Super Colossal has been awarded the commission for the Australian Peacekeeping Memorial on Anzac Parade in the ACT. The project was won in an open two stage competition. The project was launched by the Minster for Veteran Affairs, Alan Griffin MP at Parliament House on Friday 19th December.
The Australian Peacekeeping Memorial comprises of two primary elements. The first is a glowing passage of light that is both legible within the oversized urbanism of Anzac Parade and provides a powerful entry sequence for the memorial. The passage comprises of two massive, equally weighted monoliths set slightly off the ground in a stone court. They are representative of parties in conflict, separated by an intense light.
This walkway between the two monoliths is lined with backlit stone. To the rear of this passage is a contained gathering space for ceremonial purposes and individual reflection.
The focus of this area is a single beam that spans across the space bearing the names of the individual campaigns of the Australian Peacekeeping forces from their first campaign in Indonesia in 1947 until the present day. Below the beam is an inclined plane on which commemorative wreaths may be placed. The surface of this plane is highly polished, reflecting the sky and trees above.
The project will begin Design Development and Contract Documentation in January 2009.
Posted by Marcus Trimble on Dec 23 2008 7 Comments
A British inventor has developed adjustable glasses that can be tuned by the wearer to correct their sight, and by removing the need for an optician, he hopes to improve the vision of 1 billion of the world’s most disadvantaged people. The Guardian.Comments Off mb
The Independent reports on the economic crisis and the repercussions for the Venetian glass-blowers of Murano.
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Rafael Moneo will expand the Puerta de Atocha station in Madrid with the addition of a new terminal. The €520million project will facilitate 36 million passengers a year arriving via Spain’s expanding network of high speed trains. El Pais.Comments Off mb
Nicolai Ouroussoff on the end of one of architecture’s most delirious eras: Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition. NYT.Comments Off mb
Mapping the Inauguration. “One can’t help but be utterly fascinated by the image of military personnel swarming around this map or looking on from above in the bleachers to play out scenarios of what will happen and what might happen in a sort of cartographic war game.” Agreed.
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Italian engineers will start work next month to stabilise the Campanile of St Mark’s Square after sensors revealed the 98m Venetian tower has shifted several millimetres in the past half century. The Independent.
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Google is employing the hive mind in mapping parts of the planet where existing data is difficult to obtain. Their mapmaker service allows people to chart out their environment using collaborative tools.
Below we see Islamabad, Pakistan taking shape:
The emphasis of the service on regions where existing map data is thin is represented in this image of the world as currently mapped out by the internet users globally:
EM Farrelly on the MCA Extension. In a nutshell — she is not impressed. And referring to the original 1997 plan for the extension: “Shouldn’t Sejima simply be invited back to finish the job?”Comments Off mt
Zaha Hadid’s Christmas tree was the top seller at €46,000 when 44 designer Christmas trees were auctioned at the Les Sapins de Noël des Créateurs charity auction in Paris. ‘No live Christmas tree was used in any of the designs, making all of the ‘trees’ sustainable luxuries.’IHT.1 Comment mb
[Position Filled. Thanks to everyone that sent their portfolios in!]
Okay. So we need some staff. If you are looking for work and you fit the outline below, then please send your CV and portfolio to info@supercolossal.ch
Some notes for those interested in sending in their CVs:
We are looking for someone to start in the second week of January 2009.
We are looking for a graduate, with project experience and preferably with experience in documentation.
Excellence In Model Making skills will be valued highly. We share office space with Tribe Studios and we would like to make better models than them.
You may be expected to contribute to this blog, so writing coherently and the ability to find curios in hidden corners of the internet is a plus.
You must have excellent taste in music. At this moment, excellent taste in music includes the following: The Magnetic Fields, The Triffids, Paavoharju, Bruce Springsteen. But this may change.
We are up to series 4 of The Wire. You?
We currently have adequate in-house crocheting skills, so while we would never say no to more, please don’t feel that it is a pre-requisite for application.
Because you are the youth you know ALLSOFTWAREINEXISTENCE innately, but you may like to know that we use macintosh computers for typing into and archicad for most of our drawing.
In case you didn’t know, we are in Sydney, Australia.
Unfortunately we do not have the capacity to sponsor international superstar architects currently residing in Australia and the recruitment agencies take, like, 30% of the pay packet for visa sponsorship, so that’s not really viable for anyone is it? Except for the recruitment agencies I guess.
So if that sounds reasonable to you, send us a sample of your work (soon! the year is running out!) and we will get in contact. And please pass this on to anyone you know who may be looking for some work.
Posted by Marcus Trimble on Dec 15 2008 7 Comments
The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. A new book from Actar.
“Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes.”Comments Off mt
“So there’s a big hub-bub about what to call the CCTV tower. People
are leaning towards Zhichuang which translates to “Knowledge Window”
but it’s a homophone for haemorrhoids” - Aaron via Matt.
Those that feel like translating, please do so in the comments.
Posted by Marcus Trimble on Dec 12 2008 Comments Off
The harbour has a number of pools within the heads that provide a service less concerned with the taming of the ocean as they are along the coast and more with a nineteenth century notion of orderly bathing in calm water.
At their most minimal, these pools, sheltered from ocean swells leave behind the monolithic carved earth geological bathing of the ocean pools for a finely drawn line in the water that separates pure leisure from the leisure+infrastructure+public transport mode of the greater harbour space.
At their most formal they are olympic pools located on the harbour edge; highly controlled wave resisting, chlorinated vessels of sky blue water.
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I have looked for all of the publicly accessible baths and pools around Sydney Harbour. In addition to these there are of course hundreds of private pools right on the waters edge, as if that much water in front of you were not enough, but I will leave those to someone else to collate.
If I have missed any and if I have the names wrong, let me know and I will update the post. Curiously and likely due to human error, I found the exact number of pools within the harbour as I did along the coast (26).
Working clockwise from South Head, starting at Watsons Bay:
Parsley Bay:
Nielson Park with its excellent change rooms that provide a modesty tunnel for safely traversing the way to the harbour away from prying eyes:
The Mojave phone booth was a lone phone booth in the Mojave Desert that developed a cult following in the late nineties. It was located 15 miles from the nearest highway and miles from anywhere else, and in an early internet meme people started ringing it daily while others went out to answer the random calls. This site has information on the phone’s discovery and background.
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Witold Rybczynski reviews ‘Le Corbusier: A Life’ and ‘Le Corbusier Le Grand.’ ‘Weber’s admiring biography brings Le Corbusier to life, unraveling many obscure aspects of a man who was famously secretive and, though he wrote some 50 books, divulged very little of himself.’IHTComments Off mb
Some photos of nice projects on display at the UTS Exhibition — Even Better than the Real Thing, curated and organised by Dr Sam Spurr. The show was very good I thought — UTS definitely has the clearest agenda of the three architecture schools in Sydney and their projects had a very strong graphic sensibility, if a lack of plans, sections and the like. The projects are generally about the possibilities of very focussed areas of study; structural facades, data collection and visualisation, visual indertiminancy, and (as Anthony Bourke refers to it) post-kids-with-balloons-urbanism.
Being a bad blogger, I neglected to get the names of all the student’s work shown here, so if you know, let me know! + Insert iphone dodgy camera disclaimer here.
Daniel Jaramillo (MArch)
Diana Quintero (MDA)
Amanda Clarke and Alina McConnochie (MArch)
Jessica Dixon (MDA)
Amanda Clarke. Shenzen Urbanism studio. (MArch)
The Street as Platform studio had a series of visualisations playing continuously. Difficult to photograph, and they probably could have done with a better projector, but an impressive result from a studio where the students had no coding skills at the beginning of the two week course.
Phil Clemens
And finally, Jason McDermott’sPHD work in progress, using wii-motes as interactive drawing devices. Pictured above, in ‘Awesome Romance’ mode.
By way of contrast, Daniel Everett’s ‘Court’ series presents shadowless, depthless spaces that are nonetheless similarly descriptive of movement and contact:
The Big Picture has big pictures of Venice in its highest acqua alta in 22 years. Wake-boarding (sponsored by redbull) seems a suitable mode of transport in this situation.
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Junkjet: an energetic site for a collaborative fanzine “set up to discuss speculative works on topics of electronic media, aesthetics, and on architectures.”Comments Off mt
Mark Leckey has won the 2008 Turner Prize and now wants his own variety programme: “Like the Two Ronnies. But with art.” Guardian.Comments Off mb
Jonathon Glancey reviews Dominique Perrault’s reconstruction of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Guardian.Comments Off mb
The water in Venice today rose to its highest level in more than 20 years, topping 61 inches, well past the 40 inch flood mark. IHT.
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New York City car owners accrued 9,955,441 parking tickets from July 2007 to June 2008. The New York Times shows you where they were issued.
+ Is it shocking to anyone else that one block on West 23rd St can accrue 10,900 parking tickets in a year? That is an average of thirty tickets a day…
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