Galería Nacional de Groenlandia/National Gallery of Greenland

Danish architects bjarke ingels group has won the invited competition to design greenland's new national gallery of art in the capital city of nuuk. a collaborative effort with TNT nuuk, ramboll nuuk, andarkitekti, the proposal was unanimously selected over six other nordic architects including norwegian snøhetta and finnish heikkinen-komonen.Conceived as a projection of a geometrically perfect circle on the sloped site, the new

3000 m2 museum is a courtyard building that combines a comprehensive layout with a sensitive adaption to the landscape. the resulting form resembles a melted ring that follows the natural topography to imply the metaphor of a glacier or drifting snow.

La oficina de arquitectura danesa bjarke ingels group ha ganado el concurso por invitación para el diseño de la nueva galería nacional de arte en la ciudad capital de Nuuk, Groenlandia. Un esfuerzo de colaboración con TNT nuuk, Nuuk Ramboll, andarkitekti, la propuesta fue seleccionada por unanimidad por otros seis arquitectos nórdicos incluyendo al noruego snøhetta and heikkinen-komonen.

Concebido como una proyección de un círculo geométricamente perfecto en el sitio con pendiente, el nuevo museo de 3000 m2 es un edificio con patio, que combina un diseño integral con una adaptación sensible al paisaje. la forma resultante se asemeja a un anillo fundido que sigue la topografía natural que implica la metáfora de la nieve, los glaciares a la deriva.

Siga leyendo:

http://www.dsgnr.cl/2011/02/galeria-nacional-de-groenlandia-big-architects/#more-13225
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/9/view/13191/big-architects-national-gallery-of-greenland.html

Tokyo: buildings that didn´t collapse thanks to Building Codes

Noda, Iwate. From Clarin.com

From Inhabitat.com, an excerpt from the article by Diane Pham:

From seawalls that line stretches of Japan’s coastline, to skyscrapers that sway to absorb earthquakes, to unrelenting building codes, there is no other country better prepared for an earthquake than Japan. Over the years, the country has invested billions of dollars developing new technology to aid in protecting their citizens and infrastructure against earthquakes and tsunamis.

Buildings in the country have been built to be earthquake proof, and construction focuses on deep foundation and massive shock absorbers to dampen seismic energy in the event of an earthquake. Another method that is often employed in construction is to create a base for the building that would allow it to move semi-independently from the total structure, in turn reducing the shaking caused by a quake. As seen in the video taken above by an onlooker in the neighborhood of Shinjuku, while the buildings sway, they do not collapse. In fact, not one building in Tokyo fell despite the record breaking magnitude – a true testament to the level of engineering involved in the construction of their structures.

Keep on reading:

http://inhabitat.com/despite-record-breaking-earthquake-no-buildings-in-tokyo-collapsed-thanks-to-stringent-building-codes/

The aftermath of the earthquake in Rikuzentakada

From npr.org, excerpts from the article by Alan Greenblatt:

¨Japan could not protect its entire coastline against tsunami with its system of seawalls. And with sizable aftershocks still occurring, the final death toll will not be known for some time. But it will be a fraction of the 230,000 deaths seen in Haiti following last year's earthquake.

That's in spite of the fact that the Port-au-Prince earthquake was far smaller in magnitude than Friday's, which was 8.9 — one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded.

"The biggest difference between a place like Haiti and Japan is that in Japan, they experience earthquakes frequently and they build the habits of a high level of earthquake technology into their engineering," says Miyamoto, who is president of a structural engineering firm based in California.

"They get a magnitude earthquake of 7 or 8 every decade, so naturally they get good at it," he says.

ncome inequality rarely matters so much as it does when it comes to surviving earthquakes. Japan is a wealthy nation that can afford to build structures capable of standing up to sustained shaking. But places like Haiti, which was already one of the world's poorest nations before its devastating earthquake struck, can't.

Japan faces enormous recovery and rebuilding costs, but it can afford to pay them, says Roger Bilham, a University of Colorado geologist. "Basically, when you have an earthquake in developing countries, they die," he says. "In the developed countries, they pay."

In poor countries, Bilham says, badly constructed houses are "an unrecognized weapon of mass destruction."

Corruption And Collapse

The type of brittle, poorly mixed concrete often used in Haiti was a major factor in the enormous death toll there last year, with thousands of buildings damaged. According to Bilham, Haiti's earthquake caused more than twice as many deaths as any previous 7.0 earthquake.

Building failures also accounted for the bulk of the nearly 90,000 deaths caused by an 8.0 earthquake in 2008 in Sichuan, China. That earthquake led to loud complaints about corruption and shoddy materials used in school construction.

Bilham co-authored a study published in Nature in January that found 83 percent of quake deaths from building collapse over the past 30 years happened in countries that were especially corrupt.

Builders sometimes find it cheaper to pay bribes than build according to code.¨

Read the full article:

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/11/134468071/japanese-preparedness-likely-saved-thousands

Do streets in Washington DC have hidden symbols in their pattern?

At sunrise, a jogger reaches the top of the 56 steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Photograph by Dan Westergren. National Geographic.com

I´m reading the novel The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown; not that I want to recommend the book, for me, it´s like a copy of The Da Vinci Code, but it´s fun when you don´t want to think hard on real life work. At least, I´ve learnt some interesting facts about the history of Washington DC and its architecture. Of course, I can´t forget the book is fiction, but it was my first time, for example, to learn about George Washington´s Aphoteosis.

The dome showing George Washington´s Aphoteosis.From learnnc.org

The George Washington´s Masonic Memorial. From http://gwmemorial.org/index.php

Trying to see what is fact an what is not, I´ve come across with an article by Brian Handwerk for National Geographic. There are a couple of questions, based on the intrigues in the book The Lost Symbol that are answered by two Masons and a historian of the ancient Christian order. Here, the excerpt about the streets:

An old map of Washington DC. Google images

FREEMASON MYTH 4

Washington, D.C.'s Streets Form Giant Masonic Symbols

It's long been suggested that powerful Freemasons embedded Masonic symbols in the Washington, D.C., street plan designed mainly by Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant in 1791.

The Lost Symbol is expected to prominently feature "Masonic mapping," detecting pentagrams and other symbols by connecting the dots among landmarks. Pre-release clues released by author Dan Brown, for example, include GPS coordinates for Washington landmarks.

"Individually, Masons had a role in building the White House, in building and designing Washington, D.C.," said Mark Tabbert, director of collections at the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia. "And [small scale] Masonic symbols can be found throughout the city, as they can in most U.S. cities."

But there's no Masonic message in the city's street plan, Tabbert said. For starters, Pierre L'Enfant wasn't a Mason.

And, Tabbert asked, why would Masons go to the trouble of laying out a street grid to match their symbols?

"There has to be a [reason] for doing such a thing," said Tabbert, himself a Mason. "Dan Brown will find one, because he writes fiction. But there isn't one."

Read the full article:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090915-lost-symbol-dan-brown-freemasons-book.html

Tape Vienna, Odeon 2010, by Numen. Tuesday 15 March

Tape Vienna, Odeon 2010, by Numen/For Use from Design Museum on Vimeo.

For one night only witness and explore Tape London, a sculptural installation on an architectural scale by Vienna and Zagreb based architects Numen/For Use. Their series of tape structures have been nominated in this year’s Brit Insurance Designs of the Year, and they have been commissioned to create a site specific tape installation across the Design Museum’s First Floor Gallery to dramatically preside over the stage for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2011 awards ceremony.

The Design Museum will be open to the public between 6.30pm and 9pm on Tuesday 15 March for an evening viewing of this temporary installation and an opportunity to judge for yourself the winner of Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2011 announced earlier that day.

Christoph Katzler, Ante Krizmanic and Nikola Radeljkovic from Numen/For Use will be available to guide you through their work and the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year gallery will be open throughout the evening.

The installation

Mutliple layers of transparent tape act like tendons stretched between rigid points and columns. Days of work and 45km of tape went into creating some of the structures, which can be experienced from inside as well as out. Try to believe it!

The concept

The inspiration comes from a set design for a dance performance, in which the form evolves from the movement of dancers between pillars: the dancers stretch the tape as they move, resulting in a (tape) recording of the choreography.

http://www.designsoftheyear.com/2011/03/10/special-late-opening-with-a-giant-sticky-tape-installation/

Designmuseum.org

Film by Numen.org

Design Museum, Shad Thames, SE1 2YD

Street artist JR in Los Angeles: 'The Wrinkles of the City'

Hidden behind his signature sunglasses and fedora, JR, like his now-famous British counterpart Banksy, is a man of mystery. There are certain facts that everyone seems to agree on: He was born in France. He is 28 years old. He got his start as a graffiti writer, but has since morphed into a hybrid photographer/street artist. He refers to himself as a “poster artist.”

“When I was doing graffiti when I was 14, 15 years old, I was tagging my name — leaving my mark — but I stopped pasting my pictures and started pasting other peoples' photos and my whole world became about staying invisible and making others visible — and the street is the best medium for that,” JR explained.

JR is famous for putting up black-and-white photographs of faces on the sides of buildings — and for going big. Recent projects include “Face 2 Face,” which featured images of Israelis pasted on the homes and businesses of Palestinians in the Middle East and vice versa; and “Women are Heroes,” which showcased photos of women pasted on the walls and roofs of their homes in the slums of Kenya and favelas of Brazil.

When JR first arrived in Los Angeles about a month ago, he was not yet a household name. But after putting up more than a dozen murals everywhere from downtown to the beach, he has achieved rock-star status, leaving autographs in the form of giant murals throughout the city.

In Los Angles, JR was on a mission: To install the third and final segment of “The Wrinkles of the City,” a project that paired images of old people (thus the “wrinkles” of the title) with even older buildings in Cartagena, Spain and Shanghai. Thanks to L.A.'s lack of ruins, the project took on a different meaning here.

“'The Wrinkles of the City' is a project about history, memory, architecture, urbanism and, of course, most of all, people,” said Emile Abinal, a member of JR's crew, who is often described as his right-hand man. “The first two parts of the project were to contrast the history of the city with the memory of the people by putting the wrinkles of the people on the wrinkles of city, which are destroyed buildings, ruins, etc.”

“In Los Angeles, it is about image,” Abinal added. “What is your image when you are in the city of plastic surgery, of Hollywood, of youthfulness — where normally wrinkles are not allowed?”

REFERENCE:

Los Angeles Times. Keep on reading:

http://www.thisisbrandx.com/2011/03/cover-story-street-artist-jr-brings-wrinkles-to-the-city.html

Music from cathedrals plans (Cathedral scan project)

Luebeck. Waveform and plan

As Carrington explains it, his project Cathedral Scan "translates the architectural plans of Gothic cathedrals into open-ended musical scores via custom software. Treating the plans as a kind of map, in the live performance Carrington navigates through them to create diverse rhythms, drones and textures."

Groups of scanners filling the sonic spectrum may act in synch, forming a single harmonically-dense rhythm, or they may scan the plans at different speeds, resulting in complex polyrhythms. Each plan is treated as a modular score, with a distinct rhythm and timbre of its own. Also, by varying the speed and intensity of each scanning group, drone-like sounds may emerge based on the “resonant frequency” of the black and white plan.

Of course, it's difficult not to wonder what this might sound like applied to radically other architectural styles and structural types, from, say, the Seagram Building or the Forth Bridge to troglodyte homes in Cappadocia. Further, it would be interesting to see this applied not just to plans or sections—not just to architectural representations—but to three-dimensional structures in real-time. Laser scans of old ruins turned from visual information to live sound, broadcast 24 hours a day on dedicated radio stations installed amidst the fallen walls of old temples, or acoustically rediscovering every frequency at which Mayan subwoofers once roared.

REFERENCE: text from

http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/blogs/post.asp?bbPostId=CzCXn5HJUl2JdAIqVS90FboXBCwNYFJnSqtXBF41fdj5iwXP&bbParentWidgetId=B8hgtgwAXRcJz48YZ7K5qHdr

Read more about this project

http://blakecarrington.com/016.php

False Teeth Awning

A quick survey of Bethan Huws's work suggests that she's an artist who is hard to keep up with. Over the past couple of decades, her work has included architectural interventions (adding floors to otherwise empty galleries), films, sculptures, performances and watercolours – conceptual art with a humanising wit.

In 2009, Huws stencilled the words False Teeth on to the windows of an original seaside shelter in Margate (apparently where TS Eliot wrote some lines from The Waste Land), inviting us to imagine its 26 panes as a pretend set of teeth.

From Guardian.co. Uk. Article by Skye Sherwin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/02/artist-of-week-bethan-huws

Architects try to save Le Corbusier´s Chandigarth building

The Chandigarh Legislative Assembly building, one of the city's many buildings designed by Le Corbusier. Photograph: Jophn Macdougall/AFP

It is a last-ditch effort to save a city built as a monument to modernity and hope but now threatened by neglect and the fierce demands of the global art market. Chandigarh, 180 miles north of Delhi, was built by Le Corbusier 60 years ago.

Since then, many of its finest buildings, recognised as modernist masterpieces, have been neglected. Recently, international art dealers have made substantial sums selling hundreds of chairs, tables, carvings and prints designed by Le Corbusier and his assistants but obtained at knockdown prices from officials often unaware of their value.

Now a group of local architects, art historians and officials are hoping to mobilise international help to prevent further damage to Le Corbusier's unique Indian legacy. A report commissioned by the government in Chandigarh has recommended a campaign targeting the UN heritage agency, Unesco, as well as foreign governments, especially in Europe where many of the items have been auctioned. Informal approaches to embassies in Delhi have failed, the unpublished report, seen by the Guardian, says.

Read the full article by Jason Burk for the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/07/chandigarh-le-corbusier-heritage-site