Wednesday 31 July 2013

Holiday Period

DIMSCALE's office will be closed between 12th and 30th of August. However, we are available to receive any contact, preferably by e-mail, that will be answered in short notice.

Our blog will also return in September, with a lot of new content related with Architecture, Cost Management and everything in between.

We wish a good vacation period to all our clients, partners and blog viewers!

Monday 29 July 2013

ARCHITECTURE REFERENCES - Palafito Del Mar Hotel, by Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer

Palafito Del Mar Hotel
Chilóe, Chile
Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer, Chile

Area: 380 sqm
Year: 2013
Photos: Eugenio Ortúzar, Alvaro Vidal, Tania Gebauer, Marco Polidura

Project's description on ArchDaily [adapted]:
Pedro Montt is a neighborhood on stilts in the city of Castro, Chiloe. It is one of the oldest and most characteristic neighborhoods of the city and of Chile. It takes over the sea, where there are no regulations, only internal codes of a community that has existed for years on the waterfront, over the sea, showcasing a way of living and a culture.
The city of Castro is undergoing rapid changes, many of them related to tourism and thus, this neighborhood on stilts begins to emerge as one of the most attractive places for visitors to the island of Chiloe. Different tourism-related private enterprises strongly revitalize a degraded neighborhood, exonerated and marginal for the local authorities. This is countered by the neighborhood’s strength and charm, which attracts many travelers from different parts of the world with an unprejudiced view towards cultural identity.
Private initiatives allow many of the buildings currently neglected or extremely deteriorated, to be reused, recovered or reinvented, for the traditional neighborhood, the hostels and travelers to coexist. This has produced a sociological phenomenon that we have seen in the course of a couple of years after the completion of the work, a unique “self revitalization”, from the people to their neighborhood.

This phenomenon, which we may have already seen in other places in Chile such as Valparaiso, has allowed this community to reconsider their own space, in a tangential manner and without any state support. The neighborhood was always viewed as marginal and poor, but the respect from people external to their environment has stimulated the community to care for their common space and housing.

The commission of the project was, by request of the owner, to design a boutique hotel as an experience to live Chiloe, preserving the ancient stilt space, where all the bedrooms would overlook the Castro estuary, and where the tides were always present in every corner of the project.

Thus arises the idea of making a stilt landscape out of different stilts, laid out around the seaside life in a collage composition that yields different colors, shapes, and textures, specific to their environment.

A central circulation enhanced by a linear skylight leads into the different rooms that are arranged linearly, successively crossing the various “thresholds of the sea”, which is where one observes the tide from inside the stilts. It finally concludes at the beginning of the project, a living room, by the fire, which welcomes guests for the encounter of Chiloe culture.

-  Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer



Friday 26 July 2013

The wall sculptures of Cecilia Vissers

After getting to know Cecilia Vissers' work through her website, we invited the artist to share with us some of her work, namely this concept of wall sculptures. We found this work very interesting due to the way it complements Architecture through Design and Art. Cecilia shared with us some photos and reviews regarding these works, as well as a brief profile regarding her artistic path.

Silent light, two-part, each part 113x75x1,2cm, anodized aluminum, 2011 (photo Peter Cox)
So Far, two-part, multiple, each part 20x8,5x1cm, anodized aluminum, 2012 (photo Peter Cox)
Wald L, two-part, each part 60x47x1,2cm, anodized aluminum, 2013 (photo Peter Cox)
Wald L, two-part, each part 60x47x1,2cm, anodized aluminum, 2013 (photo Peter Cox)
Very likely, two-part, each part 63,5x62x1,2cm, 2012 (photo Peter Cox)
Exhibtion View ‘Wind Swept’ Corona Unger, Bremen, 2013 (photo Bjoern Behrens)
Two centuries black, two-part, each part 45x27x0,8cm, hot rolled steel, 2011 (photo Peter Cox)
Orange tide III, 200x89x1cm, anodized aluminum, 2010 (photo Peter Cox)
Exhibition View ‘Wind Swept’ Corona Unger, Bremen, 2013 (photo Bjoern Behrens)


Cecilia Vissers is an internationally exhibiting visual artist, in 1993 she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in ’s Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. Recent shows include Masters&Pelavin, New York, Nouvelles Images Gallery, The Hague, Corona Unger Gallery, Bremen.

Cecilia Vissers’ sculptures and installations are grounded in the remote landscapes of Scotland and Ireland.

"My sculptures became more minimal by degrees to the point that since 2006 I have mainly been concerned with wall based sculptures executed in steel and aluminium. I want my sculptures to be entirely simple, to be viewed quickly, the focus is on the smooth and flat surface obtained by specialized industrial processes."

- Cecilia Vissers 


 
"Since the 1960s, a number of artists, for different reasons, have taken the decision to repeat a single practice, or to make one ongoing piece, throughout their working lives.

The Single Road will explore the implications of this attitude and commitment.

The sculptor Cecilia Vissers is one such example. She has been exhibiting since 1994. Gradually over time the focus of her art narrowed, until, by 2006, she decided only to work in anodised aluminium and steel. Inspired by the directness and plainness of minimalism, she regards the materials she uses and her approach towards them as the consistent factor for all her work. The alterations she makes between each piece and the next are negligible, and consist, essentially, of modifications to the shape of a rectangle or a square. But she stresses these differences are slight by comparison to the emphasis she places on the continuity of her work."

- Dr. Alistiar Rider, ‘the single road’, Feb. 2013, UK
 
 

"Cecilia Vissers’ wall sculptures are fully autonomous objects, introverted, useless, beautiful, present and unusable. They appear to be created never to betray the process of their origin. Purely in terms of visual tensions it is not clear whether the object has been shaped because there were incisions (from the outside), or whether the material has shaped itself (from the inside).

Memories of the sublime landscapes of Ireland and Scotland with poetic names like Blacksod Bay, Canna, Gaoth, guide Cecilia's activities in the studio. Halfway between memory and the here-and-now an important role is assigned to her stunning and beautiful photographs that introduce a first phase of abstraction to the artistic process.

From the landscapes Cecilia loves, she also brings in the combination of the weight of matter and the transparency of atmosphere: matter as in the sheer weight of her sculptures, atmosphere as in their shining colour. Every proportion, every curve in her work is carefully considered and reconsidered, as repeated hikes through a specific landscape shed new light on it every time. It's the nature of the natural landscape that it never repeats itself. This unfolding is what each of her work asks us to observe, because there's nothing static about them. Even a square is not a square."

- Cees de Boer, art historian, Amsterdam, NL