“the house that is not really there”
Senan Abdelqaber has designed, with this house, an approach that is nothing more than a platform bracing the horizon to a vast landscape. 
The entry below leads to an intimate yet modern domicile that gently unfolds space by the interplay of natural and man-made materials, soft against hard, transparent versus opaque, light and shadow.
Private Library from A Space In Time on Vimeo.
A short film about the design of a writing studio in the woods of Long Island by architect Andrew Berman. The film, while informative conveys the tranquility of the building by simply inviting you to enter and experience the pace of the writer’s world inside.
Directed & Produced by David Vegezzi
Cinematography by Ben Wolf
Edited by Carsten Becker
Music by Circle of Sound
I.M.Pei has recently completed the Museum of Islamic Arts in Doha, Qatar. The museum aims to showcase the complexity and diversity of the arts of Islamic culture and be an international centre for learning and creativity.
The building is defined by the main volume - an abstracted pyramid, common in Pei’s work, made up of large cubic forms. The 35,000 sq.m mass, rendered with quarry stone exterior, appears to majestically rise out of the sea. The interiors however lack the simple elegance of the elevations, appearing overworked and dated.
Celebrating excellent places and how people inhabit them
Unique in the ever-expanding universe of award programs, our concern is for good places and how people inhabit them. We seek entries of exemplary work, inviting participation from a range of design and research disciplines, recognizing projects whose significance extends beyond any one profession or field. Projects should emphasize a link between research and practice, demonstrating how an understanding of human interaction with place can inspire design.
Awards recognize
Design: Excellence in human environments, completed projects.
Planning: Proposals for future design, use, or management of a place.
Research: Projects investigating relationships between design, human behavior, culture, and experience.
Book: Recently published books advancing the critical understanding of place and design of exceptional environments.
At home we, like most people, put our Xmas and other cards on the bookshelf in our living room. With that in mind I thought I’d display a handful of the “cards” I received via e-mail this season.
My weekly page update:
Petit Bayle in Tarn-et-Garonne, France by meld architecture.
This week’s book review is In the Chinese City: Perspectives on the Transmutations of an Empire, edited by Frederic Edelmann.
Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:
20 Predictions for ‘09
A new feature at Archinect that looks forward instead of looking back.Graduate Directory 2009
Wallpaper’s annual directory of artists, architects, photographers, graphic designers, etc.UrbanOmnibus
A soon-to launch online project of the Architectural League that will create a new kind of conversation about design and New York City, currently asking for contributions.
Why Do Architects Wear Black? (2009) edited by Cordula Rau
Springer
Cloth, 228 pages
Architects wearing black is a stereotype on par with architects wearing black, plastic-frame spectacles. Most architects don’t abide by these fashion recipes, but if somebody outside the profession comes across just one architect fitting the Corbusian mold then, alas, all architects must do the same. That Le Corbusier’s and Philip Johnson’s proclivities for a certain attire has trickled down to numerous enough architects to become a popular stereotype — and not Frank Lloyd Wright’s cane and pork pie hat — is evidenced by this small book that asks architects, “Why do architects wear black?” Packaged in a small, sketchbook-size format are a hundred or so answers to that question, one response per spread with the original handwritten answer opposite the typed, translated text and the name of the architect, designer or draftsman. Spanning seven years, the answers reveal as much about the personalities as they do about the question itself.
The decision by Cordula Rau — an “industry manager who left his white-blue, silver-shimmering world of car bodywork and dove into the pitch-black, mysterious world of architecture” and was asked that very question shortly after such leap — to retain the handwritten responses is an important one. Not only does it reveal the answer in the original language (and in some instances revealing incorrect translation, even from English to English!), it lets the reader dapple in the realm of graphology, to see what the cursive, the composition, the white spaces, the messiness (or cleanliness) of the writing reveals about the architect. Only a few include doodles, surprising for a profession that uses drawings more than text to describe ideas. Many of the responses are simply one short sentence; in some cases they are only one word (”Green” in one case, “Fear” in another). Answers range from the enigmatic to straightforward, personal reasons for wearing or not wearing black. Certain strands of thought can be discovered while flipping through the book: black is a (non-)color that allows other colors to stand out, black is an easy choice, black is fashionable, black is tragic, that question is false.
Priced at just under thirty dollars, this is the kind of book that will be given to an architect, rather than purchased by one for his or herself. Many will get a kick out of how well-known architects (Peter Eisenman, Jaques Herzog, Rem Koolhaas, etc.) answer the question, though these aren’t necessarily the most interesting. Thinking about the book’s design — its small size, cloth cover, ribbon bookmark, its sketchbook qualities — I couldn’t help but yearn for some blank pages at the end to add responses from famous architects I might come across. Oh, to stumble across Frank Gehry again, look him straight in the face and ask, “Why do architects wear black?”
or 
Posts will be on hold for Xmas with family and friends, resuming in about a week.
[santaland at macy's herald square]
Happy Holidays!
Building the Gherkin dvd introduction..
designed by Norman Foster ..
film by ican films ..
Hi this is About me box, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from.
