Tag: architecture

Neuendorf House

Claudio Silverstrin and John Pawson, Neuendorf House, Courtyard Enclosure, Mallorca, Balearic Islands

The Neuendorf House in Mallorca was designed by John Pawson in partnership with Claudio Silvestrin. Entry to the house involves a theatrical descent between narrow walls past a basin set in a full-height groove. The approach presents, with its acoustics, a calibrated experience of enclosure and compression against the vast landscape that is the house’s context.

The courtyard’s composition si emphatically vertical. The exaggerated height of the walls is dramatised by the narrow slot whose edges emphasizes the wall’s thickness. A modest contrasting horizontal form is added by a bench set very low to the ground. The contrast between the landscape outside and the courtyard space is underlined by the view of the sky above and the landscape seen through the wall’s gap.

Source: just-good-design.com

Odile Decq

Odile Decq, Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark Museum, Nanjing, China

The Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark, near the city of Nanjing, is a geological and paleo-archaeological museum. This geological museum can be found in the beautiful valley between Tangshan and Fangshan, two volcanic mountains. Not only does the museum reveal a 700-million-year slice of earth’s geological history, but the discovery of ancient hominid remains in a cave here in the 1950s sparked worldwide speculation about the early origins of mankind.

The architect of the project was Odile Decq, the founder of Studio Odile Decq. She is an award-winning French architect, urban planner and academic. She graduated in 1978 from Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris- La Villette with a diploma in Urban Planning. Okile Decq was awarded the Golden Lion of Architecture during the Venice Biennale in 1996.

Since 1992, Odile Decq has been a professor at the Ecole Soeciale d’Architecture in Paris where she was elected head of the Department of Architecture in 2007. She left in 2012, opeining her own school, the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture, in Lyon, France. The Institute, cofounded with architect Matteo Cainer, opened in 2014.

Gol Stavkirke

Gol Stavkirke, Oslo, Norway, 1212 AD

Gol Stave Church (Gol Stavkirke) is a stave church originally from Gol, Hallingdal, Norway. It is now located in the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History at Bygdøy in Oslo, Norway. When the city built a new church around 1880, it was decided to demolish the old stave church. It was saved from destruction by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments, which bought the materials in order to re-erect the church elsewhere.

It was acquired by King Oscar II, who financed its relocation and restoration as the central building of his private open-air museum near Oslo. The restoration, overseen by architect Waldemar Hansteen, was completed in 1885. In 1907 this early open air museum, the world’s first, was merged with the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, which now manages the stave church, still nominally the property of the reigning monarch. The church was dated to 1212 by the characteristic patterns of the annual growth rings in the timber construction.

A modern replica of the Gol Stave Church is in the mediaval park Gordarike. The copy was built in the 1980s and consecrated by the bishop of Tunsberg in 1994. In the summer evening on Wednesdays there is a devotional and sometimes musical performance. The church is often used for weddings. The woodwork inside the church is adorned with beautiful carvings and details.

Source: dariaendresen

Ricardo Bofill

Ricardo Bofill, Bofill Arquitectura, “Walden 7″, Barcelona, Spain

Walden 7, built in 1974, represents the successful implementation of an old ambition of architect Ricardo Bofill and it has a special significance within the development of his work. Working to a budget appreciably lower than the norm for subsidized housing at the time, and with some unusual funding, Walden-7 rose up as a monument and point of reference in this area to the west of Barcelona.

Walden 7 consists of a fourteen-storey cluster of 446 apartments, grouped around five courtyards, on top of which are two swimming pools. With few exceptions, each apartment faces both the outside of the block and into one of the courtyards, There is a complex system of bridges and balconies for access producing a fantastic variety of vistas and enclosures.

The exterior facade has the appearance of a huge fortification completely painted in red, which is opened to the interior spaces through large overtures like urban windows with a height of several stories. The courtyards have a lively treatment because of the intense blue and yellow colored facade. The main courtyard, at the building’s entrance, is a recovery of the street and the plaza for the benefit of the inhabitants, which generates an interior world apart from the exterior chaos.

The dwellings, a combination of square 30 square meter modules, come in different sizes, ranging from the single-module studio to the four-module apartment, either on one floor or as a duplex. The ground floor consists of public spaces, meeting rooms, games rooms, bars and shops.

Well of Chand Baori

Photographer Unknown, Well of Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India

The Well of Chand Baori is situated in the village of Abhaneri in the state of Rajasthan, India.. There are 3500 narrow steps extending for a height of thirteen stories. It extends approximately one hundred feet into the ground making it one of the deepest and largest stepwells in India. It was built by King Chanda of the Nikumbh dynasty between 800-900 CE and was dedicate to Hashat Mata, Goddess of Joy and Happiness upon completion.

The well was designed to conserve as much water as possible in the extremely dry area of Rajasthan. At the bottom of the well, the air remains about 6 degrees cooler than the temperature at ground level. it is used as a gathering place for locals during intense heat of the day. The site has been used as a filming location for the movies “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”.

Do Ho Suh

Fabric Installations by Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh’s immersive architectural installations—unexpectedly crafted with ethereal fabric—are spaces that are at once deeply familiar and profoundly alien. Suh is internationally renowned for his “fabric architecture” sculptures that explore the global nature of contemporary identity as well as memory, migration, and our ideas of home.

The large-scale installations of the artist’s brightly hued “Hub” sculptures—intricately detailed, hand-sewn fabric recreations of homes where Suh has lived from around the world. The Hubs comprise a series of conjoined rooms and passageways that visitors can enter and experience from the inside.

Suh was born in Korea and moved to the United States at the age of 29 in 1991, and he currently lives between New York, London, and Seoul. He crafts his works using traditional Korean sewing techniques combined with 3-D modeling and mapping technologies. Suh sees these works as “suitcase homes,” so lightweight and portable they can be installed almost anywhere.

Ludwig Favre

Ludwig Favre, Photographs of Grundtvig’s Church, Copenhagen, Denmark

Favre is a photographer that specializes in major city landscapes, and has a history of shooting interiors.

Copenhagen’s Grundtvig’s Church is a rare example of expressionist church architecture, and one of the most well-known churches in the Danish city. French photographer Ludwig Favre was attracted to the perpendicular lines that compose the early 20th-century structure, in addition to the nearly six million yellow bricks that fill its interior. Favre decided to shoot the building’s 1800-seat congregation, capturing the minimal ornamentation found in the famous church’s massive vaulted halls and nave.