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AIA Announces Winners of the 2016 Small Project Awards

July 1, 2016signordalLeave a comment

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected seven recipients of the 2016 Small Project Awards. This is the 13th edition of the program, which was established to recognize firms for their excellence in small-project design. This year the winners have been placed into two categories: Category 1, which awards “a small project construction, object, work of environmental art or architectural design element up to $150,000 in construction cost,” and Category 2, given to “A small project construction, up to $1,500,000 in construction cost.”

This year’s winners include a wide variety of program types and sites. Continue after the break for the list and descriptions of the projects.

Category 1

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Studio Hive; Pittsburgh / GBBN Architects

The Studio Hive is part of the Teen Zone in the East Liberty Branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Made of wood and sound absorbent industrial felt its creation has contributed to a 350% increase in attendance at the library’s teen programs and events. The design team developed a 3-dimensional digital model of the hive which allowed designers to tune the form and refine it to minimize material waste. The connection to both the remaining library space and to the street provides teens with a sense of their social context and environment while they occupy a space that is uniquely personal.

Deployable Smocked Porch; Winterset, Iowa / Substance Architecture

A simple wooden frame defines the small space and supports two porch swings. The smocked screening creates curtains that can be opened and closed to allow access, as well as provide shade and enclosure. A rectangular opening in the roof allows a defined shaft of daylight to enter the space. This opening is echoed in the small turf area cut into the floor. The project was designed and constructed adjacent to the courthouse square in Winterset as a pro bono effort to support The Iowa Preservation Alliance. The wood was salvaged from a demolished home, and the labor to sew, fabricate, and construct the space were provided by the design team. As a result, the budget for the project was $900.

wa_sauna; Seattle / goCstudio

This floating sauna, funded through the support of a crowdfunding campaign, functions as a boat that can be moored at a marina or private property and taken out on the open water as needed. The interior space is heated by a simple efficient wood burning stove. As a mobile piece of architecture, wa_sauna is able to engage with the many inhabitants living aboard boats and houseboats as well as the large community of boaters, kayakers, paddle boarders and rowers. Using a pre-manufactured aluminium frame and floatation system for the deck, wa_sauna can be seen quietly exploring Seattle’s lakes on a regular basis.

Weihnacht Huts; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania / NAD

This pro-bono design is for thirty-five craft exhibit huts for an authentic German Weihnachtsmarkt (open-air Christmas market). The huts feature a steeply-sloped roof designed for snowfall and a ridge line borrowed from traditional Moravian vernacular. With a limited budget for materials ($286 per unit), paired with the necessity for the structures to be taken apart and stored every year, the deck, walls, and roof panels are constructed as single units to be taken apart, transported, and stored flat with ease. The poly-carbonate roof is not only easy to dissemble, but also allows for a large amount of light and warmth inside during the day. During the night the huts are illuminated from within and emit a lovely glow to add to the magical Christmas atmosphere of Bethlehem’s historic district.

Category 2

Girl Scouts Camp Prairie Schooner; Kansas City, Missouri / el dorado

Camp Prairie Schooner features a dining hall, five permanent units, two buildings for troop use, a 40-foot rappel tower, an archery range, a swimming pool and a zipline. The load bearing walls of the structures are constructed of 2×6 wood studs, that in turn support a series of common & scissor trusses. The envelope is clad with corrugated metal panels, complementing the wood and aluminum clad windows and skylights. The end of the bunk houses are a combination of fluted polycarbonate glazing and painted concrete board over a rain screen system. All mechanical systems are concealed within the trusses. The pendant lights are custom fixtures designed and built by a former girl scout.

Linear Cabin; Alma Lake, Wisconsin / Johnsen Schmaling Architects

The Linear Cabin is a small family retreat, its low-slung body sitting in a small clearing in Wisconsin’s North Woods. The building consists of three identically sized, nearly opaque boxes tied together with a continuous thin roof plane. The voids between the boxes serve as picture frames, allowing for unobstructed views through the building from the outside and into the sylvan landscape from within. The interior is clad in knotty pine, and is tempered by its crisply detailed joints and the simple lines of the lacquered millwork throughout. On the outside, the cabin is wrapped in blackened cedar, its somber darkness echoing the weathered monochrome of traditional Wisconsin cabins.

St. Pius Chapel & Prayer Garden; New Orleans / Eskew+Dumez+Ripple

Designed as a quiet refuge and intimate sanctuary for sacred reflection and contemplation, the new chapel is a subtle addition to the landscape. The sanctuary, which complements the modernist character of the adjacent church (circa 1963), is small but tall, keeping occupants close while inspiring reverence. Beyond a few pieces of furniture and religious items, the space’s power and purpose is enhanced by its very simplicity allowing occupants worship in quiet and contemplative solitude, without distraction.

Studio Dental; San Francisco / Montalba Architects, Inc.

The challenge was to create a spacious interior while packing Studio Dental’s required program for its mobile unit, which travels to businesses offering convenient dentistry. The 26-foot-long trailer with 230 interior square feet features a waiting area, sterilization room, and two operatories. The sterilization room is hidden behind millwork panels that wrap around to form the patient waiting bench. A centralized, double-sided millwork panel houses equipment for both operatories and gestures up to 11-foot-plus ceilings with translucent sculpted skylights. The materials reinforce Studio Dental’s identity with natural wood millwork, bright-white surfaces, and a custom perforation pattern.

Village Health Works Staff Housing; Bujumbura Burundi / Louise Braverman Architect

Embedded in the mountainside of an off-the-grid rural village in Burundi, this 18-bed staff housing is a bridge between East African elemental aesthetics and inventive sustainability. Cutting a skewed line in the terrain, the 6000-square-foot dormitory captures breathtaking mountain views. The same moves that establish its visual presence, such as airflow enhancing porches, also advance its sustainability. Currently rebuilding after many years of horrific civil strife, the villagers hope that this housing will create a model for the sustainable future of both the community and the country.

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Pompidou Metz Restaurant Extension / Studiolada Architects

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Architects: Studiolada Architects
Location: 1 Parvis des Droits de l’Homme, 57000 Metz, France
Architect In Charge: Christophe Aubertin
Partner Architect: Benoît Sindt ― Studiolada Architects
Area: 100.0 sqm
Project Year: 2015
Photographs: Luis Diaz Diaz

Commissioned By: Metz Métropole
Scmc: ABECO / Anthony Bochaton
Engineering Firm: BE Barthes Bois / Tecnos
Graphic Designer: Morgan Fortems

Finished in 2010, the Pompidou Metz center imagined by Shigeru Ban quickly became an architectural icon not only for the city of Metz, but also for the region and even the country. Given the important number of visitors to the Museum and the restaurant, the need for more inside eating space on the terrace soon became apparent. However, the idea of intervening on an existing building does not come without important implications regarding architectural integrity ― the intervention will indeed modify the façaces and volumes of the existing structure.

How can a 100 sqm extension be thought and built onto the Pompidou Metz Centre? A mere “feather” compared to the bold and colossal building. What would be the best way to intervene on a masterpiece such as this one, and which positioning should be adopted?

Our response was to distance and detach ourselves from the existing architecture. This independence remains, from our point of view, the best way to solve issues of identity and amalgam between coexisting architectures. Our approach strives to be precise and elegant, as we deeply respect Shigeru Ban’s work. Our addition to the building respects its heritage and character, while at the same time giving it specific meaning and identity.

The volume is formed of a glass monolith, clear and light ― making it radically different from the Museum in terms of architectural vocabulary and choice of materials (i.e. the use of wood, large white shapes and framed windows).
The façades, abstract and intangible, are materialised by the reflections forming onto the clear shapes. The roof seems to be non-existent, as its edge is hidden by the windows.
Thirty-three thin white blades form an enveloping structure around the compartment.
The new room does not strike us as an extension, but as an autonomous object appearing to avoid contact with its environment. The museum’s integrity is preserved as the new structure simply sits in place ― and could one day be easily removed, if need be.

The atmosphere created by the new architecture is a microcosm formed with the terrace and its surroundings. Although the lines forming the architectural volumetry are simple and pure, we have chosen to a bolder approach when it comes to the choice of materials; three local artisan trades were invited to work on the project, in an effort to connect the building with the Lorraine region.

Glass and Crystal
Throughout the ages, the Lorraine region has been renowned for mastering the art of glass and crystal manufacturing.

The façades of the new space are made of large glass volumes, some of which are curved and held together onto the metallic frame by a cloud of dots. The shiny rounded shape can be seen as a tribute to the glass-making expertise represented in the Lorraine region by Emile Gallé, Daum, Baccarat, Saint Louis and Meisenthal.

Ceramic and Earthenware
From Lunéville to Saint Clément and Lonwy, the art of ceramic, enamel and earthenware making has also been an important cultural heritage of the Lorraine region. We can find a reference to this trade in our choice of flooring, which forms a perfectly continuous pattern running between the terrace and the floor of the restaurant.

Textile and weaving
The development of the textile industry in the Vosges region through the 19th and 20th century is also exploited. We were particularly interested in the patterns generated by the singularities of the weaving techniques, which make the fabric so distinctive. A large white curtain is there to envelop and shelter the inside space when required, notably to avoid direct sunlight or over-heating problems. This unique piece of work was weaved in the workshops of the “maison Garnier Thiébaut” in Gerarmer (Vosges region). The white fabric reveals its geometric pattern subtly and almost imperceptibly at certain angles only, through different states of shininess of the white thread.

Through these three different kinds of surfaces (glazing, flooring and veiling), the three Lorraine traditional trades find themselves both united and confronted by the contemporary graphic matrix of the pattern, created in collaboration with the graphic designer Morgan Fortems.

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Benthem Crouwel Architects to Design Addition to Arnhem Museum

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Dutch firm Benthem Crouwel Architects have won a competition to renovate and expand Museum Arnhem, a museum located in Arnhem, Netherlands housing a collection of modern and contemporary art. The winning proposal was selected by the jury from its “clarity and simplicity, the preservation of the centuries-old lateral moraine, and the brilliant idea of incorporating a publicly open veranda into the new extension.”

The original building, designed in 1873 by Dutch architect Cornelis Outshoorn, will be restored and updated to accentuate the museum’s unique location and architectural character. Benthem Crouwel’s plan includes exposing the original structure and reopening the spacious interior located under the dome. To bring new light into the space, new wings will be pulled out to create a symmetrical plan and provide new galleries overlooking the garden.

The plan also calls for an addition containing 550 square meters of exhibition space, a entrance hall, and improved public facilities. To connect the museum back to nature, the new wing will feature a sculpture garden and panoramic views of the Rhine and the Arnhem skyline. The sleek box will also extend south over a ravine, giving museum-goers a sense of hovering in the trees.

“The clarity of vision and the alternating views of art and landscape envisaged by Benthem Crouwel greatly appealed to the jury,” the jury report stated. “A strip with separate rooms and connecting areas will build in natural pauses. The museum enthusiastically welcomes elements such as a delightful view of the sculpture garden and fine vistas … The winning design maximises the advantages of the museum’s unique selling point, its splendid location in the landscape with unparalleled vistas.

Particularly impressive to the jury was the staircase bisecting the museum addition, which takes guests to a viewing platform where they can look out over the river and landscape. The steps will also function as a performing area for the museum garden. Overall, the jury was pleased with the design’s strong internal logic and bold identity.

According to current plans, the building will begin construction toward the end of 2017 and will cost approximately €11 million.

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House on the Pacific Coast / Bernardi + Peschard arquitectura

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Architects: Bernardi + Peschard arquitectura
Location: Guerrero, Mexico
Project Year: 2013
Photographs: Rafael Gamo

Lighting Design: Luz en Arquitectura
Landscape Design : Pedro Sánchez
Constuction: Orix

The architectural design begins with a central volume that is bigger than the rest; it dialogues with, divides and denotes the uses of the surrounding spaces. It was built as fragments that become a series of independent pavilions, and turn the complex into a beach villa. It leaves behind the massive house constructions in the surrounding area.

In a palapa made of natural parota wood, over 10 m high, you find the living/dining room, which makes the transition to the semiprivate and private spaces. This element has a first plane looking into the private beach on the Pacific coast. This area was designed with the idea of making it the common area, the heart of the house, and so it is close to the sea, and has an imposing height and size. Next to this you find the other spaces in rock blocks mixed with wood elements and a palm tree cover, generating a dialogue between the natural materials of the site, which give the spaces a sense of warmth and shelter.

We use materials with the most natural finishes possible. The poured concrete was made of a mix of the site’s different types of sand. As a result, the project opens a dialogue not only among the elements, but also in the undeniable context of a beach with forest vegetation and the coastal profile.

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Modern as Metaphor: Where the Tate Stands in a Post-Brexit World

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Architects in the United Kingdom have been subjected to a month of monumental highs and lows. After Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern extension (known as Switch House) opened Friday, June 17, the following Thursday, June 23, the country proclaimed its (ill-planned) desire to leave the European Union. It would be easy to see the two events as separate, with no obvious overlap. But in fact the Tate seems to have an odd symbiosis with the Brexit decision – if in no other way than by promoting a vision emphatically against it.

Making the Tate Modern

Chatter of the Tate Modern’s expansion began in the mid-aughts, years earlier than had been originally forecasted based on visitor projections. The original building, which opened in May of 2000 and is now known as Boiler House, was anticipated to have 2 million annual visitors. Just over a month after opening, the museum had already received its millionth patron, and by 2014 attendance had climbed to 5.7 million per year, making it the most visited modern and contemporary art museum in the world.

Founded in 1897 when sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate donated his paintings collection and £80,000 to the British capital, forming the Tate Gallery, the museum has been London’s principal venue for modern art since 1916.

Always straddling between the nineteenth and twentieth century, the need for a separate modern art museum was acknowledged early on, but not addressed until the early 1990s. What is now the Tate Modern began as Bankside, an ill-placed power station at the heart of London, on the south side of the Thames opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral. Designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1947, the power plant began operations in 1963 but was quickly decommissioned in 1981, and was almost demolished in the subsequent decade. In April 1994, Bankside was selected as the home for the Tate’s new outpost, and Herzog & de Meuron won the building’s design competition in January 1995.

Known for his clairvoyance, Tate Director Nicholas Serota saw the advantage of Bankside’s scale – a museum of its size could never have been built for the same cost from scratch – and also recognized that the site offered the possibility for future expansion. The museum announced its plans for such a proposal in 2005, when Herzog & de Meuron were selected again for the expansion. At the time, it was stated that the addition – which would add 60 percent more gallery space – would be completed in time for 2012 Olympics in London, but all bets were off after the onset of the Financial Crisis.

After the 2005 announcement, Herzog & de Meuron unveiled their initial design for the museum in the summer of 2006. The proposal revealed an irregular and slightly precarious heap of rectilinear glass boxes, gradually tapering in a ziggurat-like shape. The then-all-glass extension echoed the glossy “light block” that was Herzog & de Meuron’s one significant structural addition to the Giles Gilbert Scott building during the original renovation. For a point of comparison, one can look to Herzog & de Meuron’s headquarters building for Actelion in Allschwil, Switzerland, completed in 2010. The facility employs a similar – albeit more linear – heap of geometric forms, fused together, forming a structural whole.

As noted by Serota, the growth of the Tate’s attendance also spurred an exponential expansion of the range and scope of works found in the museum’s collections. Describing the inaugural display in the combined Switch House and Boiler House in an interview with The Art Newspaper, Serota stated, “There is [a] much higher incidence of us showing work by women, a much broader geographical spread and much more photography. These are big changes compared with Tate Modern 2000.” Formulated in the 1990s, after the 11/09/89 fall of the Berlin Wall and before 09/11/2001, the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 came off the heels of the millennium and the optimism, inclusiveness, and prosperity, that color a decade which we might now reconsider with fondness.

Tate After Brexit: Modern as Metaphor

On the day following the Brexit vote, the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans – who was the first non-English person to win the Turner Prize in 2000 – wrote his own crestfallen reaction to the new reality and era ushered in by the decision. Tillmans expressed his own advocacy for “Remain” by designing a series of posters meant to promote popular reasoning for Europe to continue to be unified.

In his short, stream of consciousness style reaction to the vote, Tillmans describes how the Tate’s opening in 2000 seemed like the coronation to an age of openness that was cultivated during the 90s. And in retrospect, it is easy to see the parallels the new museum of art of the twentieth and twenty-first century, intent on collecting and establishing a global narrative for art, as a pinnacle achievement on a path towards greater acceptance.

Two years after the original design was unveiled, the glass-box proposal was out, and in its place, Herzog & de Meuron created a version of the extension sheared of its block-like extrusions, establishing a form that had the austerity of the original Scott building. As noted by The Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright, “The faceted form of the extension is a result of the forces acting on it from all sides, sculpted by its neighbors’ rights to light and the invisible lines of protected views to the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral across the river.”

The building’s facade had also changed from glass to brick; translucence shelved for opacity. Although similar to Bankside in the of use of brick as a skin or sheet over a concrete substructure, the actual appearance is clearly distinct. The brickwork of Switch House is a lattice of double-bond bricks threaded onto steel rods, appropriately compared to “knitwear” by the architects – or in the words of Oliver Wainwright, “hung like chainmail…draped over a muscular concrete cage like a masonry veil.”

Wainwright extends his medieval analogy to the full stature of Switch House, comparing the form with one that “rears up like a defensive watchtower, there to ward off property developers from encroaching any further on the former Bankside power station.” Considering Serota’s position on the diverse mission of the Tate, and in light of the extension’s defensive appearance, perhaps we should view the construction of Switch House and the emphatic departure from glass to brick in a new light?

Museum as Social Condenser

Considering other developments on the south side of the Thames, Oliver Wainwright recently wrote an editorial for the Harvard Design Magazine, “Fortress London: The New US Embassy and the Rise of Counter-Terror Urbanism,” in its current issue: Run for Cover! No. 42 S/S 2016. In his essay, Wainwright uses the new US Embassy in Nine Elms, designed by KieranTimberlake, as a launch point for a discussion of what he calls a new kind of “anxious urbanism.”

The design of the US Embassy is heavily driven by defensive elements disguised in its outwardly “transparent” appearance – walls made of six inch glass, a set-back and raised ground condition, steel and concrete bollards hidden in the landscape, and others – KieranTimberlake has stated that the building’s inspiration came from European castles, and thus creates a strange symbiosis with the Tate’s new appearance. While real life fortifications protect the embassy, those of Switch House – the protective layer of bricks, the slit-like windows, and the “crow’s nest” lookout on the building’s tenth floor – are aestheticized and ornamental, but the buildings do seem to share a defensive strategy protecting what happens within. What if Herzog and de Meuron’s structural choices – although only fortress-like in an iconographic sense – are in fact a metaphor for the defenses required by a museum that is promoting a de-Westernized, all-inclusive narrative for art in a post-Brexit world with nationalism on the rise?

Ending on an anxious note in his essay for the Harvard Design Magazine, Oliver Wainwright discourages this “fortress urbanism” that is an opposition and obstruction to civic life, but luckily the Tate’s strategies are a mere smokescreen. Switch House proffers an image of defense as a foil for the atmosphere of acceptance that lies within. Maybe Herzog & de Meuron’s shift from glass to brick was not so much about continuity between the past and future of Bankside, but was instead a prescient decision to implement the architectural fortifications necessary for a building promoting a mood of inclusiveness that now lies in question?

In her essay for The Financial Times, “How Tate Modern transformed the way we see art,” Jackie Wullschlager expresses how in making us feel small, the Tate Modern has consistently allowed viewers to see beyond the individual: “[the museum’s] beyond-human scale exerts a particular kind of mastery: it encourages us to surrender to, rather than closely engage with, works on display. This is especially the case in regard to its immense installations, but the effect ripples on in the exhibition galleries. Counter-intuitively, feeling small brings liberation, the excitement of being swept away, not needing to judge or even make sense of the museum or the art.”

As Oliver Wainwright notes in his review of Switch House, the findings of a survey of patrons of the Tate Modern found that one of their main reasons for visiting the museum was to encounter other people – in other words, art museum as social condenser. Building on this, Wainwright admires how the museum’s new interior is equipped with nooks and niches in what makes for “a people-watching paradise.” And as Wullschlager remarks in The Financial Times, museums in the twenty-first century are “a place of encounter, social nexus, a contemporary agora.”

Switch House now appears to symbolize the chasm that has been lodged between conservative and progressive politics. The inclusiveness of the Tate may live on in its interior space, but the facade suggests that the progressiveness of the art world is something increasingly rare. It begs the question, should architecture emphasize the insular defense of these progressive visions, or seek to promote them outside its walls?

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Enough House / MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects

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Architects: MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects
Location: Upper Kingsburg, NS B0J, Canada
Architect In Charge: MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects
Area: 700.0 sqm
Project Year: 2015

From the architect. Enough House is the newest addition to architect Brian MacKay-Lyons’ Shobac farm in Nova Scotia. The beautiful property overlooks the Atlantic Ocean and acts as both the satellite rural studio for Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects and as an architectural testing ground. For almost 30 years, MacKay-Lyons has used the cliff-side site to explore ideas of form, materiality and building in the landscape. The campus mixes old and new, as reclaimed historic buildings sit next to modern structures unified by their palette.

The latest addition, Enough House, provides accommodation for an intern architect to work closely with MacKay-Lyons. The cabin is an essay in economy: space, budget, schedule and aesthetic. It shares the same minimalist ethic as the adjacent, 1830’s schoolhouse. But whereas the schoolhouse is classical and an essay in wood detailing, Enough House is developed from materiality that is thoroughly contemporary: all Corten outside and many rusted steel totems inside. Its exposed Douglas fir plywood sheathing, the wide stained pine floorboards and the plywood cabinetry match the rusted palette, giving the building a monolithic effect.

Enough House’s simple form recalls the archetypal child’s image of a house. It was partially inspired by the residence of Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis, where MacKay-Lyons played as a child. Lewis lived in a simple structure that consisted of a bedroom upstairs and a single room downstairs with a stove, stairs and a window to paint beside. Enough House is similarly restrained in terms of programming, with a living space, kitchen and two bedrooms.

The proto-urban infill project has a pivotal position in the campus that actively engages with all of the other structures by framing courtyards. As a landscape viewing instrument it seems to own the pastoral valley to the north and east through a generous 24-foot wide corner window. At grade the blank plinth/hearth/stair wall protects the interior from the road, while a 12-foot south-facing window above offers a dramatic view toward the beach.

MacKay-Lyons’ daughter Renee MacKay-Lyons engineered the wood platform frame construction. Placing the building on a series of concrete fins allows the project to ‘touch the land lightly’ (Glenn Murcutt). The pedestal-like fins make the project an iconic reference to a modest, traditional shed. Structural tie downs to resist overturning due to lateral wind loads.

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Gilles Retsin Architecture Unveils Design for Suncheon Art Platform

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London-based Gilles Retsin Architecture has unveiled its entry for the Suncheon Art Platform competition, an arts center formed by a low, horizontal structure that frames a series of courtyards and squares in Suncheon, Korea.

These courtyards will be composed of four main public spaces —a central events courtyard, a sculpture courtyard, a garden courtyard, and an entrance square—each of which is intended to connect and nurture the various programs surrounding it.

The architects explained that “overall, the design will consist of 278 standardized, large-scale, engineered timber elements, which combine together into a highly differentiated spatial assembly. These blocks are initially structurally weak but gain strength through redundant combination.”

This system is a technologically advanced construction method based on Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL), a method of prefabricating stiff hollow tubes in straight or L-shaped pieces. The hollow insides of these tubes can then be utilized for HVAC installations, services, and museum lighting.

Furthermore, this construction method reflects traditional Korean architecture and timber construction, which features similar spatial organization and timber jointing.

Architects: Gilles Retsin Architecture
Location: Suncheon-si, Jeollanam-do, South Korea
Team: Gilles Retsin Architecture: Gilles Retsin, Lei Zheng, Dongwhi Kim
Engineering: Tim Lucas, Price & Myers Consulting Engineers
Photographs: Courtesy of Gilles Retsin Architecture

Learn more about the project here, and see the winning design here.

News via Gilles Retsin Architecture.

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Rijksmuseum Releases 250,000 Images of Artwork for Free Download

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Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Image © Myra May

The Rijksmuseum, one of the largest museums in Europe dedicated to arts and history, made 250,000 works from its huge collection available for free online viewing or download.

During the golden age of sailing ships (roughly between 1584 and 1702), when Dutch ships dominated the trade routes of the world, the Netherlands became the first capitalist power in the west. The growing bourgeoisie class demanded a vast production of portraits and paintings, which enhanced trade, promoted the sciences and especially stimulated the arts. Few countries have such great quality artistic productions such as the Netherlands from that time.

The Rijksmuseum collection of paintings includes works by the leading masters of the seventeenth century. Names like Jacob van Ruysdael, Frans Hals, Fra Angelico, Rembrandt, and Vermeer are part of the collection. Works such as “The Jewish Bride” (1665), “The Nightwatch” (1642), “From Staalmeesters” (1662) by Rembrandt; “The Milkmaid” (1660), by Johannes Vermeer; “Winter Landscape” (1608), by Hendrick Avercamp; “Portrait of Couple Isaac Abrahamsz Massa and Beatrix van der Laen” (1622), by Frans Hals; and “Portrait of Adolf in Catharina Croeser” (1655), by Jan Steen, are available for free download.

All pictures are available in high resolution and users can explore the entire collection by artist, theme, style or similarity. To download, a simple registration is required or you can log in using your Facebook account. Then, just click on the option (download image) located below the selected artwork and save.

Access the Rijksmuseum page to download your free high-resolution images.

News Via Revista Bula

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BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping

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Reporting from Mali. Photo: Malkit Shoshan. Design: Irma Boom and Julia Neller. Image © Volume

Volume #48: The Research Turn contains the exhibition catalogue for BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping, the Dutch entry at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, by Malkit Shoshan. BLUE focuses on the most prominent footprint of the United Nations’ peacekeeping operations: the compound.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and increasingly since 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’, warfare has moved into the city. While the wars of the 20th century were largely between nations, fighting over territorial sovereignty and along disputed borders, the wars of the 21st century have been internal and borderless. Today’s wars are being fought between large multinational coalitions of security regimes and insurgent networks. It’s not just war that has moved to the city though: the entire security apparatus has moved with them too, including its peacekeepers and their entire infrastructure. Today, United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations are taking place in hundreds of cities around the world and at a large scale.

BLUE aims to turn the spotlight on contemporary UN peacekeeping missions as an urban phenomenon. For the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, the Netherlands will explore architecture’s ability to improve the quality of the built environment – and with it people’s lives – by critically exploring its own role in UN missions and its frontiers.

BLUE: The Legacy of UN Peacekeeping Missions began as a research project and a dialogue between the Dutch Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs, architects and other cultural actors. The Dutch ‘3D’ approach to missions – integrating Defense, Diplomacy and Development – is internationally regarded as innovative and progressive. By adding a fourth ‘D’ – Design – UN camps can be transformed from closed fortresses into catalysts for local development.

BLUE takes the Dutch Camp for the UN in Gao, Mali – Camp Castor – as its case study. Here the ‘blue people’, the Tuareg, and the ‘blue helmets’ of the UN meet; as do the desert and the Dutch approach, the nomads and settlement… BLUE – which as a color also represents boundlessness – exists at the intersection of architecture, human rights and activism. It emerges in times of conflict as the endless space of imagination and pragmatism that can produce alternative solutions. BLUE has the potential to improve life for millions of people.

BLUE is made up of a series of narratives based on conversations with military engineers, architects, anthropologists, economists, activists, policy-makers, journalists and novelists. Incorporating cultural and spatial explorations, BLUE positions architecture in three distinct ways: as research, identifying and making visible spatial challenges and opportunities; as a practice, improving people’s living environment; and as a critical cultural space, reflecting upon phenomenal transitions in society. With this approach, conflict can become a chance for architecture to reinvent both the built environment and itself.

BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions. Photo: Iwan Baan. Image © Volume

Design for Legacy

There are about 170 UN peacekeeping bases located in rapidly growing cities in the Sahel. These compounds are there to accommodate UN personnel while they conduct missions. In order to not put additional pressure on scarce local resources, bases mostly provide their own water and electricity. They have basic infrastructure – a hospital, power plant, and waste treatment plant. The camps are rapidly built and are designed to operate as self-sufficient entities that have little need for interaction with their urban environments.

On the other side of their fences are the cities, which are mostly expected to multiply in size over the next twenty years. Many of these cities already struggle to provide residents with regular access to water and electricity. They have shortages of both food and housing. If armed conflicts and militarization continue to escalate in the region, resources will become even more scarce.

Design for Legacy aims to introduce architectural and design thinking into the planning and construction of UN peacekeeping bases. Currently engineered like machines with no civic or communal values, they could provide essential support local populations and leave behind a sustainable physical legacy that is beneficial to the development and stability of the local community once the mission is completed.

The UN itself talks about ‘Guidelines for the Integrated Approach’ – bringing together Defense, Diplomacy, and Development. What if we added a fourth ‘D’, for Design?

Architectural and urban design knowledge can bring together scales, disciplines, and stakeholders. By incorporating participatory practices, these could become important instruments for mission planning. It could help to generate alternative visions for the future of these areas and work towards a positive legacy.

In the end, the mission will be gone, but infrastructure, resources, and knowledge will remain behind with the local populations.

Four Steps for Sharing Space

Below is a four-stage process that describes how a UN base can gradually open up and share resources and knowledge with local populations. The four stages are linked to security regimes. These exchanges aim to empower the local population so that they can reconstruct and strengthen their own environment.

First Step for Sharing Space: Exchange. Image © Volume

1. Exchange

A first interaction with the community during the construction phase of the base is important. In an uncertain security environment, relationships should be established at the start that facilitate knowledge exchange and carefully managed economic exchange, with some local sourcing. In this first exchange, UN forces should address local urgencies wherever and whenever possible.

Second Step for Sharing Space: Interface. Image © Volume

2. Interface

The periphery of the base can act as an interface with the local environment if the right precautions are taken, even with relatively high threat levels. Here the civilian population can receive medical treatment and have access to water, food and electricity.

Inside the base, infrastructure such as water, electricity and sewage could be developed with a legacy in mind. The physical organization of the base could be designed so that it takes into account the future growth of the city and allow for an easy transformation of the base from being used by the UN to local inhabitants – from both an organizational and a technical point of view.

3. Shared space

Whenever possible, a shared space between the city and the base should be developed. This could be where UN peacekeepers and the local community develop and execute projects together. Here resources, education, trade, employment and cultural facilities could be designed to bring the locals and the UN together.

This area should be visually attractive, taking into consideration local culture. It could contribute to the establishment of a safe and secure environment for the local population as well as for the UN troops. The shared space should be developed gradually and in collaboration with the local community. It could be considered a hub and as a catalyst for local development.

By supplying resources and making knowledge available, local inhabitants can become empowered to develop their environment themselves. Schools and workshops could experiment with the production of resources by combining do-it-yourself solutions with both smaller and larger scale infrastructural production and maintenance. Spatial practices developed in the shared space could be replicated both in the city and on base.

Fourth Step for Sharing Space: Post-mission. Image © Volume

4. Post-mission

At the end of the mission, the base should be handed over to the local population, and become an integral part of the city. Since bases have been developed with the idea of legacy in mind and have incorporated local techniques, the structures should leave behind valuable resources for the city.

Malkit Shoshan on How the City is a Shared Ground for the Instruments of War and Peace
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BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions: Inside the Netherlands’ Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale
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PDR 385 / Fragmentos de Arquitectura

July 1, 2016signordalLeave a comment

Architects: Fragmentos de Arquitectura
Location: Praia D’el Rey, 2510-451 Amoreira, Portugal
Area: 600.0 sqm
Project Year: 2010
Photographs: Fernando Guerra | FG+SG

Located in Praia del Rey, Obidos, this 4-bedroom detached villa has two floors, which are developed around a mezzanine. From the central positioning of the mezzanine it is possible to appreciate the dynamics of the various surrounding spaces. Strong ties are created between the house, the garden and pool – the outdoor living areas clearly visible from the inside through large west-facing windows. Walkways encircle the house; the outdoor leisure areas around the swimming pool and reflection pool, surrounded by extensive lawns, fruit trees and shrubs.

The main living room, with dining area and movie theatre, have a large fireplace as the central feature. Also on the ground floor, facing the pool and garden, are two rooms: a games room and a multipurpose room. Only accessible from the garden, and each with its own washroom facilities, these rooms are ideally suited as play/recreation rooms for teenagers and young people.

With the exception of the three rooms with views, the whole of the ground floor is clad with horizontal wooden slats. This “camouflage” allows the entry of light and ventilation whilst preserving the privacy of interior spaces such as the kitchen and washroom.

Access to the suites on the 1st floor, is via a flight of stairs designed in two distinct sections. The lower half are a solid structure made out of masonry, which end on a small landing before turning into an upper section of wooden floating stairs.

The mezzanine, used for circulating and as a reading area, looks out over a large terrace with spectacular views of the surrounding area. Off of the mezzanine are 4 individually designed suites. Each suite overlooks a different garden – gardens with a “zen-style” theme which are viewed through vertical wooden slats. The sea-facing suites each have a small covered veranda, which helps to bring the view into the room. The house is primarily south and west facing in order to make the most of natural sunlight and its relationship with the sea, garden and pool.

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