Visitors to the pavilion can hear eight narrators tell stories about pools, considering topics such as fulfillment and accomplishment, segregation and inclusion, and learning from the past and reflecting for the future, all the while awash in the self-reflexive setting of a newly-built natatorium.
The architects describe the exhibition as “a lens through which to explore Australian cultural identity. Be they natural or manmade, inland or coastal, temporary or permanent, visitors to the new Australian pavilion in Venice will be invited to explore the pools of Australia in all their forms.”
This video is part of a partnership between ArchDaily and the Spanish photographer Jesús Granada. These videos have been filmed in 4K, a level of quality that allows viewers to perceive details that don’t come across in standard video formats. Granada’s stock images of the Biennale can be obtained on his website, here; ArchDaily’s complete coverage of the 2016 Biennale can be found here.
From the architect. What happens at the junction of a design rich aesthetic from the 50s through the 70s and the “cleanliness” of current design? When minimalist utilitarian carpentry meets crafted objects and Oriental inspiration? What sparks when urbanity and nature loving coalesced? This intersection of worlds is found in the newly designed Nahalat Yitzhak apartment in Tel Aviv.
The apartment is home to a renown fashion designer and his partner, a media figure. They requested functional and spacious spaces, as well as ample storage. Planning the apartment instigated many conversations regarding lifestyle, practical use, leisure, natural lighting, and work requirements. Before the renovation, the apartment had two bedrooms, a living room and a separate kitchen; the rooftop floor had a 10 m2 attic. The design concept for downstairs led to the creation of one unrestricted and functional space – by perceiving the structure’s enveloping walls as an outer shell for a domestic hub. Custom-made carpentry and welding units structure the inner space, as each function has a unit that “contains” it. In addition, 40 m2 of lightweight construction (steel frame and aluminium roof) were added to the rooftop floor.
The construction process began by demolishing all the inner walls on the entrance level, dismantling the floor, washrooms and windows, and creating a totally clear space, with the exception of one constructive cement pillar. Plumbing, electric wiring and aluminium work were likewise replaced. Renovation costs totalled around $200K, most going to carpentry and welding; The 74 m2 first floor now consists of an open space for the living room, kitchen, dining table (with a closed guest bathroom), as well as the master bedroom unit with a walk-in closet and bathroom. The 64 m2 rooftop floor holds an additional lounge, kitchen and small dining table, as well as a guest bedroom and washroom. A paved balcony of 24 m2 is annexed to the parameter.
The black iron entrance door leads into a small entrance hall that exists in the gap between a large service closet and the outer wall. One of the unique elements of the apartment is a floor-to-ceiling closet, shaped in the letter “L”. The closet is the heart of the house with regard to its location and volume, and one sees it immediately and continuously from every spot in the space.
This main piece of carpentry arranges all different uses around it: An entrance hall, guest bathroom, living room, dining area, kitchen, bedroom and closet room. It is bidirectional, and is used both as a facade for the living space and as an inner facade for the bedroom (and even the guest bathroom). Along its line the closet is used for food and kitchenware, office supplies, bookshelves, clothes and shoes, and even as a docking station for the robotic vacuum cleaner. It also serves as a passage to the air conditioning, electricity and lighting systems. The closet is constructed with natural bamboo boards, separated from both floor and ceiling by a black aluminum profile. Using the wood with its natural tones as a critical mass in the apartment is affected by the late 50s esthetic, beloved by the tenants.
The living room is furnished with checkered Missoni armchairs and a grey couch. End tables of three different heights fill the space, all made of mapa-burl wood with an epoxy finish, and a hand-woven Uzbek rug warms the grey floor tiles. Black wood podiums were placed the big window, adorned with antique Oriental lamps. Pictures of Wild Africa, sculptures and a variety of plants complete the exotic look. The living room is bordered by a costume welding unit, iron and black net, used to exhibit plants and decorative pieces and prepared for an entertainment and sound systems. The kitchen was planned as different units set side by side, each of which has its own defined purpose, while between them a dining table is placed. A black marble surface sits on a custom-made wooden unit with legs, which contains cupboards, drawers and an oven. A custom-ordered stainless steel component is used as a “wet unit”, in which a sink and a hidden dishwasher are contained. Beside it we find an open storage unit for “freestyle” storage. The fridge nests inside the main closet. A concealed door in the same large closet leads into the master bedroom. The bedroom is surrounded by wing-door closets and drawers for maximal storage. The closet ends at the constructive cement pillar, from which plaster was peeled and roughly. Between the pillar and the outer wall is a transparent glass divider, allowing for light and an inside view of the kitchen. The front of the closet leads to the dressing room, and ends as a ceiling-high open storage unit for shoes. To the right of the dressing room, separated by transparent glass dividers, one can find the washroom. White cylinder sinks were placed on a woodworked bamboo board, sitting upon a unit made of iron frames with a black paint finish. A pair of mirrors, with black iron tri-square-shaped corners, hang above them.
Spiral stairs made of black-painted steel lead up to the rooftop floor. This floor was planned mainly for hosting and work – a living space and open kitchen, beside a bedroom and washroom. Floor-to-ceiling glass vitrines were installed around the living space. The moving vitrines were planned so that one could open them completely and utilize the kitchen for outdoor hosting and gardening. The balcony was paved with “brutalist” cement tiles, and is mainly used as a green terrace for growing vegetables, organic herbs and ornamental plants. From the balcony, a crowded and densely populated urban view of Tel Aviv can be seen. This “White City” view contrasts the inner greenhouse effect.
During the planning process, an emphasis was placed on natural lighting, the relationship between the “outer” public spaces and the “inner” private spaces, as well as interior. Every item in the apartment was carefully selected: Leather chairs on an iron frame from the 1970s, glass tables, vintage lamps found in Athens, hand-woven carpets, Missoni textile, Andrew Martin upholstery, an earthenware pot from Tibet, an original oil painting from a private collection and more. The washrooms and bathroom serve as blue and turquoise focal points that break the wood and black theme–exposed to the main space once the door is opened.
The exhibition, presenting seventy works – in all media – from each period of the artist’s career, honors five decades of the gallery showing Schwitter’s work. Hadid’s design is a reflection on the artist’s well-known, but destroyed, Merzbau, a sculpture that filled the artist’s workspace from 1923-1937. According to the Hadid’s office, “[Merzbau was] a living, inhabited collage, ever-shifting and expanding, and this was the starting point for [Zaha’s] exhibition design which pushes beyond mere random collage to embrace the unpredictable richness and the complex variegated order found in nature.” The design builds on an established relationship between Hadid and Galerie Gmurzynska; Merz following in the footsteps of an earlier exhibition space designed for another of the architect’s inspirations, Kasimir Malevich.
Courtesy of Galerie Gmurzynska
ZHA describes the architect’s interventions as a “marriage” of Hadid’s sculptural constructions with the paintings and sculptures of Schwitters, creating “an evolving ecology within the gallery…a complex, unitary spatial construct.”
Courtesy of Galerie Gmurzynska
“The current Schwitters exhibition with Zaha Hadid’s exhibition design, is the logical complement to the [Malevich] Suprematism exhibition and takes place in the same space,” said Mathias Rastorfer, CEO and co-owner of the Gmurzynska Galleries. “Zaha’s spirit is ingrained in the DNA of Zaha Hadid Architects and this exhibition is a testimony both to her and to the continuous creative powers of Zaha Hadid Architects under the leadership of Patrik Schumacher.”
Courtesy of Galerie Gmurzynska
This year, the gallery and the city of Zurich are hosting a centenary celebration for the DADA art movement, of which Schwitters was an integral part. Galerie Gmurzynska itself is housed in the same building complex that was once host to the fabled Galerie Dada run by Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball. Kurt Schwitters: Merz is on view until September 30.
The building has one floor at ground level to lighten the presence of itself on the lot and then developed a basement with a corridor for bedrooms and the intimate areas.
The lot has a perforated platform that sustains the roofs with the same structural profiles.
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The house is configured based on three horizontal plans, the columns help to make this possible. These plans define a front terrace, an inner terrace with a pool and an intimate backyard.
The interior is defined by the shadows of the upper plans, because their enclosures are glazed in all its magnitude. In it, the space is continuous, and a stone veneer volume followed by wooden floors define a primary and simple finish.
The continuity between the exterior and the interior space is a both directions experience inside the house.
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The house theme recurs in other projects of Metropolis, where the space flows and the nature surrounds the architecture completely, making it part of the house through transparencies, participating with it to the very end of the new created situation.
Alison Brooks. Image Courtesy of Caro Communications
Alison Brooks Architects (ABA) has been selected to design the latest Maggie’s Centre, at the edge of the Musgrove Park Hospital Grounds in Somerset, England. Known as Maggie’s Taunton, the project is a collaboration between ABA, Johanna Gibbons of JLH Landscape Architecture, and structural engineers Webb Yates.
Maggie’s is a charity that provides free practical, emotional, and social support for cancer patients and their families and friends. Considering architecture as a vital element of care, since 1996 the organization has commissioned a who’s who of contemporary practices to design their facilities, including Frank Gehry, OMA, Rogers Stirk Harbour, Steven Holl, and the late Zaha Hadid.
“We are so pleased to be bringing Maggie's Centre to Taunton and are excited by the designs put forward by Alison Brooks and JLG Landscape Architecture,” said Maggie’s Chief Executive Laura Lee. “Great design and architecture are integral to what we do at Maggie’s as each and every one of our Centres is specifically designed to welcome people with cancer and offer them a place to seek practical advice, talk to other people with cancer or just to sit quietly with a cup of tea while awaiting appointments or results.”
“We’re honoured and delighted to be working with Maggie’s to design a new Centre in Taunton,” said Alison Brooks. “Our project will build on Maggie Keswick Jencks’ legacy of extraordinary and uplifting spaces for cancer patients and their families with creative working environments for the Maggie’s team. Taunton is in a beautiful part of Somerset and we hope our project, overlooking the Blackdown Hills, will make the most of this opportunity.”
Maggie’s Taunton does not yet have an expected date for completion. The commission represents Alison Brooks Architects’ first project in the health sector.
Structural: Blackwell Partnership Inc.; David Bowick
Builder: Darlington Construction
Millwork: Kobi’s Cabinets
Client: Ian MacDonald
From the architect. The four-season family cabin by architect Ian MacDonald is a deeply thoughtful response to the cultural heritage landscape of Go Home Bay, an enclave of Ontario’s Georgian Bay archipelago. The area was once immortalized by the Group of Seven and abounds with natural beauty. Rocky islands are topped by scraggly white pines shaped by the west winds. However, the landscape is also increasingly vulnerable to development. Over-scaled structures have become evermore commonplace, dominating the context, dwarfing the surroundings and spoiling one’s experience of the natural realm.
Floor Plan
This cabin is an important, positive alternative to the prevailing trends. It uses contemporary language while embodying the distinguishing and modest characteristics of the vernacular cottages that have unobtrusively dotted the area since the 1890s. The amber-hued interiors, framed in rough-sawn fir, are efficient, compact and distilled down to the necessary essentials for peaceful weekends outside of the city. The simplicity belies a profound connection to the surrounding nature that is at once strong and sensitive, stirring and peaceful.
MacDonald strategically sited the structure to respect the beautiful shoreline, and to create a sense of anticipation for visitors. When visitors approach by water (it is 16-miles from the nearest dock, with no in-road access), the property’s mature trees fragment their views of the low-slung volume. It is only as visitors climb up from the dock through a juniper meadow, surrounded by tall white pines, that they see the cottage clearly as a charcoal-coloured cedar shingle box. The lightness on the land is instantly evident in the construction: MacDonald cantilevered the form off concrete piers so that it floats over a whaleback outcropping of granite.
Elevation
Elevation
He carefully sequenced interior spaces to underscore a rich connection to the landscape. Entering into a simple vestibule from the east, visitors’ views are largely withheld to delay and therefore intensify their effect. Visitors then pass into the long kitchen, which doubles as a corridor along the back of the cabin, connecting the principal areas and ending in a cozy sitting cove complete with a woodstove and views to the extensive forest behind. This space serves as counterpoint to the big water views in the adjacent main room where some 42 linear feet of windows look west toward the open Go Home Bay channel. Here, the ground plane drops out of view, and the short middle ground is lost. This obscuring engages the visitor’s imagination, resulting in a more grand perception of the scale of the landscape, and defining one’s primary memory of the place.
Sustainable features lighten the building’s footprint. The main construction materials were coordinated on a single barge to reduce the embodied energy of transportation. Furthermore, MacDonald drew on his knowledge of the site’s weather patterns — the inner bay locale can be stiflingly hot in the summer due to a lack of airflow — to improve passive thermal comfort. The irrigated green roof ameliorates cooling, sunshades integrated with the envelope reduce heat gain, and the main space, capped by operable clerestories, transforms into a screened-in porch with lift and slide doors to improve cross ventilation. This porosity in the architecture helps the inhabitants mark the changes in the days, the seasons and the climate, ultimately forging a more profound connection to the land.
Adjaye Associates, working with local firm AB3D, envisioned the museum as a social incubator, a welcoming and porous space where people could be brought together through a variety of formal and spontaneous interactions. The jury found that the proposal’s distinctive silhouette would give the museum a strong presence within its context of planned commercial and residential developments, and that is orientation and materiality showed a keen awareness of the vernacular and cultural contexts.
“The winning proposal is a beautiful and poetic response to the challenge of the design brief but above all it is specific to Riga,” said Jury Chair David Bickle. “The team thoroughly understood the effect of soft northern light in experiencing and creating art and this insight was the inspiration for their scheme. Through the use of wood and form, the concept design subtly references Latvian architecture, proposing a very animated structure with a lively entrance that will enable the museum to create architectural presence in a new and emerging district. The design is very welcoming and porous – it has the potential to be loved.”
The Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art will be located in a new business and leisure center of Riga known as New Hanza City (NHC), a 24.5 hectare development on the site of the city’s former railway goods station. The project will be joined by the headquarters of ABLV Bank, a hotel, conference center, exclusive apartment district, a pre-school, and urban gardens for recreation. The new museum will cost rough €30 million and will house a unique collection spanning art and visual culture in Latvia and the Baltic Sea region from the 1960s to the present day.
“I am honoured to have been selected for this ambitious and much-needed project. This museum will be a beacon that both celebrates Latvia’s incredible artistic legacy and meaningfully links the country to the international art community. The entire process – from collaborating with AB3D to cultivate a design that both understands and enhances its context, to the transparent nature of the competition – has been a pleasure, and stands as a testament to Latvia’s profound commitment to the importance of contemporary art to its cultural life.”
The jury also made special acknowledgements to Henning Larsen Architects and Sauerbruch Hutton, awarding an honorable mention to Sauerbruch Hutton’s entry for its “modest beauty and anti-icon rationale.”
To many, it might seem that the goals of Alejandro Aravena‘s 2016 Venice Biennale—as he describes it, “to understand what design tools are needed to subvert the forces that privilege the individual gain over the collective benefit”—are beyond reproach. In spite of these aims, a number of commentators nevertheless have emerged, perhaps led most vocally by Patrik Schumacher, criticizing the biennale. In this article, originally published on The Architecture Foundation’s website as “Holier than thou,” Phineas Harper responds to those criticisms.
The most surprising turn of the 2016 Venice Biennale was not the exhibition itself, but the reaction of its critics. Within hours of kick-off, the internet was filling up with derogatory mutterings of the show being ‘”worthy,” “moralizing,” “holier than thou,” “earnest,” “virtue-signaling” and “right on” (which apparently is an insult). The architectural Twitterati, it seemed, were unimpressed.
But what exactly were they hating on? The biennale principally exhibited practices which saw some form of suffering in the world and, through their work, in way or another, were trying to lessen it. How did such a compassionate brief generate such a miserly push-back?
First lets deal with the obvious; I get that this wasn’t the thrill-a-minute spectacle of some mythical previous years. Venice 2016 hosted some dry pieces of research which, though clearly important in content, failed to leap from the gallery walls. It is hard for any exhibit to hold its own in an environment as overwhelming as Venice, more so in the blur of lunches and Prosecco that is the vernissage. The many vast exhibition spaces favor bold one-liner gestures and with viewers obliged to rush through galleries, each crammed with ideas, in limited time, nuance suffocates in the volume of it all. Where complexity is retained in reams of in-depth text or similarly dense exhibits, it comes across as a selfish curatorial move, demanding precious attention like a spoiled child inevitably at the expense of others.
Many of this year’s curators seem to have created exhibitions forgetting the context in which they will be seen, certainly the context in which they will be reviewed. But that is true of every biennale – 2014’s Arsenale, for example, plodded through a stultifying showcase of Italian cinema and regional research punctuated by impenetrable contemporary dance, yet Rem received rave reviews. My hunch is that, as is common across political discourse, those with high ethical ambitions are judged to unattainable standards. Feminists will be familiar with this – say you’re in favor of women’s rights but then buy a top from a company known for poor manufacturing conditions and you might as well be Philip Green himself. So in 2012 David Chipperfield can put on a warm and fuzzy melange of what his mates have been toying with recently and he gets a B+, but in 2016 Aravena ups the political ante with an attempt at something much more ambitious yet receives a D-.
The argument of this year’s detractors seems to boil down to a feeling that architects ought not to try and help poor people. The thrust of it ran: Architecture isn’t as effective a tool to address global inequality as infrastructure, politics or NGO-led development and therefore shouldn’t attempt to. At one end of the spectrum this manifested as a ”get back in the kitchen”-like call for returning to ”what architects are good at,” (which seemingly means cornices and structural gymnastics). From the other end we were told architects could by all means lobby the real keepers of power but that attempts to address suffering through practice itself were “hopeless.”
The first response is intensely conservative but at least consistent. For its proponents, architecture is about making nice things for paying clients and there it ends. It’s a view that’s naive, ahistorical and boring but is what it is. The second however is more pernicious. It wraps up a cluster of problematic values in one defeatist sentiment: That the only power we hold as citizens is as small participants in a large democracy. That it is worse to try and fail than to not try. That helping the few is worthless if you cannot help the many.
What a grim worldview! The belief that is is right to not act because you are less powerful than another who could is perverse. It is like refusing to care for a sick friend because a nurse would be more qualified. It is also historically ignorant – the story of human progress is not made in sweeping decisions by powerful individuals but by complex social movements whether of the Right, the Left or neither. Political change is won through the actions, arguments and attitudes of thousands of contributing actors who cannot necessarily see the role their part has played. To insist that anybody with even the smallest agency to make the world a better place should sit idly by and wait for a messiah to intervene on their behalf is not just lazy, it is breathtakingly dull.
This biennale was not perfect. None are. And frankly I wonder whether Venice can ever be a fit venue for a serious interrogation of issues more profound than the Campari or Aperol conundrum. The vernissage is, at heart, a schmoozey, boozey networking knees-up in which the architectural great and good cheek-kiss their way down Via Garibaldi occasionally glancing in a pavilion. Arevena knew this all too well when he set out to give the festival some bite. Rather than opt for crowd-pleasing spectacle he forged ahead with a more weighty brief and, with half the time of his predecessor, has galvanized a compelling response. It isn’t a jaw-dropping one-liner, but it is the first biennale I intend to return to for a closer look.
From the architect. During the design process of the lake house I focused on finding the essence of a holiday home—a complement to family life. The house serves as a refuge for a family of five living in the capital—an opportunity to spend free time with family and friends in the countryside.
Single-storey bungalow is organized around a central living area with a fireplace. Secondary functions are shifted sideways, their volume wraps around the living room. Thanks to folding doors living room opens to the south terrace.
Diagram
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There is an asymmetrically positioned hipped roof. Over the south terrace it creates a valuable space protected against sun and rain. Inside the roof serves as an additional space to accommodate additional guests or a hideout for kids.
Outside the cabin is almost monochrome, just natural wood and white painted cladding. No details. All attention is paid to the essential part of the house, which is inside. There we find the beauty, colors and textures.
Redsquare Productions has produced a short film on architect Shigeru Ban’s design for the Aspen Art Museum (AAM) in Aspen, Colorado. The film explores the museum’s architectural design and built environment through the utilization of time-lapse and motion sequences, highlighting Ban’s vision for the space.
The design invites “those outside to engage with the building’s interior, and provides those inside the opportunity to see their exterior surroundings,” writes Shigeru Ban Architects in their project description. In this sense, the museum becomes a site-specific sequence that incorporates the surrounding mountains and overall beauty of nature into the inside of the building.
Sig Nordal 