Some urban sculptures by Claes Oldenburg

Pennsylvania Academy of Arts. Picture by Tom Crane

Hats in Salinas, California. From http://www.agilitynut.com/08/8/shats2.jpg

Spoon bridge and cherry, Minneapolis. From http://www.agilitynut.com/07/7/mcherry3.jpg

Claes Oldenburg unveils his latest outdoor sculpture — a giant paintbrush — outside the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia this weekend. At first, Oldenburg's giant clothespins and spoons made him a target for ridicule. But now you can find examples of his work all over the world. And like all of his work, it's intended to provoke a response.

Pop art master Claes Oldenburg will officially unveil his latest sculpture outside the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on Saturday. Oldenburg is known for taking everyday objects and blowing them up to impossible sizes. At first, his giant clothespins and spoons made him a target for ridicule. But now you can find examples of Oldenburg's work all over the world, from Cologne to Cleveland. And they've been embraced — for the most part.

REFERENCE

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/30/140929475/pop-art-master-oldenburg-unveils-another-big-idea

The Chinese city of Chaohu has vanished....

Chaohu. Picture by Louisa Lim.

Chaohu government building. Picture by Louisa Lim.

A few days ago I had a conversation with my eldest daughter who works in Sunset Beach, Southern California. It was hard for the inhabitants to accept but at least they had the opportunity to know that their ¨nobody´s land¨ would become part of Huntington Beach (Orange County), instead of belonging to Los Angeles. Many people aroused their voices, the consequences, some irregular businesses had to close, and now police is everywhere. The neighborhood looks the same, but it isn´t.

Now, I´m reading about Chaohu, that´s worst because it seems the inhabitants didn´t know the City would disappear -administratively speaking- and what is worst, it was degraded, now it´s a town.

¨Imagine a city like Los Angeles disappearing from the map completely. That's exactly what happened to Chaohu, a city in eastern China's Anhui province with a similar population — about 4 million. The people have remained, but the city has vanished in an administrative sleight of hand.

That was the Kafkaesque reality for Chaohu's inhabitants, who went to bed one night and woke up the morning of Aug. 22 to find out that their city no longer existed. For many, their first inkling that something had changed was from the local news.

"Anhui province is today announcing the cancellation of Chaohu city," the broadcast said. It went on to explain that the city once known as Chaohu had been divided into three. The nearby cities of Hefei, Wuhu and Ma'anshan each absorbed a piece of territory. The broadcast confusingly described the move as "an inherent need at a certain level of economic growth."

(...) Rumors had circulated for a few weeks beforehand, but there had been no public consultation and no official notice, with residents not being told about the new boundaries in advance.

This division of Chaohu has led to some strange anomalies.

For example, in Lintou town, a bridge serves as the new boundary dividing Hefei from Ma'anshan. This means that, for some, the five-minute bicycle ride between home and work has become a trip from Hefei to Ma'anshan and vice versa. The residents of Lintou complain that the redistricting is illogical. (....)In the longer term, residents worry that being hitched to Ma'anshan will be bad for their village. Everyone is aware that Hefei is the major beneficiary of this move: Its area will increase by 40 percent, and it will become the biggest city in China in terms of area, according to the local media.

Hefei will also now take over the whole of Chao Lake, after which the city was named. Some argue this is good for the lake, since Hefei will be able to spend more money cleaning it up.

Read the article by Louisa Lim:

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/21/140633602/the-curious-case-of-the-vanishing-chinese-city?ft=1&f=1001

Nunavut vertical cave. Concept in the Artic.

Well, something different today. From Planetizen.com the preview from Tim Halbur:

Toronto architect Reza Aliabadi took a trip into the far northern reaches of Nunavut, the Inuit territory above Canada. There, the flatness of the tundra and the stone stacks made by the Inuit inspired him to propose a stacked housing tower.

The fanciful design, which Aliabadi entered in a contest looking for "fresh approaches to adding density," will never be built.

Aliabadi's idea is "...a high-density residential structure designed along the lines of the Inuit sculptures he saw at Pond Inlet, and deposited on an ice floe in the Arctic, one of the lowest-density spots on earth. The imaginary tower consists of large stacked boulders, each hollowed out to provide one or more apartments per rock, and arrayed vertically along a service and elevator shaft."

Pictures courtesy http://www.rzlbd.com/

Automatic sketch of Los Angeles

This is my automatic sketch of Los Angeles. And this is not Los Angeles, but the concepts I remember. The old and the new, the different levels, the postmodern architecture, some basements, some bridges and tunnels across the mountains, a few trees only in the plazas, the city against the mountains and the sky behind. And nobody walking around.

Moshe Safdie´s building in Kansas will be dismantled

The building that will be dismantled in Kansas. Picture from the article

I´ve been reading today about the controversial building designed by Viñoly´s UK Art Center, it was finally opened after a litigation: the reason, rising costs, redesign of the structure on site. And this is not the only example. Starchitects sometimes seem not to care about huge construction costs. Best example, Calatrava. Now, it was the time for arch. Moshe Safdie to suffer the consequences. Or maybe the contractors are not selected with the required experience to build difficult shapes.

Moshe Safdie. Picture downloaded from the article

Moshe Safdie. From e-architect.co.uk

By Kevin Collison. The Kansas City Star:

Water poured into the unfinished West Edge building’s atrium last March through an open ceiling. Mike Allen of Caymus Real Estate toured the project.(..)

More than one observer has compared the imposing curved balconies that architect Moshe Safdie designed for the grand atrium of the new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts to the iconic swirl of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

A similarly dramatic interior was created by Safdie in Kansas City, but most of us will never see it.

That’s because the office building he designed for Kansas City advertising executive Bob Bernstein at the West Edge near the Country Club Plaza is slated to be dismantled.

In a recent interview, Safdie said he was “heartbroken” that building wouldn’t be completed.

“It’s really sad,” he said. “We spent five to six years of our lives laboring over every detail. … A lot of love and care went into this.

“I feel particularly sad for the Bernstein family. It was a noble undertaking. They wanted a headquarters but obviously wanted to do something for the entire city.”

For several years now the exterior of the forlorn, unfinished structure at 48th Street and Belleview Avenue has been part of thousands of people’s daily commutes on Southwest Trafficway.

What has not been visible is its six-level interior atrium. Safdie’s “tornado” design slightly shifted the curves of each interior office balcony to create the illusion of motion, energizing the soaring space.

Over the next few months, if all goes as planned, that atrium — and the rest of the building — will be dismantled and replaced by a more conventional office building designed by 360 Architecture for the Polsinelli Shughart law firm.

Seven years ago, Bernstein searched for an architect to design what was to be the headquarters of the Bernstein-Rein advertising agency. Top designers, including Zaha Hadid and I.M. Pei, were considered before Bernstein chose Safdie and his “hillside village” concept.

In December 2004, a beaming Bernstein joined Safdie in unveiling the model. A year later, construction started. But by early 2007, Bernstein and the builder, J.E. Dunn Construction Co., were embroiled in a dispute over rising costs.

“I tried to be an intermediary,” Safdie said. “I called them individually and tried to have a meeting of the three of us, but it never worked.”

Keep on reading:

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/09/19/3153908/renowned-architect-is-sad-that.html

Viñoly´s Art Center. From

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2011/09/Firstsite-Art-Ctr-Grand-Opening.asp

Botticelli and Leonardo: different ways of seeing landscapes

St. John on Patmos. 1490. By Sandro Botticelli. Google images

Sandro Botticelli. Agony in the garden. 1500. Google images

Botticelli didn´t paint landscapes but if so, they were as a background where the main frame was acquired by the addition of arches, architecture in general. Even rocks seem to be built by humans. From Au-dela de la peinture, 1936; first published in Cahiers d´Art, Special Issue, 1937, the words by Max Ernst:

Sandro Botticelli. Virgin and the Child enthroned. Google images.

Landscape detail. Sandro Botticelli.

¨Botticelli did not like landscape painting, regarding it as a ¨limited and mediocre kind of investigation.¨He said contemptuously that ¨by throwing a sponge soaked with different colours at a wall one can make a spot in which a beautiful landscape can be seen.¨ This earned him a severe admonition from his colleague Leonardo da Vinci:

¨He (Botticelli) is right: one is bound to see bizarre inventions in such a smudge; I mean that he who will gaze attentively at that spot will see in it human heads, various animals, a battle, rocks, the sea, clouds, thickets, and still more: it is like the tinkling of a bell which makes one hear what one imagines. Although that stain may suggest ideas, it will not teach you to complete any art, and the above mentioned painter (Botticelli) paints very bad landscapes.¨

Reproduced in Surrealism. By Patrick Waldberg.

Arno´s landscape. By Leonardo da Vinci. Google images

A storm over a hilly landscape. Leonardo da Vinci. Google images

Landscape near Pisa. Leonardo da Vinci. Google images

Guatemalan schools built with bottles

Picture by Hut It Forward

The cost of building new classrooms and schools shouldn't prohibit students in the developing world from accessing a quality education, but new construction, even using inexpensive materials like cinder block, can run up a five-digit bill in construction costs. Now, Hug It Forward, a nonprofit in Guatemala, has figured out how to build new schools on a shoestring budget by turning the plastic bottles that litter the countryside's villages into raw construction materials.

A plastic school might sound like it's better suited for Barbies than for people, but the technology—developed by the Guatemalan nonprofit Pura Vida—is actually quite clever and allows for schools to be built for less than $10,000. The plastic bottles are stuffed with trash, tucked between supportive chicken wire, and coated in layers of concrete to form walls between the framing. The bottles make up the insulation, while more structurally sound materials like wood posts are used for the framing.

Keep on reading the article by Zak Stone:

http://www.good.is/post/guatemalan-schools-built-from-bottles-not-bricks/

Reconstruction plan for Haiti

¨Over the last 18 months, Trans_City architecture and urbanism, has developed a comprehensive plan for the reconstruction of Jacmel, Haiti based upon the concept of satellite cities located at the edge of the existing, earthquake-ravaged city center.(A concept developed in accordance with the universal design principals of the Housing Reconstruction Framework of the Haitian Government)

The concept includes an urban masterplan, and a proposal for prefabricated houses, in which the building shell is industrially manufactured in Austria, and finished by local hand workers. In line with the content of the project, the architecture does not attempt to be spectacular. Rather, it is the holistic integration of the many levels of an urban system that makes this project interesting. More images and project description after the break.

The urbanism proposes an ecologically sustainable planning for a topographically challenging tropical site. We have divided the site into three basic zones, depending upon their topographic qualities.

1) Steep hillsides, which are not buildable, are to be reforested.

2) Valley bottoms, which are also not buildable due to flash-flood dangers, will be terraced and converted to middle intensity agriculture for local consumption.

3) Ridges and plateaus are inhabitable for the built environment.¨

From the article by Alison Furuto. Pictures courtesy of  Trans_City architecture and urbanism

Keep on reading:

http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/216034/20110919/reconstruction-plan-for-haiti-trans_city-architecture-and-urbanism.htm