Nadel Architects with Barrio Planners: Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez Learning Center
viv-id(vĭv'ĭd)
Architectural Record offers The First Word: A Dictionary of New Architecture Updated Daily. The writers take a look at new projects and---in a single word---explain what about each design caught their eye. A nice resource for many different reasons, all good.
The documentary film, Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, has found a distributor, Art House Films. Yipee! Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, VISUAL ACOUSTICS celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman, the world’s greatest architectural photographer, whose images brought modern architecture to the American mainstream. Shulman, who passed away this year, captured the work of nearly every modern and progressive architect since the 1930s including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Frank Gehry.
The film opens in NYC at Cinema Village on October 9. It works its way to the E Street Cinema in Washington DC for an opening on November 6. On October 16 VISUAL ACOUTICS opens in Los Angeles at, yes!, the Nuart Theater. The website link above provides dates for many other cities. This promises to be an enriching and fascinating film. By all accounts, besides being a genius photographer, Julius Shulman was a kind, funny and wonderful human. We could use that kind of role model. Right now. Let's go!
How more ironic could it be that the petroleum rich United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be the first to build an entire city, Masdar, that will be the world’s first zero carbon, zero waste city powered entirely by renewable energy sources. While a substantial number of our citizenry see no need for action of any sort, even the petroleum nations get it. Hmm.
LAVA, The Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, a Sidney, Australia, firm created the prize-winning design.
Photographer: Anne Gummerson
Before Photo
Cinco Camp, Roger Black’s West Texas retreat, is made of five shipping containers on his 3,000-acre ranch. “I wanted something that blends into the landscape and could be installed and eventually removed with minimal disturbance to the environment,” he said. Here's the NYT slideshow of Black's retreat.
Here's the NYT article relating the details of the project.
The "B'More Green" column in the Baltimore Sun provides this delightful story. Read it slowly. For those environmentally oriented, it is sheer poetry. It's here. Platanthera x canbyi: fewer than a dozen of these plants have been found in the last 70 years.
Click on image to enlarge. 
The Elizabeth River in Virginia is one of the most polluted in the country, but help is on the way. The University of Virgina School of Architecture (UVA) has established the Learning Barge as the first floating wetlands learning center in the country. There is a good podcast interview with founder of the project, Phoebe Crisman here explaining the ambitious goals of project and the dire situation of the river (the Crisman interview begins at 00:15:15).
Where others have placed structures directly on the wetlands, UVA decided to put people on the river. Floating on the river, one experiences the full impact of the river crisis and its effect on the wetlands. One begins to grasp the larger picture. A terrific idea.
Declared unacceptable: A huge yellow sign spelling out “United States”
Christoph Neimann, illustrator, graphic artist and man-who-sews, provides a sweet treat in the NYT today. We think he has an utterly delightful take on life, on the childish superstitions that we teach ourselves, and our own stories about our triumphs over luck, love and life. We're inspired.
Neimann's blog is here.
Detail, Barry Anderson AtA award winning installation,
Barry Anderson as part of a recent architectural renovation project completed by el dorado ,inc. architects. Said Project Architect, Josh Shelton:"Anderson's video installation introduces an ambient and shifting horizon line, allowing multiple perspectives and vanishing points to appear and re-appear. His work, and our collaborative dialogue surrounding the work, was necessarily spatial. As a result, our team began to understand the new architecture surrounding us in expansive ways."As the technology grows increasingly sophisticated, we are seeing video installations become embedded in architecture. There seems to be a sweeping trend developing. We will have to wait and see if it has the long-term life of physical art done with the hand or whether it is a passing fad. As few seem to "draw" architecture any more---buildings being designed almost exclusively on computers---it seems part of the zeitgeist that the art in buildings is no longer "drawn" either.
Bill Viola, Ocean Without a Shore, 2007, 3-channel High Definition“The two themes of Mary and Martyrs symbolize some of the profound mysteries of human existence. One is concerned with birth and the other with death; one with comfort and creation, the other with suffering and sacrifice. If I am successful, the final pieces will function both as aesthetic objects of contemporary art and as practical objects of traditional contemplation and devotion.”Viola manages to grasp and relate issues that illuminate the mind and heart in a way that is beyond words. His moving exhibits remind us of our humanity in all its fullness from grief to exhilaration and joy. First one to London in 2011, please, send word.
We recommend this article in Bloomberg press reflecting the impending effects of climate change on birds. A relevant comment by Mike Di Paola, the article's correspondent:
Repeat: "...we expect the ecological communities will start to tear apart." This is a very profound issue."My first reaction to the findings was, so what? It doesn’t necessarily mean that migratory ranges are shrinking or that bird numbers are dwindling. What we are witnessing, however, is symptomatic of much bigger problems.
The birds are reacting to global changes that ecologists believe presage chaos at the ecosystem level. A warmer climate will alter vegetation, the availability of prey and a thousand other habitat features too complicated to predict.
“Because species respond individually and in very complex ways, we expect that ecological communities will start to tear apart,” says Burger. “This is one of the things we’re worried about.”
"You've pulled some leftover mac n' cheese out from the refrigerator, glance over at your counter, and see a microwave and a toaster oven. Which do you toss your plate of mac into, if you're looking to be the most sustainable?"The Answer.
Pittsburgh, PA: Mark your calendar. The Carnegie Museum of Art has announced the exhibition "Palm Springs Modern: Photographs by the late Julius Shulman." The show opens 19 September and closes 31 January. The exhibition, to be held at the Heinz Architecture Center, offers a tour of the mid-century architecture and lifestyles of Palm Springs.
The exhibition features 100 original photographs by renowned Los Angeles–based photographer Julius Shulman of houses designed by iconic Modernist architects, such as Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, and John Lautner. Also presented are 20 original drawings, and renderings of three key projects by Neutra, including the famed Kaufmann House, designed as a winter residence for Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr.
Palm Springs is almost unique in America. For decades it served as a stylish laboratory for architects whose buildings are now being reexamined. The fame of Palm Springs is due in large part to the iconic photography of Shulman's striking and evocative images.
One weird leap for design. For the farm, kitchen, executive office, condo, kids room? This invites your imagination. Right here, honest. I'm sure Design Within Reach (DWR) is on top of this.
And that's the way it is Friday, July 17, 2009. Walter Cronkite, known as the most trusted man in America. Rest in peace.
Two Toms: KCRW's Tom Schnabel with Thom Mayne
Above are two of the most famous photographs in archives of architecture. Both were shot by the photographer, Julius Shulman. Shulman, the legendary architectural photographer, died July 15th at the seasoned age of 98. His images brought fame to a number of mid-20th century Modernist architects and made him a household name in his time.
His home town of Los Angeles provides this obituary. It includes a video of Shulman and a collection of his photographs plus a Q&A with him done in 1994. May he rest in peace.
Director Claude Lelouch mounted a camera to the front bumper of a sports car, and films it howling through the streets of Paris very early one summer's morning. The film, just nine minutes long, certainly demonstrates his exemplary car control at speeds calculated to be as high as 135mph as he races for his rendezvous with a mystery blonde.
It is an astonishing sequence, filmed in one take as Lelouch runs red lights, mounts curbs, drifts round tight corners, and narrowly avoids pedestrians and will certainly have you on the edge of your seat, if not hiding behind it. Lelouch, was arrested after the release of the film.
The New York Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews the Toyo Ito's new stadium that will serve as the World Games 2009 main stadium. Ouroussoff always gives us a perspective on architecture and design that is rich and illuminating.
Like many who came to prominence in the past decade or so, these architects have sought to create structures that explore the psychological extremes that late Modernism and postmodernism ignored. Their aim was to expand architecture’s emotional possibilities and, in doing so, to make room for a wider range of human experience.
Mr. Ito’s stadium is the next step on that evolutionary chain.
The late architect Samuel Mockbee and Rural Studio, the design/build program he co-founded in rural Alabama's Hale County, are the focus of the newly released documentary Snakebit. The 60-minute film, produced for PBS, explores Mockbee's quest to instill in future architects an ethos of compassion and responsibility, as well as the knowledge and passion to improve their communities' quality of life.
Mockbee was one of the first architects whose designs fully integrated materials from the community into the homes his students built. His concept of sustainability and environment responsibility, the unique use of materials and the ingenious designs remain a guiding light for environmentalists. Here are some slides of the Hale County projects to give you the flavor of the Rural Studio's work.
Snakebit draws on never-before-seen interviews with Mockbee. The film takes place in the year following Mockbee's death from leukemia, the film chronicles the studio's struggle to maintain his guiding spirit and documents its affect on the communities it assists and the students it trains.
Ultimately, say the filmmakers, Snakebit offers a dialogue about what it means to be both a successful professional and a responsible member of society. Snakebit is scheduled to air on PBS stations in fall 2009. You wouldn't want to miss it.
Heart Box
Area #5 is where the mind gets serious when viewing architecture.
If you were in Paris this summer and you wanted to see the famed Mona Lisa painting, this is what you would be up against. So if you are reading this at the economical beach house that you are sharing with only 8 others, smile!
via Sebastian Puig :c-monster.net
Yeah, yeah, we're just as crass and celebrity oriented as any Michael Jackson gang on earth. But, with good reason. Let us explain. Someone put up a site, inviting anyone to post a video of themselves moonwalking. Thousands have responded and continue to respond from all over the world.
Here's what we liked about it, besides the lovely humanity and the hilarious fun with the moonwalk: there are SO MANY ENVIRONMENTS. It's wild. The spectrum of design and architecture is as endless as its video makers. Take a look at the "Eternal Moonwalk."
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