The beauty of ethereal structures

Let us remember some definitions of "ethereal:"

Of or relating to the regions beyond the earth

celestial, heavenly c : unworldly, spiritual

lacking material substance : immaterial, intangible

 marked by unusual delicacy or refinement

suggesting the heavens or heaven 

Characterized by lightness and insubstantiality; 

intangible, airy

Of the celestial spheres; heavenly. 

Not of this world; spiritual. 

Chemistry: Of or relating to ether. 

light, intangible

Existing in the air; resembling air; looking blue like the sky; aerial: as, “ethereal mountains,”  Pertaining to the hypothetical upper, purer air, or to the higher regions beyond the earth or beyond the atmosphere; 

celestial; otherworldly; as, ethereal space; ethereal regions. 

tenuous; spiritlike 

characterized by extreme delicacy, as form, manner, thought, etc.

It seems to me that after some years of a continuous fashion of organicism in architecture, not the one emulating Wright´s forms, but the literal shapes of the animals and plants, there´s a movement in architecture that´s more spiritual, sustained by the lightness of materials and as a revival of the Asian beauties. The metaphor of ¨ethereal¨ in all its references, is always present.

I´ve compiled these examples from the last weeks, and there´s more to come. Enjoy.

Cantonese Opera. Bamboo structure designed by architect William Li. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Cantonese opera is one of the major categories in Chinese opera, originating in southern China's Cantonese culture. It is popular in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Malaysia. Like all versions of Chinese opera, it is a traditional Chinese art form, involving music, singing, martial arts, acrobatics, and acting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_opera

London architecture collective Softkill Design has joined the race to build the world's first 3D printed house, announcing plans for a plastic dwelling that could be built off-site in three weeks and assembled in a single day.

The single-storey Protohouse 2.0 will be eight metres wide and four metres long and will be printed in sections in a factory. The parts will be small enough to be transported in vans and then snapped together on site.

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/02/13/protohouse-2-3d-printed-house-by-softkill-design/

Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto has been named as the designer of this year's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, which will be a cloud-like structure made from a lattice of steel poles.

The semi-transparent pavilion will occupy 350 square-metres of lawn outside the London gallery. Two entrances will lead inside the structure, where staggered terraces will provide seating for a central cafe.

Sou Fujimoto describes his design as "an architectural landscape" where "the vivid greenery of the surrounding plant life [is] woven together with a constructed geometry".

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/02/14/sou-fujimoto-to-design-serpentine-gallery-pavilion-2013/

Stockholm 2013: talks at last week's Stockholm Furniture Fair were held beneath an installation of 11,000 patterned paper sheets by Swedish architect Gert Wingårdh and Finnish artist Kustaa Saksi.

Wingårdh and Saksi staggered the pieces of paper up from the corners of the rectangular area to create a dome accessed by an arch on each side.

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/02/12/stockholm-furniture-fair-installation-by-gert-wingardh-and-kustaa-saksi/

Steilneset memorial. By Peter Zumthor

Architect Peter Zumthor designed this memorial on an island in Norway to commemorate suspected witches who were burned at the stake there in the seventeenth century. Via dezeen magazine. 

This disappearing Church - one of the 14 winners of the "Building of the Year Awards" for 2012. See them all at  http://archdai.ly/boty-12

From ¨In wealthy Hong Kong, poorest live in metal cages¨

Hong Kong: Victoria Peak

This is an excerpt from the article written by Kelvin Chan. All pictures from AP:

HONG KONG—For many of the richest people in Hong Kong, one of Asia's wealthiest cities, home is a mansion with an expansive view from the heights of Victoria Peak. For some of the poorest, like Leung Cho-yin, home is a metal cage.

The 67-year-old former butcher pays 1,300 Hong Kong dollars ($167) a month for one of about a dozen wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment in a gritty, working-class West Kowloon neighborhood.

The cages, stacked on top of each other, measure 1.5 square meters (16 square feet). To keep bedbugs away, Leung and his roommates put thin pads, bamboo mats, even old linoleum on their cages' wooden planks instead of mattresses.

"I've been bitten so much I'm used to it," said Leung, rolling up the sleeve of his oversized blue fleece jacket to reveal a red mark on his hand. "There's nothing you can do about it. I've got to live here. I've got to survive," he said as he let out a phlegmy cough.

Some 100,000 people in the former British colony live in what's known as inadequate housing, according to the Society for Community Organization, a social welfare group. The category also includes apartments subdivided into tiny cubicles or filled with coffin-sized wood and metal sleeping compartments as well as rooftop shacks. They're a grim counterpoint to the southern Chinese city's renowned material affluence.

Forced by skyrocketing housing prices to live in cramped, dirty and unsafe conditions, their plight also highlights one of the biggest headaches facing Hong Kong's unpopular Beijing-backed leader: growing public rage over the city's housing crisis.

Leung Chun-ying took office as Hong Kong's chief executive in July pledging to provide more affordable housing in a bid to cool the anger. Home prices rose 23 percent in the first 10 months of 2012 and have doubled since bottoming out in 2008 during the global financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund said in a report last month. Rents have followed a similar trajectory.

The soaring costs are putting decent homes out of reach of a large portion of the population while stoking resentment of the government, which controls all land for development, and a coterie of wealthy property developers. Housing costs have been fuelled by easy credit thanks to ultralow interest rates that policymakers can't raise because the currency is pegged to the dollar. Money flooding in from mainland Chinese and foreign investors looking for higher returns has exacerbated the rise.

Read more:In wealthy Hong Kong, poorest live in metal cages 

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_22538602/hong-kong-poor-living-cages-and-cubicles

New York. By Andreas Feininger

Hudson river

Chelsea rooftops in the snow

Masses of tombs

Brooklyn bridge. 1940

Andreas Bernhard Lyonel Feininger (27 December 1906 - 18 February 1999) was an American photographer and a writer on photographic technique. He was noted for his dynamic black-and-white scenes of Manhattan and for studies of the structures of natural objects. Feininger was born in Paris, France, to Julia Berg and Lyonel Feininger, an American of German origin. A painter, his father was born in New York City, in 1871. His great-grandfather emigrated from Durlach, Baden, in Germany, to the United States in 1848. His younger brother was the painter, T. Lux Feininger (1910-2011), who had begun his professional career as a photographer.  Feininger grew up and was educated as an architect in Germany, where his father painted and taught, at Staatliches Bauhaus. In 1936, he gave up architecture and moved to Sweden, where he focused on photography. In advance of World War II, in 1939, Feininger immigrated to the U.S. where he established himself as a freelance photographer. In 1943 he joined the staff of Life magazine, an association that lasted until 1962. Feininger became famous for his photographs of New York. Other frequent subjects among his works were science and nature, as seen in bones, shells, plants, and minerals in the images of which he often stressed their structure. Rarely did he photograph people or make portraits, however, when he did, they became iconic. Feininger wrote comprehensive manuals about photography, of which the best known is The Complete Photographer. In the introduction to one of Feininger's books of photographs, Ralph Hattersley, the editor of the photography journal Infinity, described him as "one of the great architects who helped create photography as we know it today." In 1966, the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) awarded Feininger its highest distinction, the Robert Leavitt Award. In 1991, the International Center of Photography awarded Feininger the Infinity Lifetime Achievement Award. Today, Feininger's photographs are in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Feininger

The medieval Hereford mapa mundi

Two details from the Hereford Mapa Mundi. Screen shots from my computer

The SXIV medieval Hereford,  is the largest intact mapa mundi that is not comprehensible as a modern map, because it is the representation of the Medieval view of the world, with its architecture, history, monsters, animals. It pictures the human knowledge in only one piece of art.

Though the unconventional orientation has been to east, when it is turned around, some geographies are recognizable, like Italy, the Northern of Africa, Greece.

The Victorians considered this map a monstrosity, because it has an ancient characteristic called ¨augmentation:¨  the horror vacui of the first cartographers made them fill the ¨map¨ with all kind of figures -from the real or mythological world-, even with non existing rivers, mountains.
Watch this video to learn more about the Hereford map:

As a bonus:

A Babylonian world map, known as the Imago Mundi, is commonly dated to the 6th century BCE. The map as reconstructed by Eckhard Unger shows Babylon on the Euphrates, surrounded by a circular landmass showing Assyria, Urartu and several cities, in turn surrounded by a "bitter river" (Oceanus), with seven islands arranged around it so as to form a seven-pointed star. The accompanying text mentions seven outer regions beyond the encircling ocean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps

Detroit through Dave Jordano's pictures

I've never been in Detroit, but at least have seen lots of photographs on line. The most captivating for me are those of abandoned houses.

I'm sharing these selections of pictures by photographer Dave Jordano, a former Detroit citizen. The following is an excerpt from wired.com

In the past 40 years, the number of people living in the city of Detroit has halved. This has led many to write it off — in many ways, wrongly — as a decrepit ghost town. Unbroken Down is a photo project that counters the images of abandoned buildings with personal, vibrant shots of everyday life in Detroit.

Photographer Dave Jordano – fresh out of college after being born and raised in the Motor City – was part of the exodus when he headed for Chicago to start a commercial photography studio in the late ’70s. Jordano’s father worked for General Motors and joked that motor oil ran in the family’s veins. Three years ago, Jordano returned to Detroit and began photographing the neighborhoods, people, vistas and communities of his hometown. His resulting body of work is an endearing and sprawling document of a city close to his heart.

“This is the most emotional work I’ve made,” he says. “I don’t get tired and I just keep wanting to go back. I find more and more material every time I go.”

Unbroken Down is also an attempt to set the photographic record straight. Jordano believes that Detroit is more than a tale of decline and images of the associated urban decay. Yet, a lot of celebrated photography projects made in Detroit recently have focused on ruination as if the apocalypse passed through and kept going.

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/01/detroit-dave-jordano/?cid=5559794&pid=5173

The ¨intelligent¨ sidewalks in Rio de Janeiro

Ipanema sidewalk. From greengopost.com

Rio de Janeiro sidewalk. From wikipedia.org

Sidewalk in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. 

From http://www.flickr.com/photos/artjonak/7510519826/

When I was a student in highschool, a friend of us went to Rio de Janeiro. He was a young man, and there was too much in Rio to enjoy. When he came back, the first description of the city he made me and my girl friends, was about the design of the sidewalks. Being our sidewalks in Buenos Aires so boring, with these mosaics we call ¨vainillas¨ he was absolutely impressed by the wavy pattern.

A few years after, I had my own opportunity to personally walk Rio´s sidewalks, by the sea, with the  buildings and the morros on the other side, that´s a great experience. 

Today I´ve read that:

¨The city began installing a series of QR code patterns onto its pavements on Friday 25 January in preparation for the 2016 Olympics, starting at Arpoador by Ipanema Beach. Keeping in line with the traditional black and white mosaic tiles that already line the streets in this area, the QR codes can be easily activated using a free app for smart phones called ‘QR Reader’.

In scanning the pavement QR code, the user will be diverted to a tourist information website which lists details about area where they are standing, including a Google Map so they can find their way about.

The first of this series of QR code mosaics is located in Arpoador and its associated website provides information such as: “The place was named Arpoador because in the past, whale harpooning was common in that region. The whales used to migrate from the south in search of warmer waters. At that time, it was necessary practice because whale oil was widely used in construction to produce mortar.”

Other tit-bits of information include the length of the beach (500m), details of night-time sport activities and where to stand to get the best views of the Ipanema and Leblon Beaches. Warnings of strong waves in the area are both a warning to weaker swimmers and an invitation to seasoned surfers.¨

FROM:

http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=21802

I´d never have imagined an interactive, intelligent design as this in my years of a student in architecture. Even more, there´s a Dutch firm that will ¨build¨ the first house ¨printed¨ with a huge 3D printer.

I´m astonished, maybe I´m getting old.

QR code mosaic in Rio de Janeiro. From http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com

Great design of maps and land cross sections

Felipe Correa/Somatic Collaborative, The Section as a Tool: A Regional Framework for Alexander von Humboldt’s Avenue of the Volcanoes, 2004.

I am sharing these great maps, land cross sections, cartography designs in general, from the post by landscape professor in Harvard, Jill Desimini: Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary- It´s only my selection, click below to see the gallery in full:

http://places.designobserver.com/slideshow/cartographic-grounds-exhibition/37632/2574/1#slide

Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldt’s Distribution of Plants in Equinoctial America: According to Elevation above the Level of the Sea, 1854.[Courtesy of Harvard Map Collection] 

George F. Becker, Comstock Mine Maps—Numbers IV and V, 1882 [© 2000 Cartography Associates]

STUDIO 09, Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò, Le Grand Paris, The After Kyoto Metropolis, 2009

Matthew Paris, Map of the British Isles, 1250. [© British Library Board]

Alison and Peter Smithson, Cambridge Walks, 1976. [Alison and Peter Smithson Archive, Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University]

Yamashiro no Kuni ezu, 1800. [Courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division]

Zoom of the Yamashiro no Kuni ezu, 1800 (map above)

Eduard Imhof, Karte der Gegend um den Walensee, 1938. .[Courtesy of Alpines Museum der Schweiz, Bern] 

Zaha Hadid, The Peak Leisure Club, Hong Kong, 1982–1983.

Bridge over the Han River: screen shots from The Host movie

A forest of columns.

Up till now, I´ve seen three movies by Korean director Bong Joon Ho, and in my list of preferred  directors, he is after Peter Greenaway, whom I´ve always had on top. I love the way he shows in dark comedies the life and social issues of workers and poor people in Korea. 

The first movie is Mother, it was absolutely great, it broke my heart. Second one, Barking dogs never bite, which I highly recommend if you´d like to see how´s the life in Korean tenement halls, those multistory anonymous buildings. 

And the third one, The Host, which monster reminded me of Godzilla. The plot is really interesting and the scenes in the bridge over the Han River and the sewers, beautiful.

I´ve selected some screen shots from my computer, enjoy!

Here, a man´s suicide. See him falling down the bridge, with the city behind.

The beauty of the structural iron knotts

The beauty of the iron structure is captured from below and above

A succession of concrete arches shown in different points of view while the young lady is running.

As a bonus, let us see two more pictures of the Paik Nam June Media Bridge by Planning Korea:

¨Korean creative director Byung Ju Lee of Planning Korea announced a new paradigm in bridge called ‘Paik Nam June Media Bridge’ in Seoul, Korea. Connecting Dangi-li Power Plant (which has a plan to be redeveloped into public cultural space) in the north and The National Assembly Building in the south, this bridge shows the first example of ‘a city expanded to the river’.

Pictures and text from:

http://www.dezeen.com/2010/10/27/paik-nam-june-media-bridge-by-planning-korea/