Ideal house cologne

These are images from Zaha Hadid’s office, showing her Ideal House installation at the IMM furniture fair in Cologne.
Zaha Hadid said ‘we experimented with several different techniques before coming up with a final design. first, we strongly manipulated the outer form, but we later returned to a precision-like cube. design then focused on the inner windings and the complexity of the cavities’.



ideal house - zaha hadid



ideal house – zaha hadid



digital visualization of the ideal house by zaha hadid

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Zaha Hhadid
mage: © designboom
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Le Corbusier's Final Project

Le Corbusier is considered one of the fathers of modern urban planning. But his last creation, a spectacular concrete church in the small French town of Firminy, was never completed. Now, more than 40 years after his death, Sainte Pierre is finally being opened to the public.

By Stefan Simons in Firminy, France
Photo: © spiegelonline
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"Evil Can also Be Beautiful"

"All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and, of course, the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures.

Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark."

"Ugliness also has a right to exist. Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. But seriously, if something like this building is ugly but nevertheless important, we must preserve it."

Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in. I think appropriateness is more important."

"Evil has many faces. It can also arise both from inability or from malicious intentions."

"Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there."

Rem Koolhaas
Photo: © spiegelonline
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Prison Space

Leoben Centre of Justice (Austria)

Completed in November 2004 within a period of two years, the result of a multi-discipline design process, the Justizzentrum Leoben, Leoben Centre of Justice is one of the many projects of the Grazer architect Josef Hohensinn of Hohensinn Architektur. With a sense of avoiding the psychological damage inmates are suffering from with the detention, the building was designed in an almost transparent manner. With the usage of GLASS in the construction, a modern, open and light flooded environment was created to ensure the separation as well as "non-separation"” to the society for the inmates. And in short sentence this is a prison. What do you think about a space can be a prison? If you want to design a PRISON what kind of space yo create?

AND What Do you think about this place. I am so excited to see your opinion.

John Cage "four and a half minutes of silence." 4′33″

4′33″ is a musical work by avant-garde composer John Cage, often described as "four and a half minutes of silence." Though first "performed" on the piano, the piece was composed for any instrument or instruments and is structured in three movements.

Three movements, no notes.

A few notes about silence and John Cage

In the late 1940s John Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally extremely soundproof. Anechoic chambers are widely used for measuring the acoustic properties of instruments and microphones, and for performing psychoacoustic experiments.


Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."

I don't know if this explanation is accurate, but this experience is often described as the inspiration behind the famous Cage composition 4' 33".

The idea persists, maybe it's a kind of urban myth in sound. It's an attractive notion. The roar of silence, that low rumble … I like the idea that this is the sound of our circulatory system up close … like when you get close to large waterfalls and they're noisy, in fact a gigantic wall of noise with huge bass rumble.

The high-pitched sound we hear when things are silent may be our own central nervous system, but that's unless there's a TV on nearby. Televisions have a high-pitched carrier frequency whenver they're turned on. And as we get older we lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds. This accounts for some drivers who don't notice when their signal light is on, because the relatively high-pitched sound isn't as audible to them. I wonder if we lose the ability to hear that high-pitched nervous system sound?

In many applications of acoustics it is necessary to know what humans actually hear. Sound, which consists of air pressure waves, can be accurately measured. However, is important to remember that the question of what humans hear is not only a physical question but also very much a psychological issue.

In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."

There has been some scepticism about the accuracy of the engineer's explanation, especially being able to hear one's own nervous system (a mild case of tinnitus might be a more likely explanation for hearing a quiet, high-pitched sound). Whatever the truth of these explanations, Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."[2] The realisation as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of his most notorious piece, 4′33″.

Cage wrote in "A Composer's Confessions" (1948) that he had the desire to "compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to the Muzak Co. It will be 4 [and a half] minutes long — these being the standard lengths of 'canned' music, and its title will be 'Silent Prayer'. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape or fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibly."

Another cited influence for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage's friend and sometimes colleague Robert Rauschenberg had produced, in 1951, a series of white paintings, seemingly "blank" canvases (though painted with white house paint) that in fact change according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in the room and so on. This inspired Cage to use a similar idea as he later stated, "Actually what pushed me into it was not guts but the example of Robert Rauschenberg. His white paintings… when I saw those, I said, 'Oh yes, I must. Otherwise I'm lagging, otherwise music is lagging'"; Cage's musical equivalent to the Rauschenberg paintings uses the "silence" of the piece as an aural "blank canvas" to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient sounds surrounding each performance.

Performances

The premiere of the three-movement 4′33″ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and lift the keyboard lid. Some time later, without having played any notes, he closed the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he lifted the lid. And after a period of time, he closed the lid again and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Richard Kostelanetz suggests that the very fact that Tudor, a man known for championing experimental music, was the performer, and that Cage, a man known for introducing unexpected non-musical noise into his work, was the composer, would have led the audience to expect unexpected sounds. Anybody listening intently would have heard them: while the performer produces no deliberately musical sound, there will nonetheless be sounds in the concert hall (just as there were sounds in the anechoic chamber at Harvard). It is these sounds, unpredictable and unintentional, that are to be regarded as constituting the music in this piece. The piece remains controversial to this day, and is seen as challenging the very definition of music.

The length of 4′33″ is in fact not designated by its score. The instructions for the work indicate that it consists of three movements, for each of which the only instruction is "tacet," indicating silence on the part of the performer or performers. The title of the piece in each performance is determined by the length of silence chosen. Cage chose the length of the famous first premiere performance by chance methods using I Ching models, and later said that it just as easily could have been any other length. There is no evidence supporting the sometimes-made claim that Cage chose the length deliberately, four minutes and thirty-three seconds being 273 seconds and absolute zero being temperature of −273 °C.

4′33″ No. 2

In 1962, Cage wrote 0′00″, which is also referred to as 4′33″ No. 2. The directions originally consisted of one sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.

The second performance added four new qualifications to the directions: "the performer should allow any interruptions of the action, the action should fulfill an obligation to others, the same action should not be used in more than one performance, and should not be the performance of a musical composition."