Tag Archives: architecture

Another London Bridge

nep-bridge-008

I don’t live in London. But having been born and raised there I still have a particular affinity for this great city. So, when the London Borough of Wandsworth recently published submissions for a new bridge of the River Thames I had to survey the designs. Over 70 teams submitted ideas since the process was opened to competition in December 2014.  The bridge will eventually span the river between Nine Elms and Pimlico.

Please check out the official designs here. Some are quite extraordinary.

Image: Scheme 008. Courtesy of Nine Elms to Pimlico (NEP) Bridge Competition, London Borough of Wandsworth.

 

Water From Air

WARKAWATER

Ideas and innovations that solve a particular human hardship are worthy of reward and recognition. When the idea is also ingenious and simple it should be celebrated. Take the invention of industrial designers Arturo Vittori and Andreas Vogler. Fashioned from plant stalks and nylon mess their 30 foot tall WarkaWater Towers soak up moisture from the air for later collection — often up to 25 gallons of drinking water today. When almost a quarter of the world’s population has poor access to daily potable water this remarkable invention serves a genuine need.

From Smithsonian:

In some parts of Ethiopia, finding potable water is a six-hour journey.

People in the region spend 40 billion hours a year trying to find and collect water, says a group called the Water Project. And even when they find it, the water is often not safe, collected from ponds or lakes teeming with infectious bacteria, contaminated with animal waste or other harmful substances.

The water scarcity issue—which affects nearly 1 billion people in Africa alone—has drawn the attention of big-name philanthropists like actor and Water.org co-founder Matt Damon and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who, through their respective nonprofits, have poured millions of dollars into research and solutions, coming up with things like a system that converts toilet water to drinking water and a “Re-invent the Toilet Challenge,” among others.

Critics, however, have their doubts about integrating such complex technologies in remote villages that don’t even have access to a local repairman. Costs and maintenance could render many of these ideas impractical.

“If the many failed development projects of the past 60 years have taught us anything,” wrote one critic, Toilets for People founder Jason Kasshe, in a New York Times editorial, “it’s that complicated, imported solutions do not work.”

Other low-tech inventions, like this life straw, aren’t as complicated, but still rely on users to find a water source.

It was this dilemma—supplying drinking water in a way that’s both practical and convenient—that served as the impetus for a new product called Warka Water, an inexpensive, easily-assembled structure that extracts gallons of fresh water from the air.

The invention from Arturo Vittori, an industrial designer, and his colleague Andreas Vogler doesn’t involve complicated gadgetry or feats of engineering, but instead relies on basic elements like shape and material and the ways in which they work together.

At first glance, the 30-foot-tall, vase-shaped towers, named after a fig tree native to Ethiopia, have the look and feel of a showy art installation. But every detail, from carefully-placed curves to unique materials, has a functional purpose.

The rigid outer housing of each tower is comprised of lightweight and elastic juncus stalks, woven in a pattern that offers stability in the face of strong wind gusts while still allowing air to flow through. A mesh net made of nylon or  polypropylene, which calls to mind a large Chinese lantern, hangs inside, collecting droplets of dew that form along the surface. As cold air condenses, the droplets roll down into a container at the bottom of the tower. The water in the container then passes through a tube that functions as a faucet, carrying the water to those waiting on the ground.

Using mesh to facilitate clean drinking water isn’t an entirely new concept. A few years back, an MIT student designed a fog-harvesting device with the material. But Vittori’s invention yields more water, at a lower cost, than some other concepts that came before it.

“[In Ethiopia], public infrastructures do not exist and building [something like] a well is not easy,” Vittori says of the country. “To find water, you need to drill in the ground very deep, often as much as 1,600 feet.  So it’s technically difficult and expensive. Moreover, pumps need electricity to run as well as access to spare parts in case the pump breaks down.”

So how would Warka Water’s low-tech design hold up in remote sub-Saharan villages? Internal field tests have shown that one Warka Water tower can supply more than 25 gallons of water throughout the course of a day, Vittori claims. He says because the most important factor in collecting condensation is the difference in temperature between nightfall and daybreak, the towers are proving successful even in the desert, where temperatures, in that time, can differ as much as 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

The structures, made from biodegradable materials, are easy to clean and can be erected without mechanical tools in less than a week. Plus, he says, “once locals have the necessary know-how, they will be able to teach other villages and communities to build the Warka.”

In all, it costs about $500 to set up a tower—less than a quarter of the cost of something like the Gates toilet, which costs about $2,200 to install and more to maintain. If the tower is mass produced, the price would be even lower, Vittori says. His team hopes to install two Warka Towers in Ethiopia by next year and is currently searching for investors who may be interested in scaling the water harvesting technology across the region.

Read the entire article here.

Image: WarkaWater Tower. Courtesy of Andreas vogler and Arturo Vittori, WARKAWATER PROJECT / www.architectureandvision.com.

 

Mining Minecraft

minecraft-example

If you have a child under the age of 13 it’s likely that you’ve heard of, seen or even used Minecraft. More than just a typical online game, Minecraft is a playground for aspiring architects — despite the Creepers. Minecraft began in 2011 with a simple premise — place and remove blocks to fend of unwanted marauders. Now it has become a blank canvas for young minds to design and collaborate on building fantastical structures. My own twin 11 year-olds have designed their dream homes complete with basement stables, glass stairways roof-top pool.

From the Guardian:

I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when I became aware of my eight-year-old son’s fixation with Minecraft. I only know that the odd reference to zombies and pickaxes burgeoned until it was an omnipresent force in our household, the dominant topic of conversation and, most bafflingly, a game he found so gripping that he didn’t just want to play it, he wanted to watch YouTube videos of others playing it too.

This was clearly more than any old computer game – for Otis and, judging by discussion at the school gates, his friends too. I felt as if he’d joined a cult, albeit a reasonably benign one, though as someone who last played a computer game when Jet Set Willy was the height of technological wizardry, I hardly felt in a position to judge.

Minecraft, I realised, was something I knew nothing about. It was time to become acquainted. I announced my intention to give myself a crash course in the game to Otis one evening, interrupting his search for Obsidian to build a portal to the Nether dimension. As you do. “Why would you want to play Minecraft?” he asked, as if I’d confided that I was taking up a career in trapeze-artistry.

For anyone as mystified about it as I was, Minecraft is now one of the world’s biggest computer games, a global phenomenon that’s totted up 14,403,011 purchases as I write; 19,270 in the past 24 hours – live statistics they update on their website, as if it were Children in Need night.

Trying to define the objective of the game isn’t easy. When I ask Otis, he shrugs. “I’m not sure there is one. But that’s what’s brilliant. You can do anything you like.”

This doesn’t seem like much of an insight, though to be fair, the developers themselves, Mojang, define it succinctly as, “a game about breaking and placing blocks”. This sounds delightfully simple, an impression echoed by its graphics. In sharp contrast to the rich, more cinematic style of other games, this is unapologetically old school, the sort of computer game of the future that Marty McFly would have played.

In this case, looks are deceptive. “The pixelated style might appear simple but it masks a huge amount of depth and complexity,” explains Alex Wiltshire, former editor of Edge magazine and author of forthcoming Minecraft guide, Block-o-pedia. “Its complex nature doesn’t lie in detailed art assets, but in how each element of the game interrelates.”

It’s this that gives players the potential to produce elaborate constructions on a lavish scale; fans have made everything from 1:1 scale re-creations of the Lord of the Rings’ Mines of Moria, to models of entire cities.

I’m a long way from that. “Don’t worry, Mum – when I first went on it when I was six, I had no idea what I was doing,” Otis reassures, shaking his head at the thought of those naive days, way back when.

Otis’s device of choice is his iPod, ideal for on-the-move sessions, though this once caused him serious grief after being caught on it under his duvet after lights out. I take one look at the lightning speed with which his fingers move and decide to download it on to my MacBook instead. The introduction of an additional version of the game into our household is greeted very much like Walter Raleigh’s return from the New World.

We open up the game and he tells me that I am “Steve”, the default player, and that we get a choice of modes in which to play: creative or survival. He suggests I start with the former on the basis that this is the best place for those who aren’t very good at it.

In creative mode, you are dropped into a newly generated world (an island in our case) and gifted a raft of resources – everything from coal and lapis lazuli to cake and beds.

At the risk of sounding like a dunce, it isn’t at all obvious what I’m supposed to do. So instead of springing into action, I’m left standing, looking around lamely as if I’m on the edge of a dance floor waiting for someone to come and put me out of my misery. Despite knowing that the major skill required in this game is building, before Otis intervenes, the most I can accomplish is to dig a few holes.

“When it first came out everyone was confused as the developer gave little or no guidance,” says Wiltshire. “It didn’t specifically say you had to cut down a tree to get some wood, whereas games that are produced by big companies give instructions – the last thing they want is for people not to understand how to play. With Minecraft, which had an indie developer, the player had to work things out for themselves. It was quite a tonic.”

He believes that this is why a game not specifically designed for children has become so popular with them. “Because you learn so much when you’re young, kids are used to the idea of a world they don’t fully understand, so they’re comfortable with having to find things out for themselves.”

For the moment, I’m happy to take instruction from my son, who begins his demonstration by creating a rollercoaster – an obvious priority when you’ve just landed on a desert island. He quickly installs its tracks, weaving them through trees and into the sea, before sending Steve for a ride. He asks me if I feel ready to have a go. I feel as if I’m on a nursing home word processing course.

Familiarising yourself takes a little time but once you get going – and have worked out the controls – being able to run, fly, swim and build is undeniably absorbing. I also finally manage to construct something, a slightly disappointing shipping container-type affair that explodes Wiltshire’s assertion that it’s “virtually impossible to build something that looks terrible in Minecraft”. Still, I’m enjoying it, I can’t deny it. Aged eight, I’d have loved it every bit as much as my son does.

The more I play it, the more I also start to understand why this game is been championed for its educational possibilities, with some schools in the US using it as a tool to teach maths and science.

Dr Helen O’Connor, who runs UK-based Childchology – which provides children and their families with support for common psychological problems via the internet – said: “Minecraft offers some strong positives for children. It works on a cognitive level in that it involves problem solving, imagination, memory, creativity and logical sequencing. There is a good educational element to the game, and it also requires some number crunching.

“Unlike lots of other games, there is little violence, with the exception of fighting off a few zombies and creepers. This is perhaps one of the reasons why it is fairly gender neutral and girls enjoy playing it as well as boys.”

The next part of Otis’s demonstration involves switching to survival mode. He explains: “You’ve got to find the resources yourself here. You’re not just given them. Oh and there are villains too. Zombie pigmen and that kind of thing.”

It’s clear that life in survival mode is a significantly hairier prospect than in creative, particularly when Otis changes the difficulty setting to its highest notch. He says he doesn’t do this often because, after spending three weeks creating a house from wood and cobblestones, zombies nearly trashed the place. I make a mental note to remind him of this conversation next time he has a sleepover.

One of the things that’s so appealing about Minecraft is that there is no obvious start and end; it’s a game of infinite possibilities, which is presumably why it’s often compared to Lego. Yet, the addictive nature of the game is clearly vexing many parents: internet talkboards are awash with people seeking advice on how to prize their children away from it.

Read the entire story here.

Image courtesy of Minecraft.

Gephyrophobes Not Welcome

Royal_Gorge_Bridge

A gephyrophobic person is said to have a fear of crossing bridges. So, we’d strongly recommend avoiding the structures on this list of some of the world’s scariest bridges. For those who suffer no anxiety from either bridges or heights, and who crave endless vistas both horizontally and vertically, this list is for you. Our favorite, the suspension bridge over the Royal Gorge in Colorado.

From the Guardian:

From rickety rope walkways to spectacular feats of engineering, we take a look at some of the world’s scariest bridges.

Until 2001, the Royal Gorge bridge in Colorado was the highest bridge in the world. Built in 1929, the 291m-high structure is now a popular tourist attraction, not least because of the fact that it is situated within a theme park.

Read the entire story and see more images here.

Image: Royal Gorge, Colorado. Courtesy of Wikipedia / Hustvedt.

 

SkyCycling

London-skycycle

Famed architect Norman Foster has a brilliant and restless mind. So, he’s not content to stop imagining, even with some of the world’s most innovative and recognizable architectural designs to his credit — 30 St. Mary Axe (London’s “gherkin” or pickle skyscraper), Hearst Tower, and the Millau Viaduct.

Foster is also an avid cyclist, which leads to his re-imagining of the lowly bicycle lane as a more lofty construct. Two hundred miles or so of raised bicycle lanes suspended above London, running mostly above railway lines, the SkyCycle. What a gorgeous idea.

From the Guardian:

Gliding through the air on a bike might so far be confined to the fantasy realms of singing nannies and aliens in baskets, but riding over rooftops could one day form part of your regular commute to work, if Norman Foster has his way.

Unveiled this week, in an appropriately light-headed vision for the holiday season, SkyCycle proposes a network of elevated bike paths hoisted aloft above railway lines, allowing you to zip through town blissfully liberated from the roads.

The project, which has the backing of Network Rail and Transport for London, would see over 220km of car-free routes installed above London’s suburban rail network, suspended on pylons above the tracks and accessed at over 200 entrance points. At up to 15 metres wide, each of the ten routes would accommodate 12,000 cyclists per hour and improve journey times by up to 29 minutes, according to the designers.

Lord Foster, who says that cycling is one of his great passions, describes the plan as “a lateral approach to finding space in a congested city.”

“By using the corridors above the suburban railways,” he said, “we could create a world-class network of safe, car-free cycle routes that are ideally located for commuters.”

Developed by landscape practice Exterior Architecture, with Foster and Partners and Space Syntax, the proposed network would cover a catchment area of six million people, half of whom live and work within 10 minutes of an entrance. But its ambitions stretch beyond London alone.

“The dream is that you could wake up in Paris and cycle to the Gare du Nord,” says Sam Martin of Exterior Architecture. “Then get the train to Stratford, and cycle straight into central London in minutes, without worrying about trucks and buses.”

Developed over the last two years, the initial idea came from the student project of one of Martin’s employees, Oli Clark, who proposed a network of elevated cycle routes weaving in and around Battersea power station. “It was a hobby in the office for a while,” says Martin. “Then we arranged a meeting at City Hall with the deputy mayor of transport – and bumped into Boris in the lift.”

Bumping into Boris has been the fateful beginning for some of the mayor’s other adventures in novelty infrastructure, including Anish Kapoor’s Orbit tower, apparently forged in a chance meeting with Lakshmi Mittal in the cloakrooms at Davos. Other encounters have resulted in cycle “superhighways” (which many blame for the recent increase in accidents) and a £60 million cable car that doesn’t really go anywhere. But could SkyCycle be different?

“It’s about having an eye on the future,” says Martin. “If London keeps growing and spreading itself out, with people forced to commute increasingly longer distances, then in 20 years it’s just going to be a ghetto for people in suits. After rail fare increases this week, a greater percentage of people’s income is being taken up with transport. There has to be another way to allow everyone access to the centre, and stop this doughnut effect.”

After meeting with Network Rail last year, the design team has focused on a 6.5km trial route from Stratford to Liverpool Street Station, following the path of the overground line, a stretch they estimate would cost around £220 million. Working with Roger Ridsdill-Smith, Foster’s head of structural engineering, responsible for the Millennium Bridge, they have developed what Martin describes as “a system akin to a tunnel-boring machine, but happening above ground”.

“It’s no different to the electrification of the lines west of Paddington,” he says. “It would involve a series of pylons installed along the outside edge of the tracks, from which a deck would project out. Trains could still run while the cycle decks were being installed.”

As for access, the proposal would see the installation of vertical hydraulic platforms next to existing railway stations, as well as ramps that took advantage of the raised topography around viaducts and cuttings. “It wouldn’t be completely seamless in terms of the cycling experience,” Martin admits. “But it could be a place for Boris Bike docking stations, to avoid people having to get their own equipment up there.” He says the structure could also be a source of energy creation, supporting solar panels and rain water collection.

The rail network has long been seen as a key to opening up cycle networks, given the amount of available land alongside rail lines, but no proposal has yet suggested launching cyclists into the air.

Read the entire article here.

Image: How the proposed SkyCycle tracks could look. Courtesy of Foster and Partners / Guardian.

The AbFab Garden Bridge

London-garden-bridge

Should it come to fruition, London’s answer to Lower Manhattan’s High Line promises to be a delightful walker’s paradise and another visitor magnet. The Garden Bridge is a new pedestrian walkway across the River Thames designed with nature in mind, and planted throughout with trees, shrubs and wildflowers. Interestingly, the idea for the design came from British national treasure, actress Joanna Lumley.

From Slate:

British designer Thomas Heatherwick has a knack for reinventing iconic designs. See, for example, his modern take on a midcentury double-decker bus or his 2012 Olympic cauldron, made of 204 copper petals representing participating nations. Heatherwick is also known for whimsical inventions like his 2004 rolling bridge, which curls up on itself to let boats pass beneath it.

The latest proposal from Heatherwick, the man that mentor Terence Conran branded a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, is a nature-inspired walkway across the Thames: The Garden Bridge.

Oddly, the idea for the design came from Absolutely Fabulous actress Joanna Lumley, who approached Heatherwick years ago. The bridge would be a new structure across the river intended to help improve pedestrian life by connecting North and South London with a planted garden path landscaped by U.K. designer and horticulturalist Dan Pearson. It would be filled with indigenous river edge trees, shrubs, and wildflowers and include benches and walkways of varying widths to create both intimate and more expansive spaces along the walkway. If built, the bridge would be an obvious crowdpleaser as a public green space, lookout point, and tourist destination. In London it would be a rare new jewel in the crown of a city already famed for its gardens.

Why is the idea of a slow garden path through a bustling urban landscape so appealing? Perhaps it’s because, like a vertical garden, such greenways inject our concrete metropolises with a stylized dose of the natural world we destroyed to build them. (Even if the inevitable crowds might detract from the imagined experience.)

Or perhaps it has something to do with biologist Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, described in Charles Montgomery’s new book Happy City as the notion that “humans are hardwired to find particular scenes of nature calming and restorative.” Montgomery also discusses a theory by biologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan that explains how negotiating busy city streets demands draining “voluntary attention,” whereas “involuntary attention, the kind we give to nature, is effortless, like a daydream or a song washing through your brain. You might not even realize you are paying attention and yet you may be restored and transformed by the act.”

Is this London’s answer to NYC’s High Line, itself inspired by Paris’ Promenade plantée? (Although those projects were built on the ruins of abandoned railway tracks, the parallels are clear.) Earlier this week, the Financial Times noted that the initiative has been “seen by many as the capital’s answer to New York’s much-praised High Line,” adding that “the project appealed to the rivalry between New York and London.”

While the proposed Garden Bridge has the informal support of Mayor Boris Johnson, it would be built using mostly private funding (and board trustees have rejected the idea of selling naming rights to corporate sponsors). Half of that money has already been raised, through private donations and a recent injection of cash from the government, notes The Independent, which reported on Wednesday that Transport for London, the city’s transit authority, has pledged 30 million pounds in support of the project.

Until Dec. 20, the public can visit the website of the Garden Bridge Trust that has been set up to welcome suggestions and thoughts on the plan, which if built could be open to the public in late 2017. In the meantime, this Garden Bridge video narrated by Lumley offers a sneak peek.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge would provide a leisurely garden path across the Thames River. Courtesy Arup.

 

Hotels of the Future

Fantastic — in the original sense of the word — designs for some futuristic hotels, some of which have arrived in the present.

See more designs here.

Image: The Heart hotel, designed by Arina Agieieva and Dmitry Zhuikov, is a proposed design for a New York hotel. The project aims to draw local residents and hotel visitors closer together by embedding the hotel into city life; bedrooms are found in the converted offices that flank the core of the structure – its heart – and leisure facilities are available for the use of everyone. Courtesy of Telegraph.

Farmscrapers

No, the drawing is not a construction from the mind of sci fi illustrator extraordinaire Michael Whelan. This is reality. Or, to be more precise an architectural rendering of buildings to come — in China of course.

From the Independent:

A French architecture firm has unveiled their new ambitious ‘farmscraper’ project – six towering structures which promise to change the way that we think about green living.

Vincent Callebaut Architects’ innovative Asian Cairns was planned specifically for Chinese city Shenzhen in response to the growing population, increasing CO2 emissions and urban development.

The structures will consist of a series of pebble-shaped levels – each connected by a central spinal column – which will contain residential areas, offices, and leisure spaces.

Sustainability is key to the innovative project – wind turbines will cover the roof of each tower, water recycling systems will be in place to recycle waste water, and solar panels will be installed on the buildings, providing renewable energy. The structures will also have gardens on the exterior, further adding to the project’s green credentials.

Vincent Callebaut, the Belgian architect behind the firm, is well-known for his ambitious, eco-friendly projects, winning many awards over the years.

His self-sufficient amphibious city Lilypad – ‘a floating ecopolis for climate refugees’ – is perhaps his most famous design. The model has been proposed as a long-term solution to rising water levels, and successfully meets the four challenges of climate, biodiversity, water, and health, that the OECD laid out in 2008.

Vincent Callebaut Architects said: “It is a prototype to build a green, dense, smart city connected by technology and eco-designed from biotechnologies.”

Read the entire article and see more illustrations after the jump.

Image: “Farmscrapers” take eco-friendly architecture to dizzying heights in China. Courtesy of Vincent Callebaut Architects / Independent.

Las Vegas, Tianducheng and Paris: Cultural Borrowing

These three locations in Nevada, China (near Hangzhou) and Paris, France, have something in common. People the world over travel to these three places to see what they share. But only one has an original. In this case, we’re talking about the Eiffel Tower.

Now, this architectural grand theft is subject to a lengthy debate — the merits of mimicry, on a vast scale. There is even a fascinating coffee table sized book dedicated to this growing trend: Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, by Bianca Bosker.

Interestingly, the copycat trend only seems worrisome if those doing the copying are in a powerful and growing nation, and the copying is done on a national scale, perhaps for some form of cultural assimilation. After all, we don’t hear similar cries when developers put up a copy of Venice in Las Vegas — that’s just for entertainment we are told.

Yet haven’t civilizations borrowed, and stolen, ideas both good and bad throughout the ages? The answer of course is an unequivocal yes. Humans are avaricious collectors of memes that work — it’s more efficient to borrow than to invent. The Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians; the Romans borrowed from the Greeks; the Turks borrowed from the Romans; the Arabs borrowed from the Turks; the Spanish from the Arabs, the French from the Spanish, the British from the French, and so on. Of course what seems to be causing a more recent stir is that China is doing the borrowing, and on such a rapid and grand scale — the nation is copying not just buildings (and most other products) but entire urban landscapes. However, this is one way that empires emerge and evolve. In this case, China’s acquisitive impulses could, perhaps, be tempered if most nations of the world borrowed less from the Chinese — money that is. But that’s another story.

[div class=attrib]From the Atlantic:[end-div]

The latest and most famous case of Chinese architectural mimicry doesn’t look much like its predecessors. On December 28, German news weekly Der Spiegel reported that the Wangjing Soho, Zaha Hadid’s soaring new office and retail development under construction in Beijing, is being replicated, wall for wall and window for window, in Chongqing, a city in central China.

To most outside observers, this bold and quickly commissioned counterfeit represents a familiar form of piracy. In fashion, technology, and architecture, great ideas trickle down, often against the wishes of their progenitors. But in China, architectural copies don’t usually ape the latest designs.

In the vast space between Beijing and Chongqing lies a whole world of Chinese architectural simulacra that quietly aspire to a different ideal. In suburbs around China’s booming cities, developers build replicas of towns like Halstatt, Austria and Dorchester, England. Individual homes and offices, too, are designed to look like Versailles or the Chrysler Building. The most popular facsimile in China is the White House. The fastest-urbanizing country in history isn’t scanning design magazines for inspiration; it’s watching movies.

At Beijing’s Palais de Fortune, two hundred chateaus sit behind gold-tipped fences. At Chengdu’s British Town, pitched roofs and cast-iron street lamps dot the streets. At Shanghai’s Thames Town, a Gothic cathedral has become a tourist attraction in itself. Other developments have names like “Top Aristocrat,” (Beijing), “the Garden of Monet” (Shanghai), and “Galaxy Dante,” (Shenzhen).

Architects and critics within and beyond China have treated these derivative designs with scorn, as shameless kitsch or simply trash. Others cite China’s larger knock-off culture, from handbags to housing, as evidence of the innovation gap between China and the United States. For a larger audience on the Internet, they are merely a punchline, another example of China’s endlessly entertaining wackiness.

In short, the majority of Chinese architectural imitation, oozing with historical romanticism, is not taken seriously.

But perhaps it ought to be.

In Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, the first detailed book on the subject, Bianca Bosker argues that the significance of these constructions has been unfairly discounted. Bosker, a senior technology editor at the Huffington Post, has been visiting copycat Chinese villages for some six years, and in her view, these distorted impressions of the West offer a glance at the hopes, dreams and contradictions of China’s middle class.

“Clearly there’s an acknowledgement that there’s something great about Paris,” says Bosker. “But it’s also: ‘We can do it ourselves.'”

Armed with firsthand observation, field research, interviews, and a solid historical background, Bosker’s book is an attempt to change the way we think about Chinese duplitecture. “We’re seeing the Chinese dream in action,” she says. “It has to do with this ability to take control of your life. There’s now this plethora of options to choose from.” That is something new in China, as is the role that private enterprise is taking in molding built environments that will respond to people’s fantasies.

While the experts scoff, the people who build and inhabit these places are quite proud of them. As the saying goes, “The way to live best is to eat Chinese food, drive an American car, and live in a British house. That’s the ideal life.” The Chinese middle class is living in Orange County, Beijing, the same way you listen to reggae music or lounge in Danish furniture.

In practice, though, the depth and scale of this phenomenon has few parallels. No one knows how many facsimile communities there are in China, but the number is increasing every day. “Every time I go looking for more,” Bosker says, “I find more.”

How many are there?

“At least hundreds.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Tianducheng, 13th arrondissement, Paris in China. Courtesy of Bianca Bosker/University of Hawaii Press.[end-div]

Plagiarism is the Sincerest Form of Capitalism

Plagiarism is fine art in China. But, it’s also very big business. The nation knocks off everything, from Hollywood and Bollywood movies, to software, electronics, appliances, drugs, and military equipment. Now, it’s moved on to copying architectural plans.

[div class=attrib]From the Telegraph:[end-div]

China is famous for its copy-cat architecture: you can find replicas of everything from the Eiffel Tower and the White House to an Austrian village across its vast land. But now they have gone one step further: recreating a building that hasn’t even been finished yet. A building designed by the Iraqi-British architect Dame Zaha Hadid for Beijing has been copied by a developer in Chongqing, south-west China, and now the two projects are racing to be completed first.

Dame Zaha, whose Wangjing Soho complex consists of three pebble-like constructions and will house an office and retail complex, unveiled her designs in August 2011 and hopes to complete the project next year.

Meanwhile, a remarkably similar project called Meiquan 22nd Century is being constructed in Chongqing, that experts (and anyone with eyes, really) deem a rip-off. The developers of the Soho complex are concerned that the other is being built at a much faster rate than their own.

“It is possible that the Chongqing pirates got hold of some digital files or renderings of the project,” Satoshi Ohashi, project director at Zaha Hadid Architects, told Der Spiegel online. “[From these] you could work out a similar building if you are technically very capable, but this would only be a rough simulation of the architecture.”

So where does the law stand? Reporting on the intriguing case, China Intellectual Property magazine commented, “Up to now, there is no special law in China which has specific provisions on IP rights related to architecture.” They added that if it went to court, the likely outcome would be payment of compensation to Dame Zaha’s firm, rather than the defendant being forced to pull the building down. However, Dame Zaha seems somewhat unfazed about the structure, simply remarking that if the finished building contains a certain amount of innovation then “that could be quite exciting”. One of the world’s most celebrated architects, Dame Zaha – who recently designed the Aquatics Centre for the London Olympics – has 11 current projects in China. She is quite the star over there: 15,000 fans flocked to see her give a talk at the unveiling of the designs for the complex.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Wangjing Soho Architecture. Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects.[end-div]

The Most Beautiful Railway Stations

[div class=attrib]From Flavorwire:[end-div]

In 1972, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and The New York Times’ very first architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable observed that “nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.” A comment on the emerging age of the jetliner and a swanky commercial air travel industry that made the behemoth train stations of the time appear as cumbersome relics of an outdated industrial era, we don’t think the judgment holds up today — at all. Like so many things that we wrote off in favor of what was seemingly more modern and efficient (ahem, vinyl records and Polaroid film), the train station is back and better than ever. So, we’re taking the time to look back at some of the greatest stations still standing.

[div class=attrib]See other beautiful stations and read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Grand Central Terminal — New York City, New York. Courtesy of Flavorwire.[end-div]

Skyscrapers A La Mode

Since 2006 Evolo architecture magazine has run a competition for architects to bring life to their most fantastic skyscraper designs. All the finalists of 2012 competition presented some stunning ideas, and topped by the winner, Himalaya Water Tower, from Zhi Zheng, Hongchuan Zhao, Dongbai Song of China.

[div class=attrib]From Evolo:[end-div]

Housed within 55,000 glaciers in the Himalaya Mountains sits 40 percent of the world’s fresh water. The massive ice sheets are melting at a faster-than-ever pace due to climate change, posing possible dire consequences for the continent of Asia and the entire world stand, and especially for the villages and cities that sit on the seven rivers that come are fed from the Himalayas’ runoff as they respond with erratic flooding or drought.

The “Himalaya Water Tower” is a skyscraper located high in the mountain range that serves to store water and helps regulate its dispersal to the land below as the mountains’ natural supplies dry up. The skyscraper, which can be replicated en masse, will collect water in the rainy season, purify it, freeze it into ice and store it for future use. The water distribution schedule will evolve with the needs of residents below; while it can be used to help in times of current drought, it’s also meant to store plentiful water for future generations.

Follow the other notable finalists at Evolo magazine after the jump.

Great Architecture

Jonathan Glancey, architecture critic at the Guardian in the UK for the last fifteen years, is moving on to greener pastures, and presumably new buildings. In his final article for the newspaper he reflects on some buildings that have engendered shock and/or awe.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

Fifteen years is not a long time in architecture. It is the slowest as well as the most political of the arts. This much was clear when I joined the Guardian as its architecture and design correspondent, from the Independent, in 1997. I thought the Millennium Experience (the talk of the day) decidedly dimwitted and said so in no uncertain terms; it lacked a big idea and anything like the imagination of, say, the Great Exhibition of 1851, or the Festival of Britain in 1951.

For the macho New Labour government, newly in office and all football and testosterone, criticism of this cherished project was tantamount to sedition. They lashed out like angry cats; there were complaints from 10 Downing Street’s press office about negative coverage of the Dome. Hard to believe then, much harder now. That year’s London Model Engineer Exhibition was far more exciting; here was an enthusiastic celebration of the making of things, at a time when manufacturing was becoming increasingly looked down on.

New Labour, meanwhile, promised it would do things for architecture and urban design that Roman emperors and Renaissance princes could only have dreamed of. The north Greenwich peninsula was to become a new Florence, with trams and affordable housing. As would the Thames Gateway, that Siberia stretching – marshy, mysterious, semi-industrial – to Southend Pier and the sea. To a new, fast-breeding generation of quangocrats this land looked like a blank space on the London A-Z, ready to fill with “environmentally friendly” development. Precious little has happened there since, save for some below-standard housing, Boris Johnson’s proposal for an estuary airport and – a very good thing – an RSPB visitors’ centre designed by Van Heyningen and Haward near Purfleet on the Rainham marshes.

Labour’s promises turned out to be largely tosh, of course. Architecture and urban planning are usually best when neither hyped nor hurried. Grand plans grow best over time, as serendipity and common sense soften hard edges. In 2002, Tony Blair decided to invade Iraq – not a decision that, on the face of it, has a lot to do with architecture; but one of the articles I am most proud to have written for this paper was the story of a journey I made from one end of Iraq to the other, with Stuart Freedman, an unflappable press photographer. At the time, the Blair government was denying there would be a war, yet every Iraqi we spoke to knew the bombs were about to fall. It was my credentials as a critic and architectural historian that got me my Iraqi visa. Foreign correspondents, including several I met in Baghdad’s al-Rashid hotel, were understandably finding the terrain hard-going. But handwritten in my passport was an instruction saying: “Give this man every assistance.”

We travelled to Babylon to see Saddam’s reconstruction of the fabled walled city, and to Ur, Abraham’s home, and its daunting ziggurat and then – wonder of wonders – into the forbidden southern deserts to Eridu. Here I walked on the sand-covered remains of one of the world’s first cities. This, if anywhere, is where architecture was born. At Samarra, in northern Iraq, I climbed to the top of the wondrous spiral minaret of what was once the town’s Great Mosque. How the sun shone that day. When I got to the top, there was nothing to hang on to. I was confronted by the blazing blue sky and its gods, or God; the architecture itself was all but invisible. Saddam’s soldiers, charming recruits in starched and frayed uniforms drilled by a tough and paternal sergeant, led me through the country, through miles of unexploded war material piled high along sandy tracks, and across the paths of Shia militia.

Ten years on, Zaha Hadid, a Baghdad-born architect who has risen to stellar prominence since 2002, has won her first Iraqi commission, a new headquarters for the Iraqi National Bank in Baghdad. With luck, other inspired architects will get to work in Iraq, too, reconnecting the country with its former role as a crucible of great buildings and memorable cities.

Architecture is also the stuff of construction, engineering, maths and science. Of philosophy, sociology, Le Corbusier and who knows what else. It is also, I can’t help feeling, harder to create great buildings now than it was in the past. When Eridu or the palaces and piazzas of Renaissance Italy were shaped, architecture was the most expensive and prestigious of all cultural endeavours. Today we spread our wealth more thinly, spending ever more on disposable consumer junk, building more roads to serve ever more grim private housing estates, unsustainable supermarkets and distribution depots (and container ports and their giant ships), and the landfill sites we appear to need to shore up our insatiable, throwaway culture. Architecture has been in danger, like our indefensibly mean and horrid modern housing, of becoming little more than a commodity. Government talk of building a rash of “eco-towns” proved not just unpopular but more hot air. A policy initiative too far, the idea has effectively been dropped.

And, yet, despite all these challenges, the art form survives and even thrives. I have been moved in different ways by the magnificent Neues Museum, Berlin, a 10-year project led by David Chipperfield; by the elemental European Southern Observatory Hotel by Auer + Weber, for scientists in Chile’s Atacama Desert; and by Charles Barclay’s timber Kielder Observatory, where I spent a night in 2008 watching stars hanging above the Northumbrian forest.

I have been enchanted by the 2002 Serpentine Pavilion, a glimpse into a possible future by Toyo Ito and Cecil Balmond; by the inspiring reinvention of St Pancras station by Alastair Lansley and fellow architects; and by Blur, a truly sensational pavilion by Diller + Scofidio set on a steel jetty overlooking Lake Neuchatel at Yverdon-les-Bains. A part of Switzerland’s Expo 2002, this cat’s cradle of tensile steel was a machine for making clouds. You walked through the clouds as they appeared and, when conditions were right, watched them float away over the lake.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: The spiral minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, Iraq. Courtesy Reuters / Guardian.[end-div]

World’s Narrowest House – 4 Feet Wide

[div class=attrib]From TreeHugger:[end-div]

Aristotle said “No great genius was without a mixture of insanity.” Marcel Proust wrote “Everything great in the world is created by neurotics. They have composed our masterpieces, but we don’t consider what they have cost their creators in sleepless nights, and worst of all, fear of death.”

Perhaps that’s why Jakub Szcz?sny designed this hermitage, this “studio for invited guests – young creators and intellectualists from all over the world.”- it will drive them completely crazy.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of living in small spaces. I write about them all the time. But the Keret House is 122 cm (48.031″) at its widest, 72 (28.34″) at its narrowest. I know people wider than that.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Shopping town USA

[div class=attrib]From Eurozine:[end-div]
In the course of his life, Victor Gruen completed major urban interventions in the US and western Europe that fundamentally altered the course of western urban development. Anette Baldauf describes how Gruen’s fame rests mostly on the insertion of commercial machines into the decentred US suburbs. These so-called “shopping towns” were supposed to strengthen civic life and structure the amorphous, mono-functional agglomerations of suburban sprawl. Yet within a decade, Gruen’s designs had become the architectural extension of the policies of racial and gender segregation underlying the US postwar consumer utopia.

In 1943, the US American magazine Architectural Forum invited Victor Gruen and his wife Elsie Krummeck to take part in an exchange of visions for the architechtonic shaping of the postwar period. The editors of the issue, entitled Architecture 194x, appealed to recognised modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Charles Eames to design parts of a model town for the year “194x”, in other words for an unspecified year, by which time the Second World War would have ended. The architects Gruen & Krummeck partnership were to design a prototype for a “regional shopping centre”. The editors specified that the shopping centre was to be situated on the outskirts of the city, on traffic island between two highways and would supplement the pedestrian zone down town. “How can shopping be made more inviting?”, the editors asked Gruen & Krummeck, who, at the time of the competition, were famous for their spectacular glass designs for boutiques on Fifth Avenue and for national department store chains on the outskirts of US cities.

The two architects responded to the commission to build a “small neighbourhood shopping centre” with a design that far exceeded the specified size and function of the centre. Gruen later explained that the project reflected the couple’s dissatisfaction with Los Angeles, where long distances between shops, regular traffic jams, and an absence of pedestrian zones made shopping tiresome work. Gruen and Krummeck saw in Los Angeles the blueprint of an “an automotive-rich postwar America”. Their counter-design was oriented towards the traditional main squares of European cities. Hence, they suggested two central structural interventions: first, the automobile and the shopper were to be assigned two distinct spatial units, and second, space for consumption and civic space were to be merged. Working to this premise, Gruen and Krummeck designed a centre that was organised around a spacious green square – with garden restaurants, milk bars, and music stands. The design integrated 28 shops and 13 public facilities; among the latter were a library, a post office, a theatre, a lecture hall, a night club, a nursery, a play room, and a pony stable.

The editors of Architectural Forum rejected Gruen’s and Krummeck’s design. They insisted upon a reduced “regional shopping centre” and urged the architects to rework their submission along these lines. Gruen and Krummeck responded with an adjustment that would later prove crucial: they abandoned the idea of a green square in the centre of the complex and suggested building a closed, round building made of glass. They surrounded the inwardly directed shopping complex with two rings. The first ring was to serve as a pedestrian zone, the second as a car park. This design also failed to please. George Nelson, the editor-in-chief, was scandalised and argued that by removing the central square, the space for sitting around and strolling was lost. For him, the shopping centre as closed space was inconceivable. Eventually, Gruen and Krummeck submitted a design for a conventional shopping centre with shops arranged in a “U” shape around a courtyard. Clearly, those that would celebrate the closed shopping centre a few years later were not yet active. It was only a decade later that Gruen was able to convince two leading department-store owners of the profitability of a self-enclosed shopping centre. Excluding cars, street traders, animals, and other potential disturbances, and supported by surveillance technology, the shopping mall would embody the ideal, typical values of suburban lifestyles – order, cleanliness, and safety. Public judgement of Gruen’s “architecture of introversion” fundamentally changed, then, in the course of the 1950s. What was it, exactly, that led to this revised evaluation of a closed, inwardly directed space of consumption?

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]