The reflector has the shape of a sail and comes in two sizes, which can be orientated towards the ceiling or the floor. Vollee gives it’s characterful imprint to many different ambient situations.

Source: lorenz-kaz.com

The buildings by Sejima and Nishizawa seem deceptively simple. The architects hold a vision of a building as a seamless whole, where the physical presence retreats and forms a sensuous background for people, objects, activities, and landscapes. They explore like few others the phenomenal properties of continuous space, lightness, transparency, and materiality to create a subtle synthesis. Sejima and Nishizawa’s architecture stands in direct contrast with the bombastic and rhetorical. Instead, they seek the essential qualities of architecture that result in a much-appreciated straightforwardness, economy of means, and restraint in their work.

It may be tempting to view Sejima and Nishizawa’s refined compositions of lightness and transparency as elitist or rarefied. Their aesthetic, however, is one of inclusion. Their approach is fresh, always offering new possibilities within the normal constraints of an architectural project as it systematically takes the next step. They use common, everyday materials while remaining attuned to the possibilities of contemporary technology; their understanding of space does not reproduce conventional models.

They often opt for non-hierarchical spaces, or in their own words, the “equivalence of spaces,” creating unpretentious, democratic buildings according to the task and budget at hand. One example is the Almere project in the Netherlands, with its many simple classrooms and workshops, all presenting privileged views of the sea.

Another example is the Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, a space to be used by students day and night. Sejima and Nishizawa originally conceived it as a multi-story building, but, in the course of their deliberation, it became a single yet vast, flowing space. The building’s many spaces (library, restaurant, exhibition areas, offices, etc.) are differentiated not by walls but by undulations of a continuous floor, which rises and falls to accommodate the different uses, while allowing vistas across this internal “landscape for people.”

The relation of the building to its context is of utmost importance to Sejima and Nishizawa. They have called public buildings “mountains in the landscape,” believing that they should never lose the natural and meaningful connection with their surroundings. The New Museum in New York feels at home in the rough Bowery area of the city.

Their glass-enclosed museums, such as the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, blur the borders between inside and out, providing direct and changing views to the surroundings.

For architecture that is simultaneously delicate and powerful, precise and fluid, ingenious but not overly or overtly clever; for the creation of buildings that successfully interact with their contexts and the activities they contain, creating a sense of fullness and experiential richness; for a singular architectural language that springs from a collaborative process that is both unique and inspirational; for their notable completed buildings and the promise of new projects together, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa are the recipients of the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Source: pritzkerprize.com

Wassily Kandinsky’s art explored the relationship between color and its viewers. He eschewed the grays, browns and blacks of Cubism, embracing color as the primary vehicle for expression. In doing so he completely separated painting from a need to depict a subject. The goal of Kandinsky’s art was to capture music in a plastic medium, to evoke the same feelings a piece of music could evoke through shades and hues.

The theories he developed about color and meaning would prove influential in all creative fields, with the De Stijl movement expanding his philosophies and incorporating color into industrial design and architecture. Employing the color wheel, Kandinsky went through each hue, explaining the feelings it evoked, emotions it captured, and the sound it “made.”

Cycling through the colors of the rainbow, here is a sample of Kandinsky’s thoughts on color from his book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”. If you are considering a vibrant cladding product for your next building, be inspired by the master of the whole spectrum:

Orange: a mixture of red and yellow, radiant, healthy, serious.

Translated into sound: middle range church bell, an alto voice.

Yellow: “warm, cheeky, and exciting, disturbing for people, typical earthly color… representing madness in color, an attack of rage, blind madness, maniacal rage.”

Translated into sound: loud sharp trumpets and high fanfares.

Green: stillness and peace, but with a hidden, passive strength. “Green is like a fat, very healthy cow lying still and unmoving, only capable of chewing the cud, regarding the world with stupid dull eyes.”

Translated into sound: quiet drawn out middle position violin.

Blue: deep, inner, supernatural, peaceful. “Sinking towards black, it has the overtone of a mourning that is not human … typical heavenly color.”

Translated into sound: the flute, cello, and organ.

Unfortunately Kandinsky didn’t distinguish between blue and indigo. Apparently they were the same to him.

Violet: a mixture of red and blue, “morbid, extinguished … sad.”

Translated into sound: the english horn and bassoon.

Source: architizer.com

The big decorative tassels that brings together and adorn the historical palaces’ curtains, are reinterpreted, summarized and decomposed to delete every classical assets and obtain contemporary designed elements. The project considers 10 elements different in shape, details or decorative elements, that can be combined together to obtain personalized compositions.
Metal turning’s frame is enriched with brushed brass details and the traditional textile fringes are replaced with small varnished or gold metallic beams.

Source: marcozito.com

Sunset

by LAAGO Architects 

Macro scale conceptual proposal

by DEA Studio

Architecture Illustrations

by Jora Kasapi

The Illustrations represent several collages realized with different postproduction techniques. Some of them were part of comissioned work and some realized for research projects or simple competitions.

The evening walk and Tirana by night

by Blerus

Illustrations

by Dashnor Kadiri

Urban moments

by Enxhi Daci

Urban design for urban regeneration in the warehouse area, Vau i Dejës city.

Path on monochrome

by Denis Muça

Innovative is a word often used to describe Toyo Ito’s works. This is apparent in the temporary pavilion created in Bruges in 2002 and the TOD’S building in Tokyo in 2004 where the building skin also serves as structure.

Ito has said that he strives for architecture that is fluid and not confined by what he considers to be the limitations of modern architecture. In the Sendai Mediatheque, 2000, he achieved this by structural tubes, which permitted new interior spatial qualities.

In the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, the horizontal and vertical network of spaces creates opportunities for communication and connection. Seeking freedom from the rigidity of a grid, Ito is interested in relationships — between rooms, exterior and interior, and building and surroundings. Toyo Ito‘s work has drawn on inspiration from the principles of nature, as evidenced by the unity achieved between organic-like structures, surface and skin.

Toyo Ito’s personal creative agenda is always coupled with public responsibility. Of his many inspiring spaces, the Municipal Funeral Hall in Gifu Prefecture of 2006 or the Tama Art University Library in Tokyo, 2007 or the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London in 2002 are but three examples that illustrate Ito’s cognizant understanding of the people and the activities within his buildings.

The education of future architects has always been a concern of Toyo Ito. This is apparent in his teaching positions and in the recent rebuilding of the Silver Hut as part of the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture in Omishima, which is used for workshops and research. Perhaps a more perfect example is his office, which is like a school where young architects come to work and learn. It is evident that while innovating and pushing the boundaries of architecture forward, he does not close the road behind him. He is a pioneer and encourages others to benefit from his discoveries and for them to advance in their own directions as well.

Toyo Ito is a creator of timeless buildings, who at the same time boldly charts new paths. His architecture projects an air of optimism, lightness and joy, and is infused with both a sense of uniqueness and universality. For these reasons and for his synthesis of structure, space and form that creates inviting places, for his sensitivity to landscape, for infusing his designs with a spiritual dimension and for the poetics that transcend all his works, Toyo Ito is awarded the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Source: pritzkerprize.com

Peja will have on the near future a pedestrian boulevard & biking track of 1.2 km in its urban structure, that will connect Peja center with the proposed “Borea” square, as finalization of the recreational and functional pathway. This represents DEA studio macro scale conceptual proposal on the macro context of the city.

Finalization of the boulevard with cable car station, as a precise destination for the city, stimulates the design team to conceive the space around it as a public square with all the proper facilities in its perimeter geometry. The area around the cable car station is designed to be physically formulated by the volume of the hotel in the Western orientation of the site and the apart hotel in the Southern one.

The square itself is conceived to be not completely a flat one but it will be special with its “visual movement”. The trick of changing silhouettes through the interpretation of the ground level as the continuity of the existing hilly terrain morphology of the site East orientation.

The arrival in “Borea” square will give to the people the impression of a space shared in between the nature and human creation.  At the same time it will be a preliminary psychological preparation for their later on nature destination towards the mountains. The square will have its focal element, as a vice-versa arrival point, the cable car station. Its deconstructivist architecture is not by case …, but … like an urban sculpture properly in the gravity area, it could sign the landmark of “Borea Resort”.

The silhouette changes and the architecture “play” with the alternation of the levels does not remain a detached detail of the entire “urban scenery” of the complex. It is clearly identified even in the architecture of the resort, through the silhouette of the proposed buildings, which appears “troubled”, but not occasionally in analogy with the wonderful silhouette of the Mountains on their background.

All around the functional urban space will appear a different silhouette with different emotions and spatial effects, that could potentially stick up the complex itself and could be … why not … its identikit noted in the world of global tourism. The resort will be not dedicated only to the winter season sports, but long year with different sports like, hiking, mountain biking, alpinist, skateboard‍, rollers, ping pong, basketball, volleyball, etc.