Architecture Archive - The Fox Is Black

Studio House in Granada by Elisa Valero Architects

Architect Elisa Valero decided to build herself a home for herself in Granada, Spain, a beautiful space that has “work areas and a living space for a single person without renouncing quality and spatial wealth.” The building is filled with an unbelievable number of windows that allows for a vast amount of light to spill into the space. The mixture of natural materials with clean white walls is a nice touch, though my favorite part has to be the large office with it’s huge window. It’s also really great how integrated the building is in the neighborhood, even though it’s such an old neighborhood. Because of it’s white exterior it seems to blend in perfectly. I’m quite jealous of this space.

Found through Vectroave

Bobby

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Bobby Solomon

July 31, 2011 - See more posts by Bobby

Street Art and Buildings: Architecture on Buildings

Today we have images of iconic architecture sprayed onto the sides of a particular building in Lisbon. I found this gallery on SpaceInvading, where the homem (or mulher) behind the spray can has depicted works from a range of architects including SANAA, Niemeyer, Utzon, and others. Maybe you recognize the Bruder Klaus Chapel by Zumthor above, or below that the Casa da Música by OMA.

Alex

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Alex Dent

July 27, 2011 - See more posts by Alex

Street Art and Buildings: Herzog & de Meuron make Graffiti

Photos by Iwan Baan

In an architectural nod to the neighborhood, Herzog & de Meuron created this aluminum, graffiti-inspired gate for the entrance to 40 Bond, a residential building in Manhattan. All this twisting metal is not really graffiti or street art but rather this is art for the street inspired by graffiti, oozing with as much street cred as any architect can garner. But this graffiti gate keeps people out, like would-be taggers, and away from the surface of the building, which at street level is also covered with wiggly lines. The graffiti pattern continues to inside surfaces of the lobby, where wood becomes carved and mirrors become etched with the über graffiti lifted from the streets outside.

Alex

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Alex Dent

July 26, 2011 - See more posts by Alex

Street Art and Buildings: Sequin Surfaces by Theresa Himmer

The relationship between street art and buildings isn’t always happy, sometimes resembling an unhappily-arranged marriage, with only a brief courtship occurring in the middle of the night. But this week, I thought we could look at some happier unions between street art and buildings. The first examples are in Reykjavik, Iceland by artist Theresa Himmer, who has used a kind of sequins for buildings to makes images of glaciers and lava. Instead of covering each entire facade with these tiny, shiny discs (like this Maison Martin Margiela store in downtown LA) much of the original wall’s surface is visible. These glittery additions are bright spots in the grey urban fabric and probably a god-send during the winter months when the capitol city gets just a few hours of daylight. So maybe a street artist working under the cover of dark would have more hours to work in Reykjavik, but the scale and technical construction that went into these hints at a longer and more symbiotic planning phase.

Alex

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Alex Dent

July 25, 2011 - See more posts by Alex

Greenland National Gallery for Art by BIG

When I first saw BIG’s winning design for the upcoming Greenland National Gallery for Art, I thought to myself, “They’re building it on Neptune.” While that isn’t entirely true, the geniuses behind the project saw it fit to drop the entire museum directly into the shoreline, letting it melt into the environment. The effect is stunning and otherworldly, like something from a sci-fi movie, which in my mind means that they’re got something good.

My favorite part is the giant window cut out from the center of the structure. It’s the fact that it’s not just a circle, it’s this odd shaped window that shows the ocean from the upper portion, and a sample of the shoreline from below. You can see what I mean by looking in the third and fourth photos above. If you’re interested in seeing more I’d suggest you click here. Really looking forward to seeing how it turns out once it’s built.

Bobby

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Bobby Solomon

July 20, 2011 - See more posts by Bobby