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2017 Fairy Tales Architecture Competition Winners

(via Archinect)

The Fairy Tales Architecture Competition concluded another successful edition Monday evening with the anticipated reveal of its 2017 winners. The competition had its biggest winners announcement yet in front of a live audience at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C.

Like every year, the submissions blur the line between fictional and non-fictional. Narratives are depicted as storybook-friendly illustrations, but refer to themes like real-life current events or evergreen topics like the creative process, mundane everyday activities, and relatable human emotions.

The esteemed jury — which included Marion Weiss, Jing Liu, Stefano Boeri, Michael Maltzan, National Building Museum Executive Director Chase W. Rynd, and Archinect’s very own Alexander Walter, among others — selected three prize winners, an American Institute of Architecture Students winner, and 10 honorable mentions.

1ST PRIZE: “Last Day” by Mykhailo Ponomarenko | Ukraine

Synopsis: “The entry utilizes classical painting techniques to create monumental landscapes with strange scifi megastructures inserted into them. The relatively mundane occurrences in the story make it feel like these wild scenes could in fact be real.”

From the winner: “Landscapes have always inspired me to put something weird, unreal and out of human scale into them. Something not feasible and not practical that contrasts with the natural surroundings, but also exists at the same scale. These satirical interventions lead to new ideas and feelings about nature – they make the viewer more aware about the environment and our harmful impact on it. We are flat surface creatures. Sometimes I feel that we crave it so much that the planet is going to be turned into pavement so cars can go anywhere, and our industries could continue expanding. The “Saturn Rings” in my proposal represent these flat surface desires but in a more poetic, optimistic, and friendly manner.” — Mykhailo Ponomarenko

2ND PRIZE: “City Walkers” by Terrence Hector | Chicago, IL

Synopsis: “‘City Walkers’ or ‘The Possibility of a Forgotten Domestication and Biological Industry’ tells a beautiful story of a sentient species of architecture that moves slower than humans can perceive. That doesn’t stop human beings from harnessing every possible bit of energy from “The Walkers” in addition to spawning settlements in their wake.”

From the winner: “The city in this story was an exploration of civilization and urbanism as humanity’s relationship with natural and biological systems that exist on a vastly longer timescale than the human lifespan. Creating a closer relationship time-wise between human and natural timeframes let me derive a new urban typology, which also acts as a parable of overexploitation. I was trying to work through an inferred genealogy from the USS Monitor to Hayao Miyazaki, working through a tradition of humanizing massive, aggressive machines.” – Terrence Hector

3RD PLACE: “Up Above” by Ariane Merle d’Aubigné & Jean Maleyrat | France

Synopsis: “‘Up Above’ is an imaginative story of refugees in the sky that build shanties on thin stilts, high in the clouds, to escape oppression, regulations, and inequality on the surface of the earth below.”

From the winners: “Revisiting the world of fairy tales by participating in the Blank Space competition was very stimulating. The short narrative takes a look at reality through the marvelous and the fantastic. We have tried to highlight contemporary issues and concerns by letting the supernatural burst into reality. Migration, the accumulation of wealth, overpopulation, the terrorist threat and pollution are some of the issues with which we live every day. We highlighted these concerns and our love of art through this poetic tale. Our generation often aspires to an “elsewhere”, in our “elsewhere” the rules of the game have changed.” — Ariane Merle d’Aubigné & Jean Maleyrat

AIAS Winner: “Playing House by Maria Syed & Adriana Davis – New Jersey Institute of Technology
(AIAS Prize is awarded to the highest scoring entry from an AIAS member)

Synopsis: “Playing House is an exercise in illustrating the destructive power of split-personality. Starting with traditional drawings of a modest dwelling, the drawings, and in turn, the narrative, devolve into a series of accusations, misunderstandings, and multiplicity.

From the winners: “Playing House embodies the idea that architecture can eclipse the personality of its occupants, where the character and style of the architecture dictate the mood of the inhabitants. The loud textures and discordant angles of the home sparked the idea for the story: transitioning from room to room manifests itself in drastic physical and psychological change. The drawings, the genesis of our submission, address architectural conventions of projection drawings, merged with the unconventional appearance of the home to create friction. This act is mirrored in the story, where a typical visit from a neighbor turns peculiar. The two creators of this project worked closely throughout their undergraduate career, creating an inseparable partnership for their first collaboration.” — Maria Syed & Adriana Davis

To read the winning entries in full, click here.


For more information, see Archinect.

Alexis Sablone Earns Three X Games Gold Medals and An Architecture Degree from MIT

Alexis Sablone, a recent graduate from MIT’s M.S. Arch.S. Program and architecture undergrad from Columbia University shares a letter to her 80 year-old self about her path, on and off the skateboard.

Written in January 2017, Alex addresses her future self and tells the tale of her love of skating, since she was 10, when she finally got a skateboard for her birthday. After years of hard work learning to ollie, flip and grind, she went to Camp Woodward, a gymnastic skating camp in Pennsylvania where she (after many dropouts of other girls) became the final female skater at the camp. At age 12, she was sponsored by Element! but swiftly found out that competitions were not her favorite thing.

She writes to herself…

AS:It wasn’t all rosy, though. I’ll bet you still cringe at the memory of Element flying you out to California for a competition when you were 13. You were so nervous that your legs were practically shaking on the board. That’s probably why you botched your first trick and sprained your ankle. God, that was traumatic. Right then and there, you swore you’d never do another competition.

and

AS:You weren’t ready for that, not yet. You wanted to skate on your own terms, back in your garage. You didn’t want the pressure of getting money and free gear and having the sponsors expecting something in return.

So you left them. Just like that. You moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, and left all your sponsors behind.

You studied architecture at Columbia. You worked your ass off, barely slept, and loved every single second of it. Of course you still skated, but you were just doing it for you, without the weight of expectations. A fresh start.

And in 2008, when she graduated, she was presented with a crossroads—to skate professionally or work at a random desk job—which led her to win three X Games Gold Medals. With the winnings, she put herself through graduate school at MIT where she graduated with a Master of Architecture.

In her sign off, she urges her future self to “never stop creating.” Which we now extend to you!

#architecturestories #studyarchitecture

Thank you, Alexis Sablone for sharing your story and allowing us in to hear it. What an inspiration!


Excerpts pulled from the article published in The Players’ Tribune Letter to my Future Self.

 

Building Diversity Within Austin's Architecture Community

(via KUT.org)

When you think of architecture, you probably think about the style and functionality of a building. You may not always think about the people who drew up the plans. But their perspectives can help shape the way our cities look. In Austin, African-American women are hoping to diversify the field of architecture.

A couple weeks ago, Devanne Pena made a surprising discovery.

“I just became a licensed architect,” Pena said. “I found out that I am the second black woman to be licensed in Austin, Texas altogether, which is nuts.”

Pena was keeping her eye on a directory of African-American architects maintained by The University of Cincinnati, but that directory is an unofficial record. We turned to some official record-keepers to see if Pena was really the second black female architect currently working in Austin.

Glenn Garry with the Texas Board Of Architecture Examiners said Pena is set to become the third black woman architect licensed in Austin after some standard administrative procedures, but there could be even more that aren’t accounted for.

“So it looks like Ms. Pena is almost correct,” Garry said. “Our database has a field for whether you’re male or female, for what your race or ethnicity is, stuff like that. Those fields are totally optional though, so we have a lot of people who don’t answer any of that stuff, so we can’t – we don’t know.”

Still, the data does point to an overall lack of diversity in the field. Out of the more than 1,100 licensed architects in Austin, only seven reported their race as African-American.

undefinedYou may be thinking, why does any of this matter? What difference does it makes if the person designing a building is a man, a woman, or a person of color? We posed that question to Donna Carter, the first black woman architect on record to be currently licensed in Austin. “The form can be very, very important to how a community and a culture survives,” Carter said.

Donna Carter, the first practicing black female architect in Austin, says architecture provides an outlet for cultural expression and community-building.

Donna Carter, the first practicing black female architect in Austin, says architecture provides an outlet for cultural expression and community-building.

“The form can be very, very important to how a community and a culture survives,” Carter said.

To Carter, architecture is more than just technical design and planning. It’s a mode of creative expression, a way of defining your community and your idea of home. Read more

Architectural Filmmaking and Storytelling with Ian Harris

Frame by frame, moment by moment, we record the world around us through our senses. We experience the warmth of light through a window, the sound of our footsteps in a hallway, the texture of a handrail, the aroma of something cooking in the kitchen. These senses create the full experience of the spaces we inhabit. They each play a role in the story of the space that we occupy. With the technological advancements in creating and distributing video we now have a way to tell the story of a design, the imagined or realized space can come alive at 24 frames per second. In the profession of architecture, video provides a new way of communicating the experience of the spaces and places designers create for those that may not be able to experience them first hand.

StudyArchitecture met with Ian Harris, director of Archiculture and co-founder of video production agency, Arbuckle Industries, to chat about teaching video to architecture students as a way to expand the way they think and talk about design.

Preparing to interview David Rockwell of Rockwell Group

Read more

Learn About Your City's Architecture By Playing PokémonGo

(via FastCoDesign)

Photo: Flickr user Teemu008]

Photo: Flickr user Teemu008]

Mark Wilson 7.12.16 | 7:00am

I’m eating a physics-defying cracker-crust pizza in Bloomington, Illinois, at a local favorite spot, Lucca Grill. I know the pizza well, but nothing else about the area. I’m only here as a quick pitstop on the way back to Chicago from a family reunion downstate.

And that’s when my I get the itch. I need more Pokémon. So I load Pokémon Go to see if there’s any monsters to catch in the area. (Okay, that’s a lie. I’ve already had it loaded. It hasn’t not been loaded in the past 48 hours.) As it happens, the bar is dry, but just down the street, there’s a Pokéstop (a place where you can check in to get free power-ups). And for some reason, that Pokéstop is raining flower petals. It’s special, and I don’t know why.

Photo: Flickr user Teemu008

Photo: Flickr user Teemu008

So I make my way down a quiet side street to explore on foot. And that’s when I come across it: the White Building. It’s an anomalously striking historic landmark, built in 1894, five stories of immaculately preserved commercial loft space, built bySamuel R. White, the same contractor who would construct many buildings for the Pullman Palace Car Company.

You won’t find the White Building on Google Maps or Streetview, but it is inPokémon Go. I collect three Pokéballs as I experience this little piece of Illinois history.

I wasn’t alone. In our collective hunt for silly cartoon monsters, Pokémon Goplayers are discovering history and architecture left and right. Users described their discoveries over the weekend, from Korean pagodas, to a Donner Party memorial in California, to the urban landscape of Perth at night, all documented on Twitter.

This is very much by the game’s design. Before Pokémon Go had any Pokémon in it, it was a location-based, turf-claiming game called Ingress. As John Hanke, VP of Niantic Labs, told the Guardian in 2014, he “wanted people to look around with fresh perspective on the places they passed by every day, looking for the unusual, the little hidden flourish or nugget of history.”

That’s why Pokémon Go is loaded with so many Pokéstops at impressive buildings, street murals, and historic landmarks. Many were sourced from Google Maps data, while the rest were submitted and peer-reviewed by Ingress players over a course of four years. You can read about the criteria for inclusion here, which includes an emphasis on locations with “a cool story, a place in history, or educational value” and “unique architecture.”

 

Read more

Architecture Guide App for Pittsburgh

Wouldn’t it be nice, when visiting a new city, to just be able to pull out your phone and have the city’s history at your fingertips? Now, you can! At least in Pittsburgh thanks to over,under! #theresanappforthat

(via Architects Newspaper)

The Boston-based interdisciplinary architecture firm over,under has launched a mobile architecture guide app called Jaunt Pittsburgh. The app provides navigation to a curated list of historic and contemporary architecture throughout the city, and can be downloaded for free for from Apple’s App Store or Google play.

Users can search and find architecture in three ways. Projects can be sorted through 1) a grid of icons, 2) a sortable list of architects, location, date, or other characteristics, and 3) a navigable map. Along with helping users find buildings throughout the city, the app includes photographs and historical information. Each project also includes a list additional readings outside of the app.

Jaunt_Map1_crop

Courtesy of over,under

“It has unusual breadth—it showcases Pittsburgh buildings as well as industrial and infrastructural sites dating from the city’s founding to the present,” says Martin Aurand, Architecture Librarian and Archivist at Carnegie Mellon University, and collaborator on the app. “It includes rare archival images from the Carnegie Mellon University Architecture Archives, and is particularly strong in its inclusion of modern and contemporary projects.”

Jaunt_Entry-645x1147

over,under worked with students from Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture and from the Carnegie Mellon Qatar campus on the app. The interdisciplinary practice works on architecture, urban design, graphic identity, and publications. The firm produces everything from architectural films and mobile apps to building and urban design proposals.

Jaunt_Grid-645x1147

USF Architecture Grads Design Award-Winning Disaster Relief Shelter

(via WUSF)

In 2009, University of South Florida School of Architecture and Community Design students Sean Verdecia and Jason Ross watched Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. What struck them was the lack of quick, proper shelter for the victims of an event like this.

Sean Verdecia, left, and Jason Ross worked with USF's technology transfer office to patent their design and develop a business plan., HANDOUT

Sean Verdecia, left, and Jason Ross worked with USF’s technology transfer office to patent their design and develop a business plan., HANDOUT

“It started with disasters,” Verdecia said. “We noticed that there’s a second disaster, where people are given these shelters that lack human dignity. We thought that maybe we could use our architecture skills to maybe come up with something new that could solve this issue.”

Even after graduating, the pair continued working on the problem and came up with an answer: AbleNook. “AbleNook is a modular disaster relief dwelling that you can put together without tools in under two hours,” Verdecia said. The duo was encouraged by professor Mark Weston to take their idea to USF’sTechnology Transfer Office, which helped them form a start-up company.

What also came in handy was a crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign they held in 2012 to build a second prototype for field testing. “We started getting these $5,000 donations pouring in and that was like, the light bulb when off and were like, ‘Oh my gosh, people really love this idea, we need to keep working on this,’” Verdecia said. “At its heart, it’s a humanitarian project and people respond to that.”  What makes AbleNook unique is that it does a lot of things other shelters can’t do.

“Maybe they can’t be deployed on an uneven terrain, or you need a whole crew to take it out to the field to assemble it, or it’s not insulated, or it’s not secure, or it doesn’t provide human dignity,” Verdecia said, adding, “when we developed this design, we wanted it to be able to check all those boxes.”

The smallest version of AbleNook has an interior space of 64 square feet, is 20 feet long and about 13 feet high, with ceilings that are 10 feet high. “It’s made out of aircraft grade aluminum and structurally insulated panels that you can just click together without any tools,” Verdecia said. If there was a need for a number of shelters to be sent to a disaster site, they can be sent out en masse on the back of a truck and delivered to a scene. “These would be shipped out from our facility, flat packed, almost like an IKEA product and then when it arrives, it’s more like a Lego product that you put together yourself,” Verdecia said.

The AbleNook has thermal insulation and a number of frosted glass windows and natural ventilation techniques to keep the interior warm or cool, depending on the climate. The expandable design means additional units can be set up side by side or on top of one another. It’s also attractive enough with an arched roof and a porch that AbleNook can be used as a portable office, classroom, or even as a prefabricated home.

“We see this kind of like a Mercedes, that you have two versions of the Mercedes,” Verdecia said. “You have the utility version and then you have the luxury version, so you can take the same base platform and you can have it as a delivery vehicle or you can have it as this luxury SUV.”

Read more.

(via WUSF)

To learn more about AbleNook, check out their website!  www.ablenook.com

If you want to know more about the USF Architecture Program, check out their profile page on StudyArchitecture.com!

 

USC Professor Develops Architecture-Inspired Video Game, Block'hood

(via USC News)

Architects are no strangers to technology. Even so, Jose Sanchez is a little less than traditional when it comes to his design tools.

Sanchez, an assistant professor at the USC School of Architecture, has earned acclaim for his architecture-inspired video game Block’hood.

Released for Windows and Mac in April, the indie title just won “best gameplay” at the 2016 Games for Change Festival. The annual event recognizes innovative games that explore health, education and social issues.

“It is really humbling to receive this award among incredible contenders like That Dragon, Cancer and Life Is Strange, Sanchez said. “The jury recognized how the mechanics of the game are fundamentally defining its ecological narrative. It means a lot for someone like me coming from architecture to be recognized outside my field, validating all the effort in attempting interdisciplinary research.”

Cost and effects

The game lets players stack pieces and construct communities of their own design. Each piece has its own particular costs and effects: apartments, solar panels and shops all play different roles in the health of your building. Ecology is a key concern, with players being forced to think about greywater use and the effect of growth on the local ecology in a bid to maintain successful communities.

Sanchez was inspired by games like SimCity and Minecraft, open sandboxes that let players create their own designs. He was interested in exploring how gameplay could extend the kinds of debates architects have about urban planning to a wider group of people: What leads communities to weaken or decay? How do you take care of waste? How do you balance needs like electricity, jobs or food with population growth?

Asking these kinds of questions are “grand challenges” for architecture, Sanchez said. But he also wanted this game to appeal to more than just architects. He designed it to be playable for people ages 10 and up, with the hope that it could provoke these ideas in the minds of future creators.

“I think the architects of tomorrow will grow up playing Minecraft or games like this, where the ideas of systems are more pressing,” Sanchez said. “The game can simulate and model notions of gentrification, social change and segregation. These are problems that architects have to deal with at all times — and it’s doing it in a creative way.”

Architecture and society

As a model for how architecture can affect society, Block’hood is fairly unique. Computational design has long been a part of the field; Sanchez said he was drawn to that side of the discipline from early on. He pursued a master’s degree that allowed him to simulate biological systems, using procedural generation to create complex, organic forms that would change shape under different conditions.

At the same time that he was studying architecture, Sanchez was learning programming. He used specialized software to explore the concepts that attracted his interest. But most of this software was designed for people with technical backgrounds — something he felt set a high barrier for entry to artists, tinkerers or others who would also enjoy exploring those concepts.

“If you use software designed for more people and people who aren’t highly technical, that software needs to teach you how to play,” Sanchez said. Create software that teaches people how to use it, and voila: Your program starts to look like a game.

It took a lot of experimentation to develop Block’hood. Along the way, Sanchez received help from Gentaro Makinoda, a graduate student at the USC School of Architecture, as well as Bryan Zhang and Alan Hung, graduates of USC Games. Sanchez collaborates frequently with the USC Games program more widely, where he gives lectures.

“I think Block’hood is a wonderful example of how many faculty at USC are involved in innovation in games,” said Tracy Fullerton, USC Games director. “It’s so great to have an architecture professor doing such deep work in games here.”

Want to learn more about the USC Architecture Program? Check out their profile on StudyArchitecture.com!

Michigan Professor Catie Newell's Illuminating Installation 'Overnight'

(via New York Times)

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A photo exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art offers views of parts of Detroit neighborhoods before they’re fully illuminated by new street lights.

Titled “Overnight,” the exhibition by Detroit-based architect Catie Newell opens Saturday at the Ann Arbor museum and runs through Nov. 6. The assistant professor at the university’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning is fascinated with light and darkness.

“I’ve always been interested in darkness and the night,” she said in a statement. “Colors look different. Things have a different hierarchy, based on what’s lit and what’s not.”

The Public Lighting Authority was set up several years ago in Detroit to deal broken lights across the city. Tens of thousands of new LED lights have been installed and about 65,000 are expected to be up by the end of 2016. They’re twice as bright and use less electricity than older lights.

Fewer than half of the city’s 88,000 streetlights were believed to be working before the efforts began. Burned out bulbs, deteriorated infrastructure and the theft of copper wiring by people seeking to profit from sales of the metal for scrap left swaths of the city in the dark.

The exhibition at the Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery includes copper, aluminum and LEDs — a reference to the city’s streetlights. And as Detroit’s new streetlights come are installed, Newell said she looks for spots of light surrounded by darkness to document.

(via New York Times)

More on Michiganradio.org!

Check out University of Michigan’s Taubman College on StudyArchitecture.com!

Tulane Architecture Students Give Local Bookstore New Life

(via News from Tulane)

Tulane Architecture Students Give Local Bookstore New Life

When Vera Warren Williams enters her freshly renovated Community Book Center at 2523 Bayou Road in New Orleans, she can scarcely believe it is the same space that she has struggled to maintain since opening the Seventh Ward location in 2003.

With its expanded children’s area, performance spaces, a gallery for artwork, contemporary shelving and African-inspired furnishings, she envisions the center as a hub for school and day care center field trips.

“Our focus has always been on children and young people but the new makeover will allow us to reach even more young people and address literacy at an even younger age,” Williams said.

Williams is grateful to the Albert Jr. and Tina Small City Center, the community design center that is part of the Tulane University School of Architecture. As part of their final design-build project, 14 students did the bulk of the work, from client and community interviews, to design, fabrication and installation.

The process began last year when City Center, which provides high-quality design assistance for nonprofit groups that are traditionally underserved by the design profession, put out its annual request for proposals. Williams’ proposal was one of over 20 project proposals submitted.

“There was a lot of enthusiasm and excitement about this project,” said Emilie Taylor, design build manager and professor of practice. “Our goal was to create a space that reflects the center’s identity as an African American-centered educational home, while becoming more accessible for new families and visitors coming to this rapidly changing neighborhood.”

Williams said she feels fortunate to have been chosen as one of City Center’s projects.

“Until now it had been an uphill battle trying to make the space appealing and comfortable while staying on top of changes in the book industry. But today I feel we have a new focus, a redirection. For us, this makeover is a blessing.”

Community Book Center will hold a reopening celebration on Wednesday (April 27), from 4 to 6 p.m.

Check out Tulane’s School of Architecture Profile Page on StudyArchitecture.com!

(via News from Tulane)