A growing number of apps for smart phones and tablets serve the architecture community, including drawing and design utilities, file sharing platforms and material catalogs. Zaha Hadid Architects has entered the architecture app arena with their application, featuring recent news stories, project files and interactive guides for visiting museums designed by Hadid.
Image Source: @ZHA_News on Twitter
The School Park was designed in partnership between architect Hélio Duarte and pedagogue Anísio Teixeira in the late 1940s. Located in the northeastern city of Salvador, Bahia, the School Park consists of a series of structures, some bounded within a park space and the rest of which are dispersed throughout the adjacent community. Conceived as a school typology that would more closely align home life and school life, the School Park was intended to serve largely the poor who were migrating from rural to urban regions of Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s.
The School Park was conceived as a model that would physically unite communities and schools, an approach that was later drawn upon by Oscar Niemeyer when he designed the CIEP schools in Rio de Janeiro and the City of São Paulo’s Building Department, responsible for designing and building the CEU schools. As an interdisciplinary collaboration that has been modified over time, the School Park emphasizes the role of architecture in rethinking education and the role of pedagogical philosophies in pushing the conventional limits of architecture.
Find images of this project by searching the VRC’s online image collection using the search terms “School Park” in the Subject field and “Salvador” in the City field.
Photograph by Kristine Stiphany, courtesy UTSOA Visual Resources Collection.
UPDATE: The deadline has been extended until Tuesday, May, 28, 2013.
The 2013 ARTstor Travel Award deadline is this Friday, May 17th. This year, the theme is cities, “their histories and development, their depictions in art and documentation, their architecture, their ruins, their governments, their peoples, their myths.”
Directives from ARTstor:
Create an ARTstor image group or groups and a single essay of 500 words or less that creatively introduces us to a city or cities we did not know or reveals an intriguing aspect of the cities we do know. Five winners—college and graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field—will receive $1,500 each to help support travel-related educational and scholarly activities.
Will you submit a group? The VRC would love to hear about it. Send an email and image group link to vrc@mail.utexas.edu, and we will promote your group on Deep Focus and the VRC’s Facebook page.
Image source: ARTstor
The brainchild of Anna Murray and Grace Winteringham, Patternity is a blog that harnesses the power of pattern. Through buildings, bodies and shadow, this archive of curated images bridges scale and texture. Find out more about the Patternity project in a write-up by Cool Hunting.
Image source: Patternity
ARTstor announces the addition of over 1,500 digital images of Italian and English art and architecture from the collection of Sarah N. James. Highlighting English architecture from the Norman Romanesque period to the neoclassical, photos from James’ travels can be viewed in the ARTstor Digital Library. Find out more about this collection at the European Architecture and Sculpture (Sara N. James).
Image source: ARTstor
The Maria Antônia Center is an adaptive re-use project designed by the São Paulo office UNA Arquitetos, directed by Cristiane Muniz, Fábio Valentim, Fernanda Barbara and Fernando Viégas. The Maria Antônia Center is affiliated with the University of São Paulo (USP) and is remembered as a site of contentious politics during the military dictatorship of the late 1960s. The project, then, required that the architects simultaneously perform a technical restoration while participating in the social and cultural mending of a deeply conflicted past.
The design strategy of UNA Arquitetos is one of subtle sophistication characteristic of the second generation of Paulista School architects. Rather than design and insert a new object building (as perhaps Niemeyer might have), the architects utilized the existing urban fabric to catalyze new relationships with the surrounding urban context. Two restored historical structures are linked by a series of exterior public plazas, ramps, and bridges that reconfigure the internal space between the structures and open the previously closed site to the city at large. Further, the project allowed for the introduction of new programs within the Rui Barbosa building, including USP courses, seminar rooms, printmaking, photography, drawing, and painting studios, as well as lending support to the existing USP Theater. The Joaquim Nabuco building houses exhibition spaces, archival research and storage space, a cafe, and a small performance space.
Despite the programmatic complexity, the scale of the Maria Antônia intervention manages to simultaneously maintain the intimacy of a particular place and refer to São Paulo’s broader cultural and historical narratives. The rare balance of weaving a building into urban space is only achievable by architects who are adept at dissolving the boundaries between building and landscape, a practice that the Brazilians know perhaps better than architects who emerge from schools that bifurcate urban design, architecture and landscape architecture. Yet, while UNA Arquitetos has inherited a tradition of integrating architecture and urban design from predecessors such as Lúcio Costa, Affonso Reidy, Eduardo Kneese de Mello and Lina Bo Bardi, they are distinct in that they must also dissolve boundaries while maneuvering within a city that is today devoid of temporal or spatial limits. While many might consider this a daunting task, UNAS seems to uphold it as yet another opportunity to intervene in the urban realm.
Find images of this project by searching the VRC’s online image collection using the search terms “Maria Antônia” in the Subject field and “São Paulo” in the City field.
Photograph by Kristine Stiphany, courtesy of the UTSOA Visual Resources Collection.
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