Tag: Architecture

LEGO Architecture: The Visual Guide

Foamboards

Created in close collaboration with The LEGO Group and Adam Reed Tucker, LEGO® Architecture visionary, LEGO Architecture: The Visual Guide takes a deep look at the artists, builders, and inspiration behind the LEGO Architecture series. Beautifully illustrated and annotated, this visual guide allows you to explore the LEGO team’s creative process in building and understand how LEGO artists translated such iconic buildings into these buildable LEGO sets. Stunning images and in-depth exploration of the real buildings like the Guggenheim™ or the Empire State Building, on which the LEGO Architecture series is based, provide you with a comprehensive look at the creation of these intricate sets. Learn why the LEGO team chose certain pieces and what particular challenges they faced. Read about the inspiration behind the creative processes and what designing and building techniques were used on various sets. Featuring profiles of the LEGO artists and builders who created the series and packaged in a sleek protective slipcase, LEGO Architecture: The Visual Guide is the ultimate illustrated tour of the LEGO Architecture series in all its micro-scale detail.

LEGO Architecture: The Visual Guide

Iconic buildings reimagined in LEGO bricks

Sleek, stylish, and perfectly proportioned, LEGO Architecture models are as inspirational as the landmark buildings and structures they celebrate. Go on a stunning photographic tour of the models, with unique insights into the creative process behind their designs.

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This fascinating guide includes a foreword by renowned LEGO architectural artist Adam Reed Tucker. Tucker strives to capture the essence of a particular architectural landmark in its pure sculptural form. He does not view his models as literal replicas, but rather as artistic interpretations using LEGO bricks as a medium. As he continues to explore how to capture new LEGO Architecture buildings with LEGO bricks and plates, he finds the possibilities and challenges they offer almost magical.

Table of Contents: Foreword Introduction Timeline LEGO Artist Profiles The Creative Process Fallingwater in Development Glossary LEGO Cityscape in Scale Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Fallingwater The White House Farnsworth House Rockefeller Center Robie House Brandenburg Gate Sydney Opera House Big Ben Villa Savoye Sungnyemun The Leaning Tower of Pisa Imperial Hotel United Nations Headquarters The Eiffel Tower Trevi Fountain John Hancock Center Willis Tower Empire State Building Seattle Space Needle Burj Khalifa Marina Bay Sands Index Acknowledgments

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The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know

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In order to master the foundation of architecture, you must first master the basic building blocks of its language; the definitions, function, and usage. The Language of Architecture provides students and professional architects with the basic elements of architectural design, divided into twenty-six easy-to-comprehend chapters. This visual reference includes an introduction to architecture design, historical view of the elements, as well as an overview of how these elements can and have been used across multiple design disciplines. Whether you’re new to the field or have been an architect for years, you’ll want to flip through the pages of this book and use it as your go-to reference for inspiration and ideas. This comprehensive learning tool is the one book you’ll want as a staple in your library.

Atelier Bow WowAtelier Bow Wow The Global Seed Vault designed by Peter W. SodermanThe Global Seed Vault designed by Peter W. Soderman Environmental Context

One of the most important and pressing aspects of the design of a structure is its environmental context, a context that can either affect the building positively (as provide warmth or shade) or extremely negatively (as in erosion or collapse). Most characteristic of this context is that it is continuously transforming, either in predictable or unanticipated ways. And the building in turn has a responsibility toward that context: perhaps at worst it will coexist, but at best it will enhance it.

Extreme Variability

Architecture has a responsibility to anticipate that the environment in which it is situated will change, and often in quite unpredictable ways. Extreme weather—floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, and avalanches—introduce design parameters that situate a work in a specific environmental context. A building erected in a flood plain might be raised on stilts while one in a frequent avalanche zone might be wedge shaped and embedded into the mountainside.

Weather

Rates of environmental change can be more predictable, from a twenty-four-hour cycle to seasonal variations. A building’s anticipation of the behaviors of basic yet constantly changing environmental elements of sun, rain, and wind cannot only be traced in the placement and dimension of apertures, the slopes of roofs, and the materials used, but in the more fundamental placement of a building within its actual physical site.

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The Elements of Modern Architecture: Understanding Contemporary Buildings

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Fifty of the world’s greatest modern buildings, from 1950 to the present, dissected and analyzed through specially commissioned freehand drawings

After a period in which computation-derived architecture—driven by digital design tools, data analysis, and new formal expression—has thrived, students and their teachers have returned to age-old techniques before employing the digital tools that are a part of every architect’s studio. Tired of the perfectly rendered screen image, architects are making presentations that are clearly the work of the hand and the mind, not the computer.

This ambitious publication, organized chronologically, is aimed at a new generation of architects who take technology for granted, but seek to further understand the principles of what makes a building meaningful and enduring. Each of the fifty works of architecture is presented through detailed consideration of its site, topology, and surroundings; natural light, volumes, and massing; program and circulation; details, fenestration, and ornamentation. Over 2,500 painstakingly hand-drawn images of the buildings of the past seven decades help readers return to the core values of understanding site and creating buildings: looking with the eyes, engaging through direct physical experience, and constructing by hand.

50+ photographs in black and white and 2,500 line drawings

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Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape

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In the summer of 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and a professor at Harvard’s new Graduate School of Design, rented a house on Planting Island, near the base of Cape Cod. There, he and his wife, Ise, hosted a festive reunion of Bauhaus masters and students who had recently emigrated from Europe: Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Xanti Schawinsky and others. Together they feasted, swam and planned their futures on a new continent, all sensing they were on the cusp of a momentous new phase in their lives. Yet even as they moved on, the group never lost its connection to the Cape Cod coast. Several members returned, when they had the means, to travel farther up the peninsula, rent cabins, buy land and design their ideal summer homes. Thus began a chapter in the history of modern architecture that has never been told–until now. The flow of talent onto the Outer Cape continued and, within a few years, the area was a hotbed of intellectual currents from New York, Boston, Cambridge and the country’s top schools of architecture and design. Avant-garde homes began to appear in the woods and on the dunes; by the 1970s, there were about 100 modern houses of interest here. In this story, we meet, among others, the Boston Brahmins Jack Phillips and Nathaniel Saltonstall; the self-taught architect, carpenter and painter Jack Hall; the Finn Olav Hammarström, who had worked for Alvar Aalto; and the prolific Charlie Zehnder, who brought the lessons of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Brutalism to the Cape. Initially, these designers had no clients; they built for themselves and their families, or for friends sympathetic to their ideals. Their homes were laboratories, places to work through ideas without spending much money. The result of this ferment is a body of work unlike any other, a regional modernism fusing the building traditions of Cape Cod fishing towns with Bauhaus concepts and postwar experimentation.

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Venice Biennale 2014: NRJA to Establish First-Ever Database of Latvian Post-War Modernist Architecture

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The architects of NRJA have been chosen to curate Latvia’s participation at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Based on the assertion that “there is (no) in Lativa,” the pavilion’s Unwritten will confront the lack of research and evaluation of Lativan post-war modernist architecture.

As the curators describe, the insufficient acknowledgment of Lativan post-war modernist architecture is the result of a tricky situation. On one hand, “there is an aversion to anything that occurred during the period of Soviet occupation,” while on the other “there is wave of uncritical nostalgia for the country’s youth and childhood, as well as the superficial hipster joy at the exotic Soviet heritage.”

Though many of these structures would have already achieved “monument” status in other countries, there has been no evaluation of their importance to Latvia’s architectural heritage. At the threat of demolition, these post-war buildings risk never being researched, leaving a period of Latvia’s architectural history unrecorded.

Thus the curators of Unwritten plan to highlight the modernism in Lativa and spark a global discussion that will hopefully result in the largest-ever database for post-war Latvian modernist architecture.

Join the discussion, here.

Venice Biennale 2014: NRJA to Establish First-Ever Database of Latvian Post-War Modernist Architecture Restaurant “Sēnīte” (1967); Vidzeme highway 37.km / Linards Skuja, Andris Bite, G. Grīnbergs, R. Ozoliņš - Courtesy of The Museum of Architecture of Latvia
Venice Biennale 2014: NRJA to Establish First-Ever Database of Latvian Post-War Modernist Architecture Museum of the Occupation of Latvia (1970); Latviešu strēlnieku square 1, Rīga / Gunārs Lūsis-Grīnbergs, Dzintars Driba, Valdis Albergs © P.Alunāns, itl.rtu.lv
Venice Biennale 2014: NRJA to Establish First-Ever Database of Latvian Post-War Modernist Architecture Unwritten - exposition of Latvia in Arsenale as an analog representation of virtual information collection in real time and space. Over 2000 pages suspended in a frame fastened to existing beams, creating a sense of an information cloud that is moving in response to airflow. © NRJA
Venice Biennale 2014: NRJA to Establish First-Ever Database of Latvian Post-War Modernist Architecture Restaurant "Jūras Pērle" - Latvian architectural heritage monument representing uncritical nostalgia of youth and childhood time. Demolished in 1994, a proof of modernism architecture absorption. (1965); Jūrmala, Latvia / Josifs Goldenbergs © Mechanik, wikimapia.org
Venice Biennale 2014: NRJA to Establish First-Ever Database of Latvian Post-War Modernist Architecture Type project for gas station (1965); Daugavpils 74, Ogre © Zigmārs Jauja, NRJA
Venice Biennale 2014: NRJA to Establish First-Ever Database of Latvian Post-War Modernist Architecture Railway station (1977); Dubulti, Jūrmala, Latvia / Ilya Yavein © Jānis Vilniņš, lv.wikipedia.org
Venice Biennale 2014: NRJA to Establish First-Ever Database of Latvian Post-War Modernist Architecture Riga high-rises: Z-Towers (NRJA, 2004-2015), Preses nams (Jānis Vilciņš, Ābrams Misulovins, 1978), Saules akmens (ZENICO PROJEKTS, TECTUM, 2002-2004) © Uldis Lukševics, NRJA
Venice Biennale 2014: NRJA to Establish First-Ever Database of Latvian Post-War Modernist Architecture Former factory “Radiotehnika;” Kurzemes 3 Rīga, Latvia © Igors Nerušs, panoramio.com

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Architecture and Democracy

Foamboards

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

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