www.hcu-architektur.de
Freitag, 17. April 2009
Donnerstag, 16. April 2009
The Large Hadron Collider - Our understanding of the Universe is about to change...
Man hat den Eindruck, daß die moderne Physik auf Annahmen beruht, die irgendwie dem Lächeln einer Katze gleichen, die gar nicht da ist.
(picture from content management system of cern- photo lab, all rights reserverd) The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.
Two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.
There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.
Hadronen sind Teilchen, die der starken Wechselwirkung unterworfen sind. Da man sie heute als aus Quarks aufgebaut betrachtet, sind sie im eigentlichen Sinn keine Elementarteilchen. Die bekanntesten Hadronen sind die Nukleonen (Neutronen und Protonen), aus denen die Atomkerne aufgebaut sind.
(following pictures (C) hannebaum seufert jentzen)
video gamish polygon sculptures
Susy Oliveira
 It is tough not to stare at Susy Oliveira’s clunky, 1980s-video-gamish polygon sculptures. Of course, sculpture is created for gawking, so clearly Oliveira has reached at least one of her goals with these large-scale pieces made of color photographic prints (c-prints) on archival card and wrapped onto foam core. Clockwise, these pieces are called Bird on a Log, The Living Boy, Time Is Never Wasted, and The Girl and the Bear. In her description of her 2008 solo show at Toronto’s Peak gallery, Oliveira wrote about examining “our preoccupation with replacing nature with fabricated versions of itself.” Fittingly, she adds that these sculptures express an “opposition between the round aspects of sculpture and the flat aspects of photography, much like bringing a virtual model into a real space.” Oliveira is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design (2000) and the University of Waterloo (2006). - Tuija Seipell |
Mittwoch, 15. April 2009
Dienstag, 14. April 2009
Atlas of Fabrication Barkow-Leibinger-Ausstellung in Berlin
Frank Barkow und Regine Leibinger haben ihr amerikanisch-deutsches Büro 1993 in Berlin gegründet und seitdem zahlreiche Projekte im In- und Ausland realisiert. Ihre Arbeitsweise ist durch ein beständiges Zusammenwirken von Berufspraxis, Forschung und Lehre geprägt. In ihrer interdisziplinären, diskursiven Arbeitsauffassung erweitert und verfeinert sich das eigene Schaffen durch den Austausch mit Experten aus den Bereichen Energie- und Klimatechnik, Tragwerksplanung, Ausstellungsgestaltung, Landschaftsarchitektur und Kunst.
Die Ausstellung „Atlas of Fabrication“ in den Galerieräumen von 032c in Berlin zeigt eine Auswahl der zuvor im größeren Rahmen in London präsentierten Exponate. Anhand von Materialstudien, Objekten und Modellen wird deutlich, wie sich Forschung, Lehre und Praxis in der Arbeit von Barkow Leibinger überschneiden, inspirieren und wechselseitig beeinflussen.
Ausstellung: 18. April bis 31. Mai 2009
Eröffnung: 18. April 2009, 18 Uhr
Ort: 032c, Kleine Kurstraße 1, 10117 Berlin
Zum Thema:
Montag, 13. April 2009
An interview with Peter Zumthor: On the Pritzker Prize, the essence of architecture and hope for young architects
When I caught up with this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, Peter Zumthor, last Thursday, I could hear the wind whipping in the background. Zumthor wasn’t in his office, which can be found in the village of Haldenstein in central Switzerland. He was outdoors, meeting with clients for two houses in a little village near Vals, the site of his best-known project, the Thermal Baths.
He was talking on his cell phone and he quickly made me, a Midwestern flatlander, very jealous with his description of his surroundings:
I’m out here on the mountainside high in the Swiss Alps. High up. I’m looking at a beautiful chain of mountains. Blue sky. You should be here.
Indeed I should....Let’s tell non-architects about you. Tell me about your office.
This office is in the Swiss Alps and we are 20 people from six or seven nations. It’s a limited number of people—not more than 20 because we’re working in a familiar kind of situation, like in a farmsted in a village. We have a couple of buildings devoted to me and that is where we are working. Life and working are closely connected.
Compared to many of today’s "starchitects," you’ve taken an unconventional career path. Do you feel vindicated by this award?
Oh yes, it’s great that you can sort of pursue your thing. Do your thing. It gets recognized. I’m not so keen on publishing. I’m not a networker. It’s great that if you do good work, it gets recognized.
When you were studying at the Pratt Institute in New York in the 1960s, did you visit Chicago?
I did. I looked at the work of Mies. I went to IIT (Crown Hall, at left). And then I took a tour through all the famous buildings of the pioneers of the city...I respect Mies a lot.
You have said, "Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language." That’s beautifully put, but I want to go deeper. I’m sorry to ask you to answer this on a cellphone, but how would you define the essence of architecture?
I guess it's to do rooms or spaces for people. If you look at the Earth without architecture, it’s sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether it’s a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.
You’ve said you are interested in making places, not just objects. How do the Vals Thermal Baths (left) illustrate that?
It’s actually built on the site where there is a hot spring. So the water comes out of the mountain right there. I built the whole thing out a local stone which we quarry half a kilometer back in the valley. The building material and the site and the hot water—it’s all there. I have to give it a shape.
It sounds like you don’t work with many clients who come do you? Do you reject most of them?
True.
Why?
I think my work is about authorship. It’s less about rendering a service and even less about implementing ideas of other people. I need a close contact to the client whoever it is and a commitment of the client to go out and do a process together. I want to do the best for him. I need his respect and his patience. I want to work with a sophisticated person who’s interested in a good building and not in my name.
What lessons does this award teach young architects?
I would hope that it would teach them that you can carefully do your thing, that you can be yourself, that you can try to solve the problem, that you can concentrate on the essence of your task, that you don’t have to do what other people expect of you. There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.
Pritzker Prize Goes to Peter Zumthor NY-Times
He is not a celebrity architect, not one of the names that show up on shortlists for museums and concert hall projects or known beyond architecture circles. He hasn’t designed many buildings; the one he is best known for is a thermal spa in an Alpine commune. And he has toiled in relative obscurity for the last 30 years in a remote village in the Swiss mountains.
Enlarge This Image 
Wolfram Janzer
Peter Zumthor’s art museum in Bregenz, Austria, has glass walls that can serve as billboards or video screens at night. More Photos »
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Helene Binet
The interior of the St. Benedict Chapel, designed by Peter Zumthor, in Sumvitg, Switzerland. More Photos >
But on Monday the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor is to be named the winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize, the highest recognition for architects.
“He has conceived his method of practice almost as carefully as each of his projects,” the citation from the nine-member Pritzker jury says. “He develops buildings of great integrity — untouched by fad or fashion. Declining a majority of the commissions that come his way, he only accepts a project if he feels a deep affinity for its program, and from the moment of commitment, his devotion is complete, overseeing the project’s realization to the very last detail.”
For Mr. Zumthor, 65, winning the Pritzker, which is awarded annually to a living architect and regarded as architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, is a kind of vindication. “You can do your work, you do your thing, and it gets recognized,” he said in a telephone interview from Haldenstein, the Swiss village where he lives and works.
Mr. Zumthor is the 33rd laureate to receive the prize, which consists of a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion and is awarded at a different architecturally significant location each year. This year’s ceremony is to be held on May 29 in Buenos Aires.
The project most closely associated with Mr. Zumthor is the spa he completed in 1996 for the Hotel Therme in Vals, an Alpine village in Switzerland. Using slabs of quartzite that evoke stacked Roman bricks, Mr. Zumthor created a contemporary take on the baths of antiquity.
He is also known for his use of wood, as in St. Benedict Chapel in Sumvitg, Switzerland, which evokes a giant hot tub.
The Pritzker jury praised Mr. Zumthor’s use of materials. “In Zumthor’s skillful hands, like those of the consummate craftsman, materials from cedar shingles to sandblasted glass are used in a way that celebrates their own unique qualities, all in the service of an architecture of permanence,” the citation said, adding, “In paring down architecture to its barest yet most sumptuous essentials, he has reaffirmed architecture’s indispensable place in a fragile world.”
Mr. Zumthor said that his projects generally originated with materials. “I work a little bit like a sculptor,” he said. “When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It’s not about paper, it’s not about forms. It’s about space and material.”
Mr. Zumthor’s buildings do not share a common vernacular. They range from tall and circular to low-slung and boxy. For his Field Chapel to St. Nikolaus von der Flüe, completed in 2007, in Mechernich, Germany, Mr. Zumthor formed the interior from 112 tree trunks configured like a tent. Over 24 days, layers of concrete were poured around the structure. Then for three weeks a fire was kept burning inside so that the dried tree trunks could be easily removed from the concrete shell. The chapel floor was covered with lead, which was melted on site and manually ladled onto the floor.
For an art museum in Bregenz, Austria — a four-story cube of concrete, steel and glass that opened in 1997 — Mr. Zumthor used glass walls that at night can become giant billboards or video screens.
His Kolumba Art Museum in Cologne, Germany, completed in 2007, rises out of the ruins of the Gothic St. Kolumba Church, destroyed in World War II. The Pritzker jury called the project “a startling contemporary work, but also one that is completely at ease with its many layers of history.”
Mr. Zumthor said that he deliberately kept his office small— no more than 20 people. “That’s the way it’s going to be so that I can be the author of everything,” he said.
“I’m not a producer of images,” he added. “I’m this guy who, when I take on a commission, I do it inside out, everything myself, with my team.”
One of Mr. Zumthor’s best-known designs never came to fruition. In 1993 he won the competition for a museum and documentation center on the horrors of Nazism to be built on the site of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Mr. Zumthor’s submission called for an extended three-story building with a framework consisting of concrete rods. The project, called the Topography of Terror, was partly built and then abandoned when the government decided not to go ahead for financial reasons. The unfinished building was demolished in 2004.
Born in Basel, Switzerland, Mr. Zumthor as a teenager served a four-year apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker. He studied at the Basel Arts and Crafts School and spent a year at Pratt Institute in New York. In the 1970s he moved to Graubünden, Switzerland, to work for the Department for the Preservation of Monuments. He established his own practice in 1979 in Haldenstein, where he and his wife, Annalisa Zumthor-Cuorad, brought up their three children.
Mr. Zumthor said that his village had been an inspiration and a refuge. “It helps you concentrate,” he said. “And also collaborators coming here are not distracted by all the things of the big city. To come up with me, you’re in the Alps. It’s sort of a commitment. It’s a beautiful feeling. Of course you have to like the mountains.”Sonntag, 12. April 2009
Schöck Novumor
the solution:
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preparing for time of extraction
isn't she lovely? dancing in a artificial world of polygons...
"There's only so much you can learn in one place
The more that I wait, the more time that I waste"
Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, US Pop-Artist
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