Zaha & The Renaissance

The wave-shaped Aquatics Centre roof has been successfully lifted and lowered into place completing what was one of the most complex engineering and construction challenges of the Olympic Park ‘big build’. The Aquatics Centre is on track to finish in summer 2011 ready for test events with the concrete dive pool also complete and work well underway on the two 50m competition and training pools.

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This is part of my research for a strange assignment for architecture history class. We have to give a presentation of an ancient, historical site (relevant to what we are studying in class, which right now is the Renaissance) from the perspective of a character of our choice. I've chosen Zaha Hadid... what would she think about Venice during the Renaissance??

Transformative Theater

Joshua Prince-Ramus talks about his recently completed Wyly Theater in Dallas, Texas. I love what he says about creation and execution in the beginning of the video.

Library As Workshop

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This is an interactive collage. Take the letters, put them in the holes, and build a sentence.

I asked my class to take two or three words each, and build the sentence, thus creating a collective active learning experience of these words of Ibn Jama'a. Its part of our preliminary conceptual research before we begin to design a library.

"The thirteenth-century scholar Ibn Jama'a, although recommending that students purchase books whenever possible, thought it most important that they be "carried in the heart" and not merely kept on a shelf. Copying out texts helped one commit them to memory, thereby building (he thought) a sort of parallel library to the one of ink and paper...According to Ibn Jama'a, the art of memory was akin to that of architecture, since by practicing it a reader could build to his taste a private palace furnished with collected treasures, declaring ownership of the texts he had chosen in a deep and definitive way."

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

What IS This?

Animal Collective Visual Album

Out With the Old, In With the New!

These are a selection of drawings and a rendering I presented at our final review. The project was to design a house on a particular site in upstate New York. I chose to make my house a home for 8 children in foster care. Their bedrooms are on wheels, allowing for the children to decide where they want to place them and providing them with the chance to begin to negotiate the boundaries of their own environment. The supporting structure of the floor above is transformed into a climbing net as it descends below into the children's realm. (Click on each photo to zoom in)








Keep checking back for updates on our new current project; a library!

Michel Rojkind

who would you like to design something for…
an ideal project?
a home for the elderly because I don't think we
have questioned enough how we end our lives.
for me it would be very depressing to be taken out of
my home, and into a retirement home, or hospital
and that's the end of your life. I'd like to create
something that helps commemorate a lifetime and
celebrates the knowledge old people have.

from rojkind's interview with designboom on december 8th, 2009