Japan opens world's first inflatable concert hall to tour flood-hit area The world’s first inflatable mobile concert hall designed to tour the northeastern areas of Japan devastated in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami will open next week. The abstract structure called Ark Nova, created by the British sculptor Anish Kapoor and Arata Isozaki, the Japanese architect, will stage world-class concerts, events and workshops. The concert hall, which was established in collaboration with the organisers of Lucerne Festival, consists of a single skin membrane that can be easily inflated or deflated to enable its transportation around the region. The opening weekend will take place in the pretty coastal town Matsushima, famous for its cedar tree islands, which was badly buffeted by the 2011 tsunami that swamped the northeastern coast. Wood from tsunami-damaged cedar trees at Zuiganji Temple in Matsushima were used to create material for both acoustic reflectors and seating in the concert hall, which stretches 30m by 36m. Describing the concept of the project, Mr Kapoor told the Telegraph: “Ark Nova is the first mobile inflatable concert hall. We felt that the site in Matsushima, amidst the destruction of the tsunami, needed a temporary structure and an inflatable seemed to be appropriate.” Events at the new concert hall will range from classical performances by world-class orchestras to performances by modern Japanese musicians such as Ryuichi Sakamoto. The inaugural weekend in Matsushima will include concerts by the Sendai Philharmonic, traditional Japanese kabuki performances and musical workshops for children. The concept of an inflatable concert hall in Japan’s northeast was the brainchild of Michael Haefliger, the artistic and executive director of the musical event Lucerne Festival. “The images of 11 March, 2011 have left their mark on all of us. Since we at Lucerne Festival have maintained a very close relationship to Japan for many years, I felt a strong desire to make a contribution to overcoming the consequences of the catastrophe, within the scope of what we have to offer. “With the Lucerne Festival Ark Nova Project we hope to give the people who are living with this situation something more than everyday pleasure. Combining different arts and cultures, this project is a fascinating symbiosis of architecture, design, folkloristic and classical music as well as music education.” By Danielle Demetriou, Tokyo 11:33AM BST 24 Sep 2013
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Intempo 47-Story Skyscraper Builders Forgot To Include Working Elevator, Oopsy The Intempo 47-story skyscraper builders forgot to design working elevators above the lower floors. It’s a blunder of astounding proportions for the troubled luxury project with a lovely beach view in Benidorm, Spain. The problem has existed for some time. However, the scandal exploded into public view late last month in Spanish news source El País when it was revealed that the upper flights of the Intempo building lacked adequate elevator access above 20 stories. And now the awful architectural blooper is earning international fame after being described in English language media. Jesus Diaz for Kinja described Benidorm as “a disgusting vacation spot in the Spanish east coast.” Essentially it’s an overbuilt crowded beach overrun by tourists. The 47-story Intempo skyscraper itself has become a symbol of Spain’s economic crisis. Planned in a hurry during the nation’s real estate bubble, the project was stranded when its original lending bank went broke. How did elevator access get overlooked? According to El País, there were multiple elevator problems — including a serious accident. But the short version is that the original project was intended to be 20 stories. Then the builders decided to make Intempo 47 stories tall but forgot to properly rescale their plans. So the elevators are too small and the motors not powerful enough. The architects in question have since resigned. But you have wonder if there’s more than just jaw-dropping incompetence going on in Benidorm, Spain. It seems as if some worker along the way might have mentioned to the boss that something wasn’t quite right with the 47-story skyscraper. But apparently morale on the Benidorm skyscraper project has been terrible. At one point, workers were being asked to go up 23 flights of stairs because a forklift hadn’t been installed for them.
So where does the project go from here? Well, according to their Twitter feed, Intempo is offering reduced prices on the luxury units. But they’re still not cheap ..... Clearly they have an expensive repair ahead of them to get the Intempo 47-story skyscraper equipped with a working elevator by the estimated December 2013 opening date. By: The Inquisitr It surprises no one when architects design a building that melts cars, and that's a problem. We now have two buildings that fry stuff: the Museum Tower in Dallas, which reflects too much light into the Nasher Sculpture Garden next door, and the Walkie Talkie Building, officially called 20 Fenchurch, which does Dallas one better by melting parts of cars in London. And while Walt Disney Concert Hall never fried Los Angeles, some of its curves did blind neighbors before the owner dulled the sheen. Who knew architects could be that good at lighting things up? The first lesson from all this is that our ability to imagine and build forms that were never before possible through the magic of computer-assisted design and construction is far outstripping our ability to discipline that exuberance. Some of the effects—one assumes unintended—might have been modeled and thus prevented. But by no means all of them. As geometries become more complex, what they will do in the real world at a large scale is very difficult to ascertain on a screen or from a 3D-printed model. The aesthetic question of what something will look like in the real world is one thing, though I do not believe we have developed an ability to have these designs respond to either our bodies and our social lives or to existing context in a manner as sexy as the forms themselves. But doing damage through unexpected consequences is a whole other matter. The worst aspect of these cases is not only that the buildings are unsuccessful because of those failures, but that it confirms to everybody who is not an architect (although it comes as a surprise to the discipline, that turns out to be quite a few people) that architects are absentminded, sloppy, and incompetent. The snarkiness of the comments that have appeared at the end of the various articles about the Dallas and London incidents are a crowdsourced testament to the hatred a large part of the public harbors against architects and their products. These incidents make it more difficult for good buildings to appear. That doesn’t mean that we should retreat into classicism or brick façades. Nor does it mean that we should make modernist boxes. They are often as bad as their parametrically designed cousins, and they often get no further than camouflaging their boring and predictable nature with the kind of refined details only architects love. But we should make buildings that are sensitive in a real way to us and to our world. Unfortunately, Rafael Viñoly’s buildings are almost never either. His creations are among the most banal, badly organized, and insensitively scaled of any designed by a name-brand architect. The Walkie Talkie is no exception (though I have to admit I have only seen it while under construction, about eight months ago). Its massive bulk is only all the more apparent because of Vinoly’s Titanic carving of what is otherwise a standard office building with an icy skin and fussy appendages. The building manages to look bigger than it really is while drawing attention to its pomposity through those alien and alienating curves. According to the always excellent critic Hugh Pearman, the Walkie Talkie’s killing-ants-with-a-magnifying-glass problem stems from a combination of trying to maximize floor plates at the higher levels, while spending as little as possible on the less desirable middle floors, and a decision not to use sun louvers on a façade that faces directly south. If this is true, these decisions are again not only crimes against good taste, but also against the environment. The Walkie Talkie was a bad building before it fried a Jaguar (and made us think what our cars are made of these days along the way). It is still a bad building. Putting louvers on the façade might help, but that's applying lipstick to a very large pig. |
By: Yahya Al-saeed
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