Gizmodo: herzog & de meuron

The Tate Gets a Design That Would Satisfy the Ancient Egyptians

Erica Ho — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:40:00 EDT

The architectural design firm Herzog & de Meuron is designing the Tate Modern art gallery's newest extension. For the Tate, its a display that will finally be able to represent its interior.

It is a much-needed breath of fresh air into a building that currently looks like an ancient crypt. Which gives a nice vibe to the contemporary art inside, mind you.

And, it looks quite similar to the De Young museum in SF, in that they both use pyramid-like shapes. [Dezeen, image credit to Hans Peter Schaefer]

Bird's Nest Architects' Latest Unveiling: A Vertigo-Inducing Jenga Apartment Tower in NYC

John Mahoney — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:40:00 EDT

Fresh off the billions of eyes that have been on the beautiful Beijing National Stadium, Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron have set their sights on NYC with this incredible 57-story residential tower, unveiled today. It consists of 145 unique apartments that are stacked into the sky like a Jenga tower that's already been well-poked by a party of well-lubricated players. Especially when you get up to the penthouse level—if you're motion sick, you might want to think twice about dropping $33 mil for such a beautiful place when you'll wake up every morning feeling like you're dangling off a cliff...

Yeah, yikes. If anyone goes for custom glass flooring, there better be plenty of airsickness bags on hand. The building, which will be built in Tribeca at 56 Leonard Street, uses extreme cantilevers to achieve a look that H&M describe as "pixelated vertical layering." Or, stacked shanty town trailers.

Herzog and de Meuron designed just about every aspect of the interiors as well, from the 12-foot glass doors that open out onto your private deck, the massive floor-to-ceiling fireplaces—even the coloring of the individual interior elements. If you want to live in an apartment designed by the same folks that brought us one of the coolest works of architecture of the 20th century (and you've got $3.5 mil for a small, low shanty or $33 mil for a top shanty), this is your place. From the top you can more closely watch the real-time collapse of Wall Street (just a few blocks away!), that is if the whole house of cards doesn't fall before this thing makes it into the sky.
[Gothamist]

Chinese Farmers Build Birds Nest Stadium Out of Bamboo

Elaine Chow — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:00:00 EDT

The Beijing National Stadium, nicknamed “The Bird's Nest,” has already become an icon in the country of 1.3 billion. But for some farmers close to Hangzhou (located in the southeast of China), the Herzog & de Meuron structure was just too darn far away... so in a fit of DIY ingenuity, they built their own replica out of bamboo. Steel's apparently kind of hard to get when you're living on a couple of dollars a day.

Altogether, it took ten bamboo sculptors roughly two weeks to put together the Bird's Nest (at a 1:20 scale of the Beijing original) out of 800 pieces of bamboo. The villagers say they plan to use the structure for local sports events. Hmmm... As cool as this DIY structure is, I'm not sure what kind of sport you'd be able to fit in it. Ping pong? [Shufa via Weird Asia News]

And just for comparison, the Beijing Stadium: