45 Ted Flato
4:00 - 5:00 Marlon Blackwell
5:00 - 5:30 Closing Remarks

Sunday, March 29

9:00 - 12:00 Self-guided tours of past Studio 804 projects in the Lawrence/Kansas City area and the East Hills Construction Innovation Laboratory

Registration

Early-bird registration $199. Register today, seating is extremely limited.
You can receive six AIA continuing ed credits for an additional $75.
$299 after Feb. 28.
Register at KU Continuing Ed.
Starting Feb. 28 KU students can register for $25 and non-KU students $39
For further information about the Symposium contact jcolistra@ku.edu

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Book Review: Shape of Sound

Shape of Sound by Victoria Meyers
Artifice Books on Architecture, 2014
Hardcover, 144 pages



On my first encounter with the title phrase "shape of sound" my thoughts did not go to, say, how the shape of a room makes sounds reverberate, or some other architectural thought. Instead I was reminded of a couple scenes from 1993's Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, a great film about the Canadian pianist who died in 1982 at only 50 years old. The scenes – "Truck Stop" and "The Idea of North" – come back-to-back roughly in the middle of the film and are appropriately related to each other (the embedded YouTube clip below is set to play the two scenes). In the first scene we see Gould enter a truck stop diner and selectively hear conversations within the noisy space; and in the second one he moves about a sound studio and gestures as if to conduct the recorded voices that overlap each other. In each scenario space is mundane yet important: The conversations surround Gould in the diner to shape the space more than the walls and windows, and in the radio recording he creates a space of sound through the layering of voices.



Although these scenes do not directly apply to architect Victoria Meyers' book on sound and architecture, I find a similar approach to sound in that she considers it in a general manner, designing some buildings for maximum reverberation, others for silence, and even one as a piece of sonic interaction. Therefore the projects in Shape of Sound, be they designed by hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) or some other studio, are diverse in how they approach sound as an integral part of existence and experience. In other words, the book is not a collection of concert halls, recording studios and sound installations, though these types are not necessarily excluded for the sake of others.


[Digital Water Pavilion | Photo by John Hill]

One of the hMa buildings, the one that graces the cover and is shown here, is the Digital Water i-Pavilion (DWiP), which houses recreational facilities and overlooks One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. As one of the last elements in Battery Park City, the pavilion adds some much-needed open space and low-scale building to the neighborhood built upon landfill. It also incorporates a sound piece by composer Michael J. Schumacher. "Where is it?" you may ask. It is located on the long glass facade that arcs from one street to the next and fronts a playing field on the east. The composition, called WaTER, is "found" in the frit pattern that covers the glass (also acting as a means of filtering direct sunlight) and then "played" with a smartphone app. It is just one manner of making a relationship between sound and architecture, in this case via technology and architectural materials.


[Digital Water Pavilion | Photo by John Hill]

Meyers examines sound through eight chapters: Form, Materiality, Windows, Sound Urbanism, Reflection, Virtuality, Sound Art, and Silence. The buildings of hMa are found within each chapter, but they are accompanied by other architects' projects as diverse as a Le Corbusier church built after he died and a sound/light installation created for the 2004 Olympics. Considering that the hMa projects are found in multiple chapters (DWiP is in Sound Urbanism and Virtuality, for example), the book reads like something between a monograph and a treatise. It's a commendable approach that firmly anchors Meyers' work into a particular way of thinking about architecture, while also being generously open to other voices and positions. So come to think of it, maybe the book is like the Glenn Gould scenes after all, since they both embrace the cacophony of sounds around to create something special.

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Today's archidose #812

Here are a few photos of the Nordwesthaus (2008) in Fußach, Austria, by Baumschlager Eberle, photographed by Martin Krause.







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

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SOILED No. 6: Call for Submissions

Deathscrapers, of all things, is the theme for the sixth issue of SOILED, which has just put out a call for submissions. Deadline is March 15, 2015, with details below the drawing of a casket.


[Image courtesy of SOILED]

"I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens." –Woody Allen

Deathscrapers summons the architecture that surrounds the dearly departed. If Woody Allen’s aphorism generalizes a broad American apprehension for openly discussing matters of death, Deathscrapers is its architectural antidote and seeks to knock at death’s (literal) door to uncover issues of narrative, memory, and form. Deathscrapers spans all scales of spaces for the dead and the bereaved, from urns and caskets, to morgues and mortuaries, mausoleums and cemeteries, even enormous necropolises. Adolf Loos declared, “Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument.” Deathscrapers will purvey playful stories that are simultaneously as serious as the grave. How can architecture bring new life into rituals and environments for the dead? How might aesthetics participate in a new necropolitan culture? Is it productive to render the morbid more social? Akin to previous issues of SOILED, Deathscrapers welcomes ideas that might transcend their mortality on the printed page. Queue the requiem and warm up the hearse: are you ready to go?

Guidelines and such can be found on the SOILED website.

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Andrés Jaque Wins MoMA PS1 Competition

Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation's COSMO continues MoMA PS1's selection of designs for its Young Architects Program with an emphasis on environmental issues. HWKN's Wendy in 2012 was covered in nanoparticles that cleaned the air; CODA's Party Wall one year later was made from the scraps of skateboard manufacturing; and The Living's Hy-Fi last year featured bricks made from organic matter.


[Rendering of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation’s COSMO. Image courtesy of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation.]

COSMO continues this trend with "an assemblage of ecosystems, based on advanced environmental design." To further quote MoMA's press release, "COSMO is engineered to filter and purify 3,000 gallons of water, eliminating suspended particles and nitrates, balancing the PH, and increasing the level of dissolved oxygen. It takes four days for the 3,000 gallons of water to become purified, then the cycle continues with the same body of water, becoming more purified with every cycle."


[Rendering of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation’s COSMO. Image courtesy of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation.]

The revelling comes in the form of "a stretched-out plastic mesh at the core of the construction [that] will glow automatically whenever its water has been purified." It's hard to determine which of the two released renderings (not much to go on) illustrate this state, if at all, but the installation's form has a very playful quality to it that will make sustainability fun...every four days, at least.

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Today's archidose #811

Here are a few buildings in winter, all photographed by iConte.

Herzog and de Meuron's VitraHaus in Weil am Rhein, Germany:


Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France:


Peter Zumthor's Kunsthaus Bregenz in Bregenz, Austria:


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

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AE31: Supershades

One of the standout projects in BIG's HOT TO COLD exhibition now at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, is what the firm calls "Magic Carpet," a media headquarters for the Middle East. The project stands out partly because it is located right at the start of the exhibition, which rings the NBM's huge four-story atrium, and because the draped "carpet" that covers a series of stacked boxes between two towers is a really interesting way of creating an outdoor shelter in a dry and hot climate. But it's not the first instance of the architectural element I'm calling "Supershades." This post looks at a few more projects that use expansive covers, most of them perforated and all of them in warm climates, to shelter exterior and interior spaces.

BIG's Magic Carpet:



(Top photo: John Hill, renderings via Design Boom)

The first project that springs to mind, mainly because of a similar draping of super-thin concrete, is Alvaro Siza's pavilion for Expo 98 in Lisbon, Portugal. Expos are often venues for temporary architecture, but Siza's pavilion remains to this day. Perhaps this is because it represented the home country, but I like to think it is due to the simple yet mind-boggling (still!) design of the suspended concrete roof.

Alvaro Siza's Portuguese Pavilion for Expo 98:


(Photos: Flavio/Flickr)

A project that came three years after Expo 98, but was never realized, is OMA's design for LACMA, which is now being carried out by Peter Zumthor in a much different manner. Koolhaas and the Gang proposed a huge translucent roof over LACMA's jumble of existing buildings. OMA treated the existing as a "Pompeian Base" with new layers over it, rather than simply adding more buildings or demolishing them to make way for something new, as Zumthor is doing. 

OMA's LACMA Extension:


(Images via oma.eu)

A project that is being realized, and is one of the most anticipated openings of 2015, is Jean Nouvel's design for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. His design, which dates back to 2007, puts about 250,000 square feet of exhibition space and other functions under a lattice-like dome that will create "a haven of coolness." The building is located on Saaydiyat Island, which will be home to more cultural institutions by big-name architects; the flattened dome makes a statement from the water. But it's the space underneath that is most amazing, with dappled light and cooling breezes coming across the water.

Jean Nouvel's Louvre Abu Dhabi:




(Renderings via Louvre Abu Dhabi website, construction photo via gulfbusiness.com)

The last two Supershade projects have been completed within the last five years. First is Michel Rojkind's project for the National Film Archive and Film Institute of Mexico, which is made up of old and new buildings and a plaza capped by a larger perforated canopy. The outdoor space functions like a lobby and a shelter for other programs (concerts, theater, exhibitions, etc.).

Rojkind Arquitectos's Cineteca Nacional Siglo XXI:



(Photos: Paul Rivera)

Last but not least is the New Orquideorama for Medellin´s Botanical Garden, designed by PLAN:B and JPRCR. Their design of the wood-slat canopy echoes the surrounding trees, rising from "trunks" and branching out in hexagonal pieces that shelter visitors.

PLAN:B Arquitectos' + JPRCR Arquitectos' Orquideorama:



(Photos: Cristobal Palma)

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