Graduate shows 2016: Royal College of Art graduate Wan Tseng has designed erotic devices that provide a subtle, sensation-focused alternative to traditional sex toys (+ slideshow). (more…)
Sydney-based architecture and urban design firm Stewart Hollenstein have unveiled a scheme to transform the North Bund (lower Hongkou) region of Shanghai. Centered around a 2.7 kilometer stretch of Changzhi Road parallel to the Huangpu River waterfront, the project proposes the creation of a new “People’s Avenue,” reclaiming the street for pedestrian use and providing a framework for the development of the district and the city at large. The plan calls for the design of a new market hall, city library, theater, community center and two museums, helping to establish a new “Cultural Spine” for Hongkou.
Central to the design is the redevelopment of the existing avenue. While current plans call for a widening of the street to accommodate a 10-lane highway, Stewart Hollenstein proposes instead that the road be gradually phased into a multi-modal artery, giving priority to pedestrian occupation. The new avenue will be lined with a continuous active edge featuring shops and restaurants to connect a series of larger public spaces, establishing a new identity for the streetscape and promoting a cleaner, healthier city.
“The vision for the ‘People’s Avenue’ is one that starts at the scale of the citizen and uses this viewpoint to transform the entire North Bund,” says Stewart Hollenstein Director Matthias Hollenstein. “The ‘People’s Avenue’ forms the backbone to a public domain network designed to be generous, vibrant and integrated with the existing heritage fabric and future cultural and commercial developments.”
Stewart Hollenstein’s scheme flips the typical pattern of construction in Shanghai by establishing public areas first, then framing the space with development. At the artery’s western end, existing buildings are razed to make room for a covered marketplace; at the eastern end, Shanghai’s Jewish Quarter is revitalized with the addition of a new community center and children’s museum. In between, public plazas are created in front of a new theater and art gallery and along the Hongkou Canal.
“With the development of many sites in the study area already underway, our proposal presents a new strategy where development and a well-defined public realm support one another,” explains Stewart Hollenstein Director Felicity Stewart. “This is not a pattern we are currently seeing in Hongkou District where development has little relationship with the street and is designed on a block by block basis rather than supporting street life.”
The design proposal will be presented by Felicity Stewart and Matthias Hollenstein at the China Australian Urban Forum on June 29th 2016 in Shanghai. The forum was envisioned as an opportunity for experts from China and Australia to discuss potential futures for Shanghai with the purpose of addressing issues such as liveability, sustainability, infrastructure and preservation.
Sydney-based architecture and urban design firm Stewart Hollenstein have unveiled a scheme to transform the North Bund (lower Hongkou) region of Shanghai. Centered around a 2.7 kilometer stretch of Changzhi Road parallel to the Huangpu River waterfront, the project proposes the creation of a new “People’s Avenue,” reclaiming the street for pedestrian use and providing a framework for the development of the district and the city at large. The plan calls for the design of a new market hall, city library, theater, community center and two museums, helping to establish a new “Cultural Spine” for Hongkou.
Central to the design is the redevelopment of the existing avenue. While current plans call for a widening of the street to accommodate a 10-lane highway, Stewart Hollenstein proposes instead that the road be gradually phased into a multi-modal artery, giving priority to pedestrian occupation. The new avenue will be lined with a continuous active edge featuring shops and restaurants to connect a series of larger public spaces, establishing a new identity for the streetscape and promoting a cleaner, healthier city.
“The vision for the ‘People’s Avenue’ is one that starts at the scale of the citizen and uses this viewpoint to transform the entire North Bund,” says Stewart Hollenstein Director Matthias Hollenstein. “The ‘People’s Avenue’ forms the backbone to a public domain network designed to be generous, vibrant and integrated with the existing heritage fabric and future cultural and commercial developments.”
Stewart Hollenstein’s scheme flips the typical pattern of construction in Shanghai by establishing public areas first, then framing the space with development. At the artery’s western end, existing buildings are razed to make room for a covered marketplace; at the eastern end, Shanghai’s Jewish Quarter is revitalized with the addition of a new community center and children’s museum. In between, public plazas are created in front of a new theater and art gallery and along the Hongkou Canal.
“With the development of many sites in the study area already underway, our proposal presents a new strategy where development and a well-defined public realm support one another,” explains Stewart Hollenstein Director Felicity Stewart. “This is not a pattern we are currently seeing in Hongkou District where development has little relationship with the street and is designed on a block by block basis rather than supporting street life.”
The design proposal will be presented by Felicity Stewart and Matthias Hollenstein at the China Australian Urban Forum on June 29th 2016 in Shanghai. The forum was envisioned as an opportunity for experts from China and Australia to discuss potential futures for Shanghai with the purpose of addressing issues such as liveability, sustainability, infrastructure and preservation.
Sydney-based architecture and urban design firm Stewart Hollenstein have unveiled a scheme to transform the North Bund (lower Hongkou) region of Shanghai. Centered around a 2.7 kilometer stretch of Changzhi Road parallel to the Huangpu River waterfront, the project proposes the creation of a new “People’s Avenue,” reclaiming the street for pedestrian use and providing a framework for the development of the district and the city at large. The plan calls for the design of a new market hall, city library, theater, community center and two museums, helping to establish a new “Cultural Spine” for Hongkou.
Central to the design is the redevelopment of the existing avenue. While current plans call for a widening of the street to accommodate a 10-lane highway, Stewart Hollenstein proposes instead that the road be gradually phased into a multi-modal artery, giving priority to pedestrian occupation. The new avenue will be lined with a continuous active edge featuring shops and restaurants to connect a series of larger public spaces, establishing a new identity for the streetscape and promoting a cleaner, healthier city.
“The vision for the ‘People’s Avenue’ is one that starts at the scale of the citizen and uses this viewpoint to transform the entire North Bund,” says Stewart Hollenstein Director Matthias Hollenstein. “The ‘People’s Avenue’ forms the backbone to a public domain network designed to be generous, vibrant and integrated with the existing heritage fabric and future cultural and commercial developments.”
Stewart Hollenstein’s scheme flips the typical pattern of construction in Shanghai by establishing public areas first, then framing the space with development. At the artery’s western end, existing buildings are razed to make room for a covered marketplace; at the eastern end, Shanghai’s Jewish Quarter is revitalized with the addition of a new community center and children’s museum. In between, public plazas are created in front of a new theater and art gallery and along the Hongkou Canal.
“With the development of many sites in the study area already underway, our proposal presents a new strategy where development and a well-defined public realm support one another,” explains Stewart Hollenstein Director Felicity Stewart. “This is not a pattern we are currently seeing in Hongkou District where development has little relationship with the street and is designed on a block by block basis rather than supporting street life.”
The design proposal will be presented by Felicity Stewart and Matthias Hollenstein at the China Australian Urban Forum on June 29th 2016 in Shanghai. The forum was envisioned as an opportunity for experts from China and Australia to discuss potential futures for Shanghai with the purpose of addressing issues such as liveability, sustainability, infrastructure and preservation.
A frame for the sky over a forest of columns shapes a pavilion to contemplate a well-orchestrated dialogue with the existing historical context.
The project sits within the garden premises of a historic 20th century eclectic house in Merida, Yucatan, considered national heritage and currently a museum. The garden regularly hosts social events for which temporary tents were assembled for weather protection. The client sought for a permanent structure to hold all kinds of scales of events and to enhance a more intimate relationship with the existing building.
The solution was a pavilion made of 36 slim columns that form a C shape promenade supporting a 6” thin, knife-edged canopy. The columns relate to the trees that surround the property and the balconies of the house. The roof reinforces the presence of the “emptied” space below contrasting with the solid nature of the house and connecting with the garden to its sides. The roof frames the sky converting it into a continuous phenomenological factor during the gatherings at any time of the day.
Materiality is defined through prefabricated white concrete using local stone and aggregates. The light color resonates with the character of the city and the house and allows light and shadow to mark the passage of the sun on its surfaces.
Seams at the prefab columns and canopy were carefully placed and detailed to emphasize the connections of the elements that were installed in less than 3 months, having the least impact to the business operation.
Above the roof a secondary steel structure allows for canopy calibration and ties all column heads to provide a hurricane safe structure. The steel grid also serves a track for a retractable roof that may be closed during rainy days.
The simple and evident tectonics create a language that dialogues between two epochs while providing limits and a sense of place for a space that would previously obviate the existence of the house.
The XV International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale opened its doors last month. Under the directorship of Chilean Pritzker Prize-winner Alejandro Aravena, “Reporting the front” asked architects to go beyond “business as usual” and investigate concealed built environments – conflict zones and urban slums, as well as locations suffering from housing shortage, migrations and environmental disasters. Clearly, the aim of this Biennale is to open the profession to new fields of engagement and share knowledge on how to improve people’s quality of life.
This stance that has been highly criticized by Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects, who believes that architects “are not equipped to [address these issues]. It’s not the best value for our expertise.” But is this a view shared by the rest of the design world and its critics? What are the limits and benefits of this “humanitarian architecture”? Read on to find out critics’ comments.
“Alas, the architect remains a distant witness – an interlocutor with conditions – to the urgencies of human living.” – Carson Chan, Frieze Magazine
Carson Chan, reviewing for Frieze Magazine, noted “[that] architecture should be concerned with the conditions of living seems obvious, but some would claim that the concern for social ills, though virtuous and principled, is not one that can be directly attended to by architectural form, at least not with guaranteed results.”
That said, Chan doesn’t support Schumacher’s opinion:
Architects have as much right to comment on social and political problems as any other profession that studies and considers the way we live. What we see in Venice is not amateurism, or perhaps not only amateurism, but too often we find exhibitions positioned at such removed, analytical distances from the issues they seek to examine that any real-world obstacles become almost fantasy scenarios.
Chan explains architecture is “bound to spatialize, reproduce and distribute the inequalities of capital,” an argument that he further develops by quoting Erik Swyngedouw, who said that such architectural projects “require painstaking organization, careful thought, radical imagination, and – above all – the intellectual and political will to inaugurate an equal, solidarity-based and free socio-spatial order that abolishes what exists.”
The problem here is the architecture discipline’s age-old inability to discern between learning from a condition and intervening in it – between its intelligence as an analytic tool, and its separate role as an agent of design.
Perhaps the problem lies in the expectations raised by the Biennale. While Chan questions architects’ ability to act in an environment with “political, racial, economic, and ideological realities,” he values their ability to analyse a socially critical situation, and thinks the best exhibitions “made their point by offering singular, coherent experiences.”
“If the biennale offers no more than suggestions, they are nonetheless engaging, enriching and sometimes enlightening.” – Rowan Moore, The Observer
Rowan Moore, of The Observer, agrees with Chan on architects’ dependence on politics when it comes to budget and decision-making:
If [architects] have some influence over large budgets, it is developers or politicians who usually make the real decisions. At best, an architect can be like a jockey on a horse. Often, he or she is more like the groom, who puts nice plaits in its mane and tail.
Although Moore values the idea of “humanitarian architecture,” he questions architects’ intentions to “fulfill their creative whim”:
What, indeed, could be more useful than helping in such situations? Nothing, as long as the architects really are helping. Otherwise they are only taking their self-indulgence to a higher level, at the expense of people least able to afford it.
But Moore also highlights a paradoxical lack of compelling designs:
If “humanitarian architecture” sometimes turns out not to be humanitarian, it is not always architecture either. In the urge to do good, or to be seen to do good, architects can forget their skills of making spaces and buildings that are desirable to inhabit.
Nevertheless, Moore says that “Aravena’s theme is not only applicable to cases of great need, though it tends to be interpreted in that way,” and praises the Biennale’s 15th edition for the “substantially new cast of creative characters” it offers. Indeed, for the Observer critic, “It feels like a new world.”
“It celebrates the ability of architecture to touch the lives of those in greatest need — the poor, the refugees, the dispossessed and the neglected — an affirmation of architecture as a social good and, at its best, it is genuinely thought-provoking.” – Edwin Heathcote, The Financial Times
Like Moore, Edwin Heathcote, reviewing for The Financial Times, balances architects’ social endeavors, by reminding that practitioners also need to show the quality of their design and that the Biennale is the perfect opportunity to mainstream one’s work:
The Biennale is the showcase for architectural theory, culture and practice, a space for architecture to talk to itself and see if it is capable of communicating with a broader public. It is a place wracked by tensions — between a desire to be socially engaged and useful and a profound urge to show off.
Mostly, Heathcote points out the gaps between the global north and the global south, by explaining how the north plays a patronizing role throughout the exhibition – a disappointing report considering that Aravena is the first architect from the global south to curate the Venice Biennale:
There is also a nagging sensation that architects from the global north have parachuted patronizingly into the global south to “solve problems.” Some more radical practitioners suggested this was a wasted opportunity — a chance for the global south to project a radical agenda for architecture before the status quo is restored next time around. Others were concerned that bottom-up activism was a substitute for architectural intelligence and theory.
“Upon reflection, my ‘take-away’ from the usual sea of projects and people was this: The importance of the idea that architects have the power to use their knowledge and skills to do something good” – Aaron Betsky, Architect Magazine
For Architect Magazine’s critic Aaron Bestky, who covered the Biennale in two articles, “the great advantage of this Biennale was that it turned the spotlight both on users who we usually don’t see (not just clients for private homes, museums, or office towers) and on those architects working with them.”
Bestky argues that the use of countless screens and distracting information undermines the exhibition’s overall argument. Instead of producing cheap powerpoint presentations and postcard photographs, practitioners could use better and more informative displays. Yet, he also questions the aesthetics of social architecture:
What they do not provide, on the whole, are forms, images, or spatial sequences that excite or delight. Too often, the exhibition reminds us that such pleasure in place is still something we seem to only be able to construct for the wealthy. There has to be a way in which reinvention and the opening of social possibilities partakes of beauty.
But most important to Betsky is the predominant focus on design tools available – despite the scarcity of means in certain built environments:
I can tell you this: The best part of this year’s Biennale is its emphasis on what is not new. Rather than showcasing novel buildings or advanced design techniques, it brings to the forefront what I think is the most important mandate that faces all of us in the field of architecture, namely, what to do with what we already have: How to reuse, rethink, and remake our existing structures, cities, and materials to make them more available and beautiful for all.
Aravena’s “Reporting From The Front” Is Nothing Like Koolhaas’ 2014 Biennale-But It’s Equally as Good
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Monocle Films Report from the National Pavilions at the 2016 Venice Biennale
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EU referendum: creative businesses in the UK should consider relocating to the EU in the wake of Brexit, according to a lawyer who advises design and fashion companies. (more…)
The Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jewish People during World War II in Markowa is Poland’s first institution commemorating Poles who helped Jews. The museum’s ascetic architectural form that cuts into the ground, as well as the exhibition hidden inside, was designed by Nizio Design International. The museum was opened March 17, 2016.
Within the museum’s layout composition it is not only the form, but all the other elements, too, such as texture and material, that are to express the content related to the museum’s message. The minimalist, abstract architectural forms that have been applied here trigger certain feelings in visitors. The ascetic shape of the building is reminiscent of a house. The symbolic vision of home, which is associated with love and security, was confronted by the designers with compositional forms that express anxiety and threat. The building of reinforced concrete has facades clad in weathering steel sheets which develop a rust-like appearance indicative of the passage of time. With the architectural form being recessed in the terrain and with the materials used, the building blends in with the surroundings and amalgamates with them. For becoming a part of the context of the village and the broader history it reminds visitors of the history and life of the pre-war Markowa. Not only does it refer to the time of the Shoah, but also reveals the unchanging nature of being, against the odds of fate and history.
The partially glazed facade of the museum is a gate that is simplified to the form of a sign. Inside the museum there is twilight, illuminated by the glow of light coming from the heart of the building, which is a glass cuboid symbolising the home of Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, as well as the homes of thousands of Poles who risked their lives to help the Jews. The exhibits include the original furniture, woodworking shop, beehive, books, Józef Ulma’s cameras and family documents. Within this space displayed are projections that bring back the scenes from everyday life of the married couple and their children. The symbolic home of the Ulmas is perched on a steel substructure, the walls are finished with safety glass covered with engravings on film substrate. The wall on which projections are displayed is covered with anti-reflective film. The floor is made of pine boards with brushed and aged surfaces.
The viewing path of the museum leads around the cuboid and across the 7 thematic sections, where the story is told through artefacts, documents, photographs, and materials presented at manual and multimedia stands. In the middle of the exhibition room are 4 infoboxes in the form of steel cubes with touch screens and seats. All elements of the exhibition are arranged so as to tell the story of the shared past of Poles and Jews in the context of the tragic time of war. The interior of the Museum is kept in simple and monumental poetics of concrete walls. Its culmination – at the back of the exhibition room – is the illuminated vertical and sharp gap which symbolises the narrow gate that leads through the incomprehensible area of death.
The sharp wedge-shaped structure of the building cuts into the terrain behind the house, where the designers have located the Memory Orchard planted with apple, pear, and plum trees and which refers both to Józef Ulma’s orchard and the Olive Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem. On the monumental wall adjacent to the plane of the yard symbolising a cross-section of the soil placed are sandblasted granite plaques featuring the names of the Poles who saved Jews. Then, “embedded” in the very plane of the yard are highlighted plaques with the names of those who lost their lives for saving Jews. The density of the illuminated plaques increases towards the entrance to the museum. On the plane of the yard, like boats on a river, they form a peculiar procession of travelling lights that approach the threshold of the gate that is symbolised by the house elevation.
The museum building occupies the site by the main road running through Markowa and commemorates the events of 24 March, 1944. During World War II in Markowa Nazi gendarmes shot Wiktoria and Józef Ulma, their six children and the Jewish families they had been hiding. In 1995, the Israeli Yad Vashem institute granted the Ulmas the title of the Righteous Among the Nations. In 2009, out of 25 designs submitted for the contest, the jury selected the proposal put forward by Nizio Design International.
Zaha Hadid Architects’ (ZHA) 170-meter-tall Generali Tower has topped out at 44 stories in Milan, Italy. The Generali Tower, along with two other towers, forms the centerpiece for the CityLife masterplan to revitalize the old site of Milan’s International Fair, which closed in 2005.
Through the redevelopment, which began in 2004, the site will be open “to year-round public use, with the inclusion of new civic spaces, public parks, and residential buildings, in addition to shopping areas and corporate offices, all with direct transport connections via the Tre Torri station on the line 5 of the city’s metro system.”
The Generali Tower is aligned at ground level with its surrounding public park, a connection that is reinforced by the curvilinear geometries of its podium, which are “defined by the tensional forces generated from” important intersecting city routes.
The torsional force of the Tower “is transferred vertically through the tower by the realignment of successive floor slabs that incrementally ‘twist’ about a vertical axis. This incremental twisting is defined by algorithms to give each floor a fractionally different relationship to the floors above and below. As the tower rises creating broader views and connections across the city, this twisting orientates the tower’s upper floors to face the centre of Milan and the Duomo.”
The Tower is targeted to receive a LEED Platinum certification through elements like its double-façade system, as well as inclined structural columns, which increase efficiencies in usable floor areas. It also has a system of sun-deflecting louvers and ventilating registers that draw air outside.
Learn more about the project here.
News via Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA).
