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 [Image: Photograph by Will Webster].Photographer Will Webster got in touch the other week with a large batch of photos taken behind the scenes of the " world's largest tent," designed by Norman Foster, which opened this week in Astana, Kazakhstan.    [Images: Photos by Will Webster].From the Guardian: The Khan Shatyr, a 100,000 sq metre complex designed by Lord Foster, holds a city within a city, with shops and restaurants, cinemas, water park, botanical garden, mini-golf course, and a monorail. The aim of the tent is to provide escape to a people subjected to some of the harshest climes of Central Asia's vast steppe. Temperatures in Astana, in northern Kazakhstan, regularly dip well below -30C in winter. The "aim of the tent," of course, is also to monumentalize the ego of Nursultan Nazarbayev, which the Guardian describes as "Kazakhstan's increasingly autocratic president."  [Image: Photograph by Will Webster].But the building was assembled by everyday workers, amidst the mundane landscapes of this growing, purpose-built capital city, watched by Astana's own residents.    [Images: Photos by Will Webster].Webster's photos—a selection of which you see reproduced here—offer a welcome, unpolished, backstage view of the building as its construction approached an end.  [Image: Photo by Will Webster].Future fun rides sit patiently wrapped in plastic as men in mountaineering gear fix cabled meshes and high-tension wires high inside the volcanic space.      [Images: All photographs by Will Webster].All told, the building cuts an unlikely profile in its only semi-urban context. At dusk, through Webster's lens, it looks less like a structure parachuted in from the future, than the shell of an old expo whose excitement has long since faded.  [Image: Photo by Will Webster].(PS: The abandoned water towers of Webster's Soviet Farming Project series would also be great to explore at more length).
 [Image: A former torpedo-testing facility, now a £4 million private home; courtesy of Knight Frank].This £4 million property located in the suburbs southwest of London "must be one of the most unique spaces to have come to the market in recent local history," estate agents Knight Frank justifiably claim.     [Images: Former torpedo-testing facility in the London suburbs; courtesy of Knight Frank].After all, it is "a former torpedo testing tank, set within the wonderful Royal Park of Bushy, close to Hampton Court, converted into an amazing house." Standing within walled private gardens of 1.3 acres and extending to approximately 10,133 sq ft (940 sq m) this curved property offers not only a great and unique space but the potential to create a very special property indeed... The site was used by the Admiralty during the Second World War and was a circular domed building containing a 46m pool used to test torpedoes as they spun around at the end of a metal arm. After the war, the architects Norman and Dawbarn were commissioned to turn the tank into a modern house. They utilised the 4ft thick "blast proof" curved concrete walls in a very contemporary style using an abundance of glass and aluminium beneath a copper roof to create a very light and open space. There is huge scope to further improve the property and make use of large subterranean areas to provide a fabulous leisure facility. Being able to say—without lying—that your house has the form it does because, long ago, "torpedoes as they spun around at the end of a metal arm" outlined its foundational geometry would be awesome, indeed.  [Image: The kitchen of a former torpedo-testing facility; courtesy of Knight Frank].And while £4 million seems a bit steep, if you can still test torpedoes in the basement—while boiling you and your mysterious Eastern European paramour a pot of strozzapreti in the roomy kitchen up above—then it's probably worth every cent. (Via City A.M., indirectly on a tip from Mountain. Earlier: Buy a Fort, Buy a Church, Buy a Silk Mill).
 [Image: From "Floating City 2030: Thames Estuary Aquatic Urbanism" by Anthony Lau].Continuing with a look at some noteworthy student projects—which kicked off this week with thesis work by Taylor Medlin—we now look at a proposal by Anthony Lau, submitted back in 2008 at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. For that project, Lau designed a "floating city" for the Thames Estuary, ca. 2030 A.D. This "Thames Estuary Aquatic Urbanism," as Lau refers to it, "gives new life to decommissioned ships and oil platforms by converting them into hybrid homes adapted for aquatic living." While the idea of offshore architecture has been relatively depleted of its novelty over the last few years, the presentation and imaginative extent of Lau's idea is of sufficiently high quality to deserve wider exposure and a longer look.   [Images: From "Floating City 2030" by Anthony Lau]."Most modern floating architecture involves new-build modular systems for mass production," Lau writes. "Although this may be the most efficient for space planning, it often lacks character." His alternative: The multitude of hull shapes and sizes can inspire unique and inventive design. The proposal aims to express the beautiful forms and internal steel structures of hulls. The hulls serve as nautical reminders of the ship’s past and our previous closeness to water, which we will now embrace once again. The level of detail in Lau's resulting models is astonishing; bridged superblocks of partially rebuilt oil platforms rise from the wetlands, amidst floating gardens and forest barges, like scenes from a maritime-industrial Avalon. You can see larger versions of these images (some of which have been cropped down and recombined to fit the vertical nature of this post, which means that you will see different groupings at this link) here.       [Images: Models from "Floating City 2030" by Anthony Lau].As Lau writes: "By utilising the flooded landscape, a floating city of offshore communities, mobile infrastructure and aquatic transport will allow the city to reconfigure through fluid urban planning. Wave, tidal and wind energy will be ideal for this offshore city and the inhabitants will live alongside the natural cycles of nature and the rhythms of the river and tides." He adds that "this strategy for creating a self sufficient floating city by reusing ships and marine structures can also be applied to island nations such as the Maldives. Over 80% of its 1,200 islands are around 1 m above sea level. With sea levels rising around 0.9 cm a year, the Maldives could become uninhabitable within 100 years. Its 360,000 citizens would be forced to adapt and they could become the first floating nation."  [Image: From "Floating City 2030" by Anthony Lau].If Lau's work piques your interest, you might also want to take a look at a report released last year by the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Building Futures group, called " Facing Up To Rising Sea Levels: Retreat? Defend? Attack?" Looking to a 100 year horizon of climate change predictions, we will address how the urban, built environment needs to react now. Conservative estimates predict sea-levels to continue ro rise as the oceans warm and the ice caps melt. Coupled with isostatic rebound (the South sinking relative to the North) the effects grow ever more dramatic for large centers of population on the coast. Predicted weather patterns show increased rainfall intesity, leading to sever problems of surface water flooding in built up areas. The ensuing paper explores the architectural implications of three different hydrological strategies: retreating from the coast, defending what we've built there, and attacking the incoming waters with aggressive engineering. Interestingly, meanwhile, one of Lau's initiatives since graduating from the Bartlett is to form a company focusing on urban bicycle infrastructure, specifically the Cyclehoop, "an award-winning design that converts existing street furniture into secure bicycle parking." It's also quite colorful. But perhaps a Boathoop is in the works for residents of his future Floating City... For substantially larger project images, click here. (Follow Lau's Cyclehoop project on Twitter: @cyclehoop).
 [Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].I'm a fan of this strangely megalithic museum and cultural center made from a series of concrete shells, colored white with crushed marble, proposed for the Czech city of Olomouc. According to the designers, Šépka Architekti, the project "attempts to draw inspiration from both... a small scale of mediaeval subdivision of land on the one hand and the large scale of palaces, ecclesiastical and military buildings of the Předhradí beginning here on the other."  [Image: Sketch of the Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti, looking vaguely like an inverted, institutional-scale variation on Neil Denari's Useful and Agreeable House].The museum is divided into five apparently separate but linked buildings; this is due to "the necessary separation of the individual functions of the exhibition halls, library, entry hall or bookshop and refreshments," a "necessary separation" that also generates a convenient spatial identity for the overall project. One of the coolest things about the design, though, is what Šépka Architekti call their "house in a house" idea, inspired by access to indirect sunlight: "Even in the cases when an upper floor is inserted in an individual building, daylight is ensured on the lower floor through placement of a smaller structure. We thus approach the topic of a ‘house in a house’, which ensures favourable conditions for the the display of exhibits on the walls while providing light from above on both floors." You can see the formal implications of this in the below image, where a massive, seemingly hovering trapezoid acts both as another, elevated room for gallery use and as a massive, light-filtering device for the skylights further above.  [Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].It's a mass that casts shadows inside the building. Provided the exterior concrete ages well, the museum's fivefold street presence—briefly stepping back at one point to form a public plaza—is actually pretty stunning. It manages to allude to design languages as diverse as Neo-Brutalism, the Romanesque, a kind of Tatooine Moderne, and computer harddrive casings (although I'm reminded of Owen Hatherley's recent quip about "a modernised classicism, monumental yet free in details, that usually gets subsumed under the meaningless retrospective coinage 'art deco'"—here, we might say, "modern geometries, imposing in size, built from concrete, and thus subsumed under the meaningless retrospective coinage 'Neo-Brutalism'").     [Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].The results are quite beautiful in profile, even when simply rising up behind the walls of neighboring buildings. In any case, the interior volumes also lend themselves well to defining an overall spatial experience, even while departing from one another just enough to keep each bay or gallery distinct.    [Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].As mentioned earlier, that interior is a mix of art galleries, a library, a bookshop/cafe, performance spaces, and, oddly enough, as if Photoshopped in simply to prove a point, a basketball court. Note that the stadium seating visible in many of these images has been mounted on rails for ease of rearrangement.      [Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].In plan, it's interesting to remember that the separate units of the building here were generated from what Šépka Architekti referred to as the "small scale of mediaeval subdivision of land." In other words, the buildings take their formal cue—at least abstractly—from ancient real estate divisions on the ground in Olomouc, not from some overzealous application of the architects' own stylized form of site analysis.    [Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].The complete building, seen in slices:    [Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].Further, the "small scale of mediaeval subdivision of land" that I've mentioned three times now also means that what could very easily be an imposing, alien monolith made from smooth white concrete, stuck irresponsibly in the center of the city, actually manages to be appropriate in scale.   [Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].The building hasn't been constructed, of course, and we have no real idea how the concrete will age; but I was struck by the images from the instant I saw them, flipping through a back issue of a10 yesterday afternoon. Check out more images courtesy of Šépka Architekti.
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