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

aspiring city planner?

City Creator

suite sewer

"Each suite of the Park Hotel offers at minimal capacity maximum possible comfort for recreation and relaxation."
These ingenious little rooms are available for rent, and at whatever you can afford. The use of these concrete tubes into temporary housing shelters is inspiring to me, simple and effective. I'd like one in my back yard to hide in once in a while (great place for reading OSHA safety manuals). Of course these are used by campers, hikers (and vagrants?) passing thru for an evening or two. I do enjoy the use of already manufactured and readily available forms as living spaces. Close in the ends, put a door on the thing and roll it into place!

park hotel link

zoomorphic architecture - 'Lucy' the elephant

I went here as a kid, I'd live in it!. I have some plan drawings of the interior around here somewhere, interesting, I'll post them here when I find them.

Lucy the Elephant is a six-story elephant-shaped architectural folly constructed of wood and tin sheeting in 1882 by James V. Lafferty in Margate City, New Jersey, two miles (3.2 km) south of Atlantic City, in an effort to sell real estate and attract tourism.

The idea of an animal-shaped building was innovative, and in 1882 the U.S. Patent Office granted Lafferty a patent giving him the exclusive right to make, use or sell animal-shaped buildings for seventeen years. Lucy is the oldest example of zoomorphic architecture, and the largest elephant in the world. more...
...what would happen if we crossed 'Stoorn' the moose with 'Lucy' the elephant? (answer)