ArchVox with Jose Gonzalez

Today on The ATAACast I interviewed Jose Gonzalez of ArchVox, a student run magazine at The University of South Florida School of Architecture and Community Design. We talk very deeply about architecture, our ideas about he profession, what we think the profession needs and what we're doing to change it.

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Burning Man! with guest Gabriel Chavez

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ArchDaily's "The Best Structures of Burning Man 2015"

New Zealand's New Flag

Hello! We hope everyone is enjoying enjoying their week. Today we are talking about the four finalists in New Zealand's quest to find a new flag that reflects their current national identity. Dezeen reported on this design competition this week and we thought we would weigh in. Enjoy!

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Silver Fern (Black and White) by Alofi Kanter

Silver Fern (Red, White, and Blue) by Kyle Lockwood

Silver Fern (Black, White, and Blue) by Kyle Lockwood

Koru by Andrew Fyfe

Bubblewrap and The Earth

In this episode of The ATAACast we talk about Philippe Starck's La Nuage Fitness Center in Montpellier,France and Earth losing half of its tree population to humans. We talk about the two subjects individually and then talk about the significance of each.

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La Nuage Fitness Center

Tree Population

Google's New Logo

It would seem that Google's attempts to create a better design culture have reached full maturity. Now Google has transcended the world of Material Design where they taught the rest of the world how to design better and have applied their teachings to themselves. In this episode we talk about the new logo and what it means for means for Google. Check out End Gadget to read the full story.

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Office Duel

Hello and happy Labor Day Today we get competitive on The ATAACast and pit two design against each other. We have the Transport office by CAA architects in Beijing, China, a contemporary office place from the future. And Head Office of Caisse Desjardins de Lévis by ABCP architecture in Levis, Canada.

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Head Office of Caisse Desjardins de Lévis by ABCP

Images courtesy of Architizer and Stephane Groleau

Transport office by CAA

Images courtesy of ArchDaily and CAA

Olson Kundig Architects

After last weeks discussion about El Maqui House by GITC Arquitectura we decided to further explore non-urban architecture. And this, we discussed one of my personal favorite architecture firms, Olson Kundig Architects. We looked at The Chicken Point Cabin,The Delta Shelter, The Rolling Huts, and The Gulf Islands Cabin.

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The Chicken Point Cabin

The Delta Shelter

The Rolling Huts

The Gulf Islands Cabin

New Format!

Hello!

We at The ATAACast have made a decision that we hope you all will enjoy. After much discussion with our viewers and close friends we have decided to release the show in a new format. From now on we will be releasing multiple shorter episodes over the course of the week, rather than releasing one hour and a half episode. With each episode focusing on a particular topic or set of topics. We are going to write more about each project that we cover and show more of the images we reference in the podcast. In addition, we may start exploring themed days episode relationships.

Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated! We are constantly working to make this the best podcast we can.

Have a great week!
Kyle Santilli

P.S. New Logo is one the way. Stay tuned!

Kyle's Top 3 Bjarke Ingels Group Projects

#1 The Danish Maritime Museum

        This project is important to me because it demonstrates the most important characteristic of BIG's work, an ability to create aesthetic beauty by means of manipulating a site. The project is located next to Kronborg Castle, a historic danish site that the firm could not block views of, and is confined entirely within an old dry dock. The project uses the docks embededness into the ground to pull sunlight down, by placing only circulation in view, such that all of its gallery spaces receive natural light and the initial form of the dock remains apparent, giving a strong notion of structures past a place in its future.

#2 West 57 New York aka The Courtscraper

        What makes the courtscraper so important to me is the way in which is manages take the typical New York skyscraper form, as well as the cities love of parks, put them together, and actually get the project built. The ability to actually get a project as visually dramatic built in the city is a testament to BIG's ability to make their radical design manifest in highly volatile political climates. The project combines apartments with a view of the Hudson River, with ground level shopping and an interior courtyard to make the site a place that people will go as tourists and as consumers to look at this futuristic architecture, become acquainted with it, and hopefully be more accepting of this type of work in the future.

#3 Beach and Howe Street Vancouver

        This project is in my opinion BIG's best project to date because it is the firms philosophy manifested. The project take a small triangular lot in Vancouver, and grows out to a square by using the building code a design tool. The building code gives certain height clearance for buildings to be above other buildings, and in this case, a highway. The project then take those clearances and uses them as freedom to expand the project, doubling the floor plate by the time it reaches full height. This shows how thorough BIG searches to understand the rules its playing by, not to break the rules, but to use the given rules of a site and program requirement as design tools, rather than design inhibitors.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast using the Podcasts app on your iOS device and typing in "The ATAACast".

Episode 2! The One Where Everything Got Really Meta

Hello!

We hope everyone is had a good week and are excited for a new episode of The ATAACast! This week we talked about 3D Printed Glass, a passenger terminal in Bangkok, a house in the mountains of Chile, Kiss Lids, Frank Gehry's latest design, and fungus, the plastic of the future. We hope everyone enjoys this podcast, things got a little out of hand, and that was probably for the best.

The Podcast

The One Where Everything Got Really Meta

Links

Architect Magazine: 3D Printed Glass
ArchDaily: JAHN's Passenger Terminal
Archdaily: GITC's El Maqui House
DesignBoom: Jang Wooseok's Kiss Lid
DesignBoom: Frank Gehry on Sunset Boulevard

Fungus Articles

Gizmodo: Ecovative use fungus to make plastics obsolete
Inhabitat: Fungus is now stronger than concrete
Gizmodo: The Living's Fungus Tower

See you next week!

The Serial Release! The BIG Swimming Pool in Mumbai

Welcome to The ATAACast!

The ATAACast (Assholes Talking About Architecture Podcast) is composed of  Kyle Santilli an architecture student at USF SACD and actor Evan Causey. With this podcast we hope to blend pop culture and design by analyzing, interpreting, and discussing design in a way that is comical and opinion-based.
         In this weeks podcast, we looked at a clear swimming pool set to be built above south London, a redesign of an existing World War 1 Memorial Park, CRG's attempt to solve Mumbai's housing problem with shipping containers, a steam ring generator in Copenhagen, and the new home of architect Bjarke Ingels in Brooklyn. We delve into the controversy around these projects, and hedge our bets on the winner of the memorial competition.

Links to the projects:
Arup's glass pool
World War I Memorial Competition Finalists 
CRG's Containerscraper
Steam Ring Kickstarter
Bjarke Ingels Penthouse


Download the podcast here:
The BIG swimming pool in Mumbai