La Maison Tropicale landed by the Thames...?!?!

La Maison Tropicale, Paris 1949. Interior surface 180 square feet, terrace 500 square feet.
Jean Prouvés Tropical House as photographed by Bernard Renoux in Brazzaville in 1996. (Copyright Bernard Renoux: http://www.renoux-photo.com )

La Maison Tropicale by Jean Prouvé, beside Queensboro Bridge, NYC 2007.

The Maison Tropicale is a beautiful modernist artefact designed in 1951 by visionary French architect Jean Prouvé.
The Masion Tropicale really was a flat-pack house, and it was way ahead of its time - not for nothing has Prouvé been labelled "the godfather of high tech" (he was also on the judging panel for the Pompidou Centre). It was designed to be flown out to remote parts of Africa in cargo planes, to house French colonials so it is made entirely of flat, lightweight aluminium and steel pieces, standing on concrete stilts. Built for tropical temperatures, it features an ingenious natural ventilation system - using heat on the double roof of the house to draw in fresh air through openings in the walls and up into the ceiling. There are also adjustable sunshades around the veranda, double-skinned insulated walls and sliding doors while little circular portholes of blue glass protect from UV ray.
Only three of these houses were made in Niger and Congo, since the 50s until 2000 when Eric Touchaleaume found them, shipped them back and got them restored.
The one of the three 1951 prototypes, originally installed in Brazzaville, was bought by the New Yorker hotelier André Balazs for $ 4,968,000 ($ 5,028 per square foot) and has been lent for public view until April the 13th in front of the Tate Modern museum in London, waiting to end up as the centerpiece of some sort of environmentally sound resort in Central America.

The Maison Tropicale was also taken as theme of investigation by Angela Ferreira, chosen to represent Portugal at the 52th Venice Biennale.
The artist presented her work "Maison Tropicale", consisting of a large-scale installation, which includes sculptural and documentary elements alluding to colonial history and to contemporary colonial phenomena.
Angela Ferreira continues her investigations into the ways in which European modernism adapted or failed to adapt to the realities of the African continent, situated conceptually between the failure of modernism in the so-called centres, and the conflicting impact of colonizers attempting to implement modernism across Africa.
The critical proposition is shared by Manthia Diawara, which follows Ferreira's visits to the sites where the prototypes of the houses were installed in Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Niamey in Niger, as well as the subsequent reclamation (see the titles in the press official page:"saved from the jungle") of the prototypes by the Western art world. In a 58-minute film he shows the story of Mirelle Ngasté, the last owner of the Brazzaville Prouvé's house. The premier of the film took place on March th 10th in Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, with the opening of "Hard rain show" by Angela Ferreira and the Berardo Collection Museum.


maison tropicale in london http://www.lamaisontropicale.com/www/ http://www.designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2008/prouvehouse

maison tropical by angela ferreira and manthia diawara http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/4202 http://www.michaelstevenson.com/contemporary/exhibitions/ferreira/ferreira_diawara.htm http://www.artafrica.info/html/eventos/evento_i.php?id=2049

Arquitectura da sobra: a cidade subexposta

Dionisio Gonzalez, who deftly documents the architectural disarrangement of shanty towns in Sao Paolo, Brazil by piecing together photos of the shanty towns themselves with photos of modern, geometric architecture that blend the clean and modern with the grungy and scattered. The artistic result is a long, landscaped image that will at once please and confuse your eyes at they trace from one side to the other. Gonzalez is represented by Fiedler Contemporary in Koln, Germany.

http://www.maxestrella.com/artistas/dionisio/prensa04.htm

let's Forum

pro:

http://www.barcelona2004.org/esp/actualidad/especiales/incineradora.htm
http://www.barcelona2004.org/esp/monterrey/

Two portugues blogs about eco-architecture

http://ecocriacoes.blogspot.com/2007/03/prmio-arquitectura-sustentvel-fassa.html
http://www.projecto-ecologia.blogspot.com/

A Zero Emissions House

(1) Wind Catcher for summer ventilation (2) Solar Array for electricity and hot water (3) High Level of Insulation (4) Biomass Boiler

In the UK, various companies are building cutting-edge green homes as part of the Offsite 2007 Exhibition. Yesterday saw the official launch of a “zero emissions house” called the Lighthouse built by the Kingspan company. It will be the first home to meet the UK government environmental standard, level six of the Code of Sustainable Homes, which all new houses must meet by 2016.
The home has a simple, “barn-like” form with a 40 degree pitched roof that includes solar panels and rainwater harvesting. The home also boasts high levels of thermal insulation, passive cooling and ventilation, biomass boilers and downstairs bedrooms.Biomass boilers run on organic fuels such as wood pellets and count as zero-emission because the amount of carbon dioxide they give off when they are burned is offset by the amount that was absorbed when the crop was grown. The house also has a waste separation system that allows combustible waste to be burned to help provide power.

http://www.metaefficient.com/architecture-and-building/a-zero-emissions-house.html

Layer house by FAR

WALL HOUSE , Santiago de Chile (2004-2006)
Suburban residence. As opposed to the general notion that our living environments can be properly described and designed “in plan”, this project is a design investigation into how the qualitative aspects of the wall, as a complex membrane, structure our social interactions and climatic relationships and enable specific ecologies to develop. The project breaks down the “traditional” walls of a house into a series of four delaminated layers ( concrete cave, stacked shelving, milky shell, soft skin ) in between which the different spaces of the house slip. From the inside out the layers build upon one another, both materially and geometrically, blurring the boundary between the interior and the exterior and creating, through the specificity of the different materials used (many of which are not common in architectural applications), a series of qualitatively distinct environments. The building's most standout feature, an energy screen typically used in greenhouse construction, constitutes the outermost layer, creating not only a diffused lighting and comfortably climatized zone inside but also, through its folding and sometimes- reflective/sometimes-translucent surface, contributes to the diamond-cut appearance of the structure.

http://www.f-a-r.net/index.htm

pro
http://www.metaefficient.com/architecture-and-building/a-zero-emissions-house.html
http://sustain.ca/sales/

Bamboo bicycles in Ghana

The Bamboo and Rattan Development Program under the President’s Special Initiative Program (PSI) has introduced bamboo in the manufacture of bicycles for the rural communities.The program is aimed at raising awareness on the use of bamboo and rattan as well as their benefits in poverty alleviation and socio-economic development of rural communities.Three research scientists from the USA – Dr. David T. Ho, Dr. John Mutter and Dr Craig Calfee - are to spend 10 days in the country to demonstrate how to use bamboo in making a bicycle.Dr. Ho said the project was sponsored by EI at the Columbia University called the “Cargo Bike”, which was meant for farmers and the people living in the rural areas.“The goal of this project is to help the sustainability of transportation in the Northern regions. This is because the main means of transportation for the people of the northern regions is the bike,” he said.Dr. Ho said the bicycle, made to carry 100 kilogram of load, was designed for farmers in the rural communities for sustainable transportation.He said finance was the main problem facing the project, adding that there should be a fund that would take up two-thirds of the cost of production so that the local people could afford the product.

http://www.bicycle.net/2007/bamboo-bicycle/