Firstly, apologies for the absence of blog posts this past fortnight. Diseño Earle have been enjoying our summer break and are now refreshed and ready to go. To get things rolling, have a look at this:

Houses are expensive things nowadays. Especially in England, where even a modest starter-home can set you back over 200,000GBP. In 2005 the British government launched a competition to build homes for less than 60,000GBP. No easy task, thats for sure.

Developers George Wimpey joined with the architects at Rogers Stirk Harbour to win the competition from the field of 221 other competitors. Love them or loathe them, I can see why they won.

The main cost saving method was to have the floors, ceilings and walls all pre-fabricated in a factory and delivered ‘flat-pack’ style to the site, ready to be assembled. Due to the simple nature of the houses, they can be put together remarkably quickly, in less than a day. That’s right; a day. The results, as you can see, look great, and in a couple of years when the surrounding gardens have matured a little, I think this estate is going to look fantastic.

From a design point of view, the houses are simple and certainly nothing special, but they do have a nice modern feel and, let’s face it, are far more interesting to look at than most of the twee houses you normally find on British housing estates.

In a country with a big shortage of affordable housing, these are winners in my book. Watch the video below to see these being put together; it shows that whilst the building of Rome in a day was highly unlikely, constructing a modest family home isn’t outside the realms of possibility.

 Article found on The Contemporist

I’ve never been a huge fan of the work of French architect Jean Nouvel - most of it seemed interested in being provocative and little else. That being said, his design for a 75-story residential building in New York is really pretty brilliant. The tower grows skyward like a glass and steel tree, contorting to fit the confines of the City Zoning setbacks to create a drop-dead gorgeous form that is completely logical. Predictably, the neighbors hate it – but as yet the project is moving ahead.

See link below.

http://www.observer.com/2008/landmarks-commission-gives-nod-nouvel-s-moma-tower

We’ve been fans of Steven Holl’s work for a long, long time.  As an architect, his work is not always beautiful, but you have to admire its energy, ambition and variety in its pursuit of a larger philosophical idea.  His latest design is a high-rise residential complex in Beijing with sky bridges. See videos below.

Frank Gehry - arguably the most famous and prolific architects of the last fifty years, - is consistently criticized for solving every design problem with the same pile of crumpled metal sheets. For me, this hardly seems fair –  I would argue that most artists work within a relatively narrow band of exploration and interests.  In any case, Gehry’s new design for a 76-tower building in lower Manhattan is an eye – opener, a novel solution to a problem that has vexed him repeatedly in the past – the punched window. 

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A presentation video from our friends at Mecanoo, showing their design for a performance art center in Taiwan. Inspired by indigineous banyan trees, which grow to cover huge areas of land with multiple trunks, the building is designed about a series of breezeways and outdoor lobbies, which help to merge the complex into the surrounding parkspace.