Masdar Institute. Abu Dhabi. By Foster and partners

" The global financial crisis has derailed construction all over the world — even in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. But certain megaprojects continue to march ahead, though with tighter budgets, more pragmatic goals, and less ambitious schedules. One such project is Masdar City, in Abu Dhabi. In 2007, the government-owned Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company chose a consortium led by London-based Foster + Partners to design the master plan for the 2.3-square-mile development it touted as the world’s first zero-carbon city. Originally slated for completion by 2016, plans for Masdar included housing, cultural institutions, educational and research facilities, and space for tenants focused on the development of advanced energy technologies.

“Masdar is still a compact, high-density, mixed-use development, with well-integrated public transport and a street design that enforces walkable communities and neighborhoods,” says Jurgen Happ, a Foster associate partner.

The planning principles that Happ cites are evident in the first piece of the development — 680,000 square feet of a 3.7 million-square-foot campus designed by Foster for the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. Occupied since November, the completed portion of this graduate-level university dedicated to the study of sustainability comprises a laboratory, a library, and student housing.

Masdar Institute’s campus combines high-tech materials and technologies, like ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) cladding for the laboratory buildings, with features that take their cues from the region’s vernacular, such as glass-reinforced concrete mashrabiya screens that shield the residential buildings’ balconies."

Masdar officials envision that the city will cover 2.3 square miles, as depicted in this rendering, and have a daytime population of 90,000 by 2025.

Excerpts from the article by Sona Nambiar and Joann Gonchar, AIA.

http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/portfolio/2011/05/Masdar_Institute.asp

All pictures downloaded from archrecord.construction.com

El sepulcro de San Pedro en el Vaticano

Tumba de San Pedro, Vaticano. Copyright Ray Williams Jr

Basílica de San Pedro en el Vaticano. Imagen de aimdigital.com.ar

Reproduzco debajo el interesante artículo de Mariano de Vedía para La Nación, acerca de la tumba de San Pedro dentro de la basílica del mismo nombre, y agrego otros datos ilustrativos:

La Basílica de San Pedro esconde en su interior una máquina del tiempo, que conduce a los orígenes más entrañables de la historia cristiana. Las excavaciones iniciadas en los tiempos del papa Pío XII, entre 1939 y 1958, permitieron reconstruir el camino al corazón de la Iglesia: el lugar donde fueron depositados los restos del apóstol San Pedro, víctima de la persecución de Nerón, en el año 67 de nuestra era.

Hoy ese sitio puede visitarse, en grupos reducidos, y a medida que se desciende en un trayecto serpenteante, rodeado por sepulturas paganas y cristianas de los primeros dos siglos de la era cristiana, es inevitable sentir un impacto interior tan profundo como el silencio y los secretos que guardan los muros que sobrevivieron a los tiempos.

Por tradición, siempre se supo que en el siglo IV, en la colina vaticana, sobre el sitio donde se había colocado la tumba de Pedro, en medio de un cementerio en las afueras de Roma, el emperador Constantino había construido una basílica en agradecimiento a su conversión al cristianismo, luego de que una cruz se le apareciera en el cielo y lo ayudara a triunfar en la batalla de Majencio, en el año 312.

Todavía vivían en ese tiempo descendientes de los cristianos que habían acompañado a los apóstoles y conocían el lugar donde había sido sepultado Pedro y al que muchos iban a venerar.

Tan identificada tenía Constantino la sencilla y austera sepultura que la hizo proteger con una urna funeraria, conocida como Trofeo de Gayo, luego sellada con un muro rojo, para evitar que fuera afectada por eventuales represalias y filtraciones de agua. Ese signo indicaba que allí se encontraba alguien digno de ser venerado.

La basílica de Constantino construida sobre ese tesoro perduró durante doce siglos, hasta que fue demolida para levantar la actual Basílica de San Pedro, en el siglo XVI. Bajo el templo, todo quedó cubierto de tierra, hasta que las excavaciones de Pío XII permitieron reconstruir el sendero a las primeras tumbas y localizar la sepultura de Pedro.

Tras remover más de 50.000 metros cúbicos de tierra, los arqueólogos recuperaron 22 sepulturas y descifraron inscripciones muy significativas en los muros, como las que señalan "Petros eni" ("Pedro está aquí") y otros signos llamativos, como la letra P con tres rayas horizontales que forman el dibujo de una llave.

La sepultura se encuentra justo debajo del Altar de la Confesión, que señala el nivel de la basílica constantiniana en la actual Basílica de San Pedro, y por encima de ella está el imponente Baldaquín de Bernini, que custodia no sólo el altar donde hoy celebra el Papa, sino el origen más estremecedor de la era cristiana.

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1371715-el-interesante-camino-a-la-tumba-de-san-pedro?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=titulares&utm_campaign=NLCult

Tumba de San Pedro. Imagen de parroquiatorrelodones.com

Sepulcro de San Pedro. Foto bajada de apostolicos.en.telepolis.com

De la página http://apostolicos.en.telepolis.com he leído sobre el arqueólogo jesuita que identificó la tumba:

El Padre jesuita Antonio Ferrua, arqueólogo que identificó la tumba y las reliquias del Apóstol San Pedro bajo la Basílica vaticana.

El P. Ferrua encabezó las excavaciones arqueológicas de la Basílica de San Pedro, desde 1944 hasta 1949, por encargo del Papa Pío XII, y bajo su liderazgo se encontró la cripta auténtica y los “graffiti” que disiparon toda posible duda sobre la ubicación de la tumba de San Pedro en la colina vaticana.

Por cuenta del mismo Papa, el P. Ferrua dirigió también la reconstrucción de la basílica de San Lorenzo, gravemente dañada por los bombardeos sobre Roma del 19 de julio de 1943.

Durante más de cincuenta años, el sacerdote jesuita se desempeñó como catedrático del Pontificio Instituto de Arqueología Cristiana; y desde 1948 fue conservador del Museo Sacro de la Biblioteca Vaticana.

http://apostolicos.en.telepolis.com/5-CASUALIDADES_IBERICAS2003.html

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Orange Cube in Lyon, France

"Completed last fall, the 67,640-square-foot building, which contains a ground-floor furniture showroom and offices above, is perched on a river’s edge in a converted industrial zone in Lyon, France. Surrounded mostly by gray, modern structures, the six-story box, with its conical gashes and pulsating orange veil, is the life of the party.

On any given day, you’ll find locals and tourists alike gathering outside the building, studying its unusual features and snapping photos.

It’s a brazen work of architecture for any city, particularly Lyon. While one of the most progressive industrial centers in the 19th century and home of the visionary urbanist Tony Garnier (1869-1948), Lyon has become fairly subdued in recent decades. The city has, however, embarked on various endeavors to boost its cosmopolitan character. In the 1990s, it opened Cité Internationale, a 37-acre mixed-use project by Renzo Piano. More recently, it set out to redevelop a run-down harbor district dominated by warehouses. It is here, in the new “Lyon Confluence” district — so named because it occupies the tip of a peninsula where the Saône and Rhône rivers meet — that the Orange Cube enlivens the landscape.

In January 2006, Jakob + MacFarlane won a competition to design the building that would become the Orange Cube. No tenants were lined up at the time; the brief simply called for an eye-catching structure on a half-acre site. “The idea was to have a competition, get iconic buildings, and, through this interesting architecture, get someone to pay for it all,” explains MacFarlane. The building’s first two floors had to accommodate cultural programming, while the upper levels would house offices. The brief also stipulated that the building envelope not fill the entire site, that it have a certain amount of negative space.

That last requirement inspired the architects to create a box pierced by three large voids oriented toward the water. “The most obvious solution, from our point of view, was to take the negative space and treat it as a cutout from the whole,” says MacFarlane. “It seemed like a good of way of making something interesting out of the project.”

Excerpts from:

Article by Jenna M. McKnight

http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/portfolio/2011/05/Orange_Cube.asp

All pictures from archrecord.construction.com

Land reclamation in Hong Kong

Hong Kong. Photo credit: wired-destinations.com

An introduction of the interesting article by Mark Huppert and Marc Weigum for metropolismag.com:

¨Our interdisciplinary team, supported by the Runstad Center at the University of Washington, recently went on a research trip to Hong Kong. We were there to view the city through a multifaceted lens, looking to identify success metrics and their outcomes within the built environment. This led us to interview a diverse array of government decision-makers, private developers, investors, consultants, planners, policy-makers, and community representatives. The themes that emerged from our conversations were not quite what we expected in this intensely capitalistic city containing the most skyscrapers in the world. The glittering towers and pulsing streetscapes are on a foundation that is not quite what it seems. Hong Kong, from what we could tell, is at a monumental tipping point.

The phrase “land reclamation” is commonly used to describe the process of creating new land from sea, riverbeds or, as Webster’s puts it, from “wasteland.”Since most people associate the word reclaim with taking something back, it seems odd to use the word reclamation when it’s about creating land from something useful like the ocean or a harbor. In the case of Hong Kong, the land area wasn’t originally taken BY the sea for someone to take back, but it was certainly taken FROM the sea in order to develop something of greater economic value. It’s all a matter of perspective.¨

Central Hong Kong Island via Government House, photo: usageorge.com

Keep on reading:

http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20110425/from-reclamation-to-renewal

Beaumont-l'Eglise. From The Dreams

Beaumont-l'Eglise. From Panoramio.com

"Beaumont is composed of two villages, completely separated and quite distinct one from the other—Beaumont-l'Eglise, on the hill with its old Cathedral of the twelfth century, its Bishop's Palace which dates only from the seventeenth century, its inhabitants, scarcely one thousand in number, who are crowded together in an almost stifling way in its narrow streets; and Beaumont-la-Ville, at the foot of the hill, on the banks of the Ligneul, an ancient suburb, which the success of its manufactories of lace and fine cambric has enriched and enlarged to such an extent that it has a population of nearly ten thousand persons, several public squares, and an elegant sub-prefecture built in the modern style. These two divisions, the northern district and the southern district, have thus no longer anything in common except in an administrative way. Although scarcely thirty leagues from Paris, where one can go by rail in two hours, Beaumont-l'Eglise seems to be still immured in its old ramparts, of which, however, only three gates remain. A stationary, peculiar class of people lead there a life similar to that which their ancestors had led from father to son during the past five hundred years.

The Cathedral explains everything, has given birth to and preserved everything. It is the mother, the queen, as it rises in all its majesty in the centre of, and above, the little collection of low houses, which, like shivering birds, are sheltered under her wings of stone. One lives there simply for it, and only by it. There is no movement of business activity, and the little tradesmen only sell the necessities of life, such as are absolutely required to feed, to clothe, and to maintain the church and its clergy; and if occasionally one meets some private individuals, they are merely the last representatives of a scattered crowd of worshippers. The church dominates all; each street is one of its veins; the town has no other breath than its own. On that account, this spirit of another age, this religious torpor from the past, makes the cloistered city which surrounds it redolent with a savoury perfume of peace and of faith."

From Chapter II of The Dream (Le Reve) by Emile Zola

Read The Dream at Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29004/29004-h/files/9499/9499-h/9499-h.htm

A street of puzzles

Illustration by arch. Matteo Pericoli

When my writing is not going well, there are two things I do in the hope of luring the words back: I read some pages of books I love or I watch the world. This is my view when I am at home in Nigeria, in the port city of Lagos. An ordinary view, with houses close together, cars crammed in corners, each compound with its own gate, little kiosks dotting the street. But it is a view choked with stories, because it is full of people. I watch them and I imagine their lives and invent their dreams.

The stylish young woman who sells phone cards in a booth next door, the Hausa boys who sell water in plastic containers, stacked in wheelbarrows. The vendor with a pile of newspapers, pressing his horn, his hopeful eyes darting up to the verandas. The bean-hawker who prowls around in the mornings, calling out from time to time, a large pan on her head. The mechanics at the corner who buy from her, often jostling one another, often shirtless, and sometimes falling asleep under a shade in the afternoon.

I strain to listen to their conversations. Once I saw two of the mechanics in a raging but brief fight. Once I saw a couple walk past holding hands, not at all a common sight. Once, a young girl in a blue school uniform, hair neatly plaited, looked up and saw me, a complete stranger, and said, “Good morning, ma,” curtsying in the traditional Yoruba way, and it filled me with gladness. The metal bars on the window — burglary-proof, as we call it — sometimes give the street the air of a puzzle, jagged pieces waiting to be fit together and form a whole.

AUTHOR: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author, most recently, of “The Thing Around Your Neck.” Matteo Pericoli, an artist, is the author of “The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York.”

From: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/04/opinion/20101205_Windows.html?scp=9&sq=pericoli&st=Search

The Haussmann block, as seen by Emile Zola

An example of the Haussmann block. From http://agingmodernism.wordpress.com/

"The Haussmann block excluded, at least from its centre, all the diversified activities that coexisted there previously in the same way as the urbanization process excluded some activities from the centre of the city. Often only those activities connected to housing could find space within a block, whose character derives, as we have noted previously, from social needs. This did not cause great difficulties to the inhabitants, because the block became fragmented and most of the buildings were inhabited by a homogeneous  population.

If we take up again the distinctions made earlier between the perimeter of the block, which is in contact with the street through the facade of the buildings, and its centre, we realize that this functions only as a back space where some street activities (stables, sheds) are still located there. This arrangement ensured a distinction between the visible and the hidden parts of housing. The bourgeois building was the place of false modesty -see Zola's Pot Bouille and the thoughts contained in its first pages on "the discreet ostentation" of the facade, which masks the "internal sewer". With regard to working-class blocks of flats, they continued, undoubtedly, to be the theatre of a more open form of sociability and activities that extended the life that took place in the dwelling -children played in the courtyard and family events spilled out from the dwelling."

Paris' blocks. Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaboney/146359192/

Reference: The Block and its Differentiation. In Urban Forms. The death and life of the urban block. Ivor Samuels. P. 128-129.

Pot-Bouille by Emile Zola:

Pot-Bouille is the tenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola. It was first serialized between January and April 1882 in the periodical Le Gaulois before being published in book form by Charpentier in 1883.

The novel is an indictment of the hypocritical mores of the bourgeoisie of the Second French Empire. It is set in a Parisian apartment building, a relatively new housing arrangement at the time, and its title (roughly translating as stew pot) reflects the disparate and sometimes unpleasant elements lurking behind the building's new and decorative façade.

Pot-Bouille was first translated into English by Henry Vizetelly in 1886 and Percy Pinkerton in 1895; both translations are available in reprints. There have been other English translations through the years (as Piping Hot!, Pot Luck, Restless House, and Lesson in Love), the most recent being by Brian Nelson for Oxford World's Classics (1999).

William Busnach adapted Pot-Bouille as a play, produced at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique in 1883.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-Bouille

A push to make Nipton (California) a sustainable wonderland

Solar power provides most of the electricity in Nipton, Calif. Gerald Freeman, who bought the town in the 1980s, aims to make it a green hospitality center for traveling nature lovers. (Gina Ferazzi, Los Angeles Times / May 4, 2011)

It´s nice to know that somebody else is doing some effort in the Mojave Desert. I know part of it, usually in our way to Nevada, and, though the landscape could be beautiful, you can feel the emptiness. Here, an excerpt of a nice story by Tiffany Hsu, for Los Angeles Times:

¨Gerald Freeman was prospecting for gold in the Mojave Desert when he stumbled on Nipton.

In 1984, it had become a virtual ghost town. Its sole resident lived in the trading post selling sodas to the occasional wayward traveler who might briefly stop to watch freight trains rumble past on the nearby Union Pacific railroad.

But where most saw desolation, Freeman saw "a little place to make a home" and maybe some money too. The Caltech-trained geologist shelled out $200,000 to buy the tiny, tattered outpost.

For a quarter-century, Freeman struggled to make much of the place, spending roughly $1 million on restoration costs. About 20 people eventually moved into town, most living in recreational vehicles and trailers.

But now Freeman thinks he's finally figured out a way to turn Nipton into a boomtown.

He put up rows of gleaming solar panels, and recently began selling hats emblazoned with the hamlet's new motto: "Nipton, powered by the sun."

It's part of a major push to make Nipton a sustainable wonderland, a green hospitality center for nature lovers headed into the neighboring Mojave National Preserve.

Nipton held an opening ceremony for its new solar generating plant.  

Hermitage House. Artists´residence

The 80-kilowatt solar installation — enough to power most of the town — is 10 miles from Interstate 15 and two miles from the Nevada border. Freeman has also erected five "eco-cabins" based on designs by Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the next decade, Freeman envisions energy-efficient buildings, an organic farm, electric vehicle charging stations and even more solar installations. If the local winds weren't so weak, he'd erect wind turbines too.

Nipton isn't the only U.S. town hopping on the environmental bandwagon. Turbines are going up in Greensburg, Kan., where a tornado tore through in 2007. Soldiers Grove, Wis., moved its downtown out of a flood-prone area and equipped the new buildings with solar energy.

But Nipton has one advantage: Freeman owns the town and can do whatever he wants with it.¨

KEEP ON reading:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nipton-20110504,0,912654.story

More pictures and history at:

http://www.nipton.com/