#architecture and design

[asteticas]

ROBERT FITZPATRICK — MINO RESIDENCE, 1967.

[troythecatfish]

[americonica]

[weallarelonelytogether]

Indian architecture is as diverse as its people and culture. Among so many styles dating back to the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. These include many varieties of Indo-Islamic, Indo-Saracenic, and Rajput architecture.

[kmp-modernfurniture]

Where interior design and architecture meet

“Architecture and interior design are two sides of the same coin or in this case, space. We cannot focus solely on one aspect while overlooking the way both influence each other and combine to form a cohesive dialogue. Moreover, the creation of harmonious interiors that merge seamlessly with architecture…” Read more

[fallensapphires]

Architecture: Gothic Windows

If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts.

[mcmansionhell]

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

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[boardwalkindia]

Discovering the Top 10 Offices Globally: Remarkable Architecture and Design

Are you eager to provide your staff with the greatest workstation they could ever ask for? It turns out that all it takes to create one of the greatest office design ideas in the world is the perfect balance between inventiveness and care.

Here is a list of the top ten office design ideas in the globe, each with amazing architecture and design that can inspire you to think creatively and generate a game-changing concept.

Table of Contents:

Add India Group, India

Corus Quay, Canada

Spencer Ogden, Singapore

White Mountain Office, Sweden

Selgas Cano, Spain

Inventionland, US

Ogilvy & Mather, Indonesia

Apple’s SpaceShip (Apple Park), US

Hearst Tower, US

Leeza SOHO, China

1. Add India Tower, India

Add India Tower provides an array of well-planned workspaces that skillfully combine practicality and style. Open-concept workstations, private cabins, dedicated desks, and virtual office design solutions are among them, so everyone can discover the ideal arrangement to meet their particular needs.

All of the modern conveniences, ergonomic furnishings, and high-speed internet in each area are designed to make working there comfortable and productive. Add India Tower is aware that coworking is about creating communities more than it is about physical places, though.

Add India Tower facilitates collaboration, networking, and idea sharing by uniting individuals and businesses from diverse industries.

Members can interact, learn, and develop on a professional and personal level through Add India Tower's lively community events, workshops, and networking sessions.

Since Add India Tower recognizes the value of a healthy work-life balance, its spaces are equipped with amenities that have been thoughtfully chosen to improve members' general wellbeing.

Add India Tower makes sure that people have access to amenities that support and enhance their well-being, from well-stocked pantries to relaxation areas and leisure spaces.

2. Corus Quay, Canada

Nestled alongside the shores of Lake Ontario lies Corus Entertainment's massive workstation. This building's waterfront position is its main selling point. More than 70 Corus brands are successfully housed in its LEED-CI Gold-targeted interior.

Today, the workplace is undoubtedly Toronto's most sophisticated and intelligent building of its kind.

Currently, the office design can accommodate close to 1100 employees in a remarkably effective and cooperative workspace. They have a workplace that offers plenty of areas for staff to interact socially and collaborate.

With a five-story atrium, a three-story slide, and a lounge situated above two television studios, the office design provides its employees with the best possible work environment.

3. Spencer Ogden, Singapore

The goal of Spencer Ogden's culture is to give candidates all the support they require as well as a comfortable workplace.

A few of the main characteristics of their office design located all around the world are reclaimed wood tables, American-style eateries, and artificial turf floors. They intend to encourage mobility and opportunities for leisure among their staff members with these elements.

They have ended up constructing something that stands tall as an expression of architectural inspiration for workplaces across the world in an endeavour to give their staff the best, most inspiring workspaces.

4. White Mountain Office, Sweden

Unique is the White Mountain office design located in Stockholm, Sweden. This 1200 square foot area, which was originally intended as an anti-atomic refuge, is located 30 metres underneath the granite boulders of Vita Berg.

They are an internet provider that may have the world's most amazingly inventive workspace. Depending on where rock is most prevalent, different areas of the office design are addressed differently.

Places with an excess of rock are thought to be better suited for a closed-off workspace than more airy areas better suited for brainstorming sessions and other similar large-scale conversations.

5. Selgas Cano, Spain

The Selgas Cano office design in Madrid, Spain, is a really imaginative architectural endeavour that combines nature and business. The workplace is situated right in the middle of a forest and features glass walls that provide its staff with a constant visual feast of the surrounding natural beauty.

Not only does this type of office design have an employee-centred design, but it also employs a creative method to achieve the same goals.

A wooded office design is something that, beyond the fantasising fringes of an employee fed up with his office design feeling like a chokehold between the city, is practically unheard of. Source Link :  https://boardwalkindia.com/discovering-the-top-10-offices-globally-remarkable-architecture-and-design/

[teebeteeb]

Anti wind architecture

[whereserpentswalk]

Fuck hostile architecture, I want unhostile architecture. I want benches to be designed to be as easy as possible to sleep on. I want little places for pigeons to nest to be purposefully put on buildings. I want people designing public spaces to think about what they'd be like to skateboard on. I want "Please loiter" signs. I want people to be kind. I want...

[zegalba]

Art Nouveau storefront by Albert Pèpe (1906)

[389]

Manuel Sayrach i Carreras (Catalan, 1886-1937) - Casa Sayrach

[hayaletingozyaslari]

[upstairsdownstairsandinbetween]

Kaleidoscope Kindergarten (Tanshui Kindergarten), Tianshui, China, 

Designed by SAKO Architects

[vintagehomecollection]

The existing pool. Water can make an attractive transition between garden and countryside. Here the detailing of the pond is natural, with boulders used to make an informal surround.

The Garden Book, 1984

[mcmansionhell]

mojo dojo casa house

Howdy folks! Sorry for the delay, I was, uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, I'm back in Chicago which means this blog has returned to the Chicago suburbs. I'm sure you've all seen Barbie at this point so this 2019 not-so-dream house will come as a pleasant (?) surprise.

Yeah. So this $2.4 million, 7 bed, 8.5+ bath house is over 15,000 square feet and let me be frank: that square footage is not allocated in any kind of efficient or rational manner. It's just kind of there, like a suburban Ramada Inn banquet hall. You think that by reading this you are prepared for this, but no, you are not.

Scale (especially the human one) is unfathomable to the people who built this house. They must have some kind of rare spatial reasoning problem where they perceive themselves to be the size of at least a sedan, maybe a small aircraft. Also as you can see they only know of the existence of a single color.

Ok, but if you were eating a single bowl of cereal alone where would you sit? Personally I am a head of the table type person but I understand that others might be more discreet.

It is undeniable that they put the "great" in great room. You could race bicycles in here. Do roller derby. If you gave this space to three anarchists you would have a functioning bookshop and small press in about a week.

The island bit is so funny. It's literally so far away it's hard to get them in the same image. It is the most functionally useless space ever. You need to walk half a mile to get from the island to the sink or stove.

Of course, every McMansion has a room just for television (if not more than one room) and yet this house fails even to execute that in a way that matters. Honestly impressive.

The rug placement here is physical comedy. Like, they know they messed up.

Bling had a weird second incarnation in the 2010s HomeGoods scene. Few talk about this.

Honestly I think they should have scrapped all of this and built a bowling alley or maybe a hockey rink. Basketball court. A space this grand is wasted on sports of the table variety.

You would also think that seeing the rear exterior of this house would help to rationalize how it's planned but:

Not really.

Anyways, thanks for coming along for another edition of McMansion Hell. I'll be back to regular posting schedule now that the summer is over so keep your eyes peeled for more of the greatest houses to ever exist. Be sure to check the Patreon for today's bonus posts.

Also P.S. - I'm the architecture critic for The Nation now, so check that out, too!

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because media work is especially recession-vulnerable.