socks-studio

As a companion to previous post, here’s more drawings of the same iconic project.

From the description of the project:

OMA received an honorable mention for Très Grande Bibliothèque, a competition to build a new national library in France. The program called for the creation of various smaller libraries contained in one building envelope; including libraries for moving images, recent acquisitions, reference, catalogues and scientific research. The immense amount of information to be stored within these spaces (books, films, digital databases) became the impetus for the overall concept design. The library is imagined as a solid block of information, a dense repository for the past, from which voids are carved to create public spaces – absence floating in memory.

Partner in charge:
Rem Koolhaas
Competition Team:
Art Zaaijer, Xaveer de Geyter, Georges Heintz, Heike Lohmann, Ron Steiner, Alex Wall, Christophe Cornubert, Ramon Klein, Yushi Uehara
Engineers:
Cecil Balmond, Mohsen Zikri of Arup

Sources:
Afasia and OMA.

“Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue… Its subtext is fuck context.”
– Rem Koolhaas

The CCA in Montréal just opened a retrospective exhibition on the famous OMA entry for the 1989 French National Library competition. A cubic 100 meters tall building characterised by the distinction between book storage (solid) and public space (voids). “A building that marks the beginning of the ‘big’ period and the shift from urbanism to conceptual formalism that Rem Koolhaas would retroactively name in his infamous remark on context.”

The exhibition features the four original anonymous panels, hundreds of working drawings showing design process moving through different media, digital and physical models.

The following is the timelapse of the plaster model construction for Très Grande Bibliotheque.

Hipcescu, ‘The city of Thousand Suns’, is spoof urbanism.
Conceived by an architect, urban planner and arguably a despot, the city is the result of a well-balanced mix of Soviet propaganda and Dubai capitalism.

“On the sunny shores of the Caspian, a mere four hour flight away from Western Europe, the City of a Thousand Suns awaits you. Hipcescu, a thriving 21st century metropolis, home to the world’s highest building, the iconic Hipcescu Tower (850 m).

Please feel free to download our most recent print ad. You are hereby granted permission to use or duplicate it any way you deem appropriate. If you wish to publish it in a newspaper or magazine and pay for it yourself, you will be granted life-long Honorary Citizenship of Hipcescu.”

More infos on “hipcescu.com“, a site devoted to the cult of Hipcescu, its tower and the personality of its creator. (“Let us bear in mind V. Hipcescu’s words: “Before we build a city, we contemplate the notion of a city.” Thank you.”)

Via: Things Magazine

Thomas Carpentier’s graduation project at ESA questions the normatization of the human body proportions introduced by early Modernist Architectural manuals such as Neufert‘s, or the “Architectural Graphic Standards” or by the anthropometric scale of proportion devised by Le Corbusier with the name of Modulor.

The ambition of identifing an idealized human proportion was the alleged basis upon which building a new rational and sanitized architecture, but the mere concept of finding a norm out of an ideal body is in fact paradoxical and even discriminatory. Despite that, the Neufert’s manual easily encountered a widespread success, and the standardization today involves not only the human anatomy but also men’s behaviour.

Without futher addition to what has been already and more exhaustively written by Léopold Lambert twice in his blog (“The Modernist Ideology of a Normative Body” and “A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normatized Body“), we leave you with the work of Thomas Carpentier.

As a parody to the normatization of the body, Thomas focuses his attention to out-of-standard but iconic character’s bodies, such as the one of a culturist, Jabba the Hutt’s, Oscar Pistorius’, Borg Queen’s or David Toole’s. Around their real or fictitious proportions he then re-imagines or create architectural spaces whose main purpose is to accomodate their other standards.

Related:

Frederick Kiesler. Architecture, “Biotechnique”, and a Peek into the Future of the Computer, 1940. Thanks to Ethel Baraona for signaling!

Friends of Think Space, the annual conceptual competition program from Zagreb, Croatia (see our project Grundrisse), have recently unveiled the theme of their 2012 cycle: Past Forward.

Curator Adrian Lahoud looked back to the recent history of architecture and asked the participants to revisit “three competitions that radically transformed architectural culture: The Peak (1982), Yokohama Port Terminal (1994) and Blur Building (1999).” All three winning entries emerged under unique conditions to take up critical positions on the predominant tendencies of their time.”







From the brief:

“The last three decades saw significant change across social, political, and environmental registers. The conjunction of capital flows, mass urbanization and increasingly interconnected cultural and financial networks have reshaped the way we understand, produce and discuss architecture resulting in a breathless cycle of formal and aesthetic transformations. This restless appearance of change conceals an increasing sense of inertia or perhaps even of confusion, in that an intellectual project has yet to accompany the overiding sense of technical virtuosity.”

More infos on Think Space 2012 site.

We’re glad to use this occasion to bring back into surface an old article from the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s architecture magazines archive of the Fabrizi family: here’s the winner of one of the three competitions: The Peak, by Zaha Hadid, a hard-edged suprematist vision for a leasure club in Hong Kong, (Domus 642/1983)

Click to enlarge: