Thursday, March 27, 2008

12 more structure ideas

12 more-
1.House of Cards
2. Dresser House
3.The Field House
4.The Ice House
5.House of Saud
6.Habachi-Hirachi House
7.The Tape House
8.The Big House
9.Pagoda imploda
10. The O House
11 . House Of Commons
12.The Bow House



Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Architectural cribbage rules



Architectural Cribbage is a pastime that provides social opportunities to display true craftsmanship and respect for the environment, without rancor, animosity, or overwhelming self-interest during competition.

In view of these goals, the following are considered to be some of the unacceptable practices and are grounds for suspension or expulsion from the game of architectural cribbage:

* Marking or deforming shelters for vanity sake or manipulative purposes
* Controlling the location of the materials in the pile before dividing them up equally

* Secreting materials for later retrieval, including surreptitiously dropping stuff off before official pick up begins

* Changing or altering another structure with out permission

* Intentionally building poorly for the purpose of enhancing the record of an opponent

* Actions or conversation unbecoming a member of architectural cribbage (drunkenness, abusive language, etc.)

* Initiating a violation of rules for the purpose of gaining an advantage, whether actually gained or not, even though the rules specify a penalty for the violation

* Actions detrimental to the objectives of architectural cribbage



By honoring all rules, a player will have guidelines for a good creation and fair play, resulting in an enjoyable experience for all participants.

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Saturday, March 1, 2008

The Only building LeCorbusier built himself a 12x12ftcabin



Le Corbusier’s Cabanon, Roquebrune-Cap Martin, Côte d’Azur, France



Written by Jonathan Duff, Twentieth Century Society Member living in Brussels

Images courtesy Emmanuelle Morgan




Down a quiet, leafy footpath in the Côte d’Azur hides perhaps the most modest piece of interesting architecture of any historical period and yet it was designed by one of the twentieth century’s most influential and least modest architects.

The Swiss born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, or Le Corbusier as he preferred to be called, was a frequent visitor to Eileen Gray’s and Jean Badovici’s nearby Villa E-1027 which Gray had designed over 30 years before. He fell out with her after he got up early one morning and painted an unwanted mural in her house. An ‘act of violation’ as she described it.

Le Corbusier had become friends with another neighbour, Thomas Rebutato, a former plumber who owned and ran a small café cum inn next door, L’Etoile de Mer. It was whilst the two were planning the redevelopment of the site, with the intention of building Unités de camping, that Corbu persuaded Rebutato to give him a sliver of adjoining land on which to build a cabanon or small hut. He built it as a model in minimal habitation and as a birthday present for his wife, Yvonne.

Designed in December 1951 in less than an hour, building work lasted only six months and it was completed in August 1952 using rough pine boards for the exterior and plywood and oak pieces for the interior, mostly prefabricated in Corsica. The initial idea was to have used aluminium cladding which would have had a completely different, if not incongruous effect.

The surface area is about 16m2. There is no kitchen: the couple took all their meals, including breakfast, at the café, to which a door in the small entrance corridor provides direct access. There is no door to the WC and the bidet abuts the headrest of one of the beds: Yvonne covered it with a cloth. "Not a square centimetre wasted! A little cell at human scale where all functions were considered" as Le Corbusier described his smallest ‘machine for living in’.

He devoted much thought to the interior detailing, using vivid red, green and blue panels on the ceiling to contrast with the yellow-painted floor and wooden warmth of the walls. The ceiling is low to allow for ample storage. He painted a colourful mural along the entrance passage. The little furniture there is is made of recycled materials: crates for stools; railway carriage reading lights; porte-abus for a lamp and so on.

At the time Le Corbusier had made two long trips to India and it is possible that he was influenced by Hinduism and Sannyasa, the notion of a life of renouncement and poverty. Certainly the cabanon expresses the simplicity, truth and freedom of the individual. He made precise plans of Punjabi houses and appeared as interested in their building techniques and way of housing as he was in their architectural forms. He used these plans to design the Peon houses, simple structures that were to have been sited behind the Governor’s palace in Chandigarh.

The layout is conceived more from the interior than with regard to connecting to its immediate surrounds and yet this makes perfect sense. There are only two windows, which are small, but the shutters fold back inside to reveal mirrors that reflect the turquoise sea and, framed by pine and palm trees, the other not-so-modest machines for living in across the bay in Monte Carlo.

Although the cabanon has virtually all one needs to pass a non self-catering holiday, Le Corbusier also built an even tinier hut a few metres away for an atelier to work in, the shade of a large Carob tree linking the two.

Thirteen years after completing it, he drowned off the coast, during a long swim. This may have been an act of suicide, his wife having died in 1957. "How nice it would be to die swimming towards the sun", he once remarked to a colleague. He also designed an austere but elegant and, of course functional, concrete tomb for Yvonne and himself and it sits in the Vieux Cimetière at the top of the old town.

Gary Panter- The Human Scale Bower Bird creation


Gary Panter suggested this one...

From Wiki-pedia:
The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is the extraordinarily complex behaviour of males, which is to build a bower to attract mates. Depending on the species, the bower ranges from a circle of cleared earth with a small pile of twigs in the center to a complex and highly decorated structure of sticks and leaves — usually shaped like a walkway, a small hut or a maypole — into and around which the male places a variety of objects he has collected. These objects — usually strikingly blue in hue — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items or pieces of glass. The bird spends hours carefully sorting and arranging his collection, with each object in a specific place; if an object is moved while the bowerbird is away he will put it back in its place. No two bowers are the same, and the collection of objects reflects the personal taste of each bird and its ability to procure unusual and rare items (going as far as stealing them from neighboring bowers). At mating time, the female will go from bower to bower, watching as the male owner conducts an often elaborate mating ritual and inspecting the quality of the bower. Many females end up selecting the same male, and many underperforming males are left without mates.