Elbe Philharmonic, Germany, Hamburg Whats really freakish here is the contrast between the new buildinga liquidity-looking glass thingamajigand the old building it uses for its podium: a stolid, workaday 1960s waterfront warehouse. This odd couple, united by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and scheduled for completion in 2012, will be a new cultural complex for Hamburgs harbor, featuring a public plaza on the old warehouse roof, a hotel, some apartments, and a wildly biomorphic philharmonic hall.
Odd Trend: This new building atop old building thing is a bonafide trend. See: New Yorks Hearst Tower by Foster + Partners.
.
Fuji Television Building, Tokyo, japan It resembles something created with an Erector Set, but this buildingwhich took three years to complete and serves as the head office for Fuji TVisnt childs play. It was designed to be sturdy enough to call itself earthquake-proof. Studio toursthere are 10 studios in this officeare offered for about $5 (for adults) and grant visitors access to the 1,200-ton sphere on top, which houses an observation deck.
.
The Bar Code Building, St. Petersburg, Russia Near the banks of the Neva River, this trade complex by Vitruvius & Sons transforms the worlds most ubiquitous symbol of commercethe bar codeinto a powerful architectural motif. It can be read as an update of American-style roadside classics like the giant Dixie Cup water tower of Lexington, KY, or Detroits giant Uniroyal Tire. The rust-red steel building brightens an otherwise bleak urban setting.
Strange Trend: Theres also a Barcode House by the Dutch architecture firm MVRDV on the outskirts of Munich, but its much more subtle.
.
Bioscleave House, N.Y., East Hampton, Husband and wife artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins designed this intentionally unsettling house in 2008. With its bumpy, hilly floors and a wildly asymmetrical planeven the electrical outlets are at weird anglesits supposed to stimulate the immune systems of its occupants by keeping them from ever becoming comfortable. This relentless tentativeness, the artists believe, is the key to immortality.
Embrace the Strange: This house can be yours. Its currently offered by Sothebys Realty for $4 million.
.
Ramot Polin Apartments, Jerusalem Polish-born architect Zvi Heckers experiment in multi-unit residential construction is not as well known as the Habitat housing Moshe Safdie designed for Expo 67 in Montreal, but at 720 units is much larger. It was also an exercise in using prefabricated components, at least in the first two of its five phases. With its crazy pentagonal design, the Ramot Polin Apartments resemble a housing project for honeybees.
Behind the Scenes: This highly unorthodox complex was commissioned by the Israeli ministry of housing specifically for highly orthodox Jewish families.
.
Columbus Lighthouse, Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo, Under construction for some 40 years, and inaugurated in time for the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbuss initial landing in the New World (which was not on Hispaniola, but in the Bahamas), this monstrously spooky concrete monument, half a mile long and 688 feet tall, reputedly cost the impoverished nation some $70 million to build. The lighthouse contains what are purported to be the explorers bones.
Weird Wiring: When the lighthouse projects a cross-shaped beam into the night sky, its so bright that not only can it be seen in Puerto Rico, but it drains electrical power from surrounding neighborhoods. Its not turned on very often.
.
Oriental Pearl TV Tower, China, Shanghai Nothing else on earth quite looks like the Oriental Pearl. It was once the tallest structure on the Pudong side of Shanghais Huangpu River until it was overshadowed by the Shanghai World Financial Center in 2007. Designed by Jiang Huan Cheng of the Shanghai Modern Architectural Design Co. and completed in 1995, it stands 1,535 feet tall and is easily the worlds greatest assemblage of habitable disco balls (11!), housing several sightseeing observatories, a revolving restaurant, and a space hotel.
Tall Tale: Both Shanghai towers have recently been dwarfed by the 2,001-foot-tall Guangzhou TV and Sightseeing Tower.
.
Spittelau District Heating Plant, Austria Highly eccentric painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, fond of bright colors, crooked lines, and overall visual cacophony, designed this garbage-burning heating plant on the Donau Canal to look like Viennas answer to the Magic Kingdom. With its crazy quilt faade, decorative columns topped with gold balls, and a pollution-scrubbing smokestack, it suggests a mirage rather than a working piece of urban infrastructure.
Odd Couple: There are two of these oddities. The Maishima Incineration Plant in Osaka, Japan, is an exact replica.
.
The Atomium, Brussels A 1958 Worlds Fair leftover, the Atomium is far more eccentric than the 1964 Unisphere in New York or the 1962 Space Needle in Seattle. Conceived by an engineer, Andr Waterkeyn, it is a gigantic replica of an iron crystal molecule and was intended to symbolize the peaceful use of atomic energy for scientific purposes. Five of its nine spheres are accessible to visitors, as is its maze of interconnecting tubes.
Quirky Quote: According to the Atomium website: The completely steel-clad Atomium is a kind of UFO in the cultural history of Humanity, a mirror turned simultaneously towards the past and the future, comparing our Utopias of yesterday with our dreams for tomorrow.
.
Kansas City Public Library, The south wall of the librarys parking garage resembles a bookshelf that would dwarf anything lining the walls of the 50-Foot-Tall Womans house: each book is around 25 feet tall and nine feet wide. It was constructed as an homage to 22 favorite literary titles, chosen by patrons of the library (then, of course, approved by the board of trustees).
.
Container City II, UK There have since been many copycats, but this colorful addition to the original container city (the first modular live/work structure of its kind when it was built in 2001) at Trinity Buoy Wharf in Londons Docklands stands out as an example of sustainable architecture (80 percent of the combined building is created from recycled shipping containers and other materials). Completed in 2002, its ziggurat shape and brightly colored exteriors, not surprisingly, have attracted many artists, who live and work here today.
.
House Attack, Vienna At first glance, the base of the MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst) is an unimpressive-looking stone slab, but look up and youll see the strange factor. Designed by artist Erwin Wurm, the installation piece is a sculpture of a one-family house that symbolizes the everyday, privacy, as well as small-mindedness.
.
Edificio Mirador, Madrid Designed by Dutch architecture firm MVRDVknown for its unusual and striking constructionthis residential building, set in the northeast part of Madrid, was designed as a frame for the distant landscape, but more resembles a Borg spaceship. Oh, and that open middle section? It also serves as an outdoor meeting area for residents to take in the unobstructed views.
.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro Fret not! Even though this building strongly resembles a flying saucereven more eerily true when its lit up at nightRio has not been occupied by aliens, but rather by the design prowess of Oscar Niemeyer. After making their way up the winding red path to the entrance, visitors can enjoy views of Guanabara Bay, Sugarloaf Mountain, and the surrounding cityscapealong with museum exhibitions.
.
Druzhba Holiday Center, Yalta, Ukraine Overlooking a popular beach in the faded Soviet resort town of Yalta, this hotelbuilt in 1984 by Ukrainian architect Igor Vasilevskymay lack an imaginative name, but its hulking cylindrical mass is unmissable. Guests enter the property via a catwalk bridge surrounded by glass; inside the complex, which is supported by giant cement legs, a series of staircases and elevators connect public spaces and accommodationsmany of which have panoramic views of the Black Sea.
.
Solar Furnace, Font-Romeu-Odeillo-Via, France The ancient Egyptians and Greeks may have figured out how to harness the power of the sun using glass, but the solar scientists working in this sun-bathed town in the Pyrenees Mountains have perfected the process. The worlds largest solar furnace, on the exterior of this curious undulating building, uses some 10,000 mirrors to focus the rays and then bounce them off a gigantic concave mirror to produce temperatures above 5,430 degrees Fahrenheit.
.
Cube Houses, Rotterdam, Netherlands Known locally as Kubuswoningen, these attached Piet Blomdesigned residences on Overblaak Street were unveiled in 1984 to oows and awws. The architect tilted the traditional house structure, a cube, some 45 degrees, placing it on a hexagon-shaped pylon; all the walls and windows are angled at 54.7 degrees, and each apartment is about 900 square feet, but only 225 square feet of that is usable space.
.
Lloyds Building, London Also called the Inside-Out Building, the controversial headquarters of venerable Lloyds insurance at One Lime Street has doubled as a tourist attraction since its completion in 1986 (it even has a gift shop). The towering steel-and-glass-framed building was conceived by Richard Rogers (of Pompidou Centre fame), who wanted to place all mechanicals, elevators, etc. on the buildings exteriormuch to the amusement of passersby.
.
Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Canada This crossword puzzle checked box appears, at a distance, to be hovering Close Encountersstyle above an otherwise mundane Toronto neighborhood. As you approach, its improbability only increases. British architect Will Alsop planted this collection of galleries and studio spaces on brightly colored columns so insouciantly angled and skinny that they barely look like they can support themselves.
.
Selfridges Department Store, Birmingham, England The Birmingham branch of Selfridges is a billowy mattress of a building, clad in 15,000 shimmery aluminum discs like that famous Paco Rabanne dress. It was designed by Future Systemsthe name tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the firmto be a landmark and a catalyst for the revitalization of a largely moribund city center. An ersatz urban cliff, a giant sea anemone, a friendly, blob-like alien, the mother of all magic mushrooms, wrote Guardian architecture critic Jonathan Glancey. This is the department store as unalloyed architectural entertainment.
Step Inside: The interior, with floaty white escalators crisscrossing in an open atrium, looks like a scene from Fritz Langs Metropolis.
No comments:
Post a Comment