Arch Tracker

Our friends at Studio Banana TV have shared with an interview with Vincent Guallart, a spanish architect and pioneer of interaction between nature, technology and architecture proposes new paradigms based in urban, social and cultural conditions emerging from information society.

He crosses boundaries through collaborations in geology, sociology, engineering, fabrication, economics, and software design. His projects follow a “natural” logic, referring to components originating in nature, as well as to environmental systems. A logic that connects nature with the transformations of urban spaces, social organizations, and the digital world.

Merging architecture, nature and new technology, Guallart (b. Valencia 1963) is one of today’s most exciting Spanish architects. Besides having his own practice, he is the director of the Institute of Advanced Architecture in Catalunya (IAAC) and is the leading architect of Sociópolis project in Valencia, an innovative housing project for urban and environmental development with projects by international architects.

His most recent projects include, among others, The Alborz Gates in Tehran, Fugee Port, Keelung Port and The Fab Lab House Project-Solar decathlon
Interview by Studio Banana TV. Translation by Remy Arroyo.
Via: Studio Banana TV

Our friends at Studio Banana TV have shared with us their latest production, an interview with Bjarke Ingels, director of BIG.

Bjarke Ingels (born October 2, 1974 in Copenhagen) is a Danish architect. He heads the Bjarke Ingels Group which he founded in 2006. In 2009 he co-founded the design consultancy KiBiSi. In his designs, Bjarke Ingels often tries to achieve a balance between playful and practical approaches to architecture. In 2005, Bjarke Ingels opened his own office, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), after having co-founded PLOT Architects in 2001 and collaborated with Rem Koolhaas at OMA. Through a series of award-winning design projects and buildings, Bjarke Ingels has created an international reputation as a member of a new generation of architects that combines shrewd analysis, playful experimentation, social responsibility, and humor. These projects include BIH House in Ørestad and the new Danish national Maritime museum in Elsinore, hotel projects in Norway, a highrise designed in the shape of the Chinese character for ‘people’ for Shanghai, a masterplan for the redevelopment of a former naval base and oil industry wasteland into a zero-emission resort and entertainment city off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan, shaped as the seven mountains of the country, and a museum overlooking Mexico City. Under the BIG Banner Bjarke recently published “Yes is more – an archcomic on architectural evolution”.

Our friends at Studio Banana TV have shared with us their latest production, an interview with Ole Bouman, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI), Holland.

Ole Bouman has been director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) since April 2007. Before taking up that position he was editor-in-chief of the periodical Volume, a cooperative venture of Stichting Archis, AMO (the research bureau of OMA/Rem Koolhaas) and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University. He has curated a series of public events for the reconstruction of the public domain in cities that have been hit by disasters, such as Ramallah, Mexico City, Beirut and Prishtina. Bouman has been lecturing Design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

Studio Banana TV is an on-line platform dedicated to the promotion of multidisciplinary creativity in an audiovisual format. Studio Banana TV broadcasts its own video productions which are produced upon demand and which range from interviews to notorious artists, designers, architects, musicians etc. to documentaries on exhibitions, projects and studios. Through its thematic channels it also features a rich selection of videos edited by specialists in each field.

Via Dutch Profiles we found this interesting interview with Rem Koolhaas, principal at OMA, the interview has english subtitles.

The iconic buildings of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, OMA, and its core principles as embodied by Rem Koolhaas, have gained worldwide attention since it’s foundation in 1975.

The philosophy and aesthetic developed for competition submissions for and the Centre for Art and Mediatechnology in Karlsruhe, La Villette, the Jussieu campus and the Très Grande Biblioteque in Paris, garnered frenzied international attention and were finally realised in De Kunsthal in Rotterdam.

Rem Koolhaas’ intensive conceptual thinking about architecture and social circumstances ran simultaneously from the very early stages of his career. With a background in journalism and scriptwriting – his curiosity, research and urge to analyse are basics of his and OMA’s working process.

It is this approach that makes him a highly debated thinker and architect – although he staunchly refutes the label “Starchitect”. This image, he feels, blinds the public to a clear view of what his and OMA’s work is really about.

Casa da Musica in Porto provides a valuable steppingstone for one of OMA’s latest commissioned projects, the Taipei Performing Arts Centre. Treatment of form, innovative techniques, and the celebration of context are key elements of the design. Rather than relocating the roaring Shilin night market from the site of the forthcoming Taipei centre, OMA will instead build its 3 theatres above the market.

The vibrant, dynamic culture of the East forms a crucial element in Koolhaas’ pre-occupation with Asia. As a child he lived in Indonesia for several years. This experience is central to his current fascination with the region –  and its architecture.

Koolhaas’ seminal 1978 book Delirious New York, a Retroactive Manifesto, explores the Culture of Congestion in the big city. Nowadays, his focus is shifting to the wider consequences of the rapid growth of mega-cities.