In 1969, Italian architecture firm Archizoom proposed some bold new designs for the historic centers of Europe, including this ”Residential Building for Historical Centre’ was envisioned as a way to get close and personal with some of Florence’s greatest architecture. Zoom ahead 30 years and this superarchitecture has become commonplace: witness the Eisenman/Gwathmey/Holl/Meier finalist entry […]
Category Archives: architecture
city bits
Born out of the Rome Reborn project, CityEngine is a powerful tool for modeling entire cities in perfect detail. Because of its roots in art history the aims of the project are to render every building, not just the most important landmarks. Their digital model contains 200 monuments painstakingly modeled by art historians, and over […]
Also posted in visualization
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house of roots
While visiting the picturesque city of Tainan (Taiwan) I was lucky to see the so-called Tainan Treehouse, a monument made from the ruins of the island’s first Dutch colonial trading port. What looks like a 17th Century warehouse has been completely overgrown with the island’s lush tropical vegetation, sinuous tree roots marrying themselves to the […]
Also posted in exhibit design, livingbreathing
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shadow sign
The sign for the Gallery Hotel Art in Florence is very discrete – you can only see it at night, and it’s fashioned from small bits of bent wire, which when lit from above by a spotlight project shadows that reveal the hotel’s name on the stucco facade of the building.
Also posted in 2d, 3d, augmented reality, lighting
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green walls 2
While in Paris I was fortunate to come across two green walls in the city: the first is a massive three-story vertical jungle atop a loading dock for a department store in the Marais by Patrick Blanc (above), the second was a billboard for a green cleaning product near the Sorbonne (below). While I generally […]
Also posted in energy, environment, livingbreathing, marketing, possessed products, retail
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water towers
In Chicago last weekend I took the Chicago Architecture Foundation‘s boat tour of the Chicago river – probably the most invigorating 90 minute experience of a city and its architecture I have ever had. Along the way the city reveals itself through an unexpected perspective, but nearly all the buildings – including some of the […]
Also posted in conviviality, livingbreathing
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holes in the wall
The Art Institute of Chicago houses a unique collection of meticulously fabricated miniature rooms, the so-called Thorne Miniature Rooms, to depict period interior spaces from the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries in the US, Europe, China and Japan. The 68 models a remarkably detailed at the scale of one inch to one foot (or […]
Also posted in art, possessed products
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touch map 2
Another beautiful bronze map in Braille – this time in my favorite city (Firenze), in the middle of Piazza Repubblica, a large cast map of the city center with tactile labels on monuments and ridges on the river to indicate the direction of the current. More on Flickr.
Also posted in 3d, perception, tangible, universal design, visualization
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