Alexschi - White.wine

LM Guest House Desai Chia Architecture

Located on a rolling farm property in upstate New York, the LM Guest House celebrates the beauty of the surrounding landscape– sweeping views through an all-glass facade magnify the spacious, open feel of the living areas.The home employs several sustainable design strategies including geothermal heating and cooling, radiant floors, motorized solar shading, photovoltaic panels, and rainwater harvesting.

The open living and sleeping areas flow around a compact slatted wood core that disguises the mechanical, storage, and bathing spaces. Two sleeping couchettes with built-in bunk beds provide efficient accommodations for additional weekend guests. Natural white oak wood detailing provides warmth and texture throughout the home. The high-performance glass facade was prefabricated off site, shipped in one container, and erected in two days. An innovative steel frame structure allows the roof to cantilever dramatically over the open living areas and bedroom.

Images and text via Desai Chia Architecture

Architects for Animals: Giving Shelter

In an effort to raise money for FixNation, a non-profit charity that aims to reduce the homeless cat population in Los Angeles by spaying and neutering them, 12 architects and designers have created fun cat shelters for their recently held Architects for Animals: Giving Shelter benefit.

Images and text via + via

Weberbrunner Architekten - House B renovation, Weiningen 2008. Photos © Beat Bühler.

Sunday Dalí: The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933. Collage.

From Ego Is A Rat On A Sinking Ship:

The woman sought by the Surrealist, then, was not conceived of as one who would avoid exploitation at all. It was just that Surrealism offered what it thought was an alternative exploitation to that of bourgeois society. One expression of this alternative can be seen in Salvador Dalí’s Phénomène de l’extase, a collage showing various enraptured female faces, many of which were taken from Charcot’s photographs. The image originally followed a text by Dalí on the apparently irrational component of art nouveau architecture, parts of which alluded to sculptural details of girls and angels in rhapsodic abandon on the buildings of Antoni Gaudí. “Continuous erotic ecstasy,” wrote the artist, leads to “contractions and attitudes without precedent in the history of statuary.” He continued in a subsection also entitled “Phénomène de l’extase” that “the repugnant can be transformed into the beautiful” through such ecstasy.1 The transformation of the perception of art, architecture, and most other forms of modern life was thus dependent upon the continuous excitation of ecstasy. The sexual abandon of the female hysterics in the collage was one way of accommodating such a desire.2

Salvador Dalí, “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture Modern’ style,” Minotaure 3-4 (12 December 1933), 69-76. ↩

Robert James Belton, The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art, 249. ↩

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Photographing the Milky Way Over Greece

Alexandros Maragos is an Athens based filmmaker and photographer best known for his landscape photography, astrophotography and timelapse imagery. In his own words:

The Milky Way is the name of the spiral galaxy in which our solar system is located. It is our home in space. The Earth orbits the Sun in the Solar System, and the Solar System is embedded within this vast galaxy of stars. In the northern hemisphere, the Milky Way is visible in the southern half of the sky. This makes Greece one of the best places in the world to see and photograph the galaxy because of the country’s geographic location in Southern Europe at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. 

As a filmmaker and photographer I feel very fortunate to live here. Every time I want to shoot the night sky, all I do is to pick a new spot on the map and just go there and take the shot. Greece is a heaven for astrophotography. Whether you choose a mountain, a beach, a peninsula or any of the 6,000 islands, the Milky Way is always visible in the southern sky.

To see more of his work visit his website or follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

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Social Housing

I have received a lot of follow up questions and comments to my post about social housing and my opinion that vertical social housing is a dying typology including:

What is Vertical Social Housing? Google didn’t return anything obviously useful.

Hi, different anon, but what impact are you referring to when it comes to vertical social housing?

A dying typology? You are wrong

What is Social Housing? Social housing is affordable housing. A key function of social housing is to provide accommodation that is affordable to people on low incomes. Limits to rent increases set by law mean that rents are kept affordable. 

Vertical Social Housing brings up images of identical towers like the Pruitt–Igoe complex which was composed of 33 buildings of 11 stories each, located on St. Louis. Its demolition was one of the first demolitions of modernist architecture; postmodern architectural historian Charles Jencks called its destruction “the day Modern architecture died." Its failure is often seen as a direct indictment of the society-changing aspirations of the International school of architecture. [via]

In the United States, policies included "urban renewal” and building of large scale vertical social housing projects. Urban renewal demolished entire neighborhoods in many inner cities to accommodate these projects as a solution to the lack of affordable housing; but in many ways, it was a cause of urban decay rather than a remedy.

This type of architecture segregated and isolated its residents from the cities around them. Effectively trapping them in buildings that quickly deteriorated because of poor maintenance and overcrowding. Like in every typology you find some successful examples but many of these projects have been demolished to be replaced by low rise urban infill projects. The idea is to thread social housing into the tapestry of the city instead of creating isolated pockets.

You can read more on how cities have tried to redirect their efforts to provide affordable housing in books like Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival and American Project.

Architecture should not reinforce the old stigma of living in social housing, and architects should find the joy in tight budgets, limited briefs, and seemingly mundane programs.

Here are some recent successful examples of low-rise social housing: 

Le Lorrain – Brussels, Belgium

Honeycomb Apartments – Izola, Slovenia

Monterrey Housing – Nuevo León, Mexico

Vivazz, Mieres Social Housing – Asturias, Spain

Tête en l’air Social Housing – Paris, France