Hope you’re well in 2020 :) 

A competition entry for a museum in St.Petersburg, which I was a part of at Snøhetta, commemorating the Siege and Defense of Leningrad just got a nice little write up at Chroniques Architecture. Unfortunately we didn’t take out this one! 

As a temporary mobile structure with a progressive social agenda, strict physical constraints, and so many stakeholders, a response to the brief could only really have a lasting positive impact if it truly embraced flexibility. Rather than a statement of architectural form which gives representation to the raw humanity of the refugee crisis, we have designed a flexible, modular system which gives representation to the opportunities, relationships and connections it creates - for migrants, local government, private interest, and the citizens of Malmö. Instead of re-producing the traditional bureaucratic model of one institution at one location, OS proposes to juxtapose three agents at one site, creating a rotating collage of events. Each of the three OS units will be temporarily appropriated by a governmental agency, organisation, company or small upstarting restaurant. Potentially configurable in hundreds of different arrangements, OS offers an infrastructure for social encounters and co-existence by conflating cultural events with support, networking and education. It can for example allow the visitor to attend a lecture on how to start a company, discuss possible courses with a university counsellor, or check out the ongoing Iranian film festival while trying some newly baked pirogues. Like any operative system, OS provides a platform for activities, without defining the outcome. In the end, the encounters, discussions, sensations and knowledge produced here will therefore be the result of a unique mixture of the different agents and visitors engaged.

Great to see that the drawing structures I developed with Hannes Frykholm in 2011 at UC Berkeley are finally gaining traction, with this one by Vince Barry from the Cork Centre for Architectural Education! 

Check out his incredible photography project on instagram here. 

http://www.archdaily.com/793971/roy-and-diana-vagelos-education-center-diller-scofidio-plus-renfro

Image courtesy of Google Earth’s equally insane 3D features 

(DJ They)

Also interesting to notice how people generally tend to photograph the model from one of two different angles... 

Open til October 30! - Exhibition info here

More info can be found here. 

Henry Stephens, Nick Roberts, Hannes Frykholm, 2016

Henry Stephens, 2016

Great piece on the currently unbelievable housing situation in Auckland.