Architects: A2 Architects
Location: Jevnaker, Norway
Architect In Charge: Peter Carroll, Caomhan Murphy, Joan McElligott, David McInerney
Technical Design: Jakob Ilera, INSEQ
Area: 100.0 sqm
Year: 2013
Photographs: Jiru Havran
From the architect. ‘Pulp Press (Kistefos) 2013’ is a permanent site-specific artist-architect commission for Kistefos Museum – one of Scandinavia’s largest parks of contemporary sculpture. The museum occupies the grounds of a 19th century paper mill in Jevnaker, an hour north of Oslo, Norway.
The cast concrete pavilion is an open-ended volume, 13m in length, 6.5m in width and 5m in height with one open façade facing the former paper mill and another facing the river. It sits at an angle to form a taut cluster with an existing boathouse and a cast concrete pier. The pavilion shares its polished concrete floor level with the pier that likewise takes its cue from the fifty-year flood level. Its concrete form is embedded like an erratic onto a sloping river meadow.
One arrives at the pavilion to be presented with a shuttered, camera-like front consisting of a trio of pivoting pre-stressed plywood doors. The doors are recessed into the pavilion in order to create an ante space before entering the darkened interior. Within, the concrete walls of the pavilion are darkened with a black pigment to enable a large projected moving image of the original press that has brought the industrial machine of the old paper mill back to life, albeit as a digital simulacrum built with software that is more typically used by the military and gaming programmers. The projector is recessed into a pocket in the roof thickness thereby allowing for the projected work to be received onto a freestanding cast concrete wall within the pavilion.
The projected work within is a hyper-realistic portrait of the machine (decommissioned in 1950) and painstakingly remade as a virtual form. Importantly, it has even been renovated within the virtual to function once more. Pipes have been replaced, valves sourced, missing components researched by the production team for over a year and all recreated in simulacra. The projected work’s physical presence is also inherent in the daily increasing ‘stock’ of digital sheets of paper pulp it produces – digital files that are inspired by historic images. They accumulate in metal hard-disk units on a nest of precast concrete and brass shelves inside the pavilion, emulating the piles of wood pulp bales that the mill once produced. As each hard disk is filled, another is required, and so the project expands forever more.
Walking around either side of the freestanding projection wall an external balcony is made that frames a new view onto the River Rand. A frameless glass balustrade is detailed so as not to hinder this. A cast polished concrete bench allows the public to rest and relax while re-adjusting to the real world having experienced the projected virtual world of the pavilion.
While we may live in a ‘paperless’ world, the work is keen to remind us that even digital data is stored in a physical world. The pavilion sits along the edge of the River Rands that powers the projected work within the pavilion by hydro-electrics – the very same river that gave rise to the original paper mill in 1889.
Architects: Leibar Seigneurin Architectes
Location: Anglet, France
Area: 6269.0 sqm
Year: 2013
Photographs: Patrick Miara
From the architect. A strong proposal regarding management of the car park, because this one is completely treated underground. This having for effect to delete quite public road networks on the plot of land, and thus to avoid the noise and visual pollution generated by vehicles.
The setting-up of buildings allows to set up of real ” between two “, permeable but contained spaces, very clearly perceptible since the street giving to the set a fluid relation with its environment while protecting the intimacy and the quality of housing.
The implementation of low building also allows to introduce an intermediate scale, between the waterside residence and the detached houses situated in the South, in one concerns to respect the existing balances.
The very strong ” value added ” of our proposal live in the character not only crossing housing, but in the potential of use which offers the device of ” double loggia ” on rooms to be lived.
At the same time, the space not occupied by the constructions is completely landscaped to offer with regard to the local residents a set of houses implanted in a park.
So for one traditional living space, we obtain an exceptional enjoyment of life
Architects: Khosla Associates
Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Principal Designers: Sandeep Khosla and Amaresh Anand
Design Team: Sandeep Khosla , Amaresh Anand , Akanksha Chajjer and Moiz Faizulla
Year: 2014
Photographs: Shamanth Patil J
Civil Contractors: Dan Constructions Pvt. Ltd
Structural Engineer: S & S Associates
From the architect. The house was conceived for a young couple and their teen daughter, and the program on this 9,600 sft plot required a basement for car parking, 4 bedrooms, a home theatre, gym and public spaces such as living, dining and kitchen interacting with a large garden.
What drew us to the site in the upmarket Koramangala neighborhood in Bangalore was the number of mature trees that were part of the surrounding streetscape.
The west-facing frontage of the plot has a beautiful tree straddling the compound wall and we were keen to establish a dialogue between the house and the tree.
Our choice on the spatial flow of the house was dictated by the views to the street as well as to the open area and the low-slung house sitting on the adjacent plot to its north.
The anchor of the house is a dramatic double height living area that culminates vertically in a sweeping butterfly shaped roof, orienting west and east towards street as well as garden. Walkways on the upper level lead to private bedrooms and interact with the double height volumes of the staircase shaft on one side and the living area on the other.
Copious amounts of natural night bathe this area via a series of skylights while louvered operable blinds allow for controlled light and views via large expanses of glass on the east and west elevations.
The house is richly layered and textured with a judicious mix of materials, which extends into the choice of furniture, furnishings and artwork. The large expanses of Jaiselmer yellow sandstone are juxtaposed with the warmth of timber on the sloping roofs, polished cement and exposed concrete on wall and ceiling surfaces and a linear wall painted a deep ink blue.
In memory of architect and arts administrator Deborah Norden, the Deborah J. Norden Fund is calling for proposals from students and recent graduates in the fields of architecture, architectural history, and urban studies for awards up to $5000 in travel and study grants. A program of The Architectural League of New York, participants must submit a maximum three-page proposal, which succinctly describes the objectives of the grant request and how it will contribute to the applicant’s intellectual and creative development. The deadline for submissions is April 16, 2015. For more information, please visit here.
From the architect. This design was developed to maximise the available light and space on an oddly shaped block in the inner suburban setting of Clifton Hill.
The original weatherboard cottage which addresses the street has been maintained while a new, two-level addition at the rear provides new kitchen and dining areas and a master bedroom suite.
The addition is angular and tapered in form with an overhanging upper level which allows for the living spaces to be drenched in light in winter while providing shade in summer.
Inside, a variety of subtly overlapping spatial volumes is achieved within a relatively simple overall form. The character of the natural materials such as timber and concrete is expressed against white surfaces with occasional moments of strong colour.
Construction has commenced on Pei Cobb Freed & Partners’ 61-story condominium tower in Boston’s historic Back Bay. The $700 million development will be the tallest residential building in the city, and the tallest tower to rise since the 1976 John Hancock Tower, also designed by Pei Cobb Freed.
“The project allows us to consider once again how a tall building, together with the open space it frames, can respond creatively to the need for growth while showing appropriate respect for its historic urban setting,” says Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.
Taking shape from its triangular site, between Christian Science Plaza and the Prudential Center, the tower will rise from a granite-and-glass podium containing a condominium lobby and public restrooms for hotel guests. In total, it will be comprised of a 211-room luxury hotel, occupying the lower 18 floors, and 188 residential condominiums. Glass-screened incisions in the structure’s facade will allow for operable windows and the upper residences will feature balconies.
The tower, a collaboration between Pei Cobb Freed and Cambridge Seven Associates, is part of a masterplan that includes 30 Dalton – a 27-story residential building designed by the same team and developed by Pritzker Realty Group – and a 5,000-square-foot park designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. It was selected following a national competition.
BLUEPRINT is the latest exhibition on display at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Curated by Sebastiaan Bremer, Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu, the exhibition features 50 blueprints from participating artists and architects, ranging from as far back as 1961 to 2013.
From the Curators: “BLUEPRINT at Storefront has its curatorial blueprint at a show Sebastiaan Bremer and Pieter Woudt put together in 1999 in a DIY gallery called Spark in Chelsea, New York. The show brought together a bunch of young artists, ambitious and broke, trying to find their voice and an audience for their work. The original Blueprint show was conceived foremost as an opportunity to present this group’ s work together as a whole. The only way to the work conceptually was, it seemed, to come up with a theme or constraint – for instance, that all the works had to be the same color. Blueprints were easy to make, quite beautiful, and cheap – an advantage, since money was an issue. This ‘concept’ gave the structure for the exhibition, which ran for a few months in the gallery. Fifteen years later, this old idea seemed newly relevant. The funding for art institutions in Europe is drying up at the same rapid speed at which prices are soaring at the auction houses, giving the low cost of producing blueprints new relevance. In the meantime, many of the artists included in the original show have gone on to impressive careers, making wonderful works in incredibly diverse media and environments—and many of them started to find their signature styles around the turn of the century, the time of Blueprint. A second iteration of BLUEPRINT took place at Kunsthal KAdE in the Netherlands and at MOCA Tucson where many of the original BLUEPRINT artists—as well as some others, and architects were selected by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu of SO-IL—to look back at their practice and identify one “fundamental” work: the first piece that could serve as a blueprint of their mature work. Again, this extended group was only bound by the same constraint, yet one might be able to discover a set of affinities between the works. The exhibition at Storefront is born out of the same constraints: blueprints of or based on that “generative” work.”
Title: BLUEPRINT: Curated by Sebastiaan Bremer and Florian Idenburg & Jing Liu of SO – IL
Website: http://ift.tt/1zPYlky
Organizers:
From: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00
Until: Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:00
Venue: Storefront for Art and Architecture
Address: 97 Kenmare Street, New York, NY 10012, USA
Architects: Hariri Pontarini Architects
Architect In Charge: Siamak Hariri – Hariri Pontarini Architects
Local Architect: BL Arquitectos
Client: National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Chile, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada
General Contractor: Desarrollo y Construcción del Templo Bahá’í para Sudamérica Ltda.
Area: 1200.0 sqm
Year: 2016
Photographs: Courtesy of Bahá’í Temple of South America
Nearly four years after the start of its construction, South America’s first Bahá’í temple is beginning to take shape. Designed by Canadian firm Hariri Pontarini Architects, the temple is being constructed at the foothills of the Andes in Santiago, Chile. The building is comprised of “nine translucent wings, rising directly from the ground, and giving the impression of floating over a large reflecting water pool,” describes the project’s website. Each wing is designed like a leaf, with a steel “main stem” and “secondary veins of steel” supporting its cast glass exterior. During the day, the cast glass will filter sunlight into the temple, while at night the temple’s interior lighting will produce a soft glow on the outside.
The structure’s steel columns are now fully self-supported on its concrete foundation, and the steel frames and interior marble panels of each of the nine wings have been completed. In October, the project reached an important milestone as the installation of the cast glass cladding began on the outside of the wings.
The 1,200 square meter temple will have two prayer and meditation areas: a central area under the dome with seating for 600 people, and nine alcoves built into a wooden mezzanine circling the building’s interior. Six hectares of gardens will also surround the temple.
Due to Chile’s seismic activity, the building is built over elastomeric seismic isolators and is designed to absorb ground movements.
The temple uses traditional craftsmanship materials, complementing the cast glass and steel with stone flooring and the wooden mezzanine.
Currently there are seven Bahá’í temples located around the world, including Fariborz Sahba’s Lotus Temple in New Delhi, India.
From the architect. The commercial building, which was completed in October 2013, is a hybrid of two different building typologies. On the one hand, the building follows the historic model of a mixed-use building, with the retail functions on the lower two floors and apartments on the top floor which, in this case, has been extended to include a full residential loft. On the other hand, the building represents a development of the department store typology; three separate units are interwoven over four levels in the middle zone and the upper floors are largely shielded from the street. As a result, the building is more open to the city on the top floor and lower two floors, while the design of the elevations of the middle floors is more withdrawn.
City spaces
The compact organisation of the inside of the building and the city structure – its immediate environment – create a tension that is the basis of this design. The commercial building has been built on several historic plots, and forms a perimeter block along three very different streets. It is situated opposite two historic churches, St Michael (1583-97) to the north and St Anna (1735) to the south, as well as the connecting buildings of the “Alte Akademie” at Neuhauser Strasse and the former convent at the Altheimer Eck. Eisenmannstrasse at the front of the building is a narrow alley, which connects Neuhauser Strasse, a busy shopping street, with the Hackenviertel behind Altheimer Eck.
The building
The commercial building is semi-detached at the end of the block: two distinct building volumes at the two main elevations form two heterogeneous opposites –bronze and glass versus render; pitched roof versus recessed penthouse floor; angled versus rounded – and face the historic buildings on the other side with their contrasting elements, forming different city spaces with them. The two building volumes with their contrasting design rules are linked by a third one along Eisenmannstrasse. This does not form an additional volume, but merely presents a sculpturally articulated surface in its own right. In this way the whole development comprises three different elements, which seamlessly merge on the inside.
Neuhauser Strasse building
Opposite the “Alte Akademie”, the building creates a new urban space. The corner development is dominated by a bronze and glass curtain wall façade, which, in the upper floors, envelops the building as a non-tectonic cloak of pilaster strips of varying widths. In contrast, the bronze pillars on the ground floor continue through to the roof in five places only, and mark the historic plots. The other pillars are arranged in a specific order on the lower two floors and correspond with that of the attic floor, which also features an independent rhythm of pilaster strips of varying widths.
All glass elements in the lower two floors and the rainscreen glazing in the storeys above consist of clear glass with a low iron oxide content; the slender, over 11 m outer panes consist of two parts of laminated glass which is 3 cm thick and bonded with structural foil. The glazing of the shop windows on the ground and first floors is fitted flush with the outside of the metal pilasters, thus revealing their sculptural quality only on the inside.
Altheimer Eck building
Opposite St Anna, continuity with the adjoining and opposite developments has been achieved with a solid tectonic building, without imitation. The theme on the rear – with its largely closed façade – is structured in the form of a large-scale relief with only a few open windows and a primarily blind window structure. The
large scale of the glass panels – with their few details – matches the side façade of St Anna and, with only a few high storeys, has a calming effect on the alley. An important design element, which has an impact on the alley, is the slight curvature of the light-coloured rendered façade, which projects in a concave curve and thereby visually widens the street.
In order to achieve a façade without construction joints, it was constructed in reinforced concrete including a 20 cm thick intermediate insulation layer. Special concrete anchors were used to tie the three layers together while also allowing sufficient flexibility for the construction to withstand thermal expansion movement. The outer skin of the external wall is firmly connected with the overall building through its monolithic tie to the lower floors. In contrast to the usual insulated render system, it does not consist of a detachable and replaceable outer insulation but instead of a concrete skin that has been textured in relief form during the shell construction and then finished with a lime-based plaster.
Eisenmannstrasse façade
The third façade, which has as much a separating function as it has a connecting one, is purely a blind façade. It is characterised by display windows on the ground floor and a suspended curtain wall façade in bronze on the upper floors. The patinated metal has been folded in irregular patterns and forms a relief along the narrow Eisenmannstrasse. In this way it adopts the type and material of the main façade while also relating to the sculptural relief of the rendered rear façade.
All bronze elements used in the building consist of 2 mm thick brass sheeting with a CuZn37 alloy. In total approx. 45 tonnes of brass were used for the project. Some of the sheets are up to 4 m long. Each individual sheet was dipped in its completed shape into two different patinating liquid baths in sequence using a manual process; between dips the panels were cleaned by hand, polished and protected against corrosion with a special wax solution.
Courtyard
As a trace of the historic structure, a central courtyard has been retained from first floor level as a morphological element without concrete function. It serves to subdivide the building volume while at the same time, functioning as a threshold area, it can only be seen from a few places inside the building. This inside- outside relationship is further enhanced by using a theatre-like greenhouse on the south side. Seen from the opposite, northern side, the dense vertical winter garden is reflected in the folded mirror glass of the blind side walls; this reflection becomes a kaleidoscope and allows the artificiality of this hidden space to become real.
All plants, both inside and outside, are watered and fertilised with the help of systems that are installed underground or within the steel structure. In addition, the greenhouse includes high-pressure spray nozzles, plant lights, heating elements and ventilation flaps which are controlled by a sensor and thus ensure an ideal climate for the exotic plants used here. Particularly notable are the passion flowers that climb across several floors creating a delicate cloak of flowers.
Update: Last week, Hadid and the New York Review of Books agreed to a settlement agreement, with Hadid accepting the apology of the New York Review of Books and, in conjunction with the settlement, donating an undisclosed sum of money to a labor rights charity. You can read the full joint statement at the end of this article.
For those that follow the ins and outs of architectural criticism, it will have been hard to miss the news this week that Zaha Hadid is suing the New York Review of Books, claiming that the critical broadside launched by Martin Fuller against Hadid in his review of Rowan Moore’s book Why We Build was not only defamatory but also unrepresentative of the content of the book. Hadid’s lawyers demanded a retraction of the review, which they claimed had caused Hadid “severe emotional and physical distress.”
Hadid’s lawsuit did manage to elicit an apology from Filler, but probably not the one she was hoping for: Filler posted a retraction admitting that his review confused the number of deaths involved in all construction in Qatar in 2012-13 (almost 1,000) with the number of deaths on Hadid’s own Al Wakrah stadium (exactly zero). However, much of Filler’s comments criticizing Hadid’s cold attitude to conditions for immigrant workers in Qatar remain unaddressed.
Throughout the week, a number of other critics took this opportunity to pile more criticism on Hadid, unanimously agreeing that the lawsuit was a bad idea. Read on after the break to see the six reasons they gave explaining why.
1. The lawsuit makes Hadid look self-absorbed
“When unhappy subjects of criticism sue the critics who criticize them they rarely come through it looking anything other than spoiled and self-absorbed,” says Paul Goldberger in his article for Vanity Fair. That’s a fairly straight forward way to put it, but other writers were even less charitable: Anna Kats, writing for Blouin ArtInfo, called the lawsuit “a disturbing, if not absurdly comical, measure of her social consciousness.”
2. It shows that Hadid needs to check her privilege
The claims of emotional and physical distress claimed by Hadid’s Lawyers sit unfortunately in the wider context of the issue at hand, with Kats stating bluntly that ”construction workers across the Gulf are regularly exposed to rather more serious forms of such distress while toiling to realize the formal whimsies of many a lauded architect.”
3. The lawsuit will extend the bad press
Hadid has had something of a bad year for PR in 2013, not least for the comments she made in February saying it isn’t her duty to solve the issues of working conditions in Qatar, which formed the basis of many of Filler’s criticisms. With Filler’s article only available to NYRB subscribers, some thought it was ill-advised to bring this controversy back into the public spotlight, with James S Russell noting that “the retraction should not have been hard to get; a suit simply extends the damage to her reputation,” and Martin C Pedersen confirming in Metropolis Magazine that ”all this legal action does, in the short term, is keep interest in the story alive and link the Zaha brand (sorry about that) with human rights abuses.”
Goldberger also makes this point, but in a (perhaps unintentional) reference to Hadid’s infamous personality, he does so by drawing a comparison to well-known diva Barbra Streisand ”who sued to block publication of aerial photographs of her residence in Malibu in 2003, and in so doing drew so much publicity to the matter that the picture… was eventually downloaded more than 400,000 times.”
4. Hadid is likely to lose the case
“Good luck here: winning a hurt-feelings lawsuit, based on an essay penned by widely recognized critic,” says Pedersen. This handy article by Amy Schellenbaum at Curbed explains the complexities of this type of defamation lawsuit well, and with Filler’s apology for factual inaccuracies already out the way, the case will likely come down to whether Filler’s article can be categorized as ‘fair comment’ – or as most people would call it, ‘opinion’. If Hadid cannot demonstrate that Filler’s comments are outside the realm of opinion, then there is little chance of her winning the case.
5. Martin Filler could turn out to be right after all
Although Martin Filler was wrong in saying that workers had died on Hadid’s project, this is mostly due to the fact that construction hasn’t even begun on the stadium yet. “The suit’s claims of damage done to Hadid’s reputation are serving as a counterattack against the architect’s many critics, not an answer to their very legitimate concerns,” says Kats, adding that “nothing suggests that more such tragedies won’t transpire with the commencement of construction of the stadium.”
Indeed, when we hear of the first deaths on the project – a virtual inevitability considering Qatar’s track record on other construction projects – it is now all the more likely that the question of whether Hadid feels a responsibility to these workers will be raised again. Which leads us to the final, most important criticism of Hadid’s Lawsuit:
6. Hadid is focusing on the wrong enemy
“Instead of pursuing initiatives that would ensure worker safety and drastically distinguish her construction site from prevalent working conditions for laborers in Qatar,” says Kats, Zaha Hadid “pillories the press.” Similarly James S Russell adds that, though Hadid receives an unfair proportion of the criticism which could be doled out to the whole industry, “architects do have a moral imperative to collectively work with labor-rights groups and other construction-related professions to end abuse of the powerless by the powerful.”
Goldberger has the last word, making it clear that the same celebrity status which enabled Filler to write such derisory comments – and enabled Hadid to sue him for them – could be the key to making a lasting change to the conditions in Qatar: ”Hadid has exploited her celebrity with more skill and determination than just about anyone. It is time that she made the most of this aspect of her celebrity too, and decided that there is nothing wrong with taking a moral stand.”
The full joint statement from Zaha Hadid and the New York Review of Books:
On January 22, 2015, following extensive settlement negotiations, Ms. Zaha Hadid withdrew her lawsuit against the New York Review of Books and Mr. Martin Filler. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, which remain confidential, Ms. Hadid has accepted the apology of the New York Review of Books and Mr. Filler, and is pleased to announce, in conjunction with the settlement, the donation of an undisclosed sum of money to a charitable organization that protects and champions labor rights.
Ms. Hadid is pleased to have put to rest this dispute, and to have resolved it in a way that demonstrates her commitment to safe and fair working conditions at construction sites around the world,’ said Gonzalo Zeballos, one of the BakerHostetler attorneys representing Ms. Hadid. The other BakerHostetler attorneys working on the matter were Oren Warshavsky and Maryanne Stanganelli.
Zaha Hadid Architects remains deeply committed to promoting safe and fair working conditions. The authorities in Qatar managing the Al Wakrah site operate at the highest levels of worker health and safety, with no loss-time injuries since works began over a year ago. Workers live in high quality accommodations near the site, and the Emir of Qatar personally confirms that new laws protecting workers’ rights will be enforced, demonstrating that the parties delivering the Al Wakrah stadium are leading by example.
Sig Nordal 