Chiisai #2: On/Off

You're in your office.

It's 11 pm.

You're tired.

You just want to go home.

You know, relax, read some books, eat dinner, catch some Z's.

In the design that undergoes the literal take of "take-home office", you just have to...

Switch

Yuko Shibata Office

Like this office into...

...a spacious dining room!

Or this cute bookshelf...

...that you can push back...

...and work inside....

...this awesome library, which can be...

...closed, and turned into...

...THIS ever-comfortable bedroom.

This will be listed into the "Chiisai" series - the one I'll dedicate to Japanese minimalism and "kawaii" spaces XD

You know you can never take the Japanese lightly for their sense of space, but this I have to cheer on~

From the designer:

It was the owner’ s intent that the floor plan could be changed to completely separate the living and office sections.


This request was rendered impossible, due to the original structure being of box frame type reinforced concrete construction, with almost all walls acting as supporting building frames. The addition of two bookshelves, each with a large door, allowed us to create a space with the ability to adapt from home to office or from office to home, while leaving the original floor plan intact. 


The first bookshelf was added to the meeting room. By moving the large door, the meeting space can be divided in two. The space on the side of the bookshelf becomes a library. The large door also includes an opening in order to allow it to pass over the dining table. In this way, the table is shared between the library and meeting spaces.


The second addition was in the bed room.The opening in the bookshelf creates a passage making it possible to approach the shelf from the office, without passing through the bedroom. When the door is opened, it creates a partition between the the bedroom and study, and also has the effect of changing the space to a library.

Out for a slice

The Parlor Pizzeria

Pathangay Architects

Star Wars: Blueprints

Star Wars: The Blueprints

Lucasfilm Archives

Stack 'em high

This kiosk is made of 1000+ recycled New York Times newspaper and power coated aluminum. 

Aesop Grand Central Kiosk

Tacklebox

Masdar City

In the old movie The Fifth Element, we see a taxi with Bruce Willis flying through the futuristic city.

Well some people out there are already living with driverless transportations as guinea pigs (Big Brother style), so it might not be that surprising to have them flying in 50 years.

Check out the world's first zero-carbon city by the revolutionary Norman Foster.

Masdar City | Abu Dhabi

Foster + Partners

This looks like a 3D from a sci-fi movie. How cool can it be? XD

Aaaand that white thing in the back is the driverless car.

Yep. This one, too.

Deja vu? See my older post "The Souk".

Here >> "The Souk" - also by Foster.

I think one of my lecturers mentioned that he was involved in this project when he was in the UK.

......wait, is that why he told me to read it up?

w(￣_￣;w ￢o(￣-￣ﾒ) 

From an article by John Vidal in Guardian:

A dusty construction site on the edge of an Arabian desert is an unlikely place for a model of green living. But this is Masdar City, an $18bn (£11bn) Norman Foster-designed project where just a few hundred people are guinea pigs in the world's most advanced laboratory for hi-tech environmental technology.

Here, residents live with driverless electric cars, shaded streets cooled by a huge wind tower and a Big Brother-style "green policeman" monitoring their energy use.

Conceived in 2006, phase one of the city is now complete after three years' work and a spend of $1.4bn. The development, near Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, consists of six main buildings, one street, 101 small apartments, a large electronic library, and the Masdar Institute.

This offshoot campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has 167 students and 43 academics, most of whom are from other countries, the US, Europe, Asia and elsewhere in the Middle East. On campus there is a bank, a sushi bar, canteen, organic food shop and a concrete basement where 10 driverless vehicles whiz people along the 800 metres from the entrance of the city to the institute.

Here are some of Masdar City's other features. The 45-metre Teflon-coated wind tower shows citizens how much energy the community is using; argon gas insulates the rammed earth and steel walls; solar air-conditioning and desalination plants are being tested, as are thermal energy and "beam down" solar plants that use mirrors to concentrate the sun and heat water to generate electricity.

Phase two, due to be finished this year, will add 222 more apartments, and more streets and shops. An $800m HQ, which will house the new International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), should be finished by 2013. By 2015, Masdar City is expected to have 7,000 residents and 12,000 people commuting from Abu Dhabi.

"It felt like culture shock," Laura Stupin, a young American engineer and one of the first inhabitants of the city, wrote on her blog. "The buildings are beautiful here, and they look so different from anything I've ever seen, anywhere. I keep telling people that it feels like I'm living in a psychology experiment. Every time I flip a light switch in the living room and the faucet in the bathroom starts running, or I desperately push all the buttons on the stove to try to turn on a burner, I can't help looking over my shoulder and wondering if there's a scientist observing my behaviour and reactions in this strange environment."

That's because of the monitors, which analyse every human and mechanical action requiring electricity. Every machine the students use, every fridge door they open, or light they leave on, is recorded via an intelligent digital grid that senses and controls energy use and lets the power provider intervene. Showers turn off after a few minutes, sensors switch on fridges and lights. Temperature and water use can be centrally controlled.

"The city is a laboratory for the future," says Martyn Potter, director of operations at the institute and dubbed the "green policeman".

The Big Brother approach to cutting energy is likely to become the norm as computerised smart grids are rolled out in Europe and the US, he adds. "I want to know exactly how these buildings work. I can pinpoint who is using most energy and water, whether in an apartment or the academy. Certain students have been used to having the air conditioning on at 16C (61F), here it is 24C. Yes, they complain. But I have told them that's how it is."

Fred Moavenzadeh, head of the institute, and a Harvard professor, says: "The shock of having to conserve energy is part of the Masdar human experiment. We are living and experiencing what we are trying to … educate people about … We're using roughly half the energy of a normal building of this size. We are producing no carbon because it's all renewable. Our water consumption is less and our waste generation is relatively low."

The plan was to make Masdar the world's first zero-carbon city, but as the global "cleantech" market stalls in the recession, compromises are made. Foster planned to accommodate 50,000 residents and 40,000 commuters and the city was due be completed by 2016; now the final population will probably not exceed 40,000 and the completion date has been put at 2021 or 2025. The idea of a second Masdar City has been dropped; a $2.2bn hydrogen power project has been called off, as has a "thin film" solar manufacturing plant, intended for Abu Dhabi.

"The Masdar master plan is changing as the world economy changes," says Dale Rollins, a former Shell executive, now Masdar's chief operating officer. "It's unfair to say that what was decided in 2006 will hold for ever more. The objectives have not changed but we have re-worked the master plan. The technology and the market has moved on. We say we can do it better and we can do it in less expensive ways."

Foster's vision was for Masdar's streets to be pedestrian-only with pilotless vehicles running via magnets and fibre-optic cables. But this is now thought a white elephant. The rest of the city will be built on one floor, saving hundreds of millions of pounds. And people might move about in "golf buggy" taxis.

The master plan was to desalinate groundwater with solar energy, but for now water is piped in from one of Abu Dhabi's gas-fired, high-energy, desalination plants. The revised plan no longer counts on-site energy generation as the only source of power. The idea of coveringA scheme for covering all roofs with solar panels was found to be more costly than a centralised power plant. Meanwhile, the photovoltaic panels outside the city are proving less efficient than expected because of dust storms and haze, which can cut solar insolation by 30% – the panels must be cleaned by hand.

People living in the city say they quickly get used to the technology but not the setting. "It's quite a mind flip to be in such a strangely beautiful environment, then look out of a window and see flat dusty landscape stretching out to the horizon. It makes me feel like I'm living in a science fiction novel," wrote Stupin.

An Apple A Day

...keeps the doctors away.

Apple Campus 2

Foster + Partners

Borobudur

Happy Independence Day Indonesia.

I'm not much of a nationalist but today the whole country's putting up a salute to the mighty flag, so I might as well celebrate.

Here's something original from Indonesia, one of the world wonders.

What's not to wonder when you see this kind of humongous temple built with stacked stones and glued with egg whites, THEN survive for more than 1000 years?

Borobudur Temple

Magelang, Indonesia

From Unesco:

Borobudur is one of the greatest Buddhist monuments in the world. Founded by a king of the Saliendra dynasty, it was built to honour the glory of both the Buddha and its founder, a true king Bodhisattva. The name Borobudur is believed to have been derived from the Sanskrit words vihara Buddha uhr, meaning the Buddhist monastery on the hill. Borobudur temple is located in Muntilan, Magelang, and is about 42 km from Yogyakarta city.

This colossal temple was built between AD 750 and 842: 300 years before Cambodia's Angkor Wat, 400 years before work had begun on the great European cathedrals. Little is known about its early history except that a huge army of workers worked in the tropical heat to shift and carve the 60,000 m³ of stone. At the beginning of the 11th century AD, because of the political situation in Central Java, divine monuments in that area, including the Borobudur Temple became completely neglected and given over to decay. The Sanctuary was exposed to volcanic eruption and other ravages of nature. The temple was not rediscovered until the 19th century. A first restoration campaign, supervised by Theodor van Erp, was undertaken shortly after the turn of the century. A second one was led more recently (1973-82).

A harmonious marriage of stupas, temple-mountain and the ritual diagram, this temple complex was built on several levels around a hill which forms a natural centre. The first level above the base comprises five square terraces, graduated in size and forming the base of a pyramid. Above this level are three concentric circular platforms crowned by the main stupa. Stairways provide access to this monumental stupa. The base and the balustrades enclosing the square terraces are decorated in reliefs sculpted in the stone. They illustrate the different phases of the soul's progression towards redemption and episodes from the life of Buddha. The circular terraces are decorated with no fewer than 72 openwork stupas each containing a statue of Buddha.

Stylistically the art of Borobudur is a tributary of Indian influences (Gupta and post-Gupta styles). The walls of Borobudur are sculptured in bas-reliefs, extending over a total length of 6 km. It has been hailed as the largest and most complete ensemble of Buddhist reliefs in the world, unsurpassed in artistic merit, each scene an individual masterpiece. The narratives reliefs on the main walls read from the right to left, those on the balustrade from left to right. This was done for the purpose of the Pradaksina, the ritual circumambulation which the pilgrims make moving on the clockwise and keeping the sanctuary to the right.

The Karmawibangga reliefs on the hidden foot are devoted to the law of karma. The Lalitavistara series do not provide a complete biography of the Buddha, from the Hushita heaven and end his sermon in the Deer Park near the Benares. Jataka are stories about the Buddha before he was born as Prince Sidharta. Awadana are similar to Jataka, but the main figure is not the Boddhisatva, and the saintly deeds are attributed to other legendary persons.

The stories are compiled in the Dvijavadana (Glorious Heavenly Acts) and theAwadana Sataka (Hundred Awadanas). The first twenty panels in the lower series of the first gallery depict, the Sudhanakumaravadana. The series of reliefs covering the wall of the second gallery is devoted to Sudhana's tireless wanderings in search of the Highest Perfect Wisdom. The story is continued on the wall and balustrade of the third and fourth galleries. Its depiction in most of the 460 panels is based on the holy Nahayana text Gandavyuha, the concluding scenes being derived from another text, the Badracari.

Source: UNESCO/CLT/WHC

I Scream for Ice Cream

Dri Dri at St Martins Lane Hotel | London

Elips Design

Han Guk

Republic of Korea Pavilion | Shanghai Expo 2010

Mass Studies

Photo by Roland Halbe.

A design #4

Back to the ever-awesome "a design for a designer by a designer" series!
Been fascinated by Mulberry from the latest Tumblr posts - their campaign photos are seriously beautiful.

Mulberry Manchester Store

Universal Design Studio

Architecture and Graphic Design

Whoever says the two can't work together?

You gotta give 'em to the Japanese and Koreans.

BMW Guggenheim Lab | New York

Atelier Bow-Wow

From Dezeen:

Architecture and Graphic Design

The mobile structure for the first cycle of the BMW Guggenheim Lab has been designed by the Tokyo-based Atelier Bow-Wow as a lightweight and compact “traveling toolbox.” The 2,200-square-foot structure can easily fit into dense neighborhoods and be transported from city to city. In New York, the two-story structure is nestled between two buildings on a three-quarter-acre T-shaped site; at its southern end, it opens out onto an inviting landscaped public space and cafe.

The lower half of the BMW Guggenheim Lab structure is an open space that can be configured to meet the particular needs of the various programs, shifting from a formal lecture setting with a stage to the scene for a celebratory gathering or a workshop. The upper, “toolbox” portion of the structure is loosely wrapped in two layers of semitransparent mesh, which creates a shimmering moiré effect and allows visitors to catch glimpses of the extensive apparatus of “tools” that can be raised or lowered on a rigging system to configure the lower space for the different programs. Remarkably, the BMW Guggenheim Lab is the first building designed with a structural framework composed of carbon fiber. Videos and images of the structure and the construction process can be viewed at youtube.com/bmwguggenheimlab and flickr.com/bmwguggenheimlab.

“Rather than architects educating the public on how to behave within spaces, it is the public who should have the autonomy of spatial practice in their cities,” stated Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow. “We have always been advocates of people regaining ownership in order to shape the city around them, and are very pleased to participate in the launch of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. We always conceived the Lab as a public space without enclosure.”

The inaugural BMW Guggenheim Lab will leave behind permanent improvements to the once-vacant East Village lot on which it sits, including the stabilization and paving of the site, replacement of sidewalks, and new wrought-iron fencing and gates.

The graphic identity of the BMW Guggenheim Lab has been developed by Seoul-based graphic designers Sulki & Min.

Euro 2016

I'm a sucker for football.
The last World Cup broke my heart due to some of the unpredictable results, so I'll be waiting for the next event to cheer on.

Anyway, people and places are getting ready for Euro 2016, including Bordeaux with Herzog & de Meuron's new design. It's planned to be completed on 2015.

Stade Bordeaux

Herzog & de Meuron

Notes from the designer, from Dezeen:

Vision of a stadium

Our project for the new Bordeaux stadium is an expression of fundamentally new architecture. The pure shape of the volume, by contrast to its light and open structure, creates an at once monumental and graceful architectural piece elegantly suited to the grand landscape of Bordeaux.

Stadium architecture combines three constitutive elements: the bowl containing the game and its spectators, the concourse as the transitional element between the playing field and the outside surroundings and, finally, the overall appearance. Our approach is to reinterpret these three elements in light of the site-specific characteristics: the resulting architecture is thus one-of-a-kind, reflecting the intrinsic features of the site.

We aim to present an architectural object in which highest functional quality is combined with a unique identity. We are confident that allying these two criteria, functionality and strong identity, endows our project with an emotional dimension that the public can feel, and that is inextricably bound to the stadium’s traditional role of staging sports.

The bowl

Seating a maximum of some 43,000 persons, the bowl embraces the game area, its geometry affording optimal visibility for all, together with the maximum flexibility of capacity and usage.

The bowl consists in two superposed tiers divided into four sectors and protected from the elements by the roof. Consisting of a multitude of concentric strips, the ceiling’s homogeneous appearance guides the gaze to the playing field, while allowing sunlight to seep through thanks to the strips’ angle of slant. This open ceiling structure does not show through on the inside of the stadium, to avoid distracting the spectators’ attention.

Raising the bowl above ground level is a compact base integrating all the programmatic functions into a uniform and symmetrical volume. This plinth includes the VIP loges and salons evenly distributed east and west as well as media areas adjacent to the spaces dedicated to players.

The simplicity and pure lines of the architecture characterizing the bowl and its base guarantee a smooth flow of spectators and easy orientation.

The overall appearance

The bowl resting on its base is covered by an elegant roof which has an unusual rectangular shape. The choice of this pure and almost abstract form is the clearest and most efficient response to the site’s natural conditions, and to the main flow of spectators east-west.

This white rectangle seems projected earthwards thanks to the multiplicity of slender columns that shower down. A ribbon of food stalls and restrooms undulates through this forest of columns, brought alive by the movement of the crowd.

At once dense and light, this structure creates an evanescent rectangular volume from which emerges the sculpted and organic outline of the bowl.

In its specificity, this architectural concept confers a strong and unparalleled identity to the new Bordeaux stadium. Well anchored to its site, this elegant and diaphanous volume looks out onto the grand landscape its transparency revealing all the energy and activities which will fill this new symbol of the city of Bordeaux’s dynamism.

Herzog & de Meuron, 2011

Landscaping

The stadium’s implantation is linked to a particular situation, serving as a juncture between a high-quality natural setting to be reinforced to the north and, to the south, a structured urban periphery area in need of new development. Hence, any plans for the upcoming stadium must represent a basic step towards introducing the Secteur Nord Rocade tree belt, a project already foreseen by the city of Bordeaux’s landscape development plan.

Our proposal aspires to draw up a preliminary rendition of these future development plans. It reinterprets the tree belt’s exceptional features comprising rows of trees lining the main access ways. It defines an overall structure and organizes the various land plots in a grid.

The stadium’s surrounding areas (parvis, parking area, green corridor) belong to this language: organic tree lines serve as screens in a setting where, following the north-south orientation, they offer a variety of views while preserving a clear frontal view of the stadium’s facade. Surrounding the stadium, an entirely pedestrian public area is accessible from all sides.

The ground of the square around the stadium consists of three elements: grass-jointed concrete paving, natural lawn dotted with groups of trees forming open spaces and, facilitating stadium entry and exit, hot-rolled asphalt on surfaces around the stadium and defining the bus parking area to the east. The parking area to the north holds onto its for the most part mineral ground already anticipating the tree belt with its densely planted trees interspersed by plant beds.

These mixed area types set the stadium within a defined landscape, closely correlating the stadium site with its surrounding woodland setting.

Sea of sounds

Sorry for late updates!

Classes are starting a few days ago and I'm trying to have that fact sink in!!

Well, let's start again with some fun stuff :)

...and imagine a sea of CDs.

CDsea | UK

Bruce Munro

No, seriously, it's made of 600,000 CDs laid across a Wiltshire field in UK.

See below.

It's displayed for 2 weeks before recycled :p

Earthscrapers!

...because skyscrapers are so 2011.

The Earthscraper

BNKR Arquitectura