Text by ARQ. In October 2011, the Ministry of Public Works opened a competition to rebuild the Malleco Province Hall Building in the city of Angol through a public bid, bringing together eleven public services that were scattered throughout the city.
Our proposal was a building with a simple design and durable materials that would permit the flexible use of its spaces to respond to the variety of the services and activities that would be offered in the coming decades.
Both the building and the esplanade that precedes it are designed to support everyday life and events, using the state investment to create a condenser of citizen activities in Angol.
The strategy consisted in using the length of the terrain, 110 m, to build a continuous façade, a backdrop for the plaza of the Seven Foundations, Angol’s Civic Center.
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The volume is set back from the building line to leave a public space along the block.
Two existing araucarias defined an access patio that divided the building in two wings, one containing and auditorium and the civil registry and the other with ten public services.
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To strengthen the civic character of the building and specify its relationship with the plaza, we connected its pavement and created an esplanade where the pedestrian is the primary user.
This covered sidewalk also plays the role of connecting the esplanade, the building and the surrounding streets to integrate the new Government of Malleco with the city fabric.
The Tree Top Residence celebrates the site’s complex landscape, merging seamlessly and emerging from atop the canopy of trees that surround it. Built along a natural ridgeline, the long and narrow plan of the three-story house mimics and inverts the angles of the site’s topography, creating dynamic vertical and horizontal relationships.
Vertically, an eccentrically-helical stair functions as a primary organizing element and a sculptural gesture upon entry into the house. On the ground floor, it acts as a threshold into the open plan; on the floor above, it separates the master suite and children’s quarter, while providing a light well to the basement. Horizontally, walls are used sparingly in favor of fluidly connected spaces. Movement and views between dining areas, kitchen, play and gathering spaces are uninterrupted, and floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors blend the interior with the outside.
Hidden from the street, the residence is insulated from its neighbors, but open to its site. Canted limestone louvers, and dense planting on the north facade shield the interior from the closest adjacent neighbor. Conversely, the rest of the building opens to the site with floor-to-ceiling glazing, relying on both the house’s generous distance from the property line, and the densely wooded valley below to create a natural screen. The orchestration of this view, overlooking a dense canopy of trees, embodies the intent to offer respite from the city below.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has asked architect Renzo Piano to lead in the reconstruction of the central Italian towns devastated by last week’s magnitude 6.2 earthquake that claimed the lives of at least 290 people. Renzi announced a national action plan for recovery and risk prevention on Monday after meeting with Piano to discuss strategies for housing the over 3,000 displaced survivors and rebuilding the historic towns in a manner that would mitigate damage caused by future seismic activity.
“We have to act quickly, with the utmost urgency,” said Piano in a telephone interview with The Guardian. “Anti-seismic requirements must be inserted in the laws of the country to make our homes safe, just as it’s compulsory for a car to have brakes that work.”
The recovery plan will consist of several phases: over the next six months, the Italian government will transfer displaced residents from the 58 tent camps and temporary shelters where they are currently staying to longer-term wooden “chalet-style” huts close to their damaged or destroyed homes. Following successful relocation, reconstruction of the towns will begin.
“Reconstruction should be coordinated in the wisest and fastest way,” commented Renzi in a statement. “It’s right to do it quickly but even better to be done well and above all with the involvement of the affected people.”
Drawing from his experience working with UNESCO on disaster recovery and prevention, Piano’s comprehensive plan calls for stricter anti-seismic regulations, as well as special attention to protecting the cultural heritage of the region’s architecture. The strategy is expected to take 50 years to fully implement.
“We are speaking about the ridge of the Apennines, the backbone of Italy from north to south, an operation projected over 50 years and two generations,” he said. “We are talking about millions of buildings, it is not impossible if you work through generations.”
The 78-year-old architect was appointed an Italian senator for life in 2013.
The charming hung tiled Warren Cottage in Kingston upon Thames has been beautifully renovated and extended to turn the formerly dilapidated gatehouse into an elegant contemporary home.
The mid-nineteenth century Victorian dwelling once marked the entry into Richmond Park, and set in its own spacious gardens, it is designated as a building of Townscape Merit in the Coombe Wood conservation area.
Commissioned in 2012 to extend the cottage and create a large family home required an architecture of restraint. With the cottage restored to its former glory, the new extension meets the old with a touch of glass. Its palette is muted but precise, with crafted iroko timber glulams meeting sharp board-marked concrete walls. Together they form a restrained but striking palette that sits comfortably next to the detailed tiled faces of the cottage.
The finished scheme manifests itself as a new two-storey extension, with a separate garden room building. The double height space above the kitchen and dining area flow into the more secluded lounge. Looking out over the still pool and the retained mature trees, one encounters the garden room. A separate building, the garden room acts as a self-contained retreat, approached under a louvered timber walkway.
Environmental concerns were considered throughout the project, with the concrete walls and flooring providing essential thermal mass, and green roofs reducing the water run-off and also filtering pollutants.
The result is a project that allows the architectural languages of the contemporary and Victorian to relate to each other and form a stimulating and respectful dialogue. The delightful cottage has been fully restored and can again be appreciated for its architectural and historical interest, whilst now also providing a 6 bedroom family home.
It’s rare for an architect to have the opportunity to design a building in which symbolism and form are as important as function, if not more so. But this was the task given to David Adjaye when he won the commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which, when it opens in September, will be the final Smithsonian institution to take its place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Adjaye, whose work is marked for its extreme sensitivity to context, found himself challenged in ways he had never been before. On the occasion of the completion of Adjaye’s Eugene McDermott Award residency at MIT, Metropolis editor Vanessa Quirk spoke with the architect about the new institution, its symbolic significance, and the blurry boundary between monument and museum.
Vanessa Quirk: At what point does a museum become a monument?
David Adjaye: I’m not sure museums really are monuments or should be monuments, as a first principle. Museums should be palaces of edification—in a way, they’re palaces that democratize visual and cultural patrimony. That’s really their primary job. Let’s look at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The Mall is really about palaces of culture—and then, you have the rambling monument grounds, the anchor of which is the Washington Monument.
What [Washington, D.C., planner Pierre-Charles] L’Enfant didn’t describe was what happens when you get to the threshold between the two [the palace and the monument]. That threshold— wherever it is—becomes an interesting point of discussion. This building was neither a monument nor a palace, but somewhere between. There’s a way in which it’s referring to the urban grid and the placement of the palaces [the other museums that surround the Mall]. But because it’s a building that’s seen in the round, the objectlike quality of the form became important. It wasn’t just composition. It became something that had a strong silhouette but also had a relationship, in a way, to the most dominant monument around—Washington’s obelisk. We actually were deferential to it by making the angles of our splayed skin system the same angle as the [obelisk’s] pyramid.
That’s the kind of moment when there’s a contextual, or urbanistic, condition that’s important. I think when a museum starts off just wanting to be a monument, there’s a lot of problems [laughs].
VQ: Was the opportunity to make a sculptural building freeing for you, since you usually are so concerned about context?
DA: It was, actually, really difficult [laughs]. Because there were none of the usual references that I am used to in an urban context, the kind of relationships that I make and I talk about in my work. So, I had to look for a whole new strategy.
In the end, it forced a debate about the representation of the museum in the wider context of the community and the nation. That is a really profound question to be involved in as an architect. It’s one of those questions you don’t even think about. So, suddenly, when that question is part of the discussion, you realize it’s more than just your architectural style—and that’s great. It’s about creating meaning and associations and joining of stories. You find yourself becoming the final ingredient of a meal. It really stretched a whole side of me that I hadn’t exercised before, and I continue to draw from that very much.
VQ: Was it a priority for you that the museum also be a memorial?
DA: Implicit in the notion of a national museum of African-American history and culture there is this dialectic. It is both a celebration and a memorial, while still being a museum. It’s actually a triptych. But the ideal of a monument is also in there implicitly because, one, it is the last museum on the Washington Mall and, two, it’s also the museum that has struggled the most to justify its existence.
So, it’s a kind of monumental achievement, in an extraordinary way. Two hundred years of asking. That’s not a joke.
VQ: How does that memorializing aspect manifest itself physically in the museum?
DA: For me, it was important that that did not take any singular aspect of the narrative. Because when you’re doing that, you have this very “hot potato” moment—what do you privilege as the thing that people should remember [most about the museum]? In the interview [for the commission], that was a very, very powerful discussion with the committee. I talked about the notion of a building that should speak to the entire journey. But also to acknowledge that this journey is a kind of celebration, of rising against adverse conditions and becoming part of a great nation.
A lot of people fall afoul of taking a cliché position about slavery as a defining moment of the African-American community’s achievements. And actually, it is a traumatic moment, but alongside the many traumatic moments are also many triumphs. I just refer back to a classical tradition that memorializes stories.
