A geological-inspired addition to the Natural History museum in New York by US firm Studio Gang has received unanimous approval from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. Read more
Fernando and Humberto Campana have become the latest designers to create a shop interior for Aesop – using traditional Brazilian Cobogó bricks. Read more
From the architect. This project consists of replacing a school in bad conditions for a new building, using the same plot of land on Chaparral lane in the Municipality of San Vicente Ferrer located in the central mountain range, at 2150m above sea level and a two-hour bus journey from Medellin. It is a rural school for the children of the farmers of the region.
The new building is built on the footprint of the previous one, it prevents from touching some areas with unstable ground, and it consolidates as a perimeter that avoids using external fences and lifts like a polygonal wall that incorporates the program of classrooms and services, prolonged by the ramp and the stairs towards the play area, opening to the rural landscape. On its south face, it is hermetic to control the noise and dust from the nearby rural road, but on its north face it opens to the far away exterior of greenhouses and crops over the mountainside.
This is a project with a limited budget, for which reason we opted for cheap, hard-wearing and low maintenance materials: walls in concrete blocks in earth colors, floors in concrete or stone paving, metal handrails and bars… tones and materials similar to the ones used in the region, in contrast with the color of the vegetation and crops.
The Ensemble Immobilier Tour Maine-Montparnasse (EITMM) has selected 7 notable firms to continue to the second round in a competition for the renovation of Tour Montparnasse in the Montparnasse district of Paris, France.
Often cited as one of the architecture world’s most hated buildings, Tour Montparnasse has been criticized for its discordance with the Parisian urban landscape – just two years after its completion, new buildings over seven stories high in the city centre were banned, leaving the tower as an alien presence on the skyline.
With the launching of the competition, the EITMM hopes to transform Tour Montparnasse into a beloved landmark with a complete renovation of the facade, the building entry and all interior spaces. The budget for the project is estimated to reach over 300 million Euro ($330 million USD), and will be funded in entirety by the building owners.
After receiving inquiries from over 700 interested candidates, the list has been narrowed down to 7 multi-disciplinary teams, who will now design proposals that are “capable of giving a powerful, innovative, dynamic and ambitious new identity to the famous Parisian landmark, whilst integrating the challenges of usage, comfort and energy performance to the highest levels.”
The 7 selected architects are as follows:
The firms were selected by representatives for the Tower co-owners. “The 7 agencies were selected for their reliability, expertise, audacity and their understanding of the challenges we face,” remarked one stakeholder.
The second stage of the competition is now underway, as the seven teams will now prepare their proposals to be submitted in March 2017. The list will then be narrowed down to 2 finalists, with a winner expected to be selected in July 2017. Construction is anticipated to begin in 2019, with completion coming in 2023.
The competition is the first step in a much larger plan, Demain Montparnasse, aimed at “restoring the surrounding property’s role as a modern and accessible urban centre in the heart of Paris’s left bank.”
News via Demain Montparnasse.
A+Awards: US studio Collective–LOK’s new home for the Van Alen Institute in New York can be reconfigured for the design organisation’s different requirements, and is another winner in this year’s Architizer A+Awards. Read more
Following the news that David Bowie’s secret collection of Memphis furniture is going up for sale next month, Adam Trunoske from auction house Sotheby’s shares five of the most iconic pieces from the musician’s personal stash. Read more
From the architect. The building, built in the 1930s, had a former life as a shoe factory. The clients were drawn to it for its expansive windows, though the old arrangement of rooms meant that these were always partially hidden from view. The brief was to transform the warehouse space, taking close consideration of the scale, grain and detailing of the existing architecture, and to create something very personal to the clients, representing something of their histories.
The old factory has a roughness, an authenticity, which appealed to Dexter, whose film background supports a love of architecture seen through a lens, in movement.
The existing window frames which work together on metal rods ‘in unison’ for ventilation are a complex but beautiful mechanical pivoting system which creates a raw and industrial aesthetic that retains a certain dynamic of movement, even when static. These themes permeated the design.
A directorial, choreographic & artistic fluidity prevailed. Dalia’s operatic set design skills became the design core around which the space was manipulated. A black box like a huge fly tower sits centrally in the space. This houses a bathroom, film and book archive and laundry facilities:
The black box sets about a pattern of architectural movement so that the spaces wrap around it. Each side of the cube is characterised by a different function: reading & sleeping / working, preparing food & dining / socialising & relaxing. The whole space is however a continuous wrap.
The cube surfaces open and close, incorporating raw steel walls, blackened mesh screens, metal shelves, recesses, decorative niches and sliding doors. It is Baroque in complexity but simple in function.
Each element serves a purpose in movement to reveal a use of space that is compact and deliberate or occasionally obtuse and irreverent. Springing from the clients love for theatre, dance, music and artistic clarity, a monochrome palette became highlighted by gentle warm tones of light, delicate introductions of industrial steel blues, rich dark olive green and unexpected textures.
Hard materials appear as soft as butter, soft fabrics are placed as monolithic stone like structures. Lighting is varied, from muted & reflected tones to occasional directed, theatrical atmospheres.
The choice of materials, furniture and moveable wall screens is deeply personal, inspired by family history as well as evoking memories of journeys in Japan, Belgium, and Argentina, each captured by fragments (solid oak shelves, black ash shoji, thick black marble splinters, mountain climate blankets & throws) that combine to create a dark mystical dream at night or a textural landscape in daylight. Urban in complexity yet strangely archaic /prehistoric in its base simplicity, the apartment dominated by a black steel cube reflects the inhabitants passions and their love for material quality of an elemental nature.
The Frankfurt Book Fair and Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) have announced the results of the 2016 International DAM Architectural Book Award, their annual list of the ten best architectural books published in the past year.
This year, books were selected from 214 entries and 88 international publishers, based on criteria such as design content, quality of material and finishing, innovation, and topicality. The winning books feature a wide range of topics and graphic styles, and feature projects from all over the world.
Find the top 10 and additional shortlisted books below.
African Modernism – The Architecture of Independence. Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia
Publisher: Park Books
Edited by: Manuel Herz
Authors: Manuel Herz, Ingrid Schröder, Hans Focketyn, Julia Jamrozik
Design: Marie Lusa
Photography/illustration: Iwan Baan, Alexia Webster
The book presents 80 Modernist structures in five countries, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Kenya and Zambia, which were built in the 1960s and 1970s, the first years of independence, when people’s hopes were at their highest. And to our eyes they seem unfamiliar and new, even though some of their architects were from Europe. Remarkable discoveries, our usual image of Africa with all its disasters and misery is transformed to one veering towards cool mid-century Modernism.
Dieter Kienast -Stadt und Landschaft lesbar machen (Dieter Kienast – Readable City and Landscape)
Publisher: gta Verlag
Authors: Anette Freytag
Design: Büro 146. Valentin Hindermann, Madeleine Stahel, Maike Hamacher with Tiziana Artemisio and Barbara Hoffmann
Photography/illustrations: Georg Aerni, Christian Vogt
In “Stadt und Landschaft lesbar Machen” Anette Freytag vividly breaks down how design, theory, and presentation are interwoven in Dieter Kienast’s work, and how the latter is a combination of artistic, scientific, intellectual, and social aspects (gta Verlag). This makes the book clearly different from existing illustrated books.
Habitat Marocain Documents – Dynamics Between Formal and Informal Housing
Publisher: Park Books
Edited by: Sascha Roesler
Author: Jean Hentsch, Udo Kultermann, Sascha Roesler, André Studer, Theres Studer
Design: Adrian Ehrat
Category: Construction history monograph
This is an evolutionary building monograph on a small series of three settlements built towards the end of the French colonial era (1954-56) in Casablanca, Morocco, by the two young Swiss architects Jean Hentsch and André Studer. They built a structuralist masterpiece, which attempted to adopt approaches to regional vernacular architecture and enable future transformations of the rigid structure. This approach can be followed by means of the architects’ very historical looking travel photos of the country at that time. The actual transformations that occurred during the next 60 years are then shown, and thus the life of these structures, revealing a typical dilemma of well-meaning Westerners, whose cultural prejudices collide with the residents’ actual living habits.
Housing Cairo: The Informal Response
Publisher: Ruby Press
Author: Marc Angélil, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes u.a.
Design: Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Something Fantastic (Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz, Leonard Streich)
Photography: Students on the Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design course at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich
Housing Cairo documents the aspect of informal urbanization in this metropolis with 20 million inhabitants. The book is the result of a Master’s course (Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design at ETH Zurich) supervised by Marc Angélil, and using photographs and plans traces the city’s historical development through to the present day. Taking a district on the west bank of the Nile as an example, the methods of construction used in the very dense cluster is analyzed using photos and drawings.
Das leichte Haus. Utopie und Realität der Membranarchitektur (The Light House. The Utopia and Reality of Membrane Architecture)
Publisher: Spector Books
Author: Walter Scheiffele
Published by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
Design: Ludovic Balland Typography Cabinet, Basel, Siri Bachmann
The author Walter Scheiffele bases his publication on the 1926 book “Der Raum als Membran” by Siegfried Ebeling (1894–1963). At that time the latter developed his theory of biological architecture. On the basis of Ebeling’s biography, the books relates the history of lightweight construction and the theories behind it. It ranges from the Glass Chain and Bruno Taut, Paul Scheerbart, Hermann Finsterlin, and Hugo Junkers’ metal building projects, to Frei Otto and Werner Sobek. Interviews with contemporary architects were conducted and feature in the book.
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Author: Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis
Edited by: Sara Stemen, Jennifer Lippert
Design: Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis
The idea is so surprisingly obvious that one really wonders why no one ever thought of it until now: 62 buildings from the 20th century are presented in freshly drawn cross-sections (strictly speaking: cross-section perspectives). These cross-sections reveal not only the spatial qualities in each case, but also provide information about the way the edifices are constructed. Walls and floors are literally cut open, revealing some surprises: Who knew that Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamps is far less solid than previously thought? Insights resulting from the method behind the cross-section make the book a textbook, which all architecture students ought to consult from their very first semester on. It contains a wealth of discoveries about structures that are seemingly familiar and have often featured in publications, which makes close study along the edges of the cross-sections a pleasure.
Nadogradnje – Urban Self-Regulation in Post-Yugoslav Cities
Publisher: M BOOKS
Authors: Martin Düchs, Monika Grubbauer, Hanna Hilbrandt, Vladimir Kulić, Sven Quadflieg, Dubravka Sekulić
Edited by: Sven Quadflieg, Gregor Theune
Design: Sven Quadflieg
Photography: Gregor Theune
Based on a series of photos by Gregor Theune, this book addresses the phenomenon of adding stories to and extending existing residential buildings, as well as the continued construction of their type in the successor states to former Yugoslavia (“Nadogradnje”). It presents a good two dozen of these photographs, which are peculiarly fascinating: Time and again stories are added to pre-fabricated buildings form the socialist era – not infrequently in the form of timber-clad huts with gable roofs.
The Other Architect. Another Way of Building Architecture
Publisher: Spector Books/CCA
Edited by: Giovanna Borasi
Design: Jonathan Hares
“Architecture as production of ideas” (Mirko Zardini)
This exhibition catalog, which was produced in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, is about “The Other Architect”, in other words not about forms of architecture and the classic production of architecture, but about how new spaces and laboratories for working and reflecting in can be created outside traditional structures and beyond built edifices. It is not about building or buildings, but about thinking. The book is a collection of some 20 examples dating from the 1960s to the present day. They include, for example, the international ILAUD Group, IAUS in New York, and Forensic Architecture from London.
This is Frank Lloyd Wright
Publisher: Laurence King Publishing
Edited by: Liz Faber
Author: Ian Volner
Design: Laurence King Publishing, Art Director Angus Hyland
Illustrations: Michael Kirkham
This short publication is a skillful mixture of a monograph about the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright that by all means deserves to be taken seriously, and an entertaining closer look at a highly colorful character – an esteemed teacher, failed businessman, bon viveur. Even Wright’s extravagant dress style gets a mention. Short articles, sumptuous illustrations, and a cover made of hard cardboard give “This is Frank Lloyd Wright” the appearance of a children’s book. It is a clever disguise for a successful introduction to the work of one of the greatest architects of recent times – educational literature at its best.
Völlig losgelöst – Architektur der 1970er- und 1980er-Jahre in der Nordwestschweiz und den grenznahen Regionen (Completely Detached – Architecture of the 1970s and 1980s in Northwest Switzerland and Border Regions)
Publisher: Park Books
Authors: Christian Flierl, Ulrike Jehle-Schulte Strathaus, Roger Ehret
Design: Andreas Hidber
Photographer: Christian Flierl
Apart from the title “Völlig losgelöst”, which refers a to chapter of Pop music from the 1970s and 1980s, in terms of format and design this work initially appears to be a classic illustrated book. The book has recent architectural photographs of buildings from the era to which its slightly attention-grabbing refers. Using an extremely calm visual idiom and desaturated colors, Christian Flierl photographs buildings of which we are hardly still aware. Pleasantly short interviews by Ulrike Jehle-Schulte Strathaus and other authors, as well as a historical context help the reader understand this era and accept its aesthetics long after. Given the compelling nature of its content, theme, and style, this book deserves to keep on being perused and discovered.
The award ceremony will be held on October 19, 2016 in the library at Deutsches Architekturmuseum and all winning books will be presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair from October 20 to 23, 2016.
This year the external jury comprised: Werner Huthmacher (photographer), Torsten Köchlin (designer), Karoline Mueller-Stahl (lector, author), Christoph Scheffer (arts editor hr-iNFO radio), Martin Seelinger (architect, treasurer of The Society of the Friends of Deutsches Architekturmuseum).
The internal jurors were: Peter Cachola Schmal (Director, DAM), Annette Becker (curator, DAM), Oliver Elser (curator, DAM), Christina Budde (curator, architecture education at DAM \ coordination, DAM Architectural Book Award 2016).
News via DAM.
From the architect. Stretching itself out on the meadow, looking at the sky and all that is close to it: tree crowns, nearby mountain peaks, clouds, flying birds… the open-air house establishes the relationship with the surroundings through the courtyard, open to the sky and elevated things, and at the same time protects itself from the road and the neighbouring houses.
This design project is located in a residential district build on an old vegetable plot and crops demarcated by pumice walls. The house is situated in one of the ends of this site and borders on a road in the north-west, on other houses in the south and in the east, and there are trees from the four winds. In this location, we lay out a ground level house, opaque in the north, changing towards the south and open to the sky through the courtyard, which is conceived as a big connecting space of the house. The garden, raised a bit higher than the rest of the plot, is equipped with automatic shutters, allowing different intensity level of interaction with the neighbourhood: from full opacity to complete openness, passing though the blinds with the changing angle of their slats. The L-shaped wall, built from its own reused pumice stone it the alter ego of the Persian blinds with their adjustable slats; its task is to isolate the house from the wind and the cold from the north as well as from the noise and the visibility of the busy road.
Over the former mosaic of vegetable patches, we draw a new 1.5 X 1.5 m plot, in which we fit the whole project. This order is expressed in the structure and also gives us answers about the layout and wall coverings. Inside the wall, almost left free-standing because of the linear skylight, there is a corridor, which is in charge of organizing the program for this dwelling: a space which connects the changing areas of the house with the sky always above and follows the relentless rhythm drawn by the structure.
The open-air house wants to come across friendly to the neighbourhood, bashful to the road and rooted to the ground; it wants to be a refuge of peace and quiet in the bustle of modern life. The open-air house is just a meadow of fresh grass where one can listen to birds and count the clouds floating above.
Sig Nordal 