Venice Architectural Biennale 2010 | Junya Ishigami | Golden Lion Winner

Junya Ishigami's installation is a full- size study of a building planned for somewhere in Europe, measuring approximately 14 m x 4 m x 4 m.
The components: delicate specially-designed columns, beams and bracing: indeterminate contours lacking true physical form that dissolve into the transparent space rather than 'structures' supporting the building.
The outcome is an assembly of a small-scale parts, deviating enormously from the usual scale of architecture, yet forming a structure on an architectural scale. Even the structures that give a building its very shape may no longer be clear but rather void-like.....more

X Architects | Sham Sales Center | AbuDhabi

The proposed sales center provides a sensitive approach to the local ecology and landscape, especially to the fast depleting mangrove reserves of AbuDhabi. Extending and hovering above the existing mangroves and integrating them into its design, the sales center provides potential investors a glimpse of the nature oriented life style that can be expected from the Shams project.The form responds to the surrounding views and programmatic pressures of the project.The mangrove courts organize the program into different zones of activity and extends the users perception towards creating a symbiotic relationship with his surrounding environment.

Credits: Ahmed Al Ali, Farid Esmaeil, Luca Vigliero, Francesco Moncada, Mathan Ramaiah, Lidia, Dario Cavallaro.
Pictures of the sales center here

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010 | suh architects + do-ho suh

'Blueprint' is a collaboration project between korean artist do-ho suh and seoul-based practice
suh architects (eulho suh and kyungen kim) for this year's international architecture biennale
in venice, italy. the 12.7m-long installation explores the notion of a home by questioning
the boundaries between where one once was, is, and soon will be.

The art piece features two parts: the first is a 1:1 scale reproduction of the new york townhouse
where do-ho suh currently resides constructed entirely out of translucent nylon fabric.
The hand-stitched recreation is suspended horizontally to hover above the viewer by
a system of wires that run from wall to wall.
The second part is a floor piece laid directly under the former, seemingly employing the role of shadow to the floating building.
Made out of CNC-milled high pressure laminate panels, the piece features a composite image
of the artist's original home in Korea, the New york townhouse facade, and a typical Venetian
villa's facade. the compilation is not merely an overlap of images but a morphing of
the three typologies: the industrial brick facade bears a number of gothic-looking windows
with lancet arches and decorative railings while the bay window is topped with a style
of tiled roof found in traditional Korean Hanok houses.
The result is a physical shadow of the haunting architectural facade that blurs the line between real and reflection, art and architecture, and the elements of the past, present, and future....more

Ensamble Studio | Venice Architecture Biennale 2010

As part of this year's venice architecture biennale, spanish practice ensamble studio has created 'balancing act', an installation to be showcased at the arsenal building. Consisting of two giant beams, a spring and a rock, the project is a play of balance.
Negotiating between the old structural columns of the building, the two lines created by the installation draw a diagonal incision through the space. the result is a new order, a new rhythm to the 'tempo' already established by the existing columns. this foreign composition creates tension and friction, offering a new and disturbing reading of the space.
The predominantly horizontal structure affects the verticality of the room, breaking its scale and introducing a new element to the arsenal building.
'we have understood the whole arsenale as a theme of multiple counterpoint, where after the appearance of the original space, different voices occur around that theme, developed and carried in intervals, creating a complex compositional sequence, an architectural ''fugue'', in which different spaces follow one another, and in which the dissonant balance of the 'balancing act' is just one chord.' -ensamble studioBy playing with the forces present in the space, and the gravitational force that the structures generate, 'balancing act' makes the concept of balance tangible.....more at designboom

Shinji Ohmakidi Shinji Ohmaki | Liminal Air Installation

Liminal Air, by the Japanese designer Shinji Ohmaki, has been around for a while, and maybe even because of this there are many images on the net telling its lure… the large, evocative and soft installation travelled to galleries and showrooms apparently enchanting a large number of people and many kids… 123000 nylon strings hung from the ceiling creating a slightly irregular volume because of their different length… altogether, according to the designer, they would constitute air materialization giving it a weight and making us understand what usually surrounds us that we usually don’t perceive…
Inspiration would be from a cave situated at the bottom of Mount Fuji; the concept: the will to reflect on human perception…
If the net privileges what is current, in the big rush something ends up to some hidden corners of the web.. Maybe, sometimes, it is worthwhile to pick funny thighs that after some time in the net are better described and easy to be told to the people who couldn’t see them..
Just like this case…
More here

Superstar-A Mobile China Town |11th Venice Biennale of Architecture | MAD

2008
'Uneternal City'
11th Venice Biennale of Architecture
Acrylic, Stainless Steel
5200 (L) x 4800 (W) x 5000 (H) (mm)

'Superstar: A Mobile China Town’, was featured in the exhibition ‘Uneternal City’ of the 11^th Venice Biennale in 2008. The exhibition, curated by Aaron Betsky, invited 12 young global architects to suggest interventions into an anonymous suburban area of Rome, which could exploit and represent the new spaces and urban fabrics of a ‘Rome of the future’. The project was shown in the Arsenale, Venice, from 14^th September to 23^rd November 2008.

MAD's proposal, 'The Superstar', takes the form of a New China Town.

Along with shopping malls, petrol stations and branches of McDonalds, the old China Town renders all of our cities boring and alike. It is nothing more than restaurant streets and fake traditional buildings representing a kitsch image of contemporary China, with no real life inside. It is a historical theme park that poisons the urban space. There must be a shock therapy to remedy this situation.

Superstar: A Mobile China Town is MAD's response to the redundant and increasingly out-of-date nature of the contemporary Chinatown. Rather than a sloppy patchwork of poor construction and nostalgia, the Superstar is a fully integrated, coherent, and above all modern upgrade of the 20th century Chinatown model. It’s a place to enjoy, to consume Chinese food, quality goods and cultural events; it’s a place to create and to produce, where citizens can use workshops to study, design and realize their ideas.

Equally important to what this neo-community contains is how it operates. Superstar: A Mobile China Town is a benevolent virus that releases unknown energy in between unprincipled changes and principled steadiness. It can land at every corner of the world, exchanging the new Chinese energy with the environment where it stays. It’s self-sustaining: it grows its own food, requires no resources from the host city, and recycles all of its waste. And it’s a living place, with authentic Chinese nature, health resorts, sports facilities and drinking water lakes. There’s even a digital cemetery, to remember the dead. The Superstar is a dream that’s home to 15,000 people: there is no hierarchy, no hyponymy, but a fusion of technology and nature, future and humanity.

The Superstar’s first destination will be the periphery of Rome. The Superstar will provide an unexpected, ever-changing future imbedded in the Eternal past.

Welcome to the Superstar, the China Town of today.

Text and images from : MAD

More exhibition Structures:

Exhibition Structures 1

Exhibition Structures 2

Helix BioReactor Perth, 2009 | Emergent Architecture

Rather than responding to the brief with a monumental artwork “representing the heritage of Perth”, our design consists of an outcropping of human-scale Helix Bioreactors which relate to the city in a more nuanced way. These devices are intended to operate ontologically at both conceptual and visceral levels, in terms of space, color, luminosity, but also infrastructure and engineering. There are seven elements, tied together by a pleated, color-variegated groundscape which tracks a network of biofuel lines leading across the street to the Perth train station. This project is an attempt to avoid the trappings of conventional public art which is often associated with large, often modern, expressions of form. The design does not signify, it performs. The Helix BioReactors gather energy by way of several interwoven high- and low-tech systems. These include a luminous, artificial photosynthetic system invented by Origin Oil in Los Angeles, and thin-film solar transistors woven into ornamental electronic tracery. Now, one could argue that artwork shouldn’t actually do work, that art is by definition excessive. Of course there were also those who argued in the 20th century that multimedia art was not true art like painting. If this decade in human civilization has presented us with any resonant knowledge about our world, it is that energy is culturally precious, that it is possibly the ultimate medium. Energy may indeed be one of the most timely mediums for art.....Emergent Architecture

Temporary installation at Polytechnic of Milan |Gianluca Milesi

This is a temporary installation proposed in the space designed by Vittoriano Vigano’ for the Polytechnic of Milan in the eighties. The space has been very inspiring for its high quality minimal rationalist architecture and it would have been a perfect choreography for an intervention in terms of addition of forms, volumes and geometry. The volumes of the installation proposed have been designed to dialogue, for contrast but in a respectful way, with the existing spaces. Free and sculptural digitally created forms have been chosen to underline a difference of language and probably a difference of paradigm and symbolism with the hosting space. From the inside of the building, the sculptural form exits to the open agora in the underground, trespassing the modular glass façade. The non regular volumes would like to be a poetic contraposition to another more regular poetic language. For its nature the installation has been thought as temporary, built with light materials: a thin steel skeleton is wrapped by translucent polycarbonate. It is possible to enter the sculpture in few points and its inner and outer surfaces are supports for projections and changing communication. In this way the volumes offer a multiple perception of the spaces, as sort of parasites but as a structure at the same time. The installation, proposed to the Polytechnic of Milan, faculty of architecture, was never built.
Tetxs and images from Gianluca Milesi

Booth-Prada-Luna Rossa, for TIM Mobile Telephone Company-Next Urban Solution

Preliminary design for travelling stand to launch Prada-Luna Rossa, for TIM Mobile Telephone Company.

HEAVEN by Capella Garcia Arquitectura-Barcelona 2008

“HEAVEN”
An ecological, sensual, organic intervention
Barcelona 2008
Space designed by Juli Capella in CasaDecor ’08 for the Resyrok company.
CasaDecor ’08 Module 3
Design: Capella Garcia Arquitectura Juli Capella Samper, architect and designer
Lorelay Gazo, collaborating architect
For: Resyrok
Surface area: 92 m2
Address: Port Forum, Barcelona
Dates: From 23 October to 23 November 2008
Via