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          Street Furniture Competition  2011 

Following the success of last year’s competition, Architecture for Humanity Chicago, in collaboration with Archeworks, is proud to announce the Street Furniture Competition 2011. Read over the full competition brief after the break.

THE PROBLEM:

The American city is rooted in its neighborhoods, public spaces, and infrastructure. Transforming the interstitial open spaces that characterize our cities can be a fundamental catalyst for community connectivity and socialization. When neglected or inaccessible, these vacant spaces become detrimental to neighborhood health and vitality. To address the needs of a diverse and changing urban population, space must adapt to the needs of a broader range of ages, physical abilities, and cultural backgrounds. Through small acts we can repurpose public space to be more universally accessible, inclusive, age friendly, and a builder of community.

THE CHALLENGE:

Design one or more pieces of ‘street furniture’ that can revitalize a vacant site, is universally accessible, and fosters multi-generational community interaction. Street furniture should not be limited to benches. We consider other structures that make a small space seem inviting, usable, and safe to be street furniture. Including but not limited to: harvest tables, raised planters, play equipment, interactive sculptures. The goal of this installation is to continue the dialogue about open space and how design can be the catalyst for the creation of meaningful and joyful places that facilitate community engagement.

Winning designers will have at least one piece (potentially more) of their ‘street furniture’ built in the spring of 2011 as a year-long community installation. This installation is intended to activate the space in anticipation of a future neighborhood garden at the site. After the year, the street furniture will be considered for permanent installation or relocated to a new vacant site in Chicago.

http://www.afh-chicago.org/



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Richard Hamilton + Architecture

                   

"Interiors are a set of anachronisms; a museum, with the lingering residues of decorative styles that an inhabited space collects."
                                                                                                                         -Richard Hamilton


Hamilton was an english painter and collage artist whose projects are revered as some of the earliest works of Pop Art. His work is signified by the treatment of the classical and historical in conjunction with the contemporary. He saw interiors not as simply existing, but a sort of hodgepodge of space and time. He chose to explore the realm of architecture not through 3-D represenations but through a diversity of artistic languages, which he believed was the only way to analyze the theme of interior space. Hamilton utilized the mixture of stylized cartoon, relief sculpture photograph, paint, and screen print to create images that are both "taudry yet extraodinarily sophisticated." The collages are a spatial representations of the desires, values, expectations and consumerist attitudes throughout the late 1950's and 1960's. Hamilton focused on the conglomeration of objects from different temporal occurences and their assertions in one space. They are about the relationship between the object and the room.

   

 

                                                                                                                                                                                         

                                                                              

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SOUNDROOM: OPEN IDEAS COMPETITION

Register: Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Submit: Tuesday, June 14, 2011

SOUNDROOM COMPETITION
REHEARSAL SPACES FOR MUSICIANS

Soundroom is a company that was born with the outlook of creating a new concept of unique quality rehearsal spaces for musicians in Madrid. The appeal and originality of the design of these spaces, is valued by the company as an important part of its overall concept.
The purpose of this competition is to seek proposals that define the distribution of the space within the industrial building that was acquired in Madrid to house these rehearsal spaces.
The author or authors of the winning proposal will have the opportunity to develop their project after a direct negotiation with the property according to the prices and contracts specified on the Association of Architects of Madrid.
The Soundroom Competition is open to all architects, designers, students and interested individuals from all over the world. The proposals may be submitted individually or in teams of up to 5 people.

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Fashion + Architecture

The fashion world and the built world are two disciplines that are on seemingly different ends of the spectrum. However, their very foundations are becoming more and more intertwined.


Both fashion and architecture were devised out of a human imperative for the sheltering and protection of the body from outside sources. They were designed for human necessity. As structures and clothing became more ingrained in the social psyche, they each became a means of outward expression of identity. The home and the outfit are seen as an opportunity for an assertion of the person and personality within.

Architects and fashion designers have been experimenting with the same processes in the creation of their works. Designers such as the late Alexander McQueen (whose work is currently on exhibit at the MET) have been building structure within their clothing to give the appearance of shape and volume on the body. Structural form is the way in which many architects devise spaces for the body, such as Shigeru Ban. Many architects have experimented with the folding and draping in early stages of formal analysis, just as Fashion Designers work with initial iterations of garments. On top of these traditional means of design, many fashion designers are using 3D-modeling programs that were primarily designed to aid in architectural practices. One such designer is Elena Manferdini. These two design disciplines are interrelated at their very basis, they are designs for the body in space.

    

   

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Loft London Farm Tower Competition

The population growth and the urban centralization lead to an increase of the demand in the real estate market and in the food. One possible solution is the vertical farming. For these reasons, AWR proposes the design of a new skyscraper on the Thames waterfront. The new tower will be inserted into the new city skyline.
The competition requires the design of a vertical farm with a residential use. In The city there is still a strong demand for housing and for public functions in downtown areas where the presence of public transportation makes the site extremely strategic.
The city offers the chance to build a real vertical city, which may include a public plaza, shopping areas, restaurants and residences. Londoners welcomes the macro-structures that allow them to experience the city as well as possible. At the same time this project allows people to do many activities both indoors and outdoors because of the weather. For more information go to the competition’s official website.

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Hair + Architecture

 
Vidal Sassoon has been deemed an artist, a craftsman, and a rock star. He marched on the battlefield of hairstyling, scissors in hand, and became a liberator of women against the oppressive tyranny of the 1950's salon.


In the recent documentary chronicling Sassoon's life, he named Bauhaus architecture as a main inspiring force throughout the course of his distinguished career. As both the typology and topology of architecture was rapidly changing with the emergence of the Bauhaus and the Modernist dictum, Sassoon sought this same transformation in hair-styling. Where hair was not about tight curls, or harsh routines but more about the 'wash and wear' functionality to fit the ever changing livelihood of the  Modern (with a capital M) woman. The belief that hair was not simply about beauty, but more about geometry, angles, and structure unique to the head to which it sat upon, is the true essence that brought Sassoon's correlation between architecture and hairstyling to life. Bauhaus architects sought to revolutionize buildings and infrastructure through a pedestaling of function and program as a means of generating geometric form specific to site. Sassoon's pioneering styles were straight, short and cut into uneven shapes to express the individual bone structure. The revolution occurring in the built world was both paralleled and strengthened by what Sassoon created in not only hair-styling but life-styling.

   Vidal Sassoon Bob.                                                      Architetural Study, Johannes Intan.

Bob Variation                             Marzgefallenen-Denkmal, Germany. Walter Gropius.                           

        Bob Variation.                               Seagrams Building, New York. Mies Van Der Rohe.

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bluarch + Architecture

This blog is an expression of the interconnectivity between what is built in the world and what exists in the world. It will explore deep-seeded intersections between structure and the minute, architecture and the overlooked.

bluarch architecture + interiors + lighting is a full service practice dedicated to design innovation and technical excellence in the fields of architecture, interior design, and lighting. At bluarch, architecture is a formal and logical endeavor that offers shelter to layered human needs.

One such project that exemplifies our design ideologies is our Lake June Pointe House.

This was a lake front home located in Lake Placid, Florida. The clarity, the color, and shape of the lake and sky, the orange grove and the sand of the site itself are seen as dynamic entities which adjust and interact with one another. Using these guiding principles as a conceptual building block, three volumes which reflect these sharp differences were created and appear to slide along with a shifting nature. Its shape is elongated and oriented to maximize its use of daylight. The plan takes advantage of cross ventilation, a simple and effective ecological precept. The project was the first non-speculative house to be certified "Green" by the Florida Green Building Coalition.

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