Number of years the site stood vacant: 12
Interior design: John Pawson
Why you should know him: Recently he’s done stage design for major ballets and operas as well as a temporary exhibition in the Geometric Staircase of St. Paul’s Cathedral. See all his work.
Number of floors: 5
Square-meters: 10,000 (about 33 square-feet)
Height of peaked roof: 16 meters (about 55 feet)
Estimated annual visitors: 500,000 (double the previous amount)
Estimated cost: £80 million (about $126 million)

“It’s a true icon and example of post war modernism,” Pawson said. ”The challenge was working inside the skin of an existing building. For me it’s about retuning the existing architecture so it still feels fresh. The palette we’ll use is quite quiet and simple…and will retain and enhance the extraordinary special qualities of the building.”

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Granted, this is no ordinary road. The Timmelsjoch Pass cuts through the Alps along the Austrian/Italian border. Rising to 10,000 feet, building anything up there is a feat; Can you imagine trucking construction materials back and forth along those sharp switchbacks? As you might imagine, this isn’t a museum with rotating exhibitions. Its sole purpose is to pay homage to the pass itself. There’s a model of the pass in a single glass display case planted in the center of the one-room museum. There’s also some information behind the faceted glass walls, designed to echo the structure of the one of several icy caves nearby.

Tscholl was a natural pick for this project given his origins as well as his propensity for designing buildings that often jut out precariously over steep edges. Many of his projects are situated in remote locations, which means he’s used probably used to low turnouts sat his unveilings. This is a good thing because I’ve got a feeling The Timmelsjoch Experience Pass Museum is going to hit a new low on the list of annual visitors.

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Photographs by Alexa Rainer and Werner Tscholl

All three chargers (for home, travel and car) shut off automatically when your phone is fully charged, putting an end to phantom energy as well as ‘top-off stress’ on your phone’s battery (yes, even your phone gets stressed out). While it’s not the “most eco-friendly and efficient way to charge mobile devices,” as their site claims – my mom has them beat with her solar powered charger hub – it’s definitely better than the current energy sucking system, and at $22-$29, it’s affordable, too.

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The goal of making popular books available on the ground floor alongside a cafe is to encourage passersby to pop in, have a coffee and check out a new book – something people might be less likely to do if they knew they had to hike up to the top floor to browse through new releases. Or you could stay all day, “…learning in the morning, listening to a poetry performance at lunchtime, studying in the afternoon, watching first class theatre at night, and then relaxing in the cafe after that,” says Councilor Veronica Ward.

The inverted pyramid shape isn’t just a lark; Rather, it’s an incredibly creative way of meeting a design challenge. Based on their client’s needs, CZWG knew they would need to build a larger space than the site allowed for. They also couldn’t just build straight up because it would cut off the interaction between user groups on a given floor and it would have required the library to staff those additional stories – so they designed outward. Instead of going higher, they went wider and the result is a library that’s both stunning and completely unique. Piers Gough, a partner at CZWG, calls it “a futuristic Pandora’s box of possibilities.”

CZWG is producing some of the most exciting new work in architecture right now. I profiled their other recent project, a cancer treatment center in Nottingham, but readers might be more familiar with some of their higher profile work with the Smithsonian and in New York City.

As a side note, if you think this library is a stunner, check out the “20 More Beautiful College Libraries From Around the World.” Books never had it so good.





Photos by Tim Crocker

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[ frank gehry ]
Frank Gehry grew up in Canada. In his free time as a child, he would make small versions of buildings out of pieces of wood. In 1947 his family moved to the United States. That is where Frank Gehry began his university studies in architecture. He believes that architecture is art. He has said that, in some ways, he has been more influenced by artists and sculptors than by architects. This may be why his buildings often look like energetic sculptures made from bold geometric forms.

Gehry’s body of work favors the style of Deconstructivism, which is often referred to as post-structuralist for its ability to go beyond the modalities of structural definition. Its architectural application tends to depart from modernism in its absence of cultural givens such as societal goals and functional necessity. Deconstructivist structures are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas, such as speed or universality of form, nor a belief that form follows function per early modernist structures. Gehry’s own Santa Monica residence, which he applied his conceptual studies into a reality, is a commonly cited example of deconstructivist architecture, as it was so drastically divorced from its original context, it cloaks its original spatial intention.

Gehry’s style sometimes feels unfinished using inexpensive found objects and non-traditional media such as clay and has been called “the apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding”.

There are critics. Art historian Hal Foster reads Gehry’s architecture as, primarily, in the service of corporate branding. Other complains include complaints that the buildings waste structural resources by creating functionless forms, do not seem to belong in their surroundings and are apparently designed without accounting for the local climate.

Famous examples of Frank Gehry’s work include the “Dancing House” in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. This playful building, finished in 1996, looks like two dancers. His most famous building is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It was completed in 1997. Most of the curving building is covered in titanium. It looks like a dancing metal wave sitting on the edge of a river. The curved surfaces of this building and others by Frank Gehry are so complex to build that they require computer programs.
 
Frank Gehry’s buildings are so popular that some people say they create a “Gehry effect.” This term is used for a building that attracts visitors because of the architect who designed it.

To Gehry’s credit he has an ability to conceive and execute his surreal sculptural architecture. As there are critics of flying to the moon or jupiter, Gehry’s architecture is akin to space exploration. His work does inspire and someone will figure out how to apply concepts that will be less costly and more sustainable to build. [ gehry partners ]

[ project credits ]
Project Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Las Vegas 
Client Keep Memory Alive 
Architect Gehry Partners, Los Angeles—Frank Gehry, FAIA (design partner); Terry Bell (project partner); Brian Zamora (project designer); Kristin Ragins, Ronald A. Rosell, David Rodriguez, Michael Sedlacek (project architects); Andrew Galambos, Eun Sung Chang, AIA, Izaburo Kibayashi, Michael O’Boyle, Mok Wai Wan, Natalie Magarian, Natalie Milberg, Nora Wolin, Sameer Kashyap, Sarah David, Yvon Romeus (project team) 
Structural Engineer WSP Cantor Seinuk 
M/E/P/FP, Security, Telecommunications Engineer Cosentini Associates 
Lighting Design L’Observatoire International 
Acoustical Engineers McKay Conant Hoover; Nagata Acoustics 
Building Transportation Edgett Williams Consulting Group 
Life-Safety Engineers Aon Fire Protection Engineering Corp. 
Climate Engineer Transsolar 
Door Hardware Finish Hardware Technology 
Landscape Architect Deneen Powell Atelier 
Civil Engineer G.C. Wallace 
Building Maintenance Lerch Bates 
A/V Engineer Spurgeon Design and Development 
General Contractor Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. 
Size 85,180 square feet (site area), 60,000 (total building area)

Designed and built by LEAPfactory, “an Italian firm specializing in modular structures with low environmental impact,” the Alpine Pod uses nautical and aeronautical fabrication techniques to create a self-sufficient structure capable of withstanding extreme weather, like 124 mph winds and 26 feet of snow.

Nothing like this has ever been attempted before, and as such it looks nothing like typical alpine structures. Luca Olivari, the project’s structural engineer, used glass-fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP), which he said is “an ideal material for extreme conditions because the fiber’s weight and orientation can be precisely defined in every area of the structure to support high-concentrated loads.”

As for the pod’s features, it’s 250 square-feet and has a kitchen as well as dining and living areas, twelve bunks, storage for gear and a weather monitoring station. Photovoltaic panels produce 2.5 Kwh of solar energy; It weighs almost 3 tons and cost about $327,000 to construct. And because it’s based on a modular structure, with “individual modules designed for specific functions like eating or sleeping,” the pod itself can actually be rearranged and expanded, should demand require it.

It’s an amazing feat of specialized building under extreme conditions. I’m anxious to follow this project to see how the pod functions after months of wear. But even if the cute sweater design gets rubbed out by wind and sleet, it’s still an oasis in a frozen, forbidding landscape for adventurers heading into the alps on foot.

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It doesn’t surprise me, however, coming from William O’Brien Jr., a young assistant architecture professor at MIT and principal of an independent design practice in Cambridge, MA that was recently awarded the 2011 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers and was a finalist for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program.

The house in question is a lust-worthy little gem, a sleek-meets-rustic getaway home I would most happily leave the city for. The spacious interior (created by positioning “the interior surface of the ceiling/wall to deviate from the roof surface as it nears the floor plane to become plumb”) allows for plenty of natural light, open space as well as cozy nooks in which to curl up with a glass of wine and all those aforementioned rare books. I can’t think of a more enviable mountain retreat.



photos by william o’brien jr.

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Above photo taken prior to development. Much of the naturalized plantings are inspired by the self-seeded landscape that grew on the disused tracks.





Pebble-dash concrete walkways unify the trail, which swells and constricts, swinging from side to side, and divides into concrete tines that meld the hardscape with the planting embedded in railroad gravel mulch.






The project was designed by [ James Corner Field Operations ] and [ Diller Scofidio + Renfro ] and construction on phase 1 of the park cost around $172 million public dollars to build. This investment into the community has resulted in more than 30 different projects being proposed or constructed.
[ the highline ] [ the highline wiki ]

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christopher deam “glassic flat”


christopher deam “glassic flat”


First, “you need to create a visually attractive package,” says Allan Wallis, author of Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes. “I would ask the designers of the iPod: Could you do that for a mobile home?” And designers are heeding his call. There’s Michael Hughes of TrailerWrap and Christopher C. Deam‘s 400-square-foot “Glassic Flat” that goes for $65,000. It’s small, sure, but its modular design is a great jumping-off point for other architects.

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about perrin drumm

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