Friday, January 24, 2014

Mark Terra-Salomão | Looking Out Week 1

I'm finally making my first post. Apparently I'm less computer-literate than I like to think and don't know how to accept blog invitations.

Anyway, I wanted to mix things up a bit for this Looking Out Week 1 post by focusing on a different kind of wood product - paper - or in this case, cardboard. And this example is architecture!

After the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, much of the city was left devastated, including ChristChurch Cathedral.



Obviously, that was a massive morale buster and the City of Christchurch looked to build a new semi-permanent cathedral. They hired the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, and in a rather ironic twist of parti, he decided to build a cathedral out of 96 cardboard tubes and timber framing (and some steel reinforcement here and there). Although there has been a lot of controversy, including construction costs and delays, it is pretty interesting, and toes the line, I think, with its subtle dark humor. It is known as the Cardboard Cathedral, officially.

Model

Construction

Almost There


Done! (Actually this might be a render. But you get the point.)

Shigeru Ban has a history of building with cardboard tubes. He has even built a church out of cardboard tubes after an earthquake before the Cardboard Cathedral. That was the 1995 Takatori Catholic Church in Kobe, Japan, whose previous iteration was destroyed by the Great Hanshin earthquake of January 1995. It was supposed to be a temporary structure, but it is still standing, now in Taiwan. Here it is:



No comments:

Post a Comment