Super Colossal

A print-on-demand ‘ATM’ has been installed in a Melbourne bookstore giving access to books long out of print. A book takes mintutes to be printed and bound and they anticipate having 10,000 titles available in 18 months.
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The White House Redux competition entries are being collected and published in a massive 700 page catalogue. Damn, knew we should have entered that one… You can order a copy at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
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Researchers at Cornell have developed a synthetic ‘tree’ that simulates the capillary action that draws moisture up to the highest branches of a tree. It is a “long-standing theory that transpiration in trees and plants is a purely physical process, requiring no biological energy. It also may lead to new passive heat transfer technologies for cars or buildings, better methods for remediating soil and more effective ways to draw water out of partially dry ground.”
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Elizabeth Farrelly on the Venice Biennale: “Australian architecture, we see, has come some way since Philip Cox seemed to be its voice. But models are models, and without scale, context, habitation or explication they enchant but do not connect. The theme itself is a non-theme. So is Kipnis right? Are we partying while the world burns?”
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Luke Harding reports on the new Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture, a huge modern art gallery housed in a former Moscow bus depot. Is it Russia’s answer to the Tate Modern? The Guardian.
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EXTREME MACHINES courtesy of The Independent.
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Yokohama House by Torafu architects. Right up our alley. Dezeen has photos of the completed house.
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The Architect’s Newspaper has confirmed that Aaron Betsky fell into the canal on Friday night on his way to a dinner party hosted by Herzog and de Meuron in Palazzo Polignac.
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This is fantastic: Arbores Laetae by Diller Scofidio and Renfro.
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Abundant Pavilion

Friday, 12th September 2008 permalink

So the Venice Bienale of Architecture is up and running.

I thought that I would reblog a bunch of images of the Australian Pavilion from the pavilion’s Flickr feed. The pavilion is a documentation of Australian past and future. The top room is filled with projections of images and movies of built work; the lower room full of models of work that is underway in architecture offices across Australia.

All images by Gary Warner (one of the creative directors) who has many more images of the Australian pavilion as well as other pavilions and exhibitions up the Flickr page.

abundant australian architecture pavilion 2008

And to finish off, I like the entry to the USA pavilion — asking visitors to cross through an image of the Mexican border:

Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet? The site has an RSS feed so should the status change, you will be notified. Via Daring Fireball.
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What’s he building in there? What on earth is he building in there?
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I know we are all focussing on the LHC at the moment, but take a moment to marvel at the Large Helical Device. Built to “conduct fusion-plasma confinement research in a steady-state machine and to elucidate important research issues in physics and engineering for helical plasma reactors.” Source. Link to a really large image of it.
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Life Without Buildings on the construction work underway on Brad Pitt’s ‘Make It Right’ program in New Orleans.
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Jean Nouvel to give a lecture in Sydney in October. Presumably he is out here for a site visit for the CUB Brewery project.
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Recently 4

Tuesday, 9th September 2008 permalink

Recently:

An Verandah for a small farmhouse on the south coast of NSW

Some more folding follies. This one, an unsuccessful competition entry. In collaboration with Metalab.

More on this one, soon. Maybe.

A new kitchen in an existing house.

The Courtyard House is coming along and will soon be lodged for development approvals:

We have been studying how the metal deck roofing of the courtyard house might wrap over to become two walls of the house:

Also, the entry and placement of openings in the street facade:

Previously Recent:
Recently 1
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Recently 3

An excerpt of an interview in Perpecta 40 with Kevin Roche. I was unfamiliar with Roche, whose work through the 60′s and 70′s had a strategic directness that recalls the best work of OMA.
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More Google Maps fun — this time an annotated map of Marco Polo’s travels from Europe to China.
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An article on the offices that document the work of other higher profile architects. As far as I am aware, with the exception of John Wardle’s work with Hassel Architects, this practice is not common in Australia; particularly so in Sydney. It seems a good model for supporting smaller, young offices that may not have the capacity to produce a large building as well as for those large offices who, as a consequence of their size, have lost the capacity to produce innovative buildings. Via Archinect.
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Some photos of the Australian pavilion at the Venice Bienale, being filled with hundreds of models.
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Fragments of the human genome encoded in quilts.
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Telstra in trouble for erecting advertising in front of Uluru in its Second Life island. They have since removed the advertising and a spokesman had this to say: “You are very correct in stating BigPond takes the image of Uluru in Second Life very seriously. This is why we do not allow avatars to climb or fly over it.”
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PostSpectaular built a “design machine” to generated an infinite number of unique covers for Faber and Faber’s print on demand service in which out-of-print books are being made available again. I particularly like that there are a set of rules that determine the border designs; distinguishing between fiction, non-fiction and so on — in much the same way as Penguin’s early paperbacks did.
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A giant mechanical spider is was crawling around Liverpool’s buildings. A part of the Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008 Festival.
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