Design proposal for a new retail showroom and warehouse in Pristina by Molos Group, a creative agency based in the Republic of Kosovo.
19th century designs for the construction of a pharaonic mausoleum upon Primrose Hill, in North London, proposed by Thomas Willson of the Pyramid General Cemetery Company; image from the book Necropolis: London and Its Dead, by Catharine Arnold. As the author describes:
Constructed from brick, with granite facing, the plans comprised a chapel, office, quarters for the Keeper, Clerk, Sexton and Superintendent, four entrances and a central ventilation shaft. A series of sloping paths would allow bodies to be moved. Each catacomb took up to twenty-four coffins and could be sealed up after all interments had been completed. Resembling a beehive, it would be a thing of awe and wonder to all who saw it(…) At an estimated cost of £2,500, this massive mausoleum, higher than St. Paul’s, would contain five million Londoners.
Design proposal for the renovation of an existing building in Los Angeles, CA, by architects Dwayne Oyler and Jenny WU of Oyler Wu Collabotative.
The design involves a perforated metal mantle, set off the building just beyond the face of the existing windows, to create a flowing effect and mark the main entrance and restaurant area.
An inflatable event space, designed as ephemeral expansion for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, by New York design firm DS+R, aka architects Eliabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro.via eVolo
Design proposal for the renovation of a two-story tie shop in Tokyo, by Japanese architect Shuichiro Yoshida. The concept is based on a staggered arch system to create separate areas inside the shop and lead client; basic materials: black plaster mixed with carbon.
Design / renderings cortesy of Shuichiro Yoshida
via architizer
previously: Tube hair salon in Athens
Quarantine, SCI-Arc Undergraduate Thesis 2011 by Robert Gilson
Project description: Human ambition has surpassed the carrying capacity of the Earth. Quarantena facilitates the divorce of man from nature by exploiting the technological gap that divides the human from the natural. Q is a system for the isolation of environmental deviance. Q is a detainment network housing 1500+ detainees that cohabitate in 300 pods. Q floats within the uncertain atmosphere and above a mechanized earth..
Stunning illustrations of the Vøringsfossen Waterfall rest area proposal by Carl -Viggo Hølmebakk architects, Norway, 2008.
Continue reading “Vøringsfossen Waterfall Area / Carl -Viggo Hølmebakk”
A critical proposal on the Acropolis Museum in Athens competitions, completed in 1991 by Greek architect and professor Christos Papoulias (pdf link).
The architect suggests a museum entirely below the ground surface, build in a now invisible 17m high gap between two walls of the rocks’ phases, the Mycenaean and the Classical when the Acropolis’ rock was significantly expanded to it’s current retaining wall.
Uncovered by early 20th century excavations between the two walls, this gap today is visible only through a series of shafts left by the archaeologists (scroll for photos). These shafts and the now buried gap between the two retaining walls of the acropolis became the site for Christos Papoulias’ Erichthonean Museum of Acropolis proposal.
The museum would inhabit the south and south east part of the Acropolis plateau and could be visible only through it’s entrance. One of the existing caves would offer an exit down to the south side of the acropolis hill, leading the visitor to the fascinating but mostly overlooked theater of Dionysus and other important archaeological sites like the Odeion of Perikles, the choregic monuments, the Asklepieion, the stoa of Eumenes and the Odeion of Herodes Atticus.
The walls of Erichthonean museum would be the originally visible base 17m high base of the Parthenon and the floor a series of carefully placed platforms, would mimic the roughly poured concrete that the archaeologists have long used to make the slippery rock accesible to visitors.
The original drawings from The Erichthonean Museum belong now to the collection of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Christos Papoulias on his project: I called this project the Erichthonean Museum of Acropolis as a way of separating myself from what I considered mistaken museological ideas in the official competition program from the new museum. I worked with a new museological idea which took into consideration the city, the archaeological site and the topological characteristics.
photos of the shafts from the early 20th century excavations and the 17m high base of the Parthenon.
Electronic Urbanism, an avant-garde speculative project on town planning and electronics, by Takis Zenetos (1926-1977), the brilliant architect who designed some of the most beautiful buildings in Greece during the 60′s and early 70′s.
The basic idea of Electronic Urbanism, which Zenetos designed, developed and investigated from 1952 to 1974, is the creation of a system with diverse levels and locations for different urban functions, primarily residential, suspended from natural environments (as cantilevers or mountains) and integrated with all communications technologies, that allow wide-ranging connections among people and social groups.
He invented his overhanging cities as mega-constructions in tension that gradually would cover the Earth’s surface, though without stirring it up. The only interference with the ground is the nodal connections in combination with the foundations of the pylons.
The environment. Urban structure coexists with nature. Variation with pneumatic modules (at stage of formation)
Partial plan of a typical sector in the suspended city. The horizontal sections are taken at several typical levels
Zenetos proposes a society where working engines free the humans from boring rituals. To explain this, he wrote,“This free time that will result will give a new dimension to relations between cohabiting individuals, which will be heard by the quiet contemplation of the essence of things…” (source)
A 3D model from Electronic Urbanism project, by Y. Orfanos and D. Papadopoulos in 2003.
“Takis Zenetos was a genuine idealist, contemplating the vision of a new future enlightenment, a period of ultimate universal egalitarianism and progress for the people. In his time, he was understood by very few, while for the majority he was associated with the blurred elusiveness of a myth. Nowadays with this work we are able to conceive him for what he really represents: a prophet not only of his time but also of the century after him.”
Andreas Yakoumatos, Digital visions and Architecture,
Authors: Eleni Kalafati, Dimitris Papalexopoulos, Edilstampa, Athens 2006. (source)
Greek /english link on Takis Zenetos work here
Takis Zenetos’ profile @ Τriangle Μodernist Ηouses there
More @ Angelos Floros issuu docs:
A proposal to turn the abandoned Battersea Power Station in South West London into a museum and amusement park, from the French Atelier Zündel Cristea (AZN), winners of the ArchTriumph competition Museum of Architecture, 2013.
The 80-year old decommissioned building is located on the south banks of the river Thames surrounded by a mix of residential, industrial, office typologies and a nearby train station and park.
Built between 1930 and 1955, the victorian style design is an excellent example of original art deco interiors, constructed with steel frames and brick cladding and four concrete smoke stacks towering 103 meters above the ground; the coal-based electrical energy producing factory will be converted
into a venue for the exhibition of architecture from the middle ages to the contemporary age.
AZN on project’s concept : Our created pathway links together a number of spaces for discovery: the square in front of the museum, clearings, footpaths outside and above and inside, footpaths traversing courtyards and exhibition rooms. The angles and perspectives created by the rail’s pathway, through the movement within and outside of the structure, place visitors in a position where they can perceive simultaneously the container and its contents, the work and nature.
via the fox is black + designboom
Previously: A trampoline Paris Bridge by Atelier Zündel Cristea
Rethink Athens is a European Architectural Competition organized and funded by the Onassis Foundation promoting the revitalization of the Athenian center. Undoubtedly, this is the most ambitious effort, among a series of architectural competitions on public spaces or buildings, to shape downtown Athens and stimulate growth towards resiliency – to use the socially friendly mirror term of sustainable development.
The competition was set against the background of a crisis that during the past years has magnified urban and social ills – not to mention nationalist spirit, and this is probably the reason that the results have generated an unprecedented political paraphernalia on the Athenian urbanism.
While waiting the much promised debate on the objectives and development of the project, worths considering other proposals that have contributed in their way, yet barely discussed.
The second prize was awarded to a group of young architects (Kiki Ilousi, Oihana Iturritxa Kerexeta, Dimitris Gourdoukis, Theodora Christoforidou, Katerina Tryfonidou, Fotis Vasilakis) whose proposal, much alike the winning one, figured a network of open and green spaces around the central intervention axis, integrated in the Athenian ecosystem.
The utopian proposal award went to Kostas Tsiambaos and Myrto Kiourti who suggested a different land ownership structure stating that “the catalyst towards a new city center will be its active and responsible citizens and not its superficially redesigned image”.
The winning proposal “One Step Beyond” was submitted by OKRA, in collaboration with Mixst urbanism and Wageningen University. In the forthcoming months, OKRA will develop a plan scheduled for implementation in 2015, under the auspices of the Onassis Foundation and via European Funding. Provided that such an option is still on the table…
[previously published at funnelme]
