Médiathèque d’Anzin - Dominique Coulon & Associés

This multimedia library in Anzin, France, by Strasbourg architects Dominique Coulon & Associés is wrapped in overlapping slices of concrete.

The building reveals its preciousness at first sight. Its pure, sophisticated geometry situates it as a public building. The deliberate areas of transparency reveal its content. The reading rooms present the building to the town in the manner of an invitation. The multimedia library is covered with large white veils that reflect the light. The building asserts it lightness, like an origami. The successive folds and flaps repeat this image. It is white, almost immaterial, like the mere projection of a concept, yet it is brimming with the life that constitutes it beyond its physical limits. On the inside, there is abundant, uniform light. The space is open and fluid, offering optimal flexibility. The lighting effect produced by the tall gaps that appear to float in space is truly beautiful. The volumes are independent and geometrically free, giving the whole a wonderfully poetic feel.

Story taken from Dezeen

The Wyckoff Exchange - Andre Kikoski Architect

ANDRE KIKOSKI ARCHITECT DESIGNS INNOVATIVE RETAIL BUILDING IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Emerging Architecture Firm Transforms Abandoned Warehouse with Cutting-Edge Façade

The Wyckoff Exchange in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, New York is designed by Andre Kikoski Architect (AKA), an imaginative, award-winning architecture and design firm based in Manhattan.

“We wanted to create an iconic building to speak to Bushwick’s up-and-coming status as a center of art and creative energy,” says Kikoski, “so we devised a unique aesthetic that’s dramatic, inventive, and inspired by the neighborhood’s industrial past. With state-of-the-art technologies and construction techniques, we were able to realize this 100-foot-long, eighteen-foot-tall façade in only two inches of depth.”

Scheduled to open in winter 2010, the 10,000 square-foot Wyckoff Exchange will accommodate a live music and performance venue – to be called Radio Bushwick, with interiors also by AKA – as well as an organic market and a boutique wine shop, all in a long-vacant warehouse in the heart of a vital and rapidly changing area of the city.

The design solution for the building exterior is highly original, relying upon motorized door technology adapted from airplane hangars and factory buildings. The five pairs of moving façade panels create an ever-changing expression of function and tectonics. By day the panels fold up to create awnings for the stores and to shelter pedestrians; by night, they secure the shops behind them, while an abstract gradient of laser-cut perforations over semi-concealed LED lights makes the panels appear to glow from within – creating an enigmatic work of art on an urban scale.

“We chose materials for this façade that are both industrial and artistic,” explains Kikoski. “Our use of two restrained materials references the urban textures, surfaces, and character of the neighborhood. The surface quality of the raw, unfinished COR-TEN steel is elegantly transformed into a Rothko-like canvas by the setting sun, and the shimmering layer of perforated factory-grade stainless steel just two inches behind it forms a perfect complement.”

Andre Kikoski Architect’s design approach in the this project, as in all of its work, is aimed at creating a dynamic, fluid piece of architecture. As an expression of AKA’s trademark resourcefulness and lyricism, and as an innovative approach to recycling buildings and creating a destination environment with an extreme economy of means, Wyckoff Exchange is truly a welcome development in this quickly evolving neighborhood.

Cayuga Capital Management commissioned the project and has some 40 other properties in the area. Kikoski sees this one as “a prototype of adaptive reuse”—low-impact architecture that can spread, easily and gracefully, throughout the neighborhood. “The project,” says Kikoski, “is a sign of things to come.”

Images and text taken from Dezeen

Book 04 - Cool Pose: Fashion in Hip Hop

Graphic text documenting Cool Pose: A Black Masculine Coping and Expressive Style (White + Cone). "Cool Pose refers to a set of related physical postures, clothing styles, social roles and social scripts, behaviors, styles of walk, content and flow of speech, types of dances, handshakes, and attitudes that are used to symbolically express masculinity". The graphic text also explores the images, attitudes and proliferation of misogyny and violence in Hip Hop.