Zane Lowe’s new Beats 1 show is all about new music

This summer, Apple created New Music Daily, a curated playlist with the latest and most popular tracks from around the world. Today, it's launching a companion radio broadcast on Beats 1. The weekly show, "New Music Daily with Zane Lowe," will featur...

Architreasure Weekly #8 – The Prefab Home Edition

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Guilty as charged. We’re in love with prefab homes. They’re all the craze now (as you can tell) and we feel they just may be the future of housing with Muji and IKEA probably being the biggest forces. Prefab homes are basically homes that don’t come in the form of apartments, or buildings. These are homes that you buy in entirety, and the home is delivered to your location of choosing. In a span of 1-3 days, the home is set up (even with the furnishings included), completely ready for you to begin living in! All these homes need is a plot of land, and a decent water connection. Electricity can easily be arranged for via solar panels, but it helps to have a steady electrical line too. Today’s round up is of 5 of our favorite Prefab Homes that are there on the market today that are an absolute delight to look at as well as live in. Let’s dive in!

1. Built for every millennial wanderlust, the Coodo 18 home is a prefab loft that can literally be moved around and assembled anywhere. Made to be put up anywhere, be it on a beach, or a grassland, or the mountains, or even the roof of your house, the Coodo 18 comes with the option of wheels on its base, allowing one to transport it anywhere they want, and not being bound by estate. The best thing about the Coodo 18 is that all its components meet international environmental standards in terms of materials, recyclability, as well as environmentally friendly disposal and durability, now that’s a winner, isn’t it? Home is where the heart is, so why don’t you take it with you wherever you go?

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2. The shipping container is synonymous with instant residential architecture with an absolute variety of designs found all over the internet. They’ve also been used for multiple installations or exhibitions in the past and are most certainly a growing trend. The Ripple Home by Ceardean Architectures, is Ireland’s first shipping container home, created for the Irish Museum of Modern Art. This 60ft. X 10ft. residential space with an extended outdoor porch was built for the St. Vincent de Paul charity to create spaces the homeless could call home, with donated building materials.
The execution took all of 3 days & brought together a rather budget friendly house that runs on solar power, micro heat recovery units, back boilers, and hot water heating units. While this home isn’t up for grabs, Ceardean Architects have released a free e-book fully detailing out their design process for people interested in making their own Ripple Homes!
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3. The Gomos Modular system is a brilliant example of how pre-fabricated homes are rapidly changing the architecture industry by drastically cutting down build time and man-force… this quaint home, for starters, can be put together in all of 3 days. Designed by Portugese architect Samuel Gonclaves, the house is extendable in the sense that it can be elongated in length based on the user’s requirements. Made from prefabricated concrete shapes that fit one after the other, the more concrete members you fit, the longer the home becomes! The windows/openings are located on extreme ends of the home’s design, so the longer you make the house, the more artificial lighting you’d require towards the center of the residence. That seems to be the only caveat, but it comes with a rather incredible plus size. Instead of having a prefab home for a fixed price, you can size up or down the house based on your budget!

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4. Gone are the days when a house was all brick and mortar… rather we seem to be going back to building homes with wood and other natural materials. Estudio Borrachia’s Casa de Madera is the perfect rustic getaway house from the noisy cities and pollution. Designed to allow architecture to intermingle with the environment, the house was envisioned to be built in the woods and be absorbed by it (there’s even space on the roof to allow plants to grow, forming a layer of foliage over the top of the building). The design permits 100% cross ventilation & natural lighting, which in turn acts as an energy saving and a budget-friendly solution. Designed to embody what prefab homes should, the house aims at promising a no-hassle, peaceful lifestyle within nature’s lap for its 4 residents.
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5. Here’s a rather luxurious looking eco-home that comes with a price, but also an incredible benefit. The entire home is factory-made and can be delivered and placed on-site in literally a day. Imagine buying a house and shifting into it the very next day! Called the Big Box, this prefab house by the Bert and May Group gets built from scratch in 14 weeks and takes just a day to carry and position on-site. In fact the house in its entirety was even put on display at the London Design Festival!
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Co-authored by Khyati Seth

Architreasure Weekly #7 (The Imaginary Edition)

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What could you possibly mean by imaginary, oh writer?! Well, this round-up is of buildings that were supposed to be made but never got built. Some were halted due to financial constraints, others had safety issues, and some just got plain scrapped. This edition of Architreasure isn’t really about treasuring architecture… it’s about looking at designs that didn’t get the opportunity to change the landscape of this earth. Let’s dive in!

1. This towering (and controversial) structure was planned by Irish developer Garrett Kelleher (and envisioned by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava) to stand on 400N Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Referred to as the Chicago Spire, the building was halted mid-construction after a $50 million dollar failure, leaving the developer in massive debt. This was back in 2007. What’s happening to it now? Well, there are plans for another skyscraper to take its place. Obviously not the same builder!
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2. Formally named The Illinois, this was one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most bizarre concepts. If you’re wondering why, let me tell you other name the building had acquired for itself. The “Mile High Building”. Designed to stand at approximately 5280 feet, Wright believed the building’s construction was possible, back in 1956. The design included 528 stories, with a gross area of 18.46 million square feet, and needless to say, complications in construction caused the entire idea to be abandoned soon after. Here’s a fun fact… the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa stands at 2714 feet. Just about half of the Illinois’ proposed height.
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3. Frank Lloyd Wright was ambitious for sure, but not as much as Buckminster Fuller when he proposed the Manhattan Dome. Exactly what it sounds like, the 2 mile wide dome would cover a portion of Manhattan in thick, solid, shatterproof, one-way glass. Without a doubt, this wasn’t even near possible, but Buckminster Fuller certainly thought so back in the crazy 60s.
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4. At fourth place, is the Fourth Grace, a building envisioned for the city of Liverpool. Located beside three historic buildings that were referred to as the Three Graces, architect Will Alsop proposed this design despite heavy criticism from most people for its perceived ugliness. The Fourth Grace was designed for office space, a 107-room hotel and 50,000 sq ft of community facilities, including a bar, restaurant and viewing gallery, and was scrapped as a project altogether, not for its aesthetic, but rather the cost it entailed.
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5. This building literally embodied “they see me rolling” with its ever-changing design that involved individually rotating floors that would not only continuously change the silhouette/form of the building, it would allow each floor to have a distinctly different and unique view every time. The Dynamic Tower, designed for Dubai by David Fincher was ultimately scrapped for being highly unfeasible.
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6. The Volkshalle was Hitler’s pet project for his utopia, the country of Germania. Designed to be the town-hall in the center of the capital city, the structure was proposed to be so large that the architect himself advised Hitler against it, saying that the dome would bounce off noise created by the people inside to such an extent that it may result in permanent hearing loss for the public. In a strange twist of fortune, the war came, which meant no Hitler regime, no Germania, and definitely no Volkshalle.
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7. The Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid was designed to outshine the pyramids of Giza by being 14 times their size! Designed for the densely populated city of Tokyo, the pyramids would stand at 2000 meters tall and house a million people. Strangely, this building hasn’t been scrapped, but rather shelved until technology can bring about strong, light-weight building materials that may aid it in its construction. If you’re curious however, there’s a replica of this in Minecraft that you can visit!
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8. There’s no imaginary building list without tipping a hat to the striking imagination of the Late Zaha Hadid. Known for her grandly impossible architecture, a wide range of her projects are still under construction, given their complexity. However, the Changsha Meishihu International Cultural Centre in Hunan, China hasn’t seen much development (and is still rumored to be stuck in design and proposal stages) since its reveal in 2013.
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9. Another one of Hadid’s exemplary works, this one for her home town of Baghdad, is the Central Bank of Iraq. After the original bank building was damaged due to a suicide bombing attack, Hadid was approached for a redesign in 2011. Sadly, given the country’s political instability of late, the project has been shelved.
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10. Lastly, we have the Guggenheim Museum for Guadalajara, Mexico. This was geared to be the most expensive of all the Guggenheim museums, with a budget of up to $200 million. Designed by architect Enrique Norten, it should have been completed by 2011 and its 24-storeys would have been constructed with mainly ecological materials. However, with the museum director refusing to cut costs and scale down the project to meet Mexico’s art budgets, the Guggenheim foundation decided to abandon the project and focus on expansion in Europe and the Middle East.
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