Pallets No Longer Good For Just Shipping… Or Making Huge Fires

For this year’s Architecture Triennale, there will be an exhibition that focuses on humanitarian housing solutions. Ten architects have been chosen to design and build full-scale prototypes to be showcased. A few of the participating architects include Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, and I-Beam Design. I-Beam Design has their Pallet House that they will be showing in the exhibition. Pallets are found in most countries nowadays and make for cheap, available building materials. This house took one week to build and furnish. Homes like this show that there are quick, affordable ways to provide housing for poverty stricken areas that allow easy manipulation and customization.

The Pallet House

Can’t Move Out? Then Move Up!

By 2016, London will be in need of space to house one million more people that are expected to be moving into the city. With the current infrastructure close to being maxed out, one good idea is to move upwards. The group, Popularchitecture, has come up with a plan to build a tower that could house an entire “city” to itself. Every floor would be a “neighborhood” of 600 and a “village” would be 20 floors and house 6,000. Open areas would have gardens, open air theaters, tennis courts, and ice skating rinks. As of now, this is all pure ideas and theory but something like this would definitely help alleviate the pressure of space in London and also create a whole new layer to the urban fabric of the U.K.

Project Page via io9

Eiffel Tower’s 120th Anniversary Facelift

To celebrate the Eiffel Tower’s 120th anniversary, a competition was held to find a design that would liven up the 120 year old structure. Serero Architect’s design calls for an addition to the observation deck that is made of a temporary carbon kevlar structure and increases the current 3,000 sq. ft. of space to 6,200 sq. ft. of usable visitor space. The new design looks oddly familiar to Coney Island’s “Eiffel Tower of the Boardwalk” which was renovated last year. The addition will be completed by next year.

Project Page via Dwell

Flip That… White House?

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Control Group have gotten together and created a competition to redesign the White House. They are calling for architects and designers to redesign the “ultimate architectural symbol of political power” in the U.S. Design submissions must be in by April 27, 2008 and the winner will be announced in May. The winning design will be displayed at Storefront Gallery in New York and on their website. It will also be published in Surface magazine. First prize is $5,000, second prize is $3,000, and third prize is $1,500. Our new president will be needing a place to stay soon so get to work!!

White House Redux

A Modern Exterior for Modern Interiors

Tadao Ando’s design for hhstyle.com’s furniture store expresses just as much modernity as the furniture within it. hhstyle.com is one of Japan’s most successful furniture stores. Their new building, hhstyle.com/casa, sits next to their original shop which is more or less just a large glass box. The drastic constrast between the two buildings also carries through within as well. hhstyle.com/casa only provides furniture produced by two designers, whereas the original store contains work from over 150 designers. The irregular geometric form is best explained by Ando himself.

It is not based on any axis or geometry. From the start, this project was imagined as a steel building – a building wrapped in steel plates folded like origami… The volume was roughly determined from various conditions such as the shadow that would be cast by the building. After repeated alterations and corrections, in balance with structural studies, the final form was reached.

- Tadao Ando

Whether the forms were intentional or not, this building creates a strong modern backdrop for any modern furniture to be placed in.

hhstyle.com/casa via MoCo Tokyo

The "Anti-FEMA" Trailer

After the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Rita in 2005, victims of the storms relied on FEMA to provide shelter and food. Depending on where you were and who you were, help didn’t come right away. Julie Martin, who lost her 18th century home, did not want to wait around to see when FEMA would respond. She contacted Tumbleweed Tiny House Company and worked together to draw up plans for a version of their homes that would work in the Gulf Coast area and provide temporary shelter for her after the storms. The final price of this home turned out to be under $30,000, and as you can see, the temporary home is definitely worth the money and effort and proved that you didn’t have to fully rely on FEMA to begin rebuilding what was lost.

Full Article via Dwell

A "Positive" Step In Green Design

Now that gas costs more than the car you’re putting it in, “green” design has become alot more popular nowadays. Lowering the cost of energy to support a building is key and hey, if it helps the environment, that’s not bad either huh? Masdar HQ in Abu Dhabi is one building that is planned to do just that but better. This building is expected to actually be the first positive energy building which means it will produce more energy than it consumes. The complex, designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, will be using sustainable materials, integrated wind turbines, outdoor air quality monitors and one of the world’s largest building-integrated solar energy arrays. It will also use 70 percent less water than mixed use buildings of the same size. What’s the cost for such a fancy shmancy world’s first building might you ask? Just a cool $300 million and all this can be yours!

AS+GG via Gizmodo

Book of the Week: Materials, Structures, Standards

Designing buildings is a tough thing to do when you start actually thinking about dimensions and what must go into and hold up the walls and ceilings. Once you get that figured out, then you have to think about how the inside is going to interact with people in the building. It’s hard to find books that have alot of useful information like this and that’s on a student’s level. Materials, Structures, Standards by Julia McMorrough is one such book. This book has a large amount of useful information that can be easily incorporated into a building design. Proportions, standard sizes, material characteristics, dimensions and building diagrams are just a few of the many things this book has to offer. This book is a MUST for any architecture design student and is worth way more than the $20 you’ll shell out for it!

Materials, Sturctures, Standards

A Higher Learning

The U.K. design firm, Levitate, had the cool idea of turning a bookshelf into a staircase for a small apartment that was limited in space. As you can see, the final product was definitely a great investment and also helped try to make this bookworm look a little cooler…

Levitate via Dwell

Parachute Jump Ride To Light Up Coney Island

The once famous “Parachute Jump” ride that was built in 1939 for the World’s Fair in Queens has recently received a face lift thanks to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The structure stands 262 feet tall and has been called the “Eiffel Tower of the Boardwalk”. The ride was in its prime use in the late 1940′s and 50′s but was put out of service as many of the other rides were in 1965. The structure has been covered with lights to illuminate the boardwalk area and now is a beacon for Coney Island. The project ended up costing 5 million dollars and took seven years of negotiating and construction to complete. The following link talks about the steps taken in the negotiation process to make this restoration possible.

Coney Island Parachute Jump