Inspiring young architects since 1932!

Click on the image to the left for LEGO Home Site.
I wish I had all the LEGO's I had as a kid now.
What I do have however is
LEGO Digital Designer.
With this you can design, build in three dimensions on-line anything you can imagine restrained only by the the shape of the Lego pieces . They are not just rectangular or square blocks anymore. When you are done you can have your Lego model custom packaged and sent to you to build at home.

what makes a building unique?

Moshe Safdie on TED.com

Looking back over a long career, architect Moshe Safdie digs deep into four extraordinary projects to talk about the unique choices he made on each building -- choosing where to build, pulling information from the client, and balancing the needs and the vision behind each project. Sketches, plans and models show how these grand public buildings, museums and memorials, slowly take form. (Recorded February 2002 in Monterey, California. Duration: 17:41.)

Moshe Safdie studied architecture at McGill University and apprenticed under Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. At age 24, his master's thesis was selected to be constructed as part of the Expo 67 celebration. The Habitat 67 project, a complex of cellular residences that could be lifted into place like LEGO blocks, propelled him onto the world stage. In 1967, he returned to Israel, where he was part of the team that refurnished Old Jerusalem. He lives in a renovated home in the old city and has Israeli, U.S., and Canadian citizenship. Moshe Safdie's works are known for their dramatic curves, arrays of simple geometric patterns, and usage of windows and open spaces.

Architecture as Salvation: A Conversation with Paolo Soleri

"Paolo Soleri is a complex man, impossible to summarize. Clearly a man of deeply religious sensibilities, his unwillingness to associate himself with any religion is emphatic. Labeled as a visionary, he has struggled to escape being dismissed as a dreamer. He intends to be taken seriously." by Richard Whittaker, May 21, 2000 Read more here...[link]

Photo by C. Otto 2011

Endangered American Places

The Chicago building that formerly housed Prentice Women's Hospital is proudly unorthodox. Above a steel-and-glass base, in a sea of more-conventional rectilinear neighbors, the building's quatrefoil concrete tower rises banded with oval-shaped windows.

Designed by Bauhaus-trained Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg — best known for the twin cylindrical towers of the nearby Marina City development (1964) he designed — the Prentice tower's cloverleaf design was far from being simply contrarian. Goldberg sought to create a modernist architecture more organic than the International style's straight lines and boxes, which he came to consider dehumanizing. In hospital design, he intended to improve patient experience, which at Prentice translated into a bed tower with seven small patient floors, each divided into four lobes.

Designed for maximum flexibility, the 1974 hospital building was also structurally innovative. The tower is cantilevered from a central core, allowing for column-free, open-plan floor plates. The load-bearing concrete shell transfers loads diagonally back to the core via four large arches.

Despite its significance, this building is at risk of demolition. To bring attention to its plight, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has named the former Prentice Women's Hospital building to the 2011 list of America's Most Endangered Historic Places.
read more [link] >>>by ArchitectureWeek

KEG Apartments Transform Liquid Container Trucks Into Mobile Houses

Now that shipping container homes are super hip, designers are concocting new ways to upcycle existing materials into dwellings -- say for instance, liquid container semis! Aristide Antonas, a designer from Athens, has a great idea to recycle old trucks into apartments that can either remain stationary or stay attached to the truck and be mobile. His KEG Apartments take a cool new look at how we can reuse just about anything to create low impact domiciles for a more resourceful age.
Read More [link]

Frank Gehry Selected to Design Eisenhower National Memorial

WASHINGTON, DC.- Gehry Partners, LLP, the Los Angeles-based architectural firm headed by Frank O. Gehry, has been selected as lead designer of the national memorial to Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Eisenhower Memorial will be the seventh national presidential memorial in the Nation’s Capital, and the first since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial opened in 1997. ...more from artdaily.org

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