Together with Lars Muller Iwan Baan is working on a book about Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia and Chandigarh which will be published this summer. Here’s a little preview. Read the rest of this entry »

Right after the opening of the Burj Khalifa my brother Iwan Baan went to Dubai to capture this absurd and beautiful needle, the tallest building in the world. Yesterday Nowness featured his images. Today we share some more. Read the rest of this entry »

A little update from Iwan, while flying over Rome shooting Zaha Hadid’s curved Contemporary Art Centre, the ‘Museum of Art for the XXI Century’ in Rome.

A new project photographed by Iwan Baan. The Moriyama Houses in Tokyo by SANAA. I really want to move there. What a beautiful place!

As some of you might know, my brother’s crossing the globe photographing new projects from world leading architects. In the coming months I will share some of his new works here at Anothersomething.

To start with this new building by Michael Maltzan in LA. The Carver Apartments will give homes to 95 homeless and low income residents… The circular design minimizes the noise of the freeway and creates this lovely courtyard in the centre… Makes me think of the historic Tulou Housing in Yongding, China which he photographed last year.
Enjoy the aesthetics of architecture seen thru the eyes of the master. More soon…

Our friend Robin from A Smile in the Mind pointed us to this fantastic multi-functional sports hall by Allmann Sattler Wappner Architects for Universitätsstadt Tübingen. ‘The aim was to achieve maximum usage out of what is a comparatively small floor area. At major events, an audience of up to 3000 can be accommodated in the hall. If required telescopic stages can be drawn out on to the sprint track. The four different facades are an integral part of the building’s concept: A modern climbing wall forms the north-western facade, facilities for streetball, skating and skateboarding are placed along the south-eastern exterior wall. The south-western wall is taken up by photovoltaic elements, the entrance side of the building is used to advertise the sponsor’s name.’
Love it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIDGnEaZhYk&hl=en]

As opposed to the general notion that our living environments can be properly described and designed “in plan”, this project is a design investigation into how the qualitative aspects of the wall, as a complex membrane, structure our social interactions and climatic relationships and enable specific ecologies to develop. The project breaks down the “traditional” walls of a house into a series of four delaminated layers ( concrete cave, stacked shelving, milky shell, soft skin ) in between which the different spaces of the house slip… Continue reading

By FAR
Via plataforma arquitectura

Love it! Via MNP.

Richard Wilson made this bizarre ‘door’ in a building in Liverpool. If you’re around, from the 20th of June till end ‘08 it’s rotating.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hktO3OdOPbs]
Via Bright

More at the Daily Mail

This imposing building is believed to be the world’s tallest wooden house rising 13 floors to reach 144ft. The house is also crumbling, incomplete and under threat of demolition from city authorities who are eager to end Nikolai Sutyagin’s 15 year project. Driven to inspiration by his formative years spent in a Soviet communal flat, Sutyagin felt lonely living by himself. Building began in 1992 and was only going to reach two stories high, however, convinced by a trip to see wooden houses in Japan and Norway, he decided he had not used enough roof space efficiently enough and decided to keep building… continue reading at world architecture news

“With a wire sculpture, while the circumstances are reversed–the object remains still while the viewer circles around it– the optical effect is the same. Of particular importance to me is this question: how many lines are necessary to describe the edges and surfaces of an object in space? There is always a compromise between the sum of lines and plasticity, the ideal balance lying somewhere between an austere economy and the luxury of detail. Consider a ball, for instance. How many circles are necessary to depict it? Two? Three? Or does it need meridians–lines of longitude and latitude–like on a globe? With these we can grasp the ball’s surface, but what if we want to view both the interior and exterior simultaneously?”
Thomas Raschke’s wire frames
Via Core77

The design adapts the program to a narrow and long plot, with a smooth slope, over the Atlantic shore.
Minimizing landscape impacts, and skipping the legal setback, the main volume “moulds” itself to the site’s topography through the cantilevered extension of the upper floors.
One of these projections, with near 8 meters, configures a balcony-terrace outside, hovering and opening onto the garden and the surrounding landscape. This imparts a horizontal “sliding” effect to the volumes, allowing a “de-materialization” of the house’s verticality.
On the “skin” of the building it is thus possible to understand the presence of the circulations and services that embrace, on the different floors, the central core and its structural “skeleton”.
The construction method inverts a common situation. Inside, the white architectural concrete’ stereotomy denounces the walls-beams that support the central core and extend the living room in the suspended balcony. Outside, the different plans are clad by cappotto and the alternation of colours is highlighted by the expressive game of volumes.
Finally, different openings framed by wood windows remind us of the unavoidable presence of the sea.
Nuno Grande & Pedro Gadanh at arkispot.com

Largely unnoticed and ignored, corrugated iron buildings can be discovered scattered across Britain and the Empire. The initial proliferation of buildings constructed of corrugated iron was sparked off by an invention of 1828.

By Alasdair Ogilvie, published in PENTAGRAM PAPERS 35
Thank you Marcel.

The ultimate in global design, architecture and style, as selected by this year’s elite panel of international judges, designer Naota Fukasawa, hotelier Ian Schrager, designer Ron Arad, fashion designers Viktor and Rolf, actress Jane Birkin, and MD of Charme Matteo do Montezemolo.

See all the nominees at Wallpaper

Interior picture from Home, Buenos Aires
Table picture from Arik Levy

An explosion of architectural little magazines in the 1960s and 1970s instigated a radical transformation in architectural culture with the architecture of the magazines acting as the site of innovation and debate. Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X takes stock of seventy little magazines from this period, which were published in over a dozen cities. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazine” was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals. The terms “little” and “magazine” are not taken at face value. In addition to short-lived radical magazines, Clip/Stamp/Fold includes pamphlets and building instruction manuals along with professional magazines that experienced “moments of littleness,” influenced by the graphics and intellectual concerns of their self-published contemporaries.

The radical architecture of little magazines 196x–197x
November 14, 2006 – January 31, 2007
Storefront for art and architecture / 97 Kenmare Street / New York city

All across Beirut you can find walls covered with bullets holes. Reminders of past violence, conflict and war. Moving through the city they are an all too familiar backdrop for any urban scene. This proposal that I called ‘bullet lights’ is reversing the meaning and experience of the ‘bullet hole wallpaper’ at diverse locations in the city. Introducing unexpected poetic moments of beauty. Beauty, ambivalently mixed with the physical testimonies of violence. The project doesn’t want to make a point it just invites people to look at things differently. Seeing things from more than one perspective is the starting point for empathy.

Acknowledgments to BLDGBLOG & Subtropia
At Archis