Renovating With Paint

Achievement First Endeavor Middle School in Brooklyn was recently renovated using only paint. This project was completed by Pentagram, with help from the original architects of the building, Rogers Marvel Architects. Below are some excerpts from the post at Pentagram's website.

"Character building is the foundation of Endeavor’s teaching philosophy, and the environmental graphics at the school have been inspired by a series of motivational slogans used by its teachers. Achievement First originally produced these slogans—“All of us will learn,” “Whatever it takes,” etc.—as colorful stickers that students were encouraged to affix to their books and lockers. Scher has enlarged these into supergraphics that help define the interior spaces. The graphics appear as a series of equations (“Education = Choice,” “Education = Freedom”) in the halls, quotations running around the perimeter of the gymnasium, and most noticeably, climbing the main staircase at a front of the school, where they are visible through windows to the street. As in the program Scher designed for the school of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, the Endeavor graphics become part of the architecture and help the building become a participant in the learning process: celebrating language, “talking” to students, encouraging them to do better, creating a unique environment they can call their own."

"All of this was accomplished with little expense. As every homeowner knows, paint can be a simple and economical solution for transforming a space. At Endeavor the process required thorough planning. Using the existing color palette, Scher and her team applied the colors to a scale model of the school to conceive of the patterns and placement for specific installations. In rooms like the cafeteria, the bands of color are used to define and enhance the architecture, creating an illusion of depth that expands the space. In other areas, the painting of typography, set in Rockwell, is intricate and detailed."

The Third & The Seventh

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

The above video was recommended by Jim Williams. You probably already received the email, but I figured it might be good to post it on the blog so it will be easy to locate in the future for reference. You can find out more about The Third & The Seventh here.

Acasusso's House by Ignacio Montaldo Architects

I know you already got the email, but I thought it might be nice to post it on the blog in case someone needs to reference this in the future. Jim William's comments are below, as well as images of the project. To view the post from The Architectural Review, click here.

"A beautifully executed small project of humble materials and striking clarity. Notice the attention to the sculptural stair handrail. Inspires me to ensure that our design development documents are clearly defined."

Source: The Architectural Review

Project Name: Acasusso's House

Architect/Designer: Ignacio Montaldo Architects

Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Without Bounds or Limits

The Art Institute of Chicago is exhibiting The Plan of Chicago on the plan's 100th anniversary. The site includes a history of Daniel Burnham's work, minutes and correspondence from the planning committees, drafts of the plan, and images of the plan. All of that can be found here at the exhibition's website. A quote from the introduction is below:

"On July 4, 1909, Daniel H. Burnham and the Commercial Club of Chicago unveiled the culmination of three years of work and a decade of preparation. The Plan of Chicago, considered a fundamental urban planning document, presented one group’s radical vision for a more beautiful, orderly, and unified city. And with its lush illustrations and rousing prose, it dared its readers to not only imagine a different Chicago, but to strive to create it themselves."

Presentation flier, Feb.03 2009

Renzo Piano addition to Ronchamp Du Haut

I think Renzo Piano's proposed addition to this master piece looks respectful and elegant.  If the building is anything like the rest of the Workshops CV I'm sure it will be a success.    Check out the link and let me know your thoughts.  

-Ryan

Tim Brown on Creativity and Play

This talk was given at Serious Play 2008 held at Art Center in Pasadena, CA. Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, which is an "innovation and design" firm which is highly respected for its creative thought. It is well worth watching, and only about 28 minutes. Enjoy, and feel free to post comments and reactions.

Recessionary Design: A Boom Time for Creative Energy

According to the International Herald Tribune, economic downturns can be great opportunities for design. Read the full article here. Excerpts are included below.

"If you rewind through design history, many of the most exhilarating periods have been during economic downturns. Take the 1930s, when the modern movement flourished despite the depression. Or the late 1940s, when Italy emerged as one of the world's most dynamic design centers during its postwar reconstruction."

"The recent changes within design itself make those skills even more useful. The 20th-century model of design was devoted to the creation of things - both objects and images - but designers are now also applying their expertise to systems. This means that designers will be called upon to advise recession-struck companies on how to cut costs without impeding efficiency. They will also be asked to exploit the entrepreneurial opportunities offered by the recession by developing austerity-friendly products and services."

"Resilient though some areas of design will be, others have already been hit by recession. One is 'design-art.' Half of the lots at Sotheby's design auction in London last month were unsold, and dealers are nervous about the prospects for next month's Design Miami fair. But what's the most exciting role for design? Developing new business concepts and cracking social problems, or making expensive, uncomfortable furniture?"

Koolhaas vs. The Cleaning Lady

"Koolhaas Houselife" is a film about Rem Koolhaas' Maison à Bordeaux, and looks into what it is really like to live in this architectural masterpiece. The film examines the house through the eyes of Guadalupe Acedo, the resident "cleaning lady."

Below is a review from We Make Money Not Art:

The peculiarity of the movie is that it presents this icon of contemporary architecture through the eyes of Guadalupe Acedo, the cleaning lady, and the other people who look after the building. The charming and devoted cleaning lady struggles with the heavy curtains, the narrow staircase, the either oddly shaped or gigantic glass panels, etc. Clearly this house has not been designed for the people who have the bad idea to live outside of architecture magazines. Once in a while you can hear Guadalupe whisper gems such as: ‘If I had money, I would not build a house like this.’

One of the highlights of the video is this snippet of interview which shows a Koolhaas surprised by Guadalupe’s take and treatment of his building: ‘You see here two systems colliding: the system of the platonic conception of cleaning with the platonic conception of architecture.’

More information and the movie trailer can be found here.

The Innovators: How Successful Companies Drive Business Innovation

You can access this report from here. Below are some key findings addressed by the report:

• Customer-facing business processes are the main targets for innovation.
• Generating good innovation ideas is hard; getting them to adoption is even harder.
• Survey respondents say that a culture of innovation is critical, yet they disagree over what exactly it means.
• Technology investments are being directed towards tools that will increase information sharing and boost productivity.
• Inability to prove return on investment (ROI) continues to prevent wider deployment of innovation tools.
• Companies are looking to increase their level of collaboration with research bodies and universities, while scaling back their consulting expenditure.

Eight Ways to Save Design Conferences

According to Core77, "Design conferences have become exercises in regenerated, wasteful spectacle." Alissa Walker, Core77's resident design conference junkie, presents some ideas of how to improve design conferences. You can read the article here.

As Architecture and New Media Get To Know Each Other

Super duper video on the design of the GreenPix Zero Energy media wall in Beijing.

Is Sustainability Boring?

From the May issue of Abitare, an interesting article written by Michael Braungart, who is one-half of the cradle-to-cradle pioneers McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. The following is an excerpt from the article:

But I can tell you, sustainability is boring. It is just the minimum. Like when you were asked: “How is your relationship with your girlfriend?” What do you say? Sustainable? I’d say: “I am so sorry for you.”

Check out the full article here.

It's the Economy Stupid

Robert Blinn has written "a macroeconomic primer for design(ers) and sustainability" for Core77. Click here to read the article.

An Invisible Memorial

Below is a synopsis of the project from www.markuskinson.de:

"Touched echo" is a minimal medial intervention in public space. The visitors of the Brühl's Terrace (Dresden, Germany) are taken back in time to the night of the terrible air raid on 13th February 1945. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions. While leaning on the balustrade the sound of airplanes and explosions is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through their arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction).

Disposable Dishes

When it comes to entertaining and special occasions, eco-minded consumers can be torn by two apparently conflicting desires: the need to be green and the easy clean-up made possible by disposable dishes. Thanks to a new innovation from VerTerra, however, that conflict can finally be put to rest.

Architecture that makes energy

The Dynamic Tower is a skyscraper that is also a wind generator.

Changing the Game with Innovations

Thoughts on innovation with Procter & Gamble's CEO, A. G. Lafley - which includes the following question and answer.

"Q. And yet only half of your product innovations succeed. Why isn’t the rate higher?

A. I don’t really want it to be. Human nature is such that, if we push our people to drive the batting average up, they’ll try to hit more safely, take a shorter swing, go for the singles instead of home runs.

But we try to set milestones that innovations must meet at every step along the development process. As soon as they miss one, we allocate the resources to another product moving through the funnel. That’s another difference from the old days, when P.& G. let bad ideas go too far."

Click on the title to read the interview from the NYTimes.

Two Architectures - Video

The architecture theorist Marcos Novak and Bruce Sterling discuss about Novak’s concepts such as “trans-vergence”, “trans-architecture”, “trans-modernity”, “liquid architecture”, “navigable music”, “habitable cinema”, “archimusic”. Architectonic explorations into expanded, mixed and alternative virtual reality.

Design and the Elastic Mind

"Design and the Elastic Mind,” a current exhibition at the New York MoMA running through May 12, brings together a wide range of design, art, architectural, computational and scientific experiments that challenge us to stretch our minds and see how design participates in science and science can be engaged in design.