Iwan Baan

Archeotecture

May 20, 2009

You could almost call these buildings archeotecture, or perhaps archeolitecture, because though all three were built recently, they look and feel profoundly archeological. All of them have the mute, mysterious quality of monumental ancient ruins and they produce – for me, anyway – that weird, quiet, prickling-the-back-of-the-neck sensation you sometimes get when viewing something impossibly old.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Depth in surfaces – Wang Shu’s Ningbo Museum

May 4, 2009

Museum designed and built as if by archeological time. The Ningbo Historic Museum was designed by Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio. Photos by Iwan Baan, via archdaily.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, Uncategorised

Selgas Cano architecture office, by Iwan Baan

May 2, 2009

Selgas Cano is a Spanish architecture firm, and this long glass tube in a little wooded ravine is the Madrid office they’ve built for themselves. The shutters over the clear roof are retractable (see the photo of the pulleys at bottom).

Categories: design, Uncategorised

This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

Iwan Baan

Archeotecture

Depth in surfaces – Wang Shu’s Ningbo Museum

Selgas Cano architecture office, by Iwan Baan

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