In October alone, this eclectic and fancifully-curated blog jumped around from Pre-Islamic Civilization in Madain Saleh in Saudi Arabia to Volkswagen’s Car Towers at Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany to the Construction of an Amazing Underground Hotel in Songjiang and the triumph of a Polish Architect who designed the World’s Thinnest House. If your workday needs a dose of hilarity, trivia, or awe, we recommend a visit to Amusing Planet’s Architecture section straight away!
I love when the latest update from World-Architects arrives in my email. Covering projects and trends from around the globe, this e-magazine makes architecture available and interesting to the public. There’s always something cool to see. This week, it’s a game of shadows and light: the colorful disappearing act of Sydney’s Opera House, brought to the masses by URBANSCREEN.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/45835867]
Is your mind sufficiently blown? Thought so.
URBANSCREEN is based in Bremen, Germany. Established in 2005, their team currently consists of eight contributors, artists brought together from different disciplines representing architecture, music, stage design and media-art.
As URBANSCREEN notes in the World-Architects interview, “The majority of our works are homages to the concept of the architect, emphasizing a building’s features and extending the perception of its construction.”
Art feeding art feeding art. Check out the URBANSCREEN blog for more incredible videos like this one, and read the World-Architects article for an in-depth look at the artistic process.
Time to return some Blog Love!
We are big fans of Victor O. Schinnerer’s Risk Management Blog. Several times a month, this long-standing professional liability insurance provider posts brief, timely, helpful articles that are relevant to the design industry. The emphasis is on risk management for design firms, and posts often include links back to pertinent studies and claims scenarios.
A few recent posts:
Building Reuse Provides Environmental Value — 27 August
“Earlier this year the National Trust for Historic Preservation released a report by its Preservation Green Lab that provides the most comprehensive analysis yet of the potential environmental benefits of retrofitting the existing building stock. The study, The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse is available from the organization’s PreservationNation.org/Sustainability website.
“The report concludes that when comparing buildings of equivalent size and function, building reuse almost always offers environmental savings over demotion and new construction. The report states that it can take between 10 and 80 years for a new energy-efficient building to overcome, through efficient operations, the climate change impacts created by its constriction. For the majority of building types in different climates, the study points to 20 to 30 years of use to offset the initial carbon impacts from construction. The study recognizes that the environmental benefits of reuse are maximized when a minimum of new materials are used; renovation projects that require many new materials can reduce or even negate the benefits of reuse.” Continue reading… Continue reading “Blog Love: Schinnerer’s RM Blog”