Our slideshow is in the front page of Dwell. On the print version, we are in the “Houses we Love” section. Coolness. I love, love Dwell… and they are awesome to deal with, on top of it.
architecture
FIlm and Architecture anyone?
We, us, MJ Neal, AIA and Viviane Vives, taught a graduate advanced design studio at the University of Texas, Arlington.
This video explores how the use of film as a research tool in architecture informed the students’ projects and changed them. The students achieved a completely different relationship to the site by the use of documentary filmmaking.
Film was also used as a creative expression medium and a presentation element but the emphasis was on it’s use as a knowledge base tool. All self-consciousness was left at the door. We wanted truth, passion, we particularly fought any “architect’s preciousness.” Focus was on obliterating mythologies and keeping it real, to open them up and to make them reach the bottom of the reality of the site and the people that inhabited it.
All students shared a pool of footage and learned from each other, sharing their findings and drawing their own conclusions.
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more about “FIlm and Architecture anyone?“, posted with vodpod
First Wolfe Den Night Shots
Macho Minimalism
The Wolfe Den is in it’s final stages. Little details are being completed like the front door handle and the landscaping is being installed. Becca of Rain Lilly Design has dubbed the front stone entry design “macho minimalism”. I really like that! I’m going to steal it;)
Enjoy, I am.
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One Step at a Time…
The Wolfe Den stair progresses. The middle partition that ties into the rift cut white oak guardrail is in. And a preview of the Ipe treads. Kilean made it by with me today to check it out and generally reek havoc with everyone…
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more about “untitled”
Some nice progress! Here’s three weeks ago.
Sunday Morsel 4
a poem by Lebbeus Woods
War and Architecture
Architecture and war are not incompatible.
Architecture is war. War is architecture.
I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority
that resides in fixed and frightened forms.
I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family,
no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end,
no “sacred and primordial site.”
I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories
that would chain me with my own falsness, my own pitiful fears.
I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments,
and forms that appear with infinite strength, then “melt into air.”
I am an architect, a constructor of worlds,
a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody,
a silhouette against the darkening sky.
I cannot know your name. Nor can you know mine.
Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.
WAR AND ARCHITECTURE
RAT I ARHITEKTURA
Lebbeus Woods
pamphlet architecture 15
Incredible! Get it, read it, then read it again!
Stoned! Casa Miquel
stone, transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): stoned; ston·ing
13th century
1: to hurl stones at; especially : to kill by pelting with stones
stoned (slang) adjective
1952
1. Stupefied, excited, or muddled with alcoholic liquor
2. Stupefied, intoxicated, or otherwise influenced by the taking of drugs
3. (one I particulaly like) under the influence of drugs, under the influence of alcohol, drugged, ripped out, high, spaced out, tripping, turned on
These definitions sum up the week and what I’m going to do about it…
The post was going to start out, “So you want stone? Well here it is, all of you fake Tuscan-lovin’ sons of bitches…” But then, because of the week it’s been, the post has shifted to the fore mentioned theme.
Anyway, the house is for a small site in Barcelona that has a four story building close to one side of it and a two story retaining wall about a fourth of the way into the lot. Fortunately, a garden could be placed around the side and front on the lower floor of the house, to achieve privacy and give a sense of the exotic and intimate.
The house is simply organized around a pool/living area that opens onto a front garden. All interior spaces open onto the pool and are defined by rustic (rustico! Pepe) structural stone walls. The pool area has a wall of translucent and colored glass block. A traditional material that has been manufactured in Spain for, who could say, 80 years.
This wall allows a wonderful diffused light into all the interior spaces and controls the view of the multi story building. At the bottom of the glass block wall there is a low continuous ribbon of clear operable windows that look onto the small side garden allowing the eye to expand beyond the boundary of the wall. The problematic back yard, two stories in the air, was tied into the roof to make an extended garden and terrace. A green house on this upper level of land continues over the two story living/pool area to become a skylight.
Most of the sketches shown were done on the flight back from Barcelona.
It’s happy hour so see ya, what ever happened to those days of three for ones in Lubbock (that story will have to wait…).
Harvard, the Street not the…
Sunday Morsel 3
“There are no twelve-year-old geniuses in architecture,” remarked Le Corbusier.
Architecture is a field for irrepressible optimism and demands a tenacious staying power.
from Mexican Architecture, the work of Abraham Zabludovsky and Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon
by Paul Heyer
mj neal architects - blublog 