Thom Mayne Will Designs Almost Tallest Building in Paris, Named it the Phare Tower

Thom mayen & Morphosis recently won the International Competition for the design of the “Phare” Tower (Lighthouse), the centerpiece of a redevelopment in the business district, La Défense, just outside of Paris.

Development company Unibail, in partnership with EPAD, notes the Morphosis project as symbol of breaking the past, also decided to give Mayne faith to show his softer personality. “I’ve shown a softer side; my wife is really teasing me,” Mr. Mayne, 62, said in an interview at Morphosis, his firm in Santa Monica. “The sensuousness of Paris found its way into the project.”

Thom Mayne equalized the building as a “layered dress” or a woman’s slip. “The skin becomes primary, the body secondary,” he admitted. “It becomes metabolic, the skin. It moves.”

Mayne said the building still needed more perfection, because he only spent 3 months in development before deadline. While the outer skin is currently perforated stainless steel for first draft, it might be another finishing by the time he is finished. For studying the site he had hired a fashion photographer to shoot the site over an extended period, taking the picture at different times as he revolved around it, so Mayne can be able to catch the sense of how the light shifts throughout the day and seasons. He even doesn’t really sure what will happen in the future, with his usual nature. “I produce something, attack it, it moves, it changes, it responds to the nature of that critique, it happens reiteratively till we’ve exhausted the idea. Then it’s complete, it’s done. I’m not done. I just started.”

Mayne’s winning was an ironic news for Jean Nouvel, one of the 10 architects in the competition that included big architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster, because he had already designed a tower for the Phare ~also known as Tour Signal~ site in 1989; his cylindrical “Tour Sans Fin” and it was never built until nowadays. Again we should thank to Mayne’s wife for inspiring him with the sexy execution of resistance architecture.

The COR Building

A new high rise is going up in Miami’s design district, and its a lean, green, eco machine. A collaboration between Chad Oppenheim architecture + design, energy consultant Buro Happold, and structural engineer Ysreal Seinuk, the $40 million, 25-story, “COR” building will incorporate mixed-use residential and commercial space, integrating green technologies including wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and solar hot water generation. The building’s exoskeleton is a hyper-efficient structure that provides thermal mass for insulation, shade for residents, and architectural elements such as terraces and armatures that support turbines.

With an aim to attract creative and design-oriented businesses and professionals, the interior of COR features sleek commercial and comfortable residential spaces ranging from $400,000 to $2 million. Each residential unit will include Energy star appliances, recycled glass tile flooring, and bamboo-lined hallways. In total, COR will play host to 113 residential units, 20,100 square feet of office space and 5,400 square feet of retail space (which already includes a café and furniture store). Estimated completion is scheduled for 2009, with the ground breaking ceremony in July of 2007.

+ Chad Oppenhein

Architects have never been the main authors of cities.

The office of Rem Koolhaas is on the seventh floor of an unremarkable office block in Rotterdam – a city “without any demands, without any scene, without any culture, without any temptations,” he says. “we live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.”



"architects have never been the main authors of cities. And to the extent that they are, they have only been able to do that in the case of extreme authoritarian systems. And that is a fantastic paradox or tragedy of the architect, that our better impulses are connected to the utopian, but the utopian only works when connected to power. But I think that in any case and with the size of cities now, no one is in charge.”

Stable-Oriented form

Hans Jenny :

... Nature reveals an abundance of sculptured forms, and all of them, it must be remembered, are the result of vibration, If the tome ceases, the mass 'freezes'. Looking at these vibrational effects, it would be no exaggeration to speak of a true magnetocymatics with its own dynamokinetic morphology. Experiments like this based on pure empiricism simulate the plastice imagination and develop the power to feel oneself into a space permeated by forces.

Sketch Up

I want to introduce a new kind of software that without any problem you can develope your project from concept to presentation stage .It's simple to learn and useful for whom want to see exactly material that assign to objects in the viewports.

I haven’t actually downloaded and played with it yet, but I did notice a few things from watching their little tutorial/intro video that make me think of how clever this move is. But where’s the clever part in all of this? Well, if SketchUp is really as easy to use as the video purports it to be, pretty soon you have amateur modelers providing decent quality facsimiles of landmarks all over and geo referencing them for you and sharing them. for more information you can go to this site http://skethup.com or http://sketchup.google.com/index.html If you want to try this software you can download free sketch up 6 or Download Sketch up Pro 6 For 8 hours trail.

(For more info if you live in tehran you can buy it from paytakht or bazar reza)