Videos

This is an interesting video showing how things work behind the scenes at a luxury island resort

How Architects Work With Clients

Castles

On and Under the Water

In the On and Under the Water class we look at proposed projects including the Ocean Spiral to see what designers, engineers and architects are creating for us to be able to live on the water and below.

A Visualization of Ancient Rome

The House of the First Roman Emperor

How to draw a line

We now have a YouTube channel where we share how-to tips on drawing and model-making.

Model materials

The following video is for students who will be taking one of our classes.

This will give you an idea of materials used for architectural models.

Santiago Calatrava is a structural engineer who I also consider an artist.

One of the new classes I teach is understanding structure and we look at engineers such as Calatrava to understand how structures are put together and why they work.

This video is of the Milwaukee Art Museum that Calatrava recently designed.

Tianjin Binhai New Area Library nicknamed The Eye, is a library in Tianjin, China.

The five-level library has a total space of 33,700 square metres. It features floor-to-ceiling, terraced bookshelves able to hold 1.2 million books, and a large, luminous sphere in the center that serves as an auditorium with a capacity of 110 people. The library is nicknamed ‘The Eye’ because the sphere, which appears like an iris, can be seen from the park outside through an eye-shaped opening.

The video gives you a good idea of what it’s like approaching, entering and exploring the library.

Living inside the box

Michele Bertomen and David Boyle bought an empty 20-by-40-foot lot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They planned to build something traditional, but when the bid for the masonary envelope (the building without plumbing, electricity) came back at over $300,000, they re-evaluated. The couple decided to try shipping containers–which cost them about $50,000 for the building envelope. Bertomen, an architect, and Boyle, the general contractor, designed and oversaw construction of their home.

The sliding house

The goal was to build a house to retire to in order to grow food, entertain and enjoy the English landscape. The outcome was unconventional and very interesting, a structure that has the ability to vary or connect the overall building’s composition and character according to season, weather or simply to enjoy.

Home Delivery

The Museum of Modern Art in New York had an exhibit in 2008 titled “Home Delivery”. The exhibit addressed one of the hot topics in architecture- prefabricated housing.

The idea of making houses in factories addresses central issues as sustainability, low cost and speed of production. Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s chief curator of Architecture & Design, gives us a tour of the five houses erected for the show. These range from a second home on a beach to a digitally fabricated design that would replace the lost homes in New Orleans.

During the tour he speaks to the architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake of the Cellophane House, Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier of Burst* 008, and Oskar Leo Kaufmann of System3 about the specifics of their design.