Traveling the United States is generally a terrifyingly dull affair, punctuated by rest-stops and atrociously cookie-cutter architecture. My trips to Europe, while not always as idyllic as those promulgated by the locales is often at least architecturally more diverse and interesting than anywhere in the US. Take the building to the right for example.
It’s a lovely example of modern architectural. Lovely expanses of curtain wall glass, and a lightness on the landscape. Now, what do you think it is? A new Volkswagen factory? Nein. Headquarters of a global telecommunications powerhouse perhaps? Otan osaa!
It is, in all seriousness, a prison complex in Austria (more pictures). Dieses ist nicht ein Witz. While some might argue about the suitability of this design, it certainly also encapsulates the different approach of the US and Austria to dealing with criminals and the focus, or lack there of, on re-education and returning people to society in a useful form.
Just something to think on.
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In Guangzhou, China, there is a building going up, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP that has as its goal to be as green as possible. In fact, it attempts to use zero power from the city. This is amazingly impressive, and while I suspect some of the gains might be illusory, I suspect that they are very near the goal. I wonder if the HVAC system is designed for the painfully frigid temperatures that we often keep our offices in this country.
What is important is that it illuminates the way in which architecture can also help solve the looming energy crisis. By designing buildings that more naturally integrate with their environment, we also reduce the amount of energy and resources expended simply trying to maintain stasis in the building. In combination with new energy resources, and additional efforts to simply reduce consumption in products and behaviors, I think buildings like this also illuminate the ways we often forget about.
[via Metropolis]
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I’ve been a huge fan of modular, pre-fab housing for years, and recently Dwell Magazine has started discussing more and more of it. In the future, I think that pre-fab offers a couple of opportunities that we don’t have with the centuries-old stick construction technique that dominates in the current climate. Now, there is some focus on pre-fab for the most expensive parts of a house: kitchen and bath.
First, pre-fab offers the ability for substantially higher quality materials at a lower cost. For example, by assembling pieces of a house in a controlled atmosphere (i.e. a factory v. rainy outdoors), you can control the bonding of various elements. In addition, by using larger tools and jigs to cut and form things, you can make sure that the things are repeatable.
Second, by manufacturing in larger volume at once, you can make sure that things are “right” the first time. Most problems I’ve seen in construction stem from the ad-hoc nature of construction. Even when it’s two identical floor-plans, the walls are in slightly (sometimes as much as 6-8”) different locations.
People need to stop thinking of pre-fab as a “mobile home,” because it’s not. Take a look at what Deck House has been doing for decades. Their houses are better made and more desirable than any stick-built home around.
[via Steve Dekorte]
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The Friends Of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures take a look at the Los Angeles River, and it’s a beautiful site to review. Lots of interesting things, and strange infrastructure that people never think about.
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Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called “monolithic insanity.”
Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.
More in an article at Fortune. For me, it is not the nature of the cubicle, but the mindset it seems to inspire. There are systems and strategies to solve the regularity—and a systematic approach to furniture isn’t bad—but people often fall into the grid-driven grey-box uniformity that is so soul-crushing.
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I just received a mailing from Blu Dot, who made some of my bedroom furniture about a new project by their founder, called FLaTPaK House, a pre-manufactured modular modern housing system. It looks very interesting, although the price is not going to be the big draw. Mostly, I’m interested because it represents a relatively standardized modernity, and something less scary than approaching a blank sheet of paper with few ideas but that you want something different. The flexibility of the modular approach means that there’s no reason any two will ever look the same, and the reality is that houses have always been modular in design, just not in construction.
This join’s The Dwell Home as a new sense of modular modern pre-fabrication. Not quite as beautiful as the Dwell home, but we’ll see how pricing changes between the two approaches taken by the different organizations.
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