Friday, July 27, 2007

Small is Beautiful


Tiny Prefabs



Small is beautiful in Viet Nam



Urban Design Award for Garden Shed



Small and Cozy in Hong Kong

Low Cost Housing


Truly Expensive Very Low Cost Flats


Designer Ghetto


Zoning by Income


Unwin on Class and Housing


The Commercial Case for Mixed Income Housing


Everybody Needs a Home


Communist Condo

Architecture?


Sheds versus Monuments


Are Architects Living on Past Glory



Modern Architecture - Demolished

Walls of Water

Imagine a building made of water. The cascading water that makes up the wall, will part to let people through without getting wet.



“Equipped with suitable sensors, the water walls can detect the approach of people and, like the Red Sea for Moses, open up to allow passage through at any point," says Mitchell Joseph, leader of the MIT class that developed this concept.

The water walls will also be programmed to display images or messages.

Water will cascade out of a row of closely spaced valves along a pipe suspended in the air. The valves can be opened and closed, at high frequency, via computer control. This produces a curtain of falling water with gaps at specified locations - a pattern of pixels created from air and water instead of illuminated points on a screen. The entire surface becomes a digital display that continuously scrolls downward.



The pavilion roof, covered by a thin layer of water, will be supported by column that can move up and down. When the pavilion is closed, the whole roof will collapse to the ground and the whole structure will disappear.



"The dream of digital architecture has always been to create buildings that are responsive and reconfigurable," says Ratti, who also led the MIT class and later was part of the design team at carlorattiassociati, based in Turin. "Think about spaces that can expand or shrink based on necessity and use. It is not easy to achieve such effects when dealing with concrete, bricks and mortar. But this becomes possible with digital water, which can appear and disappear."

He added: "In the Nineties, digital technology led us to fantasize about distant virtual worlds. Today we have moved on: the future of architecture might deal with digitally augmented environments, where bits and atoms seamlessly merge."

This pavilion is set to make a splash in Spain at the Expo Zaragoza 2008.

Water Wall concept: Zaragoza Digital Mile class at MIT, led by William Mitchell and Dennis Frenchman, with Michael Joroff and Carlo Ratti;

Design of the Digital Water Pavilion
: Walter Nicolino, Carlo Ratti, Claudio Bonicco and Matteo Lai at the architecture office carlorattiassociati (Turin, Italy); the engineering company Arup (London, UK and Madrid, Spain); and landscape architects Agence Ter (Paris, France).

Sources:
MIT architects design building with 'digital water' walls
Water Pavilion
Inhabitat read more | digg story


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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Mud Houses of Bangladesh

In the less flood prone areas of Bangladesh, receiving less rainfall, and having laterite soil - which gets very hard when dry - you can find oblong shaped mud-walled houses.


"Oblong shaped mud-walled houses with thatch and tile roof are common in Bogra, Pabna, Kushtia and Jessore. In Chapai Nawabganj, the roof of the mud-walled house is moulded by brick-dust mixed with lime, which is peculiar to only this area. Besides, in the region from Bogra to Kushtia, mud-walled houses with CI sheet or kerosene tin roof is another common type. The mud is dried in the form of block for building houses. The gaps between the blocks are filled in with clay.

Mud-walled houses with two to three levels of roof are common in Chittagong region. The roofs are often thatched with CI sheet. In the Madhupur area, mud-walled house with long grass-thatched roof is common. This type of house is also common in northern and western Dhaka and south of Tangail but with CI sheet roofing."

Source: Banglapedia




Geographical Spread of Mud Houses in Bangladesh

A group of students at the University of Asia Pacific, did an excellent study on the low cost vernacular construction technique of mud houses in Bagladesh under Architect Bashirul Haq and Dr. Abu Sayeed M. Ahmed.


Mud house


Typical House layout


Typical Homestead Layout


Mud collection and dumping for seasoning


Mud collection and dumping for seasoning


Seasoning of mud in layers


Scale Model


The real thing under construction


Construction Method Of Mud House In Bangladesh. - Click here for the most popular videos

The students: “Neo”, “DAN”, “Rubel_RAF”, and Abdur Razzaq, are at archsociety forum, as is an interesting post on vernacular architecture..


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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Functional Forts

Cities have been fortified ever since they emerged in prehistoric times. Topography and natural objects, augmented by human-made defences like stone walls or timber palisades, were used to provide some form of natural protection against attack.



Up to the 15th century, the medieval castle walls and moat were sufficient defence against attackers. But this changed with the introduction of gunpowder and the cannon.

Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453: it’s three-tiered defensive walls crumbled under the power of a cannon capable of firing projectiles exceeding 800 pounds in weight. The old fortifications became vulnerable, so new designs were introduced by Italian military engineers.



The new fort layout adopted a star-shaped form; the cannons and muskets of the defenders were brought to the outer-most positions, at the tips of the stellar fortification, to direct fire to attacking forces. The rest of the city would lie beyond the reach of the enemy's guns. Instead of the simple vertical castle walls were bastions, - a sharp, jagged pattern of earthworks battered to withstand cannon fire.



A prime example is Palmanova, in north-eastern Italy, close to the border with Slovenia, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552 - 1616). In his “L'Idea Della Architettura Universale”, (1615), he proposed that the “City should be not result of nature but product of planning".

Source: The University of Melbourne, FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING AND PLANNING, CULTURE & HISTORY of URBAN PLAN Lecture Notes ©1999 C.M.Gutjahr


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Sunday, July 22, 2007

Growing Up in a Xhosa Village

"I was born on 18 July 1918 at Mveso, a tiny village on the banks of the Mbashe River in the district of Umtata, the capital of the Transkei."

"The Transkei is 800 miles east of Cape Town, 550 miles south of Johannesburg, and lies between the Kei River and the Natal border, between the rugged Drakensberg mountains to the north and the blue waters of the of the Indian Ocean to the east. It is a beautiful country of rolling hills, fertile valleys, and a thousand rivers and streams which keep the landscape green even in winter…It is home to the Thembu people, who are part of the Xhosa nation, of which I am a member."


Xhosa warrior;www.probertencyclopaedia.com

"The Xhosa are a proud and patrilineal people with an expressive and euphonious language and an abiding belief in the importance of laws, education and courtesy. Xhosa society was a balanced and harmonious social order in which every individual knew his or her place."


Xhosa village; www.stoessel.ch

"When I was not much more than a newborn, my father was involved in a dispute that deprived him of his cheftainship at Mveso… He was deprived of most of his herd and land, and the revenue that came with them. Because of our straitened circumstances, my mother moved to Qunu. We lived in a less grand style, but it was in that village that I spent some of the happiest years of my boyhood…."

"The village of Qunu was situated in a narrow, grassy valley crisscrossed by clear streams, and overlooked by green hills."

"It consisted of no more than a few hundred people who lived in huts, which were beehive-shaped structures of mud walls, with a wooden pole in the centre holding up a peaked grass roof. The floor was made of crushed ant heap, the hard dome of excavated earth above an ant colony, and was kept smooth by smearing regularly with fresh cow-dung. The smoke from the hearth escaped through the roof, and the only opening was a low doorway one had to stoop to walk through. The huts were generally gruped in a residential area that was some distance away from the maize fields. There were no roads, only paths through the grass worn away by barefoot boys and women."

"My mother presided over three hutsat Qunu which, as I remember, were always filled with the babies and children of my relations…. In African culture, the sons and daughters of one’s aunts or uncles considered brothers and sisters, not cousins…"



All brothers and sisters: homeiswhereweparkourhouse.com

"Of my mother’s three huts, one was used for cooking, one for sleeping and one for storage. In the hut in which we slept, there was no furniture in the Western sense. We slept on mats and sat on the ground….My mother cooked food on a three legged iron pot over an open fire in the centre of the hut or outside. Everything we ate we grew or made ourselves."


Three Xhosa houses; www.etnoconverse.punt.nl

"My mother would enchant me with Xhosa legends and fables that had come down from numberless generations. I recall one my mother told us about a traveller who was approached by an old woman with terrible cataracts on her eyes. The woman asked the traveller for help, and the man averted his eyes. Then another man came along and was approached by the old woman. She asked him to clean her eyes, and even though he found the task unpleasant, he did as she asked. Then, miraculously, the scales fell from the old woman’s eyes and she became young and beautiful. The man married her and became wealthy and prosperous. It is a simple tale, but its message is an enduring one: virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know."


NELSON MANDELA



|

A mother and child; www.momentos.co.za | Nelson Mandela; www.guerrillalaw.com

Excerpts from Nelson Mandela's 'Long Walk to Freedom'

Happy Birthday Madiba!




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Saturday, July 21, 2007

The Yanomamö: 'shabono' and 'waiteri'

There is the idea of the 'noble savage', and then there is the Yanomamö, a tribal people thinly scattered deep in the jungles of southern Venezuela and north-western Brazil. Men sport nothing more than a few cotton strings around their wrists, ankles, and waists. They tie the foreskins of their penises to the waist string. Women dress about the same. Life is relatively easy in the sense that they can ‘earn a living’ with about three hours’ work per day.



The Yanomamö are an aggressive people: at least one-fourth of all adult males die a violent death. Ferocity, ‘waiteri’, is perceived as a male virtue. Wife beating is common. They still engage in their traditional warfare, staging hit-and run raids to abduct women. Within the village, violence often stems from sexual affairs, failure to deliver a promised woman, or wife-stealing, and may lead to villages splitting up.





But the tribes, defined by kinship, live in visually striking circular communal huts, called the ‘shabono’, thatched lean-tos with an open courtyard in the middle reserved for ceremonies and other public activities such as games. Families take up segments within this cylindrical structure, each with their own hearth. A typical ‘shabono’ shelters 70 people.



Napolean Chagnon:'Doing Fieldwork among the Yanomamö',pdf download;
The Ax Fight, 1975, movie


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Thursday, July 19, 2007

Communist Condo

A world revolution in architecture began in Russia in 1917: young Russian architects felt when they were suddenly given the chance to make history. Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky declared, “The streets shall be our brushes, the squares our pallets!”

Invented in Russia, by 27-year-old architect Vladimir Tatlin, constructivism exploded into life after the revolution thanks to two things: the sweeping away of the old order, and the invention of reinforced concrete. Concrete was not new, of course, but the Soviets were the first to encourage architects to use it to express themselves. Soaring towers and memorials were the result, though most were never built.


No kitchen here in the apartments

In this new style, social engineering was as important as structural engineering, with the architects told to build a brave new world of buildings for a new, equal, society.



The Narkomfin was the high-water mark of Russia’s constructivist movement. The architect, Moisei Ginzburg, built Narkomfin to solve the most pressing problem of urban planning—how to avoid the isolation that comes with living in a city. His solution was radical. He wanted to replicate the community of a village in the city. So he designed a six-storey apartment block, then added on an annex containing all things the inhabitants would need for daily living.


Wide corridors to socialize with neighbours and to discuss about Marx

There was a library and a shop, a communal kitchen and dining room, even a rooftop solarium for Moscow’s brief, hot, summer. And there were meeting rooms to allow the people to discuss the onward march of socialism. The corridors to the flats were big, wide and open, to encourage people to see them as the village street, and stop and talk with their neighbours. The result was “a six-story blueprint for communal living as ingenious as it is humane.”


Source: Could these be from the original drawings; downloaded from http://os.typepad.com/my_weblog/files/reseach.pdf


Source: World Monuments Fund

But by 1930, when the building was just finishing, the movement was dying. Stalin’s iron rule left no room for free thinking. Under Stalin, came instead the heavy, oppressive shapes of neo-classicism. Narkomfin is today a sad sight: decades without maintenance have put Narkomfin on the World Monuments Fund’s 100 ‘Most Endangered Sites.’

Condensed from Chris Stephen’s article in Axess Magazine


Hint: fast forward to 60 seconds!


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