stumbled across the book Paper in Architecture by Shigeru Ban and was really impressed with his use of paper tubes as a building material. The recycled paper that goes into what is essentially a reinforced cardboard tube is quite an impressive alternative to wood and other common raw materials. Nevertheless, there were a few obstacles in the way of his initial use of the concept, mainly passing Japan’s strict building code (a problem he would face again later in Germany).

Once in use, Ban found an additional benefit to the concept in that the tubing itself could be manufactured anywhere instead of relying on transportation. This led to designing various disaster relief shelter structures that required little effort to manufacture and employ.

Traditionally, one of the main problems with previously designed relief shelters is that they used metal for the framing and metal can be sold or stolen, therefore defeating the purpose and possibly making things worse for the victims using them. Ban’s designs alleviate this basic problem and have since been used for relief projects ranging from the Kobe earthquake to Rwanda. His paper framed tents and temporary structures from churches to town halls have all met with much success.

Ban’s commitment to humanitarian efforts and sustainable design are a credit to his industry. Far too often we only see the cutting edge in architecture applied to million dollar projects — the results of which we all enjoy for their obvious qualities, but at this point in time, the concept of the common good is a subject all fields of design could stand to focus on a little closer. After all,  good design can solve any problem as Shigeru Ban has clearly shown us.

lip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X is an exhibition of seventy little magazines that incited great change in architectural culture. I wish I could take a peek inside the magazines, but unless you’ve actually made it to the exhibition (which ended last January), you’re left to feast your eyes on some of the covers above. Many mouth-watering photos from the exhibition can also be found on the Clip/Stamp/Fold Flickr feed.

(Also, check out the rare Nueva Forma magazine directly above, circa 1967 – 1975 — this was the very cover that inspired the name for our record label.)

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 exhibition’s annotated timeline serves as a cross-section, tracking the progression, upheavals, and transformations of the magazines. A selection of original magazines surveys the variety of unique formats, re-introducing rare examples from private collections, and is supplemented by complete facsimiles for visitors to browse. Audio interviews with editors and designers of these publications punctuate the room, with transcriptions appearing in the Storefront’s newsletter. In addition, many of these editors and designers have been invited to respond to the exhibition through the series Little Magazines / Small Talks held at the gallery. An implicit aim of the exhibition is to invite reflection on contemporary uses of media in architecture. Assembling all these remarkable documents for the first time offers a unique view of a key period of architectural innovation and challenges today’s architects to provoke a similar intensity.

cosa Village Pods are shelters modeled after Origami Architecture, inspired by the art of paper folding. The Folded Homes® technology is to “take flat sheets that have been stamped into a set of two-dimensional parts, fold them along their crease lines to make three-dimensional parts of the structure, and assemble those parts together to create a sturdy, rigid-walled shelter.” Made of 100% extruded plastic, these shelters are made for all seasons. Passive ventilation cools the Pod in hot environments, and its triangular windows can either be clear or opaque, giving the interior a wonderfully soft diffused light. These pods serve a multitude of purposes, from emergency to personal use applications, and were originally designed as humanitarian shelters to be used around the world since 2002.

For the first 3 ½ years, CEO Markus Robinson was the president and CEO of Icosa Village Inc. which pioneered folded-shelter technology. Through the start of 2006 Markus was directly involved in the installation of more than 140 Icosa Village Pod shelters in six countries. Lessons learned from the summer 2004 construction of a five month 40-Pod village at Forum Barcelona Exhibition in Spain and the winter deployment of 50 Pod shelters to Pakistani quake victims high up in the Himalayas in December 2005 with MSF (Médecins sans Frontiers / Doctors without Borders) were pivotal to Markus’ understanding of the challenges that must be addressed in large volume shelter deployments. Markus’ shelter-technology mantra following the Pakistan deployment was ‘simplify, simplify, simplify!’ and a return to the drawing board.

I wouldn’t mind having one of these as a design studio or a futuristic green house. A Brooklyn, New York tavern owner actually built a pod on the roof of his apartment just so he could practice drumming without disturbing his neighbors. It was, of course, fully insulated with sound-dampening insulation. Totally sweet.

n 2006, an eleven-mile wide, ten-foot tall blue fence was built around Hackney Wick and Stratford in East London. The thick layers of plywood were painted with a special kind of high gloss, water resistant blue. Andy Beckett from The Guardian called it “the colour of the future.” That future is a temporary city-within-a-city; the playground for the 2012 Olympic park. The blue security barrier was installed for public safety reasons during demolition, and has recently been taken down and replaced with a wire mesh fence. One might be left to wonder, what happened to all those miles of futuristic blue?

StudioSuperniche, a collective of architects and designers based in London saw this as an opportunity to develop the Olympic Legacy Toolkit, which they described as:

The beginning of a catalogue of temporary structures to be fabricated out of the blue plywood designed to facilitate local occupation of the site post-Games, activate the vacant plots and allow communities to reclaim the vast empty landscape as their own.

Focusing on the niche user-groups of London’s Lower Lea Valley – from bird-watchers to market stall-holders, allotment keepers to model boaters – this collection of urban furniture will populate the site in the wake of the Games, offering a provisional set of tools to stimulate an evolutionary model of local participatory development.

Their designs are wonderful, and it makes me sad that the structures are only temporary. Plywood is plywood, though. Isn’t the ping pong table just awesome? The idea of finding secondary usage for things that might otherwise end up as landfill is not only super sustainable, but a beautiful art form in itself. Looking forward to more from this lovely London collective.

uthor Paul Collins once saw Tom Kelly’s house many years ago. It was built of 51,000 beer bottles in the year 1901. Collins recounted, “Dipsomania is a boon for such builders: a similar honeycomb-like structure of bottles and mortar, built by a pharmacist in Hillsville, Virginia in the 1940s, was nicknamed The House of a Thousand Headaches for all the hangovers it held.” That made me laugh. So yeah, people build stuff out of bottles, that we know, but few know of one particularly laudable endeavor undertaken by Heineken Breweries: the WOBO (World Bottle).

It has been exactly half a decade since its epiphanic inception, an idea that was mass-produced three years after Alfred Heineken walked the beaches of Curaçao in 1960. Bottles had accumulated in the sand as ineffectual discards, many of which were produced by Heineken. The island had no economic means of recycling nor returning the bottles to their makers. In Holland, the average bottle was used 30 times before being discarded. In Curaçao, bottles were used once and thrown out.

As the story goes, there usually exists a lack of affordable housing in lower-class societies. Alfred, the compassionate chairman, envisioned a solution to the problem and asked Dutch architect John Habraken to design the WOBO, a “brick that holds beer.” Martin Pawley noted in his book Garbage Housing that the WOBO was “the first mass production container ever designed from the outset for secondary use as a building component.”

The WOBO’s interlocking design was three years in the making, made to work like brick and mortar construction. Habraken explained that one of the construction challenges “was to find a way in which corners and openings could be made without cutting bottles.” A test run of 100,000 WOBOs were produced in 1963 in two sizes (500 & 350 mm) with the smaller bottle acting similarly to a half brick. A thousand bottles bonded with cement mortar could build a 10″ x 10″ shack, and construction would be simple because the instructions could be printed right on the beer label.

In 1965, a prototype glass shed (above) was built near Alfred Heineken’s villa in in Noordwijk, Netherlands. Sadly, it is the first and only WOBO house in existence. The WOBO did not impress the company’s marketing department and the whole thing eventually fell to the wayside. How could Heineken market itself as a premium beer if it would end up lining the walls of a poor person’s home? Other questions soon followed: What if a bottle fell loose and hit a passerby, or worse yet, an entire bottle house collapsed? Who would be responsible? Perhaps Mr. Heineken was too ahead of his time, however, the WOBO still remains an amazing example of forward thinking in utilitarian and humanitarian design.

Sources: Wikipedia; Cabinet; & Inhabitat

ame across this amazingly beautiful library called the José Vasconcelos Library, or otherwise known as the “Megabiblioteca.” Named after the former philosopher, presidential candidate and president of the National Library of Mexico, this library looks like something straight out of the Matrix. I love it!

Apparently this library has a little bit of controversy surrounding it’s history that I thought would be worth mentioning. At one point in March 2007, the library was shut down due to varying defects of construction, among other irregularities. Now I’m no building architect, but from what I’ve read, the defects were due to some misplaced marble slabs, (or something along those lines) which apparently was reason enough to shut the library down for almost 2 years. Not until November of 2008 (roughly 22 months after it was closed, and the defects dealt with), did the library reopen to the public.

I think what I love most about this library is the industrial, post-modern look and feel of the architecture. Very modular and “grid-like.” Everything is so open and vast. I’m definitely going to have to take a trip to visit, at least for the sake of photographing it. The funny thing is that I initially thought this library looked like the perfect setting for some Benedict Redgrove photograph, which you may recall from a previous post we did on Benedict Redgrove (definitely worth checking out). Also, thanks to clinker for sharing this beautiful library through his flickr feed. Very inspiring.

arlier this year, high fashion house Hermès and iconic Monaco yacht brand Wally unveiled a revolutionary mega yacht named WHY, an acronym for Wally Hermès Yachts. This 58 metre-long, 38 metre-wide motor yacht is supposed to redefine the art of living on the sea with a low environmental impact. The resulting form and function is quite impressive: photovoltaic panels on the glass hull sides, a massive roof opening that operates like Venetian blinds, a 25 metre-long forward end swimming pool (with thermo regulated water, obviously), and a massive promenade on deck.

While altogether super rad, I’m not quite sold on the interior. My main critique is that the spiral staircase looks too Guggenheim-y of the Nora Roberts variety, you know, the kind of stairs that would be staged with chintzy romance and roses. I had expected a more minimal straight-flight design. I’m sure all the discriminating billionaires out there would customize everything to their own needs though, equipped with the necessities of diamonds and ponies. My only question is, where is the helipad?

In terms of sustainability, WHY requires less power at cruising speed than a boat of equal size. Its diesel-electric propulsion is the most efficient motorization today, and the surface of the photovoltaic panels, almost 900 square metres, covers most of the boat’s auxiliary system needs. If I were to spend mad scrilla on a WHY yacht, I wouldn’t feel so bad knowing that I’m saving up to 200 tons of diesel per year. Maybe in a few years, the Colorcubic headquarters will be cruising at a lovely twelve knots, saving diesel while redefining the art of working on the sea. I won’t hold my breath.

Absolutely love this. Found on Studio GloriusVandeVen. This reminds me of an older post we did on Takenobu Igarashi and three-dimensional type.

“The Alphabet consists of several buildings located near our studio in Amsterdam Slotervaart. T-shirts with this alphabet can be ordered on www.sleezysleeves.com.”