This just in, for those keen to let their imaginations run free over the summer holidays – an ideas competition on forestalling earthquake damage before it even happens.
Full details available at the NZ Society for Earthquake Engineering Pcee.nzsee.org.nz/designcomp.htm

This competition seeks proposals to increase the resilence of cities and communities affected by earthquakes and tsunamis, with a focus on aiding recovery and social regeneration to affected areas.

Entrants are encouraged to choose a city or community familiar to them, anywhere on the Pacific Rim, and to design a proposal that utilises preplanning and/or post-disaster response and reconstruction methodologies to reduce the long term impact of an earthquake event on the built environment and social fabric. Entries will respond to the specific earthquake hazards and vunerabilities that the chosen area faces.

The competition is open to all design disciplines, including architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning; and all associated engineering and sociological disciplines. Multidisciplinary entries are welcome, and international entries are encouraged.

On a recent visit to New York, there were many things that caught my eye, but one store in particular appeared to be attracting a lot of attention. The Apple stores, crisply detailed completely out of glass, is quite a startling construction – architecture that almost isn’t there.

Yes, it is glass, but it is all low-iron glass, so there is almost none of that greenish tinge you get. The Apple store on 5th Avenue, the ‘flagship’ store, is a simple glass cube set in the otherwise fairly bland and empty forecourt of a corporate tower block, and is just that: an empty glass cube. There is nothing there – certainly not even a name – just a floating, glowing white Apple logo hovering above the entry. The cube sits over a crisp square hole cut into the forecourt, and inside the glass doors of the cube sits a glass stair, curling delectably around a glass elevator.

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