Monday 22 August 2016

Danish Architecture

I recently had a trip to Denmark, and made a point of heading to the suburbs of Copenhagen to check out work by BIG architects - Bjarke Ingels Group. Specifically, I went to see 8TALLET and the nearby VM Mountain.

Frontal view of VM Mountain - foliage now well-established on the balconies

VM Mountain from rear

8TALLET - entire building in a figure of 8 shape

Responsible for this year's phenomenal Serpentine Pavilion, London, it was great to see residential accommodation on an imposing scale, utilising similar ideas of using the simple and standard into something extraordinary through intriguing repetition - in this case, the brick, offset to incredible effect. Fibreglass frames, wooden boards, and aluminium are the only materials used.



Bjarke Ingels is a really engaging speaker - the video below is quite long, but exciting - the opportunity to come up with future visions of city planning in NYC is particularly impressive to hear about.

Tuesday 2 August 2016

Life Cycle

A beguiling little animation from Kouhei Nakama on Vimeo.

Monday 22 February 2016

Retro Modernism

Some fantastic photographs by Laurent Kronental have been doing the rounds recently. His studies of now-fading visions attempts to create utopian mass housing in the suburbs of Paris are absolutely fantastic, particularly so when these still surprising structures are thrown into sharp contrast by the typical decor and style of the actual residents inhabiting them.

It's all too easy for aspiring architects to think of the one-off - spectacular money-no-object (/vanity projects?) by superstar architects such as Gehry or Norman Foster - but they often forget to consider mass housing problems and the range of solutions that have been proffered.

More here, and of course on his own site (above). The portfolio on his site includes more portraits of the local residents.