Les favoris d'Urbain, trop urbain

Urbain, trop urbain parle d'urbanisme et d'architecture, de projets urbains et d'art de la ville. Et ici, les liens papillons qui nous semblent mériter quelque collection. Retrouvez-nous: Urbain, trop urbain, le site Internet Urbain, trop urbain sur Facebook Urbain, trop urbain sur Twitter Urbain, trop urbain sur Vimeo

[tobebuild]

Palazzetto dello Sport, Rome Pier Luigi Nervi, Annibale Vitellozzi 1952

[urbain]

Représentation de la cellule dans la micrographie de Robert Hooke (1665) | Représentation d’une cellule humaine aujourd’hui, via résonance magnétique nucléaire et microscopie cryoélectronique.

[urbain]

Highrise of Homes, James Wines, 2020 (source)

[urbain]

James Wines, Highrise of Homes, project (Exterior perspective), 1981. Ink and charcoal on paper. 22 x 24 inches. 

[polychroniadis]

Günter Günschel, Stadthalle in Weissenfels, 1957.

[urbain]

“Together Alone”, Yee Bless, 2020

(source)

[urbain]

Michael Sorkin, Brooklyn Waterfront,1993

A design for a spectacular site on the Brooklyn waterfront situated opposite Lower Manhattan and below the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Given the likelihood that this will be an intensely trafficked place, the proposal was to ratchet up the mix. A conference center is maintained to the north, augmented with a hotel on a deconsecrated cruise ship or aircraft carrier. A series of brick loft buildings fills out the northern end of the site and lines its eastern flank. Further down, a large amphitheater faces the fabulous view of Manhattan. At the south end of the site we have proposed an industrial use: a barge-building yard. The barges would be fitted out as gardens, sports grounds, restaurants, and community facilities for use as constituents in the rest of the project and might be floated to other parts of the city to seed development of other stretches of waterfront.

(Source)

[urbain]

Michael Sorkin, Godzilla, 1992

The project’s affinities with Godzilla are not merely morphological but conceptual. Just as that monster stands for a certain intensification of Japanese post-nuclear anxieties, so this building represents, an intensification of Tokyo-ness. In it, the tangled skein of the city finds a critical mass and erupts into form, a verticalization of the fundamental (dis)order in the city. As with traditional skyscrapers, Godzilla is divided into three parts. The lowest includes large-scale, publicly-oriented spaces, including theaters, department stores, and other commercial uses. The middle portion holds office space and the sh-like crown, apartments. Godzilla is also designed as a strategic urban blockage, thwarting and then reorganizing traffic. It is a center of dissemination of green, blue, and car-free vectors, for the expansion of a zone of pedestrianism, and for the insinuation of fresh tendrils of form and materiality.

(Source)

[joeinct]

Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, NYC, Photo by Ezra Stoller, 1958

[urbain]

Michael Sorkin, Animal Houses, 1989

These three creatures – dog, frog, and aardvark - from 1989 are part of a bestiary of projects through which I worked out a fairly literal interest in biomorphism. I can’t account for this interest nor – given that these projects were self-generated - do I think it particularly interesting to speculate on its origins. There is obviously a point beyond which questions of taste remain personal.

The three houses do engage certain architectural specifics: symmetry, directionality, and elevation. Vertebrates are invariably bilateral and so are these buildings, each a small essay on a small range of variation within a fixed and essentially symmetrical envelope. I’ve always been interested in the way in which fixed forms accrete eccentricities, the way faces are never quite symmetrical, the meaning of the coming and going of pimples the swollen cheeks of tooth-aches. Modernist that I am, I’ve also always had a tooth for aircraft and ships. This aircraft carrier anchored in Manhattan has long been fascinating for the way in which its basic and rigorously symmetrical hydrodynamic shape has acquired a bristling entourage of turrets, antennae, cranes, and other apparatus that tilt any reading towards irregularity.

Higher vertebrates, being mobile, acquire their directional characteristic from the most efficient production of forward motion. Sense organs are generally deployed to facilitate this mobility. These houses, however, are only symbolically directional: the ocular advantage is not necessarily pegged to what seems to be the axis of motion, rather to the long sides of the object, which simply provide greater area for fenestration and view.

(Source)

[nobrashfestivity]

Giant model of the Moon, 1894, at The Field Columbian Museum 

was created to house the artifacts from the anthropology, botany, geology and zoology collections at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Originally named the Columbian Museum of Chicago.

[urbain]

Klencke Atlas, 1660

[urbain]

Screenshot of a person getting arrested being identified as a "suitcase" and a policeman being identified as a "dog" in a video demonstrating “You only look once” (YOLOv3), a real-time object detection system by Joseph Redmon and Ali Farhadi. Source: Joseph Redmon/Youtube, 2018.

[urbain]

Territorial Agency: Oceans in Transformation. Commissioned by TBA21 Academy.

The rapid depletion of the coastal ecosystems of the Mississippi Delta, combined with sea level rise scenarios.

[genericarchitecture]

Sanssouci 

Peter Joseph Lenné

[Potsdam, 1836]

[urbain]

Parc de Sans-Souci, par Peter Joseph Lenné (1789 - 1866), Postdam, 1836

[urbain]

Roller coaster and pier at West End, Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans, 1901

[urbain]

Statue of Liberty towering over Paris just before it was disassembled and shipped to New York (1884)