Daily Dose: Parking Garages

How innovative can one get with the design of a parking garage? And let’s be honest, even if you can create some pretty rockin’ structures, how interesting is it, really, if you’re still just storing cars? I guess I”ll have to let you decide, but take these projects into consideration before you do. I was impressed… a little leery of the second structure but impressed nonetheless.

LEED-certified parking garage at Santa Monica Civic Center

The parking garage at the Santa Monica Civic Center is the first LEED-certified building of its type. Recycled construction materials and low-VOC paints/finishes were used. Its solar photovoltaic roof allows for renewable energy and it also devotes some spaces to electric vehicles. You can even store your bike there for free. Plus, it looks a lot nicer from the outside than the parking garages I’m used to seeing!

Baxter Street automated parking garage in New York

Say hey to one parking garage that looks amazing but will probably never (EVER) get my business! Located on Baxter Street in Chinatown (NY), this automated parking garage claims to make the whole experience easier for drivers. Here’s how it works: you drive your car onto the automated pallet, get out, and the pallet takes the car down to an available spot. Payment is arranged with an attendant and you’re given a receipt for retrieval. Actually getting your car back may take some time, because the pallet needs to maneuver cars that may have been parked in front of yours. However, once it is back in front of you, you’re ready to go; there’s a turntable that rotates your car so you don’t have to back out of the garage (supposedly reducing accidents). Here’s the thing that gets me: there have been a few “oops” moments – as in cars dropped distances of up to 6 levels. Oh yeah, and that one time the system shut down for 26 hours and no one could get their vehicles… Hmmm maybe not. But I bet they could make a tidy sum by giving tours of the place!

I got the idea for today’s Daily Dose from an exhibition that’s currently on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. through July 11, 2010. “House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage” is the first major exhibition to document the development of this common storage structure as well as exploring future design possibilities. Check out www.nbm.org for more information.

Oh! One more thing. I was watching House Hunters last week (I think… at least, the people on the show were looking for a house…) and discovered that British folks pronounce the word garage, “ger’ əʒ”. For those not familiar with the phonetic alphabet, it rhymes with “carriage”. Try it out sometime and let me know how it goes!

Sources:

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/04/14/first-leed-certified-parking-garage/
http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/cocktail_party_physics/2007/12/index.html

Daily Dose: “Reflective” Buildings

Green building is big, and undoubtedly it’s affected you or your company in some way, be that a major shift in building materials and design or simply fewer printed documents around the office. Environmental attention and concern has also heralded in a nature-inspired style of contemporary architecture. Perhaps not surprisingly, these buildings also exhibit some of the leading green practices of today’s building industry.

Centre for Disease Control Complex, detail and nautilus shell

The nautilus shell is recognized for its geometric perfection and is the inspiration behind the design for the Centre for Disease (CDC) Complex in Taiwan. The four symbols of the DNA sequence are intertwined to form the patterned walls and the inner chambers of the building spiral toward the center, much like the actual construction of the shells themselves.

Community Rowing Boathouse

The Community Rowing Boathouse in Boston, MA was a featured project in last month’s Architectural Record. It is naturally ventilated, has low-flow plumbing and will sport a green roof once funding is secured. The image shows the south side of the building facing the street where cladding switches to horizontal louvers that mimic the waves of the nearby river.

Vertical Farm Design by Vincent Callebaut

Vincent Callebaut’s Vertical Farm is still in the design stage; Callebaut is hoping it will be constructed in New York. It’s based on a dragonfly’s wing and the “exoskeleton” is made up of steel and glass. The farm would house plants and animals in its wings and sport exterior gardens to collect and filter rain.

Yellow Treehouse Restaurant

Last (and absolutely not least!) is the Yellow Treehouse Restaurant in Aukland, New Zealand. The pine and poplar beams attached to a redwood tree resemble the construction of a moth’s nest. This luminous structure is the product of Pacific Environments Architects, Ltd. and seats eighteen diners.

Today’s Daily Dose is entitled “Reflective” Buildings for the obvious reason that these designs are relective of natural phenomena, but also because the buildings encourage our awareness of the responsibility we each have to protect the earth’s natural resources and creations. If you haven’t already, please do take the time to reflect on what you can do – however large or small – to live or build green.

Sources:

http://www.contemporist.com/2008/12/22/the-yellow-treehouse-restaurant-is-finished/
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/11/19/yellow-treehouse-restaurant-by-pacific-environments-architects/
http://www.fixr.com/blog/2009/11/08/10-buildings-inspired-by-the-natural-world/
http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/bts/archives/civic/10Harry-Parker-Boathouse/default.asp

Daily Dose: Thorne Miniature Rooms

German Sitting Room of the Biedermeier Period, 1937. Mrs. James Ward Thorne

I’ve always been intrigued by the Thorne Miniature Rooms in the Art Institute of Chicago, but I knew little about the story behind them and their creators – until today. Mrs. James Ward Thorne, born Narcissa Niblack, was the creative inspiration and designer behind these 100 period-style rooms. She was a collector of miniature furniture and amassed her knowledge of various interior designs through extensive travel and reading. Photographs from her journeys served as models for her and her workshop of artisans who made the to-scale (1 inch = 1 foot) rooms and their accessories. Thorne even had the intricately woven rugs made by her acquaintances!

English Reception Room of the Jacobean Period; Wentworth Gardner Dining Room, New Hampshire 1760

Most of the rooms showcase European or American interiors from the 13th (European) or 17th (American) centuries until the 1930s. They were conceived of and constructed between 1932 and 1940.

Shaker Living Room, 1800

Japanese Traditional Interior

Thorne’s rooms were an immediate sensation; they were on display in the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress exhibition as well as the 1939 and 1940 World’s Fairs in San Francisco and New York City. Her scale of one inch : one foot became a standard for miniatures. Thorne also influenced museum trends of her time. It was becoming increasingly popular for museums to build full-scale period rooms which raised spatial as well as monetary concerns. The miniature rooms offered a captivating, economic alternative to the full-sized rooms. She also made accessible to thousands what was previously only accessible to those wealthy enough to travel.

Pierce Mansion Entrance Hall, New Hampshire 1799

The Thorne Miniature Rooms are currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago (68), the Phoenix Art Museum (20), the Knoxville Museum of Art (9), the Kaye Miniature Museum in Los Angeles (1) and the Indianapolis Children’s Museum (1).

New Mexico Dining Room

Sources:

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/thorne

Daily Dose: Words of Frank Lloyd Wright

Everyone needs a pick-me-up from time to time. Frank Lloyd Wright’s praise of architecture and the building industry may be just the thing:

The  mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul for our own civilization.

Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Enjoy your day and catch up on the Daily Dose; past entries are listed in the right column.

Daily Dose: Addict-o-matic

I’m changing gears today. Instead of focusing on masonry news/images/professionals/buildings, I’ll be giving you the scoop on one of the places I use to find current, trending topics for the Daily Dose. What can I say? – I just feel like sharing (perhaps a tad out of character, if you ask my sister).

The image at the top of this post is the landing page for Addict-o-matic. A search engine that enables you to “instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic” as well as search top news stories in general, Addict-o-matic could become your one-stop site for online goings-on. Here’s what happens when you go to the site: at the top of the page is a search bar into which you enter your term(s). When you click “Create”, the site pulls top results from popular news, image, video and blog sites such as Google, Yahoo, Ask, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Technorati and WordPress and displays them all on one page. Look below for an example of my results for “masonry architecture.”

As you can see, each section displays 3-5 current stories, images, blog posts or videos related to your search criterion. Now comes the fun part. You can customize your results page AND bookmark it for later! Addict-o-matic allows you to move, add or delete source boxes until you get just the look you want. It alters your url each time, so your bookmarked link remains organized to your liking.

But what if you don’t know what you’re looking for? Addict-o-matic can help you there, too! Under the main search bar is a button labled “Browse the News” which enables you to do just that. You can choose a broad topic or simply click “Top News” to get an assortment of stories from popular online news sources such as CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC, BBC, USA Today and Slate. In the footer, you can also browse by topics that include “Web Buzz”, “People”, “Politics” and “Hot Stuff”. Though you can’t get Addict-o-matic results in an RSS feed just yet, it’s probably only a matter of time. For now, I recommend adding it to your search bar and enjoying its broad capabilities.

Dave Pell is the founder of Addict-o-matic, which made its debut in late 2008. It’s tripled its number of unique visitors since then, topping 150,000 in the past couple months according to CrunchBase.com. Pell also founded Rollyo, another customizable search engine that allows the user to choose the type of sites included in the results. Crowd Favorite, an independent development and consulting firm based out of Denver, CO, is the developer for Addict-o-matic.

Sources:

But of course! http://addictomatic.com
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/addictomatic