Davis ThinkingPSFK sat down with Anna Klingmann for a conversation covering trends in architecture as they pertain to sustainability and health. Her agency, Klingmann, specializes in a niche area where architecture meets branding. Although not all applications of branding will bring about improved communities and healthier living/working spaces, Klingmann’s work clearly demonstrates the importance of branding in nurturing a sense of belonging.
In the third millennium it’s getting harder than ever to stay in place. Who hasn’t seen a driver almost crash while talking on a cell phone? Who hasn’t noticed children in a park staring down at a game-boy instead of romping about? Who hasn’t been to a dinner party and caught someone sneaking a glance at his handheld under the table and sending a tweet about the first course before even finishing it? Each week, it seems, industry comes up with new gadgets that help us to jump out of our bodies and flash out there to everything under the sun that can be encoded by electrical signals, pulses of light and binary values. Few of these digital experiences would have registered before the 21st century and some have become widespread only in the past few years. We’re in the first stage of a transformation of our sense of place as momentous as that which occurred a couple of centuries ago, when products from smoke-stacked factories forged modern society.
The rebranding of the world’s tallest building, now known as Burj Khalifa, will take several years and cost tens of millions of dollars as Dubai looks to distance itself from its reputation as a glitzy, lone-star state, brand experts said on Tuesday.
Oil rigs are often seen as a symbol of our reliance on fossil fuels, but what if we could make them into something sustainable? Morris Architects, a 70-year-old international design firm, thinks it can do just that with its Oil Rig Platform Resort and Spa Concept. The architecture firm's idea, that won the Grand Prize for Radical Innovation in Hospitality, is to refit one of the Gulf Coast's 4,000 oil rigs into an exclusive eco-resort.
After applying their talents to the Nike 1948 pop-up store in Shoreditch, East London, the sportswear brand asked Oscar and Ben Wilson to redesign the same space just a few months later. The new space has a rubber Nike Grind floor made from approximately 15,000 recycled sneakers and modular furniture that can adapt for different uses of the space.
Architecture, especially the sort that lies far from the shadow of America's recent cultural and economic stagnation, is the best bellwether of innovation, a representation of the relative health of the imagination of the species. The 1,037 beautifully photographed buildings in The Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture are a testament to everything that is right and really wrong in architecture today.
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