Tabla de contenidos para March - April 2016 en AZURE

“Marble is such a finite thing,” says Gabriel Hendifar of New York studio Apparatus, explaining his latest work, the Neo Marble collection. CNC cut and turned by lathe at an Italian quarry, these classic stone vessels and candlelit lanterns are complemented with brass bowls and glass orbs. “We felt it was import ant to respect the permanence of the material, so we looked to shapes that would be relevant for a long time. We wanted to make objects that could have been designed thousands of years ago, or thousands of years from now. I like to imagine these pieces having a life before me and a life after.” apparatusstudio.com When Mogens Lassen designed the Kubus candle holder in 1962, a small series was produced and gifted to those closest to…

ICONIC BUILDING ONE AS MOST CHINESE ARCHITECTS are struggling to compete with the popular appeal of foreign architects on native soil, Ma Yansong, principal of MAD Architects, is flourishing. At 40, the Beijing native already has an impressive list of mega-projects behind him, from his first international competition win – the curvaceous twin condo towers outside Toronto, dubbed the Marilyns – to the boulder-like museum located in the Manchurian outpost of Ordos. All are remarkable structures, but his most ambitious – and accomplished – yet is an opera house and theatre in the northern Chinese city of Harbin. Located in the wetlands to the north of the Songhua River, the swooping twin buildings were planned as the centrepiece of a new city that will complement the metropolis of 10 million…

ICONIC BUILDING FOUR THE ROAD THAT WINDS through the Canadian prairies from Edmonton to Whitehorse is long and tedious, dotted with farmers’ fields and industrial plants in equal measure, and little else. But 500 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, outside Wembley, Alberta (population 1,383), a national landmark is dedicated to the rich paleontological history of a region where, tens of millions of years ago, herds of giant horned dinosaurs roamed. The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, named for the renowned Canadian paleontologist and designed by Toronto’s Teeple Architects, sits virtually on top of one of the world’s densest fossil sites: the so-called River of Death bone bed at Pipestone Creek, where the first known Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai fossil was discovered by a local teacher 42 years ago. From certain angles, the museum’s…

THE LEAD-UP TO IIDEXCANADA LAST DECEMBER gave the impression that, once again, contract furniture would rule the floor at the Toronto building expo. After all, the feature installation, Go Away!, designed by local firm Quadrangle Architects, was billed as an exploration of the workplace, with a cast of furniture from Teknion, Haworth, Keilhauer and Steelcase. The exhibit did indeed delve into the fluid work environment, and throughout the two-day run its four corners were regularly changed up to form various vignettes, from casual breakout spaces to a tiny room for making personal calls. Once visitors caught on to the revolving displays, it was both fun and worthwhile to check out each iteration, perhaps taking a break on Steelcase’s Emu Ivy outdoor sofa or Keilhauer’s Chemistry bench. The remaining 400 exhibitors…

1 Exclave by Herman Miller To set up flexible meeting zones, this multi-component suite includes tables in sitting or standing heights; wall rails and mobile carts that hold up multiple whiteor corkboards; media tiles that display one or two monitors; plus various storage elements. hermanmiller.com 2 E-Media by DVO Designed to facilitate video conferencing for smaller groups, this module features a vertical panel that holds a monitor or a camera, with cables concealed in a metal casing, and a built-in work surface (seating not included). dvoffice.com 3 Beatnik Room-in-Room by Donar Dedicate a conference space in an open plan office with this hub. Made from acoustic fabrics, the structure has integrated video display, a BOSE audio system and gesture-operated lighting. It can also be kitted out with USB and HDMI…

“Design Miami isn’t about architecture,” says Yiliu Shen-Burke. So why was the architectural designer from the Harvard Graduate School of Design standing at the threshold of the white-hot decorative arts fest back in December? Shen-Burke – along with fellow master’s candidates Joanne Cheung, Doug Harsevoort, Steven Meyer, and Jenny Shen – shrank the built environment to the scale of furniture, ceramics or lighting for Unbuilt, the Harvard GSD Pavilion. Each year since its 2005 inception, the fair has commissioned emerging talent to create an installation for its entry courtyard. Unbuilt marks the first time the privilege has gone to students; in turn, the Cambridge quintet milled 198 architectural models from foam in MiMo-era pink. Mounted on a soaring grid of steel supports, the forms are hung upside down, so visitors…

ONLY 12 PER CENT OF CITY DWELLERS live in areas where air quality meets safe levels, according to the World Health Organization – and that’s just among cities that report their data. The dream of clean air everywhere spurred Dutch artist and designer Daan Roosegaarde to invent his Smog Free Tower. Working with a team of scientists and engineers over two years, he has realized what he calls “the world’s largest smog vacuum.” The seven-metre tower, a hexagonal structure clad in horizontal aluminum louvres, employs filters similar to those found in hospitals, with ionization technology that uses a static charge to clear the air of pollutants. Roosegaarde’s scaled-up version pulls in air through a radial vent at the top, filtering 30,000 cubic metres per hour and releasing it through a…

ICONIC BUILDING TWO A GIANT SHOEBOX MAY BE THE LOGICAL FORM for a natatorium, but the Guild ford aquatic centre in Surrey, British Columbia, relays an imaginative approach that imbues it with a complexity worthy of its program. The 10,400-squaremetre expansion of the existing recreational centre harmoniously knits together an Olympic-sized pool and a leisure pool with a water slide. Along with universal change rooms and a fitness centre, there is a sauna, a steam room and spectator seating for up to 300. Bing Thom Architects worked with Shape Architecture, both based in Vancouver, to meld these diverse elements into “a meditative space, like a library,” says lead architect Bing Thom. “We are playing with this mystery of the box.” The public welcome begins outside, where the landscape has been…

“People like looking at other people without imposing, and sometimes you just need to add a bit of playfulness to enable the complexity of everyday life to unfold.” – Niels Bjørn Povlsgaard, architect NATURE HUGGER INFINITE BRIDGE GJØDE & POVLSGAARD ARKITEKTER Sometimes, an architectural gesture is so simple and inviting, it’s hard to believe it didn’t exist before. That’s the case with Infinite Bridge, a raised circle 60 metres in diameter, partly installed on a sandy beach and partly over the water in Aarhus, Denmark. Visitors stroll along the wooden jetty to take in views of the coast, or dangle their feet above the deepening water. The bridge, installed for two months last year, was so popular that weddings were held on it, and crowds gladly lined up to saunter…

Industrial designer Surfing I like theselby.com. It’s an insight into people’s lives. It’s by a photographer named Todd Selby, who started off taking pictures of his friends’ homes and putting them on his website, and then it just went crazy. It’s got design, it’s got fashion, it’s got people that you know and people you don’t. His home shoots are very natural. Up to that point, we were used to seeing everyone’s homes looking so polished. Downloading I use the TurboScan app. Basically, it’s a scanning machine on your phone. I sketch all the time, and when I work with my design team, which produces technical drawings, we start with those sketches. I scan my sketches with my phone, and I can get them to my team straight away. Listening…

SOMETIMES, INNOVATION INVOLVES keeping what’s already there. While planning National Sawdust, a performance venue in Brooklyn’s rapidly gentrifying Williamsburg neighbourhood, the partners at Bureau V realized that preserving a small piece of history was almost revolutionary. “There’s a tabula rasa model in this neighbourhood of tearing down all the old things and building glass towers,” says Peter Zuspan, who led the project with partners Stella Lee and Laura Trevino. “We thought it might be a nice gesture to keep an old brick building.” Or at least the facade. While the brick walls of a former sawdust factory still abut the sidewalk, visitors will find that the original interior has been gutted. In its place stand two eight-metre-tall crystalline forms clad in glossy black tile, which form a craggy canyon. “We…

It’s impossible to ignore the idea that driverless cars will be commonplace in the future, perhaps as soon as 2030. With our focus on big buildings in this issue, we decided to ask experts what effects they think the technology will have on our cities. Smart vehicles will create a high degree of surveillance. I’m not convinced that the public will welcome this level of monitoring. I prefer the car not to be a courtroom. – Rem Koolhaas, principal architect at OMA On its surface, an automated car promises an accident-free, lawabiding transport system. A world with driverless cars should ideally mean we no longer require multilane highways; instead, we can take the more rural approach of singlelane roads. The future might entail reduced infrastructure, which would allow more space…

ICONIC BUILDING THREE “KNOW WHOM YOU’RE SPEAKING TO,” says Siamak Hariri, the soft-spoken founding partner at Toronto’s Hariri Pontarini Architects. For Hariri, “the mother factor” is paramount. As he explains, “When I was at Yale, a secur ity guard at Louis Kahn’s University Art Gallery would run his hand along the concrete, and you got the sense he was moved by the light. Making that connection, finding that sense of humanity, is really important in architecture. If you’re building a temple and your mother doesn’t feel comfortable praying in it, then you have a problem.” Hariri’s firm, located on the first floor of a reclaimed warehouse on Toronto’s King Street West, is all wood and brick, with intensely concentrating employees filling rows of desks. But that sense of humanity he…

OVER THE PAST DECADE, the buzz in the contract furniture world has been for breakaway spaces that bring about freestyle collaboration, with open concept offices providing the perfect stage set. But another shift has been gaining ground: the need to re-include some modes of privacy that cubicles once afforded. In response, Teknion has opened a showroom in Toronto that acts as an observatory for the ever-evolving office culture. Spread out over 1,000 square metres, the column-free interior, designed by San Francisco’s Vanderbyl Design, incorporates zones both large and small for various styles of work. Along one glazed wall sits a row of high-backed upholstered chairs, overlooking the city’s harbour and providing sound- buffered seating for employees to make a private call or take a break. In another area, a grouping…