Within the IAAC Thesis projects series we started last year, we continue today by presenting the work by Gawel Tyrala, an architect from Wroclaw, Poland. As a thesis project he developed a project to enter a competition on Vistula River banks. Permanent activities around Vistula River banks forced the need to create temporary infrastructure for going on events. His project provided a transformable solution based in the reuse of transport containers, which are commonly used for air and road transport, sea shipping and warehousing. The idea of the project was to create a transformable structure which allowed many different programs to happen: exhibitions, workshops, performances, meetings, presentations, installations and many others.

Gawel Tyrala, Arq._MAA
Gawel Tyrala is a polish architect born in 1982. He graduated from Faculty of Architecture Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland (2007) and Master in Advanced Architecture at the Institute of Advanced Architecture IAAC in Barcelona (2009). He practiced at Vicente Guallart Architects, Studio El and RR-a. He was Coordinator and co-organizer of Polish Meetings of Students of Architecture OSSA in Wroclaw, Gdynia and Gliwice.

Today we present the work by Pablo Rica: Compact – Fabric Forming Component .
Fabric is a flexible and adaptable material with a soft appearance. In combination with a fill in material, the properties change from supple to hard, gaining structural and thermal qualities. The hardened material turns to have a soft appearance in reverse. This is where the ambiguity and discrepancy from solid fabric to elastic stone becomes interesting. And in that process of changing condition is where new possibilities of design arise. Compact is a research project about examining the potential of fabric as a construction technique and developing a modular system, in which material properties and environmental aspects are involved.

Pablo Rica
Graduated as architect from the University for Applied Sciences in Bern Switzerland with honors, he holds a professional Master Degree in Advanced Architecture, Digital Fabrication and Self-Sufficient Buildings from the Institute for Advanced Architecture Catalonia in Barcelona Spain. He has worked as architect and project manager with different architecture offices like UNStudio van Berkel & Bos and VMX Architects in Amsterdam, and Stump Schibli Architekten in Basel Switzerland. Two of his independent projects were runner ups for Europan competition 7 and 8. Recently, in collaboration with Josiah Barnes, the project called ‘Muscular Synergy’ was selected as second prize in the Designing Fabrication Competition of Architectural Association AA|Fab in London.

Download: Pablo Rica: Compact - Fabric Forming Component (702)

Today we present the work by Brynhildur Guðlaugs, an architect from Reikiavik, Iceland. Her proposal, called Sensual landscape, is a bathing facility for the hiking people who travel around the Torfajokull region in Iceland, an uninhabited area in the south and one of the most powerful thermal areas in the country, named after a glacier, Torfajokull. The structure of the facility is an adaptation of the already existing hot springs that are situated all around the area.

Brynhildur Guðlaugs

Brynhildur graduated with B.A. in summer 2006 from the Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavik, Department of design and architecture. She just recently graduated from the Master in Advance Architecture at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain.

Thermal landscape

Iceland is located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which makes it one of the most volcanically active places in the world. It sits astride the boundary between the Eurasian and North American Plates and the most volcanic activity is concentrated along the plate boundaries that run across Iceland from the southwest to the northeast of the country. These plates are constantly moving, and in Iceland they move apart from each other and therefore create new earth crust by the convection of lava.
Because of this volcanic activity there are over 200 volcanoes located in Iceland and about 600 hot springs. There are also about 20 high-temperature steam fields that are at least 150 °C and many of them reach temperatures of 250 °C.

This is what allows Iceland to harness geothermal energy and these steam fields are used for everything from heating houses to swimming pools.
The Sensual landscape is bathing facility for the hiking people that travel around the Torfajokull region in Iceland. It is an uninhabited area in the south, containing a wide variety of terrain and some of the most beautiful in the Iceland. It is also one of the most powerful thermal region in the country, named after a glacier, Torfajokull which is a large rhyolitic volcano massif.
The structure or the facility will be an adaptation to the already existing hot springs that are situated all around the area.
The space will literally be structured on a current of fluid. By using the same technique as we use to pump the water into the houses in Iceland, about 200°c hot water is pumped into copper pipes that flow through the structure. The movement of the water then generates different temperatures in the space as it cools down while moving through the pipes. According to this, variation of temperature can be analyzed and then, places of different activities planed according to the distribution of the temperature.
Certain areas of the structure would be influenced by different degrees of temperature, color, light, material and etc.

download: Sensual Landscape (1066)

The guests of the facility may move around this landscape of temperature and freely choose a climate and atmosphere according to their desire.

Jose Luis Vallejo y Belinda Tato han sido tutores de uno de los grupos de tesis en el IAAC el pasado mes de junio. El grupo contaba con 16 estudiantes de paises distintos tales como Rusia, Polonia, Colombia, Turquía, India, etc…Ha sido muy interesante trabajar con un grupo tan heterogéneo y multicultural. Los temas de tesis han sido seleccionados por cada uno de ellos y varían en su escala y emplazamiento. Vamos a publicar en las próximas semanas los resultados de algunos de estos trabajos. Hoy os presentamos el trabajo de Rodrigo Toledo, arquitecto de Medellín, Colombia. Se trata de una propuesta para la ciudad de Medellín en la que aborda aspectos económicos y sociales relacionados con la configuración y el uso del espacio público.

Rodrigo Toledo, Arq._MAA
Rodrigo Toledo vive en la actualidad en Medellín, Colombia. Se acaba de graduar en el Master de Arquitectura Avanzada en el Instituto de Arquitectura Avanzada de Cataluña en Barcelona. Ha trabajado como arquitecto y  profesor durante los últimos 5 años. Rodrigo se graduó en el 2004 en la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana de Medellín, Colombia.

Download: RED LIGHT CIRCUS (637)

Rodrigo Toledo, Arq._MAA
Rodrigo Toledo is currently living in Medellín, Colombia, he just recently graduated from the Master in Advance Architecture at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. He has worked both as an architect and as a professor for the last five years. Rodrigo obtained his professional degree in 2004 at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, Colombia.

Red Light Circus
The project is intended to behave as an urban intervention that adresses an informal way of economy related to mobility – of cars, goods and information-, understanding “the urban” not as a matter of scale but of exchange and social relations in the city. Located in Medellín, Colombia, the project takes a series of specific corssroads in which informal sales, amateur circus acts, and other non-institutionalized activities take place. The intention is not to legalize these activities; it is to empower them by modifying the physicality of the already existing situation of the crossroads and taking into account that the only things crossing in these places are not just cars and pedestrians but also informal markets, information, public space use, entertainment, and enviormental issues related to traffic. There is an ecology and an economy regulated by traffic lights and spatialized by zebra crossings, that appear and disappear when the light changes from green to red. Therefore the project should act on this two traffic code devices to expand their power to condition behavior in order to create a better atmosphere for this activities while generating a network of urban circus acts distributed in the city.

A series of inventories have been made to understand the complexity of the dynamics of these crossroads:

1. Mobility:
1. Vehicles
2. Pedestrians
3. Bicycles

2. Economy:
1. Circus act
2. Informal sales
3. Beggars
4. Windshield cleaners

3. Information:
1. Road signals
2. Advertisment

4. Public Space
1. Ocupation of sidewalks

5. Enviorment:
1. Polluted air as a result of gas emissions
2. High sun exposure

Having in mind all the layers that interact in these sites, the project is based on two actions that work with the simultaneity of this conditions: Redrawing the zebra crossing and enhancing the traffic light.

On one hand, the zebra crossing plays the role of a circus arena when the light is red; jugglers and acrobats perform three minutes acts in order to get money from the driver/spectators waiting along the downhill roads of the city. A number of salesmen, windshield cleaners, beggars and even mimes make their way through the cars offering their services and asking for money…most of these peole are unemployed citizens, homeless persons and refugees coming from the fields. During the green light this “traffic light inhabitants” wait and rest in the sidewalks using rocks and boxes as seats and moving them according to shade. What the intervention does is to reconfigure the geometry of the zebra crossing with the following logic:
1. Making the white lines longer: The circus arena gets bigger allowing more space and possibilities for the circus acts.
2. Defining wider areas in the pattern: Microstages are generated inside the zebra.
3. Extending some lines along the road: Uphill paths between the car lanes for moving and money collection are defined.
4. Overlapping transversal paths along the road: Return circuits and microstages between the cars are created with less inclination than the road’s slope.
5. Introdicing the zebra into the sidewalk and extruding some lines: A resting area –for actors and pedestrians- with benches and microstages is provided.
6. Creating a bicycle lane: This lane will be further extended to the transversal roads of El Poblado.

On the other hand, the traffic light’s comunication system through light signals is taken as a project strategy to design a suspended inflatable tent that, through image will provide information and scenario lights, thus communicating more than just “stop, get set, go”. The suspended tent is designed as a device that:

1. Is concieved as a shading device: Providing comfort for actos and pedestrians waiting in the sidewalk.
2. Is defined by a sequence of sections: This allows it to adapt to the specific zebra design below it.
3. Is equipped with LED lights: To act as an information node and a stage scenario thus extending the circus act to the night.
4. Is equipped with P.V. cells: To make use of the high solar exposure in favor of energy production for itself and the city’s traffic light nework.

This two interventions are meant to respond to the complexity of the crossroads without making a built statement…it rather uses what is there: flows, speeds, behavior, white paint, light and air to transform the place without changing its nature.

Download: RED LIGHT CIRCUS (637)

Superuse is based on a simple but effective concept. For the viewer, it is a big database of recycling-related projects in various fields (design, architecture, art, etc) and for its registered users it is a community whose members can submit stuff and vote other people’s sumissions. As a social network Superuse doesn’t seem to allow super fancy profile pages, but this is not necessarily a bad thing since it keeps it hardcore to the posting, the voting and the commenting. More than a tool for professionals to promote their work (even though it can also be used as such) the website is about being passionate and showing appreciation for recycling, with tons of links to pages and Flickr sets. The voting thing makes the sharing tastier, and we know sharing is one of the internet’s best virtues.

The graphics and interface themselves are rather slick and clean, with lots of thumbnailed submissions directly accessible from the homepage and a quick navigation system. I could find just a couple of flaws, like the rather undressed profile pages and having to scroll down to see who has voted each project.

The people behind the project are the brilliant dutch studio 2012 Architects (also founders of the Recyclicity foundation and soon to be featured on the next Yearbook) and Suite75.

source: www.yskira.com