El rincón del arquitecto desconocido... The corner

From Chris Ryall’s Twitter…

El Sorprendente Hombre Araña

Editora de Periódicos La Prensa S.C.L., 1963 series

Mainly reprints Amazing Spider-Man (#1 through #120) in Spanish. Mixed among the US reprints, starting with issue 122 and ending with number 185, were 45 original covers and 44 original stories by Mexican artists (principally José Luis Durán, with several by Roberto Avila). These stories were approved and copyrighted by Magazine Management, Inc., Marvel Comics Group. 

Color for Healing

This sanitorium (tuberculosis hospital) in Paimio, Finland, was designed by architect Alvar Aalto in the 1920s. Unlike many hospitals, it was full of bright colors—including welcoming yellow on the main stairs and calming green for ceilings above bedridden patients. Aalto even created special chairs to open the chest and speed healing.

The building’s colors were mostly whitewashed later in the 20th century, but now—due to a grant from the Getty Foundation as part of its Keeping It Modern initiative—its colors are being reconstructed and the building preserved for the future.

More of the story: Saving Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanitorium

Three Court House / RMA Architects

Casa Cariló / Luciano Kruk

Singapore’s supertree grove is a pretty amazing cluster of towers, combining vertical gardens, elaborate lighting and complex metalwork to give the impression of a forest. They range from 25-50 metres in height, with their canopies designed to provide shade from the harsh equatorial sun. Every evening, a dramatic light show plays to visitors in the park. I took this photo while visiting last year, sitting beneath the canopies and waiting for the show to begin. 

City of Light

Con Ed’s “The City of Light” was the largest diorama up to that time. The fourteen-minute show presented the illusion of watching New York City through a twenty-four hour cycle. Originally designed to be continuous, a break of a few minutes was required as visitors tended to stay and watch the subway cars wiz by.

Walter Dorwin Teague designed the diorama which consisted of 4,000 buildings built to perspective, with the Empire State Building the tallest, taking up twenty-two feet to represent its 102 stories.

Tree-ness House by Akihisa Hirata

Japanese architect Akihisa Hirata has completed a multi-storey project in Tokyo’s Otsuka district, which expands upon his affinity with nature-inspired architecture. although it is primarily a residential building, ‘tree-ness house’ also contains spaces for commercial tenants at its lower levels. located on a deep but narrow site, the slender design employs an organic layering system to generate a series of three-dimensional spaces that relate to the building’s surroundings.