Window to the Ocean

This is the final image of my project: 

And here, some house plans: 

Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: C'était salement romantique by Coeur de Pirate

Architecture and Music

I’ll start by quoting an anonymous author (n.d.): “music is what feelings sound like”.

Architecture and music have always been linked. Many authors have stated this relationship between architecture and music, such as Oscar Wilde and Schelling, but I would like to highlight the case of Goethe (1836), who, in a conversation with Eckermann said: “Architecture is "frozen music"… Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.”

This is why architecture for music has something special, something that makes music stop in time and architecture flow like a harmonious liquid, ending up in a whole which includes all the beauty of both arts. 

I think the best known case is the Sydney Opera House, by Jørn Utzon. Although he didn’t do the interior, the exterior is a beautiful metaphor of the sailboats which cross the bay of Sydney, made of a concrete structure, covered by bright white and cream tiles.

The Casa da Música in Porto, by O.M.A., is another example of great architecture for music. It is a building built in concrete made of a mixture of Portuguese Portland cement and blue sandstone. The interior has a wide range of textures and colors. The different rooms want to transmit different sensations, depending on the colors, the music and the way they are furnished. The main concert room is made of wood coated in gold leaf, remembering the Baroque art. 

There are many other examples of poetic architecture for music. But not only music and architecture, the conjunction of the arts make beautiful creations. A case of this is Le Corbusier, being an architect, painter, sculptor, designer, urbanist and writer, he wrote the Poem of the Right Angle (1947-1953), where he “conceived the creation and intervention of the artist in the world as a unique act in which architecture and art had a deep involvement” (Minerva, 2006).

~Nina

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Listening to: Nocturne Op.9 No.2 by Chopin

Music is what feelings sound like

No need for explanation :)

Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: The Labyrinth by Javier Navarrete

Inspiration...

If you listen to this while you are doing a project, trust me that your inspiration will increase a 100% (it's just too beautiful):

Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: Madame Butterfly by Maria Callas

Architecture and Dance

Just a quote related to our female client:

"Architecture is the design of space, both interior and exterior. So it’s much more closely related to dance than it is to painting or sculpture."

Bruce Graham

Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: Morning Passages by Philip Glass

Reaching the goal

After months of work, we finally had the definitive plans for our house.

As you know, the users of the house are an artist and a ballerina.
The whole building is made to fulfill their expectations and dreams.

There is a main common space, which is the module that articulates the spaces. It is formed by the hall, the living room/ dining room and the music room.

This module is connected to the 'technical module' and the 'artistic modules'.

The technical module is a box that contains the kitchen, the bathroom and the cupboard.

The artistic modules are the private ones for the users: the ballerina studio for her and the paint studio for him.

The paint studio has double height and it has a skylight on top, to get the best kind of light for painting.

The ballerina studio is based on the movement of a ballerina, adaptating its shape to it.

On the second floor there is the bedroom, wich has views to the living room in the lower floor.

Here are the panels, one for Projects and one for Construction:

Now, we have to customize our house a different way, and fix a couple of things. We'll see how it comes out.

Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: Riverside by Agnes Obel

News!

After some work on the house, this is the new look:
























Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: Desert Island by Architecture in Helsinki

Portugal!

We came back from Portugal a week ago, after 10 days of fun, work, visits...

In the workshop we worked on a project for the regeneration of Figueira. In our case we tried to regenerate it by the creation of four buildings. It's better explained in the panel:


















I'll post some more things about the trip in other moment ;)

Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: Ten Thousand Lines by Electric President

The Artistic Couple

And, the final panel! YAY!
























Now it has house plans and a more specific program and schemes.

Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: Learn to Fly by Foo Fighters

Let's get dark!

OK, after some changes, James' side is 'darker' haha. Also Lilly's one is sweeter. We are doing the final tweaks on the definitive panel, but here's the one we had on Monday:



























Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: You Only Live Once by The Strokes

First results

Last week we worked on the characters and some things about the house to end up with an A1, but it still needs some work (we are currently working on it):

























Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: Learn to Fly by Vitamin String Quartet (cover of Foo Fighters)

James and Lilly!

We finally know how the users will look like. They're made out of different people body parts (does it sound too much like Frankenstein?). In a first moment we made a list with all the physical features that they would have, and then voilà!

Meet James and Lilly:
























Keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: Adagio for Strings by Barber

Getting started

I'm gonna talk a little about the project we've just started in Projects in English III. For now we (David, my partner for this project, and I) just have to create the user(s) for the home we'll design for them later.

We chose that we want our users to be an artist married to a ballerina. Their personalities are quite opposite, being her a really sweet and cheerful person, and him, an eccentric and dark one.

When I was walking to uni yesterday, I saw the dawn and realized that it's so poetic that it should be one of the likes of the artist (that, or the sunset), but like a really deep like. I took a picture (sorry for the crappy quality, but I took it with the phone and while I was walking):

After school, we had lunch at Foster's Hollywood, and I took the opportunity to draw the female character. Later, I drew the male character sitting on a bench in a park:

As you may see, the male character looks a little creepy, but that's the point. He has several problems, one of them is the fact that he's agoraphobic, so he isn't... really tan.

After lunch, we went to the PAU of Vallecas, to see some examples of collective housing:
















































The pics are courtesy of David, who took his DSLR.

When I was going back home by night, I was looking through the window of the bus and I thought that as James (yes, that's the name of the male character) loves travelling, but he's agoraphobic, he could see the world through a window (again, sorry for the image quality):

Have a nice day, and keep reading!

~Nina

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Listening to: Amylase by Cajun Dance Party (I'm gonna do this in every post because I've seen it in some places like dA's journal, and I quite like it, because music really is a great inspiration).

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to my blog.

I'm Nina Mertanen, a Spanish architecture student who lives in Madrid.

I've been wanting to create a blog about architecture for a long while, and now I had the perfect excuse for it (not that I needed one, but anyways).


Maybe you're wondering, what's with that name?. Well, I think that architecture and the rest of the arts are really related, and in this case, music has a rythm, a pattern that structures it, as does architecture. So the structure of a bulding is like a symphony (maybe it's just making sense in my head). By the way, the scores of the background are from the prelude of Bach's Cello Suite No 1. Also, the playlist on the right has some part of my inspirational music, and I'll be adding new songs.


OK, now that you know a little bit abour me and about my blog, it's time to start posting something, right?


Keep reading!


~Nina