Month: April 2022

‘’In the background there is still invisible Japanese tradition’’, expresses Kisho Kurokawa, in an excerpt from the film ‘Koshuu’. He puts an emphasis on Japanese tradition, an architectural tradition that rejects symmetry despite the utilization of high-tech. He contemplates the Nakagin capsule tower (1972) a mixed-use residential and office tower located in Tokyo, Japan. The first of capsule architecture built for practical and permanent use.

The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

“The Vanished House” was a work created for the second East Lake International Ecological Sculpture Biennale held in Wuhan in 2021. The venue for the exhibition was Wuhan Shimenfeng Memorial Park, a cemetery with a beautiful environment and a tranquil spatial atmosphere. A place where the deceased rest peacefully, the venue has an ambiance suitable for memorial and mourning activities. “The Vanished House” was created as an echo of this special attribute of the venue. The work presents a house covered in sprawling ivies. A symbol of hearth and home, this house, as detached, leaves a space formed by the wrapping creepers. It is the remembrance of a vanished living space and thus of the people and things of the past. “The Vanished House” is a memorial space that invites visitors to participate in and experience.

Scoop House is a monolithic, three-storied residence that responds to the idea of contemporary urban living through sensitivity to context, style, and innovation in construction. Set amidst the tight urban fabric of Delhi, the modern house exhibits uniqueness in its form, by means of a façade that discounts the more popular orthogonality. The client’s western aspirations called for a modern outlook in designing for a family of three, over a linear plot of 180 sq yds. A context-sensitive approach has been adopted in contrast to the existing unvaried street form and architecture of the neighborhood that poorly responds to the existing community garden. The compactness of the site demanded verticality; hence, the south-east facing house is intended to be a monolithic block/cuboid with carved curvilinear facades. A large tree canopy in the community garden on the rear/north-east side forms inspiration for the curvilinearity. The scoops in the facades that the house derives its name from, help to break the scale and render a sense of softness to the building and its otherwise rigid context.

As a building, The Hotel Britomart is a 10-storey object crafted from hand-made clay bricks, its rough surface punctuated by a constellation of sleekly glazed windows, its mass appearing to hover weightlessly over an urban tapestry of cobbled lanes and dockside warehouses.