We’re having a dutch day because last week Architectural Record announced its annual Design Vanguard for 2006 and one of the winners was the Rotterdam architectural firm BAR architects (yes even more crap flash animation).
We had seen their bridge house but we didn’t know about several interesting adaptive reuse projects.
The retirement home for junkies (yes, [...]
The opponents of heritage conservation and adaptive reuse are usually overjoyed when a mishap like fire destroys a building on a site that they would rather see redeveloped as a big box shopping mall or something equally visionary.
But sometimes all is not lost - the Parthenon for instance was blown up when being used to [...]
We tend to be uninterested in adaptive reuse projects that are little more than renovations or restorations. It’s not that they are unworthy because they are extremely important - contemporary adaptive reuse is based on sustainability principles on the one hand and heritage conservation as a basic social building block on the other. It’s just [...]
It’s beautiful, but we can find very little about it.
What we do know is that it is the adaptive reuse of Schloss Rothschild, Umbau, Austria as a museum by the Viennese Pritzker Prize winning architect Hans Hollein (who has an excellent website with NO FLASH!) and it is due to be finished in 2007.
Hollein’s unbuilt [...]
We’ve talked about spam before but this time it’s Spam, the real thing, if you can say that about Spam. The Spam Museum is in an adaptively reused K-Mart, appropriately enough. It’s in Austin, Minnesota, “otherwise known as Spam Town, USA” (but not to us).
The museum also houses the offices of the Hormel Food Corp, [...]
It’s one thing to write about converting 747s into mansions but ultimately that’s only for an extremely wealthy minority.
Homelessness is endemic throughout the world and in the US alone approximately 3.5 million people are estimated to experience homelessness at some point annually, a million of them children. Extremist right wing governments have exacerbated the problem [...]
Although the essay in its adapted blog form is not yet the essay of Bacon, Montaigne, Addison or Orwell you can nonetheless see what may lie in the future as the form refines itself. Brief and pointed, visual as well as literary, loaded with allusion and subterranean complexity via links, and potentially collaborative and [...]
1964… it seems millenia ago. The American Empire had reached its zenith and the few things that were starting to go wrong seemed like minor glitches although the massive humiliation of defeat in Vietnam was soon to define the limit of US power.
In that year New York hosted a World Fair at Queens in what [...]
We’ve talked before about reusing plane parts as furniture, and the LoTek library design using aircraft fuselages is a particular favourite of ours, even if it was never built. Well, there’s more than one way to lace a boot, and there’s more than one way to skin a Boeing 747.
This project by Syndesis Ltd for [...]
We live midway between a number of huge abandoned industrial sites.
Ten kilometres in one direction is Portland with its cement works closed since 1991,
and ten kilometres in another is Lithgow blast furnace, site of the first steel production in Australia, abandoned since 1928.
About thirty kilometres away as the crow flies is Glen Davis with [...]
