Wednesday, July 4, 2012

MINI_MAX_HOUSE workshop and competition in Johannesburg/SA

Dear Colleagues and Friends,
it is my great pleasure to inform you of this interesting workshop my partner Sarah Calburn and I are running on alternative building technologies and ecology in Johannesburg, the MINI_MAX_HOUSE workshop and competition, I would really love to see you there too.
cheers
Dustin Tusnovics

the workshop information is here !


Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Rediscovering Wood: The Key to a Sustainable Future

International Conference on the Art and Joy of Wood 
19. - 22. October 2011,  Bangalore, India

Theme 2 - Stories portraying the winds of change

http://www.artjoywood.org/




















Building for a better world: how timber architecture can make a difference

Dr Tusnovics is a co-founder of “Space Matters Architecture and Urbanism”, an architecture practice in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was previously Head of the degree course on Timber Construction and Design at Salzburg University of Applied Sciences and he continues to lecture and consult on architecture in Austria, Germany and Italy. At Salzburg, he developed a project-based interdisciplinary curriculum focussing on sustainable architecture as well as innovative timber constructions and designs. He has continued this work in his current practice, which focuses on developing and implementing community-based building projects for low-income communities in South Africa.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Convertible Cities 2011 - Tirana/Albania

http://convertiblecity.blogspot.com/


This studio, at Polis University in Tirana/Albania from 28.02. - 11.03.2011, seeks to understand, explore and expand the limits and potentials contained within the terms 'formal' and 'informal' as they apply to a cross section of Tirana.
We understand these terms to operate across a range of scales and qualities: they are mental, social, economic, political, architectural, urban and cultural, and they operate here both historically and contemporaneously.
Informal thinking (however it comes into being) ranges from the lateral, imaginative and radical to the outright illegal. Formal thinking ranges from an idealised rationality of highest sophistication and order to outright oppression.
We believe that the architect needs to move, continuously, between these two ranges of thought.
Could Tirana be seen as a perfect example of both these states of thought and action?

Friday, January 28, 2011

AZA Pavillon "Taking the Gap" was realised on Mary Fitzgerald Square in Johannesburg



















'Taking the Gap' is built in ecologically sound, locally-manufactured sustainable (and innovative) building materials on Mary Fitzgerald Square for the ArchitectureZA2010 Festival, 21-27 September 2010, to comprise a to-scale example of a ‘GAP’ house within an Integrated Housing Model Proposal that challenges – financially, spatially and materially – the current ‘one man-one plot’ zoned social housing (RDP and Affordable) models to which South Africa is currently subject.

This project won the third price at the international competition URBANINFORM, www.urbaninform.net last December in New York.

Enjoy some of the images of the pavilion.
























Monday, February 22, 2010

lecture on March 1st 2010, 18:00 attention for chage in venue!!

























"Readymix Architecture" is the term Tusnovics has coined for his extremely rapid construction of community buildings in rural and township areas. This idea runs in counterpoint to the usual "solutions" to "Poverty Relief", as it sets up apolemic which directly engages the contemporary South African "roll-out" of non-urban RDP housing that currently holds us hostage. Tusnovics's are inventive and climatologically sensitive buildings that are consciously “communityforming”.
These projects are not the usual run of the mill NGO fare, but demonstrate a sustainability and design integrity that are able to mount an instant critique of the way most things are "provided" to townships and rural areas.
All these projects directly engage the "public" realm, a realm that is notably unconstructed in most low-cost South African 'urban' developments.

text by Sarah Calburn

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Friday, July 10, 2009

Friday, May 8, 2009

Article on the EUNIC workshop2008 in Johannesburg























Issued by Architektur & Bauform, 26. Jan. 2009

Article on the Lesedi Nhahle Training Crèche




















Issued in Architektur, nr.5 - June 2008
www.architektur-online.com

This Blog:

this blog is a collection of links, projects, references, information on ongoing work at the architecture&communication studio.