Category: construction

Engineering For Inspiration

The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art – Oslo

The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art is a privately owned Contemporary Art gallery in Oslo in Norway. It was founded and opened to the public in 1993.

The collection’s main focus is the American appropriation artists from the 1980s, but it is currently developing towards the international contemporary art scene, with artists like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, Tom Sachs, Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson and Cai Guo-Qiang. The museum gives 6-7 temporary exhibitions each year. Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art collaborates with international institutions, and produces exhibitions that travels worldwide.

The museum created a stir in the international art world in 2002 when it purchased the American artist Jeff Koons’s monumental sculpture in gilt porcelain of the pop star Michael Jackson with Bubbles, his favorite chimpanzee, for USD 5.1m.
In Oslo natural light is precious, particularly in the winter months. Using the available light was therefore the driving concept for The Renzo Piano Building Workshop when designing  the Tjuvholmen Icon Complex.

The three buildings are covered by the sweeping curved roof that comes right down to the park. Other materials are few and include timber cladding a reference perhaps to the traditional buildings of historic Norwegian fishing villages such as the beautifully preserved Hanseatic buildings of Bryggen in Bergen.
The roof is glazed and layered in such a way as to allow as much wintertime natural light into the museum and other buildings as possible. The light is filtered and defused to render the interiors, and exhibits naturally and with the welcome side effect of saving on electricity.

 The project is composed of three discrete buildings, a gallery an office and a culture centre and is set out along a new axis that connects the city to the sea along new canals ending in a floating dock. Along this route is a new outdoor sculpture park.

Photos: Nic Luhoux

The Astrup Fearnley museum is now officially open. The entire centre will provide a valuable cultural space for Oslo.

Bamboo: From Green Design to Sustainable Design

The book “Bamboo: From Green Design to Sustainable Design” by Rebecca Reubens is now on the market and available on Amazon, Flipkart and at stores in India and overseas. 
The introduction for her book was written by Prof. Ranjan, which i am including below. 
The book focuses on the links between design, craft and sustainability, expanding the scope of design and opportunities for designers. It inspires designers to move beyond ‘green’ or eco-design, into the realm of holistically sustainable design by focusing on bamboo – an ancient, renewable material – which has recently seen a resurgence in popularity, in both design and sustainability. The book highlights bamboo’s versatile applications and their impact on ecological, economic, social and cultural sustainability. The Sustainability Checklist included here will empower designers to guide and evaluate their designs – and move from green design towards sustainable design. The Princ e Claus Fund supports this publication for its treatment of sustainability’s many facets, unlike others that only recognize the ecological meaning. The Fund believes that culture is a basic need and the motor of development, and so actively seeks cultural collaborations founded on equality and trust, with partners of excellence, in spaces where resources and opportunities for cultural expression, creative production and research are limited and cultural heritage is threatened.
About the Author

Rebecca Reubens trained formally as an industrial designer. She now works at the intersection of design, craft and sustainability. A large part of her work has been for the development sector, with international bodies such as INBAR and UNIDO, in Europe, Asia and Africa.

She also has her independent practice, through her design firm Rhizome, which believes that renewable materials crafted into contemporary designs are the route to holistically sustainable products. Rebecca is currently pursuing her PhD at the Design for Sustainability subprogram at the Delft University of Technology on the links between sustainability, design and development, through the medium of bamboo.

“Preamble

Rebecca Reubens has asked me to write an Introduction for her new book that attempts to bridge three fields that I am deeply interested in and in which I too have been working for a very long time now. The three fields are Design, Bamboo and Sustainability, all of which are extremely complex in their own right and there is little real understanding of the issues and approaches within each of them in the modern world due to a paucity of published research here. Modern design has been around for some time having evolved from its roots in the industrial revolution but it has unfortunately become a form of consumerist expression by industry and the profession and the real human development angle is all but forgotten and we need to rediscover this aspect as a fresh approach. Bamboo is still quite unknown tomodern  industry and the design profession although it is a grand old material of traditional societies across Asia and Latin America. Finally, Sustainability has arrived with a bang at the policy level since we are faced with the excesses of industry and governence that has caused both global warming and climate change as well as social unrest which is a product of our selfish ways, all needing a serious rethink and I am happy to see these three issues being addressed here in this book.

In the world of traditional societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America there exists a demonstrated deep understanding of all three subjects since these have been used in an evolutionary manner by local communities for many centuries. These continue to exist as a living culture in their rural communities and lifestyles even today but I must say that modern communication and changing aspirations is affecting these towards rapid extinction. Just as our plant and animal species are being depleted by massive modern exploitation of resources these pearls of traditional wisdom are being lost just as rapidly by human neglect. Here I must draw particular attention to the Apa Tani tribes of Arunachal Pradesh who have over many centuries of development in their niche valley in the Eastern Himalayas demonstrated a sustainable lifestyle that is based on the careful cultivation and utilisation of bamboo, timber and an integrated water management system for agriculture that is as yet an unknown value in modern life around the world.

Design, on the other hand, is a natural human activity that evolved with man over the ages but it has now has been relegated to the precincts of a professional marketing priesthood that manages the activity in the marketplace of our global economy. Design as it was deeply understood by traditional societies as a broad based human imaginative activity has been relegated to the back burner since we have chosen to follow the specialized path of science and the trained manager since they provide rational answers for everything and modern man and their society can only decide based on explicit knowledge while design in most cases is felt or tacit knowledge and is based on instincts that are better judged by sensitive interpretation rather than by the application of cold logic. This is why I felt compelled to set up my blog titled “Design for India” where I could debate the other dmensions of design that are much needed in India today.

Bamboo, has been nurtured by traditional societies across Asia and Latin America and its varied species provide a natural material that had wide spread use in thousands of traditional applications in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America where it was abundantly grown but with the arrival of industrial revolution and the spread of Western know-how the dominant materials of our economies started depending on minerals like stone, limestone and cement, metals like steel and copper, synthetics such as plastics and petrochemicals and some economic agricultural commodities such as cotton and jute. Bamboo was therefore neglected by the colonial leaders as the spread of technology and formalized knowledge also meant the reduction of local knowledge in materials that were already in wide and sophisticated use in Asia and Latin America, particularly bamboo which was considered the ‘poor mans timber’ while the emphasis and official attention of the Government in India shifted to timber and wood during the heydays of the British Raj.

Sustainability is the hallmark of most settled societies that evolved slowly over thousands of years and gradually built up their lessons of stable and predictable agriculture and lifestyles that were quite in sync with the beat of natures’ processes. However with the arrival of power assisted technologies and communication man could do a lot more and much faster and the race for the dominance of nature commenced in real earnest and each nation tried to outdo the other in their race for global dominance in economy, power and social well being, all measured by growth and growth alone. However, the destruction of pristine rain forests in search for minerals and material wealth and the release of toxic gasses into the atmosphere has had its natural consequences and we are on the threshold of rediscovering the concept of sustainability in the face of the threat of human extinction, a threat that is imminent, if corrective strategies are not adopted by the worlds citizens and their political leaders on a most urgent basis. Sustainability is then a call for a return to a steady-state economy that echoes nature in all its involved and intertwined processes.

This impending crisis places this particular manuscript at the centre of the debate where all three subjects can play a meaningful role and in trying to address and bridge these three difficult but critical fields that promise to bring long term benefits that can counter the problems of our uncontrolled developments of the past few hundred years. Design strategies will need to be explored and design itself will need to be understood and applied by political leadership across the world along with the subjects of science, technology and management and design at a deep level will play a huge role in the reversal of global warming and the move towards sustainability in the days ahead. Bamboo is the fastest growing plant material known to man and we will need to learn to use it in new and improved ways to supplement our vast needs for materials across many areas of application and much research would be needed to fill the gaps in our knowledge along with an urgent attempt to codify and garner the traditional wisdom that still exists across the bamboo culture zones of the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America. Sustainability too is a subject of current scientific and political interest and there is much that we need to understand about the symbiotic processes that live and work in nature and then be able to use this understanding back into our own ways of living and doing things in the future.

This manuscript, “Bamboo: From Green Design to Sustainable Design” by Rebecca Reubens stands as a brave attempt to bridge the huge gap and I am sure it will encourage others to follow in the much needed integrative research and design actions that is needed in the days ahead. Rebecca studied design at National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) and then joined National Institute of Design (NID) in the Furniture Design discipline where I used to trach teach till I retired in 2010. She started her own journey into bamboo when she took on the subject as her Diploma Project as a student of Furniture Design at NID. We had a challenging project handy as part of the Bamboo & Cane Development Institute (BCDI)project that I was heading in 2001 and she has stayed with the subject and journeyed far as a member of the International Network of Bamboo & Rattan (INBAR) field team and now she has taken it on as her subject for her PhD Thesis at TU Delft in Design and Sustainability through the medium of Bamboo. She also went on to set up her own enterprise to work with local communities in Gujarat and from this to learn the significance of human effort at the grassroots using Design, Bamboo and Sustainability as her driving principles and to learn from this experience that which is not yet stated in any book so far, lessons from real life experiences from the field. All three much needed today and I wish her success.”

from MP Ranjan’s Blog…

Grand Theater Qingdao


Architects: gmp architekten
Location: Qingdao, Shandong, China
Design Team: Meinhard von Gerkan, Stephan Schütz, Nicolas Pomränke
Project Year: 2010
Project Area: 60,000 sqm
Photographs: Christian GahlArchitects: gmp architekten
Location: Qingdao, Shandong, China
Design Team: Meinhard von Gerkan, Stephan Schütz, Nicolas Pomränke
Project Year: 2010
Project Area: 60,000 sqm
Photographs: Christian Gahl

The Grand Theater is situated on the eastern side of the city of Qingdao between a bay in the Yellow Sea and Mount Laoshan (1,130m above sea level). Because of the unique situation of the massif directly by the sea, the Laoshan ridge is often wreathed in clouds, which gives the landscape a unique, often mystical, setting.

The style of the building relates to the mentioned natural spectacle, with the massif and the lightness of the clouds reflected in the appearance of the Grand Theater. It rises from the landscape like a mountain — a cloud-like roof seems to wreathe the four buildings. The raised terraces in the surrounding park are reminiscent of a mountain plateau, and take their bearings both from the sea and the mountains.

In addition to the opera house a concert and a multifunction hall as well as a media center and a hotel are integrated into the complex.


The foyer of the opera house offers direct views of the sea. Audiences can enter the auditorium on two levels, either via the lower level, giving access to the large cloakrooms and the lower circle, or via the main foyer.





The Stuttgart Station Saga

“A panel of know-alls”



Stuttgart – Excerpts from various newspapers… 

As a responsible planner of the statics the Stuttgart engineer Werner Sobek knows the construction project of the deep station to the smallest detail. In an interview Sobek increasingly objects to the reasons to which the project must be stopped because of safety concerns.

Mr. Sobek, your colleague Frei Otto calls the freeze of Stuttgart21 as threatened due to the construction site “danger to life and limb.” If the warning justified?

The warning is not justified in any way. I am shocked that Mr. Otto now expressed in this form – after many, many years has been involved in the project as an active planner and Stuttgart21 has known this for a long time so also the advice on the nature of the subsoil. These opinions do not say, that the project threatens or endangers life.

Mr. Otto warns of new underground station could be flooded by ground water or by the pressure of groundwater squeezed out of the ground uncontrollably. If you build in the groundwater, creating lift. It is known since Archimedes. The new Stuttgart main train station is between six and eight meters in groundwater. This is technically not a problem and the conditions of the city, if you go to the many parking garages, think light rail or commuter train tunnel, sensational in any way. On the contrary: The tubes of the S-and U-Bahn are for nearly 35 years in peace some six feet lower than the new station in the groundwater. And nothing has happened.

As a layman I would say that the subway station developed because of its size, a much higher lift than a narrow tube train. Is that correct?

Yes. But even the weight of the main station construction is sufficient to compensate for the buoyancy almost. It includes hundreds of stakes that anchor the station ten to 16 meters deep underground. This is an additional security. Overall, to the problem which Mr. Otto fears.

Mr. Otto said that he spoke his warning also of “moral obligation” of. Can you do with this concept in this context something?

I will not comment on that.

Try it.

At the Stuttgart 21 project some of the best and most prestigious Ingenierbüros are actually involved. This fellow can not just assume this way – even indirectly – that they would act irresponsibly or immorally. This is simply an absurdity.

================================================================



Stuttgart 21
co-creator of the station questioned
Michael Schmidt, 08/19/2010 17:28 clock

The 85-year-old Frei Otto does not currently mainly technical incalculable risks sufficiently into account. 


Photo: Zweygarth














“If a design takes long to realize, then, the plan has become obsolete. “

Frei Otto on one of the problems of the low station

One of two designers of the deep station for Stuttgart 21 suggests a new beginning of the planning. The 85-year-old Frei Otto, who for more than 13 years has together with the Düsseldorf architect Christoph Ingenhoven designed the characteristic “light eyes” and the shape of the new Stuttgart station, does not currently particularly unpredictable technical risks sufficiently into account. Above all, the Safety concerns the architect and engineer and complains that the current criticism is based primarily on the costs: “If we had had in designing the current level of information, I would be dominated by the idea of a low station moved away.” For a compelling reason why one would put the Stuttgart main station underground. Instead Otto is tinkering with the the idea of a high station in order to cross the Nesenbachtal. “A new plan could be mad to go fast, since there are now so much more information there than in the architectural competition in 1997.” The current hard-fought were on the side wings of the other option and this has ever been an issue for the architectural competition.


Geological factors affecting work 

“The purpose of the wings, which are for a station with steam locomotives because of the soot and smoke make it an absolutely necessity. Bonatz ‘grand gesture to the east has seen hardly anyone,” said Otto. . What made him much more strongly for a rethink, are the sum of the geological adversities and also insights and new and terrible experience of the behavior of crowds in the tunnel , “The main problem still remains: we sit down with the underground station in the groundwater, and it  rises up. How is the 400-meter long and 100 meter wide concrete trough in which sits the underground station, to be held then, so that it floats not. 

But can they be securely anchored? “asks the emeritus of the University of Stuttgart and founder of the Institute for Lightweight Structures in the face of the clay subsoil at Castle Garden. Also on another level, there are other problems with his creation: “Each design has its time has when it is not realized for long, then the plan becomes outdated and is flogged to death. Big projects who have no completion date, there is no psychological support” says Otto, who attained World fame for the design for the Munich Olympic roofs in collaboration with his colleagues in Stuttgart Gunter Behnisch 1972 .

Xhina: and why economies should slow down…


China’s economy is slowing down. It’s projected growth rate is set to dip down to as low as a modest 6% versus the jaw-dropping double-digit rates of the past decade or more. In March, the government set its growth target for 2012 at 7.5%. It must be remembered that this is no accident. It is a calculated move. In the most recent five-year plan this general cooling-down is part of China’s strategy to avoid the sort of economic meltdown that hit the U.S. in 2008. They read the tea leaves and decided to take measures, as they can in a centrally-controlled economy, to ensure steady, modest growth rather than bubble-producing frenetic growth. Political stability is a huge factor in this. The communist party maintains its mandate as long as the engines of the economy continue to hum relatively smoothly.

Why the slow down? According to a recent special report in The Economist, nearly 48% of China’s GDP in 2011 was dominated by internal investment in infrastructure and city building. This should come as no surprise to foreign architects who have been riding this wave for the last twenty years or so. The scary part of this number is that most of this investment is being done by state owned enterprises (SOES) operating under artificially favorable conditions. On top of this, according to the ratings agency, Fitch, lending has jumped from 122% of GDP in 2008 to 171% in 2011. This “surge in credit” is strikingly familiar because it looks like the beginnings of America’s financial crisis. As The Economist notes, “When Fitch plugged China’s figures into its disaster warning system (the “macroprudential risk indicator”), the model suggested a 60% chance of a banking crisis by the middle of next year.”

What ramifications does a China slow-down have for foreign firms? Obviously, it means projects slow down or disappear. But this does not mean China is going away. While it will continue to be a vital market over the long term, what foreign firms should prepare for is a gradual shift in the architecture market toward social infrastructure projects.

So why have some economists been signaling the alarm that China is on it’s way to a resounding POP? Well, they have also been qualifying that prediction with data about how different the Chinese situation is from that of, say, the Eurozone, or the U.S. So, yes, there are all those reports about empty buildings and vacant mega-developments blowing with dust, but not to worry. Most of those were fronted with surplus cash, money to burn—something difficult to imagine when you come from a slow western economy. In the case of China, empty buildings do not necessarily indicate a bubble. What they might indicate is that they have to start thinking about how to allocate investments differently.
Additionally, according to the report, China’s financial sector will be able to absorb any bad investments in the development sector.

China’s banking system provides a vast ocean of cash reserves to weather any financial storm that may come its way. China has set it up so that there are basically no options for locals as to where to put their money. For the most part, it all goes into low-yield savings accounts that pay a criminally-low interest rate. China is flooding in cash and, in a sense, holding the Yuan hostage. What this means is that they have a greater margin for error when and if the shit hits the fan.

The new five-year plan begins to steer the country away from this potentiality by emphasizing social infrastructure as an area to concentrate development investments. Hospitals, housing, schools, senior amenities are all up for some state-sponsored infusions and incentives.

According to a recent article by Bloomberg News, China’s central government does not intend to roll out another hefty stimulus like it did three years ago. What they are proposing instead is a shift away from reliance on state investment to a model of private investment in infrastructure, schools, and health care sectors. Basically trying to get more private money out of the banks and into the economic stream to promote growth. Of course “private” and “state” can mean one and the same in China. More specifically, the idea is that this will gradually wean the state off its dependence on SOES and create an investment climate that is more aligned with actual market forces. Many economists, within and without China, have thought SOES have been granted too much power since the nineties and that they are skewing the economy into the red-hot danger zone.

There will, however, be modest stimulus measures taken by different state agencies, such as the State Council, and the finance ministry. Bloomberg notes that these measures could impact growth by August or September. China is also set to implement policies that would speed up the approval process for major projects.

While mixed-use has dominated in recent years, both state and private investments are going to start shifting toward markets like health care, education, and housing. According to Rosealea Yao of GK Dragonomics, China needs roughly 85 million more urban households to match housing demand.

The state recognizes the need to put some sort of social safety net in place now that the old “iron rice bowl”, which thrived under the communist industrial model, has been dead for many years. Thus, the consumption of social services is becoming more and more vital in “post-communist” China. This is one reason state and private investors are gradually turning their attention to health care and education. What the new economic order in China is producing is a new demand for such social infrastructure projects. Does this mean the mall is dead in China? Not exactly. But mall developments currently attract the wealthiest 10% of the population while the state is starting to turn the energy of the economy toward the other 90% a little more.

Retail will still be there but it is not yet China’s primary mode of consumption. This is true in part because of social inequality. However, if investments in social infrastructure increase, this will help drive social inequality down. By extension, this could give consumer society a shot in the arm. So, for those architects solely doing mixed-use retail, there is still room for growth, but this is tied to the long-term potential of the emerging social sector. This will become an important growth area in the next few years.

As The Economist report notes, China still needs more of everything. What will be important for foreign architects is to adapt and remain agile. Firms may have to run a race that is less based solely on running at full-speed and more a type of combined relay comprised of running, walking, resting, running again, and so on. To expand in China, foreign firms will need to think beyond just working with commercial investment clients doing icon towers and be ready to work with social infrastructure clients. Put another way, in the next few years, foreign architects may very well be doing fewer towers and more hospitals and schools.