Diogene: A cabin designed by Renzo Piano and RPBW for Vitra – Diogene is a single-room prototype cabin, a minimalist house of 2.5 x 3 meters that “functions completely autonomously as a self-contained system and is thus independent of its environment.” Since his student days architect Piano has been fascinated …
Center for Active Design: Resources – links to design guidelines aimed at architects, urban designers, planners, policy makers, communities, developers, and educators wishing to promote health “through the design of buildings, streets, and neighborhoods.” The original publication Active Design Guidelines has been followed with four supplements: Promoting Safety …
Daimler envisions the future of car technology – car-maker Daimler recently sponsored a Future Talk event to imagine the “evolving role of vehicles in the future.” All of the ideas for using vehicles to make our lives safer and easier reuse some already-existing aspect of cars (GPS, waste heat) and apply them …
Keetwonen (Amsterdam student housing) – called “the biggest container city in the world” Keetwonen provides popular housing for students in Amsterdam, 1000 units. Each has its own kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, study room, and balcony. The initial fears of some people that the container homes would be too small, too noisy, too …
GIZMODO – The Tiny Transforming Apartment That Packs Eight Rooms into 350 Square Feet – 5 and a half minute video of Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger.com, showing us through his very small New York apartment (he’s the one who says it’s 420 sq ft). It’s beautifully outfitted with hidden …
Largest modular high-rise – post about recent groundbreaking in Brooklyn for what will be the world’s largest pre-fabricated building. The 32-storey / 363-apartment structure is the first of a planned 15. Designed by SHoP Architects (also image source). As quoted from the New York Times: …next spring, 125 …
The Architect and the Plantsman – short piece on the collaboration of Peter Zumthor and Piet Oudolf, first on last year’s Serpentine Gallery (2011, image shown below; source) and now on the transformation of a former factory, De Meelfabriek, in the Dutch city of Leiden into high-end lofts. From Zumthor on …
Check out the topic “Collective housing” on the blog of Spanish architectural publishers a+t. It looks like they’ve drawn a number of more recent posts from their books. A lot of projects from the Netherlands.