Categories
Awesomeness Inspirational Designs

The Domestic Transformer

With a population of over seven million people living in Hong Kong, space is a precious commodity. Architect Gary Chang played with the ideas of space (or the lack thereof) when he transformed the tiny tenement apartment that he used to share with his family into a fantastic, modern living space. Using an ingenious sliding wall system, he is able to create up to 24 different “rooms” in the apartment. He calls it the Domestic Transformer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak

As green as Chang’s redesign might be it didn’t come cheap – the apartment cost USD 45,000 to purchase but design changes added a further USD 218,000 to the bill.

[via GOOD]

Categories
Arty Sports Video Clips

Breathtaking Footage of the Cape Town Stadium

Time really has flown by, the 2010 Soccer World Cup is just two weeks away. Within 33 months, the brand new 68 000-seater Cape Town Stadium was erected. Made out of 93 000 cubic metres of concrete, some 9 000 glass panels, and the sweat of 2500 workers, the stadium is quite the spectacle. The bill for this massive project was a an equally whopping R4,4-billion.

African Renaissance, a local film production company has put together fantastic time-lapse footage that not only shows the beauty of the stadium but of the surroundings of Cape Town itself. Check it out below.

More facts about the stadium can be found at Cape Town Travel. Incidentally did you see the GIANT VUVUZELA mounted on the unfinished section of highway in town?

[via Wezzo | 10and5]

Categories
Cautionary Tales History

Totalitarian Architecture of the Third Reich

From Dark Roasted Blend comes a fascinating article on how the Nazi government used architecture to intimidate their people and to showcase the regime’s strengths. Hitler was a great admirer of the Roman Empire, and most of the structures and monuments designed by the Nazi party’s chief architect Albert Speer imitated Imperial Rome.

From the plans to rebuild Berin into Welthauptstadt (“World Capital”) Germania, to the Olympic Stadium for Aryan triumphs in sports, to the Reich Chancellery which would intimidate foreign dignitaries and politicians, Hitler and his associates celebrated the German national identity as the master Aryan race through architecture.

Read the engrossing article HERE.

Categories
Arty Inspirational Designs

Tod’s Omotesando Building

Fronting Omotesando, Tokyo’s famous tree-lined boulevard is the slender, L-shaped building for the Italian footwear retailer, Tods. Created by innovative architect Toyo Ito, the seven-story building contains a glass curtain wall block with concrete and steel supporting members, which crisscross and fork out to mimic the shapes of the tall elm trees that stretch along Omotesando Avenue. The branching structures don’t just form the building’s exterior, they run through the inside as well, serving as points of interest and section dividers.

More images after the jump.

Categories
Arty Awesomeness Inspirational Designs

Amazing Places – Outstanding Museum Designs

People often say it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but with these incredible museum designs, the building is as much a masterpiece as the art inside it.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in the city of Bilbao, Spain is clad with reflective titanium walls that sparkle in the sun. It is credited with starting the trend of making the building that houses art just as important as the art itself, and has even been called “the greatest building of our time”.

Osaka National Museum of Art

Constructed of titanium-coated steel tubes Osaka’s National Museum of Art resembles a giant metal insect, crouched on the ground with its wings extending into the air. Due to space constraints, most of the museum is underground; the steel frame and glass skylights are all that is visible from street level.

The New Museum on the Bowery

Situated in New York City, USa the New Museum on the Bowery resembles a stack of white baker’s boxes. The building is clad in aluminum mesh to disguise the windows.

Groninger Museum

The funky-fresh Groninger Museum in Groningen, Holland is surrounded by water and connected to the land by a pedestrian bridge. The three pavilions that make up the museum were designed by architects Philippe Starck, Alessandro Mendini and Coop Himmelb(l)au, The look of the museum is derived from the Italian ‘Memphis’ style of architecture.

15 must-see (post-and-)modern museum designs can be found at Web Urbanist.