Showing posts from category: architect
John Pawson poses for a portrait in a minimalist interior. The architect, who designed the Calvin Klein flagship store in Manhattan, is the focus of a career survey at London's Design Museum through Jan. 30, 2011. Source: Gilbert McCarragher/Design Museum via Bloomberg.
The Calvin Klein store in Manhattan seems an unlikely inspiration for a monastery.
Yet Trappist monks leafing through a book were so taken with the look of the Madison Avenue flagship that they hired its architect John Pawson to build their monastery in the Czech Republic — and won him critical acclaim.
“Architecture is one thing, what happens inside is another,” says Pawson, 61. “They saw a space which they thought could be used as a church. They saw the two tables on which sweaters were displayed as being altars.”
After a 29-year career — designing a home for author Bruce Chatwin, a bridge for Kew Gardens, London, and airport lounges for Cathay Pacific — Pawson is getting his first U.K. solo show, at London’s Design Museum (whose future building he will revamp). He became known as a guru of minimalism, after his 1996 book “Minimum,” and is now moving into the public spotlight.
We meet at the exhibition — an array of sketches, wall photographs and maquettes. At its core is a contemplative room, with benches on either side, and an arch that lets light dapple through — a flashback to the monastery at Novy Dvur.
Pawson has a quiet elegance that masks undercurrents of anxiety. He wears pressed gray trousers with an open-neck white shirt, and twice stops our conversation to check the new displays. “The storm before the calm,” he says.
His understated ethos clashes with the global trend in “starchitecture” — look-at-me buildings by big names.
The Baron House in Sweden, dating from 2005, is designed by John Pawson. The architect is known for his minimalistic buildings. Source: Fabien Baron/ Design Museum via Bloomberg.
Personality Cult
“I’m very fortunate to be in an age where architecture has gotten noticed,” he says. “I’m not complaining that there’s the cult of the personality, because it enables me to build.”
Born in Halifax, Yorkshire, Pawson tried his hand at the family textile business, then moved to Japan. He taught English at a university and visited the studio of architect Shiro Kuramata. Somewhere along the line, he caught the building bug.
He enrolled at London’s Architecture Association, and left after three years without collecting his degree. Since 1981, he has made his way as an architect.
“Calvin Klein and working for him changed people’s perception of me, so I became the man that did shops,” he says. “Before that, I was the man that did galleries, or people’s flats.”
The Czech monastery takes up a good third of his show. Everywhere else are traces of past projects, built or not.
London Refuge
The Sackler Crossing, a footbridge designed by architect John Pawson in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew outside London. Pawson is the focus of a career survey at the Design Museum in London through Jan. 30, 2011. Source: Richard Davies/Design Museum via Bloomberg.
Pawson’s project for the late Chatwin occupies a corner of a neatly labeled archive table. In a 1984 essay, Chatwin wrote that Pawson makes “simple, harmonious rooms that are a real refuge from the hideousness of contemporary London.”
In Manhattan Pawson worked with Klein, who he finds energetic and interested: “He’ll sit for 12 hours and focus on a window detail, which, to be honest, I can’t do.”
One project that never happened was Pawson’s 1998 plan for fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s house in Biarritz, France. The circular sketch for the tennis court was rejected in a letter from the Chanel maestro (included in the show) who wrote “I hate everything ‘round.’”
Lagerfeld is “an amazing raconteur and an amazing mimic, and also, like me, obsessed,” says the architect. Yet designers “want to have done it themselves, really.”
Next is Pawson’s mission to move the Design Museum into its new base at the former Commonwealth Institute in Kensington. Beyond that, he has one objective: “Get the quality better.”
“John Pawson — Plain Space” is at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 2YD through Jan. 30, 2011. Information: http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2010/2010-john-pawson or +44-207-403-6933.
(Farah Nayeri is a writer for Muse, the arts & leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
Hat tip Bloomberg
Project Name: Infiniski Manifesto House
Location: Curacaví, Chile
Area: 160 m2
Architect: James & Mau
Construction: Infiniski
Renewable Energy: Infiniski + Geotek
Landscaping: Infiniski
Year: 2009
Furniture: Cómodo Studio
Photography: Antonio Corchera
Architects James & Mau, or Jaime Gaztelu and Mauricio Galeano are also founders and partners of Infiniski, a new concept for sustainable building and construction. The Manifesto House is just one example of the eco-friendly projects that this duo has undertaken. Completed in 2009, this home is created from three containers bit its wood slatted exterior conceals the original containers like an outer shell.
From the architects:
The Manifesto house represents the Infiniski concept and its potential: bioclimatic design, recycled, reused materials, non polluting constructive systems, integration of renewable energy.
The project relies on a bioclimatic architecture adapting the form and positioning of the house to its energetic needs. The project is based on a prefabricated and modular design allowing a cheaper and faster constructive method. This modular system also allows thinking the coherence of the house with possible future modifications or enlargements in order to adapt easily to the evolving needs of the client.
The house, of 160m2 is divided in two levels and uses 3 recycled maritime containers as structure. A container cut in two parts on the first level is used as the support structure for the containers on the second level. This structure in the form a bridge creates an extra space in between the container structure, isolated with thermo glass panels. As a consequence with only 90m2 worth of container, the project generates a total 160m2, maximizing and reducing significantly the use of extra building materials. This structure in the form of a bridge, responds to the bioclimatic needs of the house — Form follows Energy — and offers an effective natural ventilation system. It also helps to take full advantage of the house´s natural surroundings, natural light and landscape views.
Like if it had a second skin, the house “dresses and undresses” itself, thanks to ventilated external solar covers on walls and roof, depending on its need for natural solar heating. The house uses two types of covers or “skin”: wooden panels coming from sustainable forests on one side and recycled mobile pallets on the other. The pallets can open themselves in winter to allow the sun to heat the metal surface of the container walls and close themselves in summer to protect the house from the heat. This skin also serves as an exterior aesthetic finishing helping the house to better integrate in its environment.
Both exterior and interior use up to 85% of recycled, reused and eco-friendly materials: recycled cellulose and cork for insulation, recycled aluminum, iron and wood, noble wood coming from sustainable forests, ecological painting, eco-label ceramics. Thanks to its bioclimatic design and to the installation of alternative energy systems the house achieves 70% autonomy.
Hat tip to Design Milk Blog
Last week, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority unveiled OMA’s conceptual masterplan for a major new arts district in Hong Kong. Under OMA’s plan – one of three competing proposals – the 40 hectare waterfront site facing Victoria Harbour would become an authentic environment of three urban villages embedded in a new public park, Hong Kong’s largest.
OMA founding partner Rem Koolhaas commented: “Using the village – a typology every citizen of Hong Kong is familiar with – as the model for our plan allows us to absorb the massive scale of WKCD’s ambition into manageable portions and forge deep connections with Kowloon, whose vital urban energy will be the lifeblood of WKCD.”
In 2009, OMA established a new office in Hong Kong to study local conditions and consult with a wide range of stakeholders and experts in the fields of culture and finance. Out of this research, we generated a cultural masterplan, working in tandem with architecture, for establishing a creative milieu that can fully ‘inhabit’ WKCD’s plethora of new arts facilities and make the neighbourhood come alive.
OMA’s three villages each have a strong emphasis on vibrant street life and cultural production where all aspects of the creative process – from education to rehearsal to production to performance – are nurtured and made visible.
Art in the east
One of the key elements of OMA’s proposal for WKCD is M+, an experimental new muséum interpreted as a barcode of overlapping bands featuring visual art, film, design and popular culture. Embedded in M+ is an Art Factory, where education, artist studios, a hotel and shops intersect and interact with the museum itself. Beneath M+, the Exhibition Centre is a venue for auctions and conventions, a further intermingling of culture and commerce. M+ links to Kowloon Park and to the surrounding neighbourhood with pedestrian bridges – one of them an extension of the park, one an extension of the museum itself – into Jordan and to Temple Street, and across Canton Road to an outpost of the museum in Victoria Towers.
To read full article via AIarcinnovations click here.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), along with China World Trade Center Co. Ltd., announced yesterday the grand opening of the China World Trade Tower, an 81-story, mixed use building set in Beijing’s Central Business District.
The tower, which was designed by SOM and contains office, meeting, restaurants, and the China World Summit Wing hotel, now stands as Beijing’s tallest structure and marks the completion of the third and most recent phase of the China World Trade Center development. The opening comes in connection with the 20th Anniversary of the China World Trade Center, which originally opened August 30, 1990.
“SOM is proud to take Beijing’s skyline to a new height with the completion of the China World Trade Tower,” said Brian Lee, design architect and partner, SOM, who attended the grand opening ceremony. “The business of China connects to the rest of the world, so we sought a design that further connected Beijing to the China World Trade Center. Not only does the Tower emphatically mark the Central Business District but the development also provides citizens of Beijing with quality buildings and open space for business, shopping, hospitality, culture, education and enjoyment in a high density urbane environment.”
To read full article via AIarchinnovations click here.
This stunning underground home by Deca Architecture utilizes a natural palette of materials to maintain a low profile while complementing the serene Mediterranean landscape that surrounds it. Situated in a small valley with views of the coast, the Aloni house consists of two stone walls bridged by a beautiful green roof that spans two adjacent slopes. The home takes advantage of rustic materials that maximize energy efficiency while allowing the house to blend in with the rugged terrain of Greece’s Antiparos Island.
The Aloni house finds its inspiration in the landscape of the Cycladic Islands, which were shaped in the past by earthen retaining walls erected to create land fit for farming. Deca Architecture decided to incorporate this traditional building typology into the design of the house, and the result is a structure that resonates with the topography of its site while taking advantage of low-impact materials that impart high insulation values. The single-level 240 square meter home features walls made of retained earth that regulate the interior temperature thanks to their high thermal mass, while a green roof provides further insulation from the bright Mediterranean sun.
To read full article via Inhabitat click here.
architect, architects, architecture, Design, eco building, Green Architecture, green building, Green Built Environment, Landscape Architecture, modern architecture, modern buildings, new buildings
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Aloni House, Antiparos Island, Cycladic Islands, Deca Architecture, Inhabitat Blog, Mediterranean
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The planned National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion.
Low-tech meets hi-tech in the Oslo offices of Snohetta, Scandinavia’s premier architecture firm. Housed in an open-plan former warehouse on the edge of the Oslo fjord, the firm greets visitors with an improvised light fixture, comprised of 600 water-filled plastic bags suspended from the ceiling in an undulating pattern. Meanwhile, in a secluded room, a robotic arm, installed last year, is busy making 3-D prototypes associated with the firm’s diverse projects around the world.
“We are the only architects who have this,” says Snohetta’s founding partner and principal, Norwegian architect Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, of the robot, manufactured by the German firm KUKA for use in the auto industry. Snohetta uses the prototypes, explains 52-year-old Mr. Thorsen, the way an artist might use preliminary studies for a final painting.
What Snohetta also has — and what just about every other large and midsize architecture practice lacks these days — is momentum. Founded in 1989, Snohetta, named after a Norwegian mountain, burst onto the architecture scene in 2002, with the opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a modern-day revival of the ancient world’s most famous library. Their current roll began in 2008, with the opening of the acclaimed Oslo Opera House, and culminated in July with the commissioning of a much-publicized extension to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This summer, the firm was also awarded a commission to redesign New York City’s Times Square, and construction is finishing up in lower Manhattan on the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion, a multi-use visitor center built directly on the site of the former World Trade Center.
Using what Mr. Thorsen likes to call an “organic” approach, Snohetta combines a deep respect for a building’s location with a harmonic and often stripped-down use of materials. In addition, Snohetta routinely incorporates artists in the very early stages of a project, rather than seeking them out later to decorate a building after it is finished. The result is a style of architecture that is both distinctive and tranquil, and often seems like an antidote to the self-conscious experiments and brash monumentality that have characterized much of the world’s recent building spree.
This year, a few months before beating out several Pritzker-Prize-winning architects for the San Francisco commission, Snohetta launched an in-house consulting wing, called Snohetta Design, which plans to extend the firm’s activities beyond architecture. The goal, says Martin Gran, CEO and managing director of Snohetta Design, is “to brand what [a] building is supposed to house.” Mr. Gran, 38, previously worked at global advertising giant McCann Erickson, where his clients included MasterCard.
During a meeting this July with Messrs. Thorsen and Gran, the two seemed to be speaking different languages. Mr. Gran may talk about “the power of branding” inherent in a successful building like the Oslo Opera House, while Mr. Thorsen, when referring to the Opera House’s predominant use of marble, talks about the “homogeneous continuation of material.”
In conversation, the effect is jarring but one of Snohetta Design’s inaugural projects, an ethereal 3-D logo for Snohetta’s King Abdullah Center for Dialogue, currently being designed for a site just outside Mecca, Saudi Arabia, demonstrates how business savvy and artistic inspiration can come together in common purpose.
Branding may have its limits, concedes Mr. Thorsen. The September 11 Memorial Pavilion, which sits atop an underground museum by another architecture firm, needs to respect the project’s commemorative function. And even the new San Francisco museum extension offers some branding challenges, he says, because of the need to respect the 1995 original building by Swiss architect Mario Botta, whose postmodernist approach of incorporating previous eras’ architectural styles is just about the opposite of what Snohetta is trying to do. “Postmodernism was never my agenda,” says Mr. Thorsen, who describes the wave as “reinventing replicas.”
“It’s not easy,” says Mr. Thorsen, of the joint task before Snohetta Design, and the architects themselves, as they try to create a new project that does justice to Mr. Botta’s popular building, while carving out an identity for itself. “But then again, architecture never is,” he adds.
The Snohetta building will be part of a $250 million expansion, says the museum’s director, Neal Benezra, which was initiated to house the contemporary art collection of Donald and Doris Fisher, founders of the Gap chain of clothing stores. Mr. Benezra says Snohetta was chosen after a selection committee visited Oslo this summer and saw the Oslo Opera House in person. Made up of several complementary levels of white Carrera marble, which seem to rise up collectively out of the Oslo Fjord like a geometric iceberg, the building proved to be “the tipping point for us.”
American architect Craig Dykers, Snohetta’s New York-based principal, is also excited about the challenge of working with Mr. Botta’s building. “It a very strong piece of architecture,” he says. “Making expansions means that you’re entering into a marriage. And I prefer to have a strong partner.”
Mr. Dykers, 48, doesn’t see the firm’s recent successes as altering its essential nature. “We have a funny name,” he says, speaking by phone from New York. “People don’t easily remember it, so fame isn’t tailored into who we are. Most people remember our buildings before they remember us.”
Hat tip to WSJ’s J. S. Marcus
Can you name the architect of this residential villa in Germany? Post your guess in the comment section below. (Answer posted tomorrow.)
Brookline, MA-based Jin Choi & Thomas Shine of Choi+Shine recently received the 2010 Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture Award for their “Land of Giants” project. The project was originally submitted for an Icelandic pylon competition, where it received an honorable mention. The competition was to find a new typology for Iceland’s high voltage power lines and pylons.
This design transforms mundane electrical pylons into statues on the Icelandic landscape by making only small alterations to existing pylon design.
Making only minor alterations to well established steel-framed tower design, we have created a series of towers that are powerful, solemn and variable. These iconic pylon-figures will become monuments in the landscape. Seeing the pylon-figures will become an unforgettable experience, elevating the towers to something more than merely a functional design of necessity.
The pylon-figures can be configured to respond to their environment with appropriate gestures. As the carried electrical lines ascend a hill, the pylon-figures change posture, imitating a climbing person. Over long spans, the pylon-figure stretches to gain increased height, crouches for increased strength or strains under the weight of the wires.
To coontinue reading in Bustler click here.
Renzo Piano's California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Credit: Tim Griffith.
When Vanity Fair recently released the results of a survey ranking the most significant pieces of architecture of the last 30 years — with Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, topping the list — the poll was met with extended grumbling. Some people griped about the many architects, including Richard Meier and Daniel Libeskind, who voted for their own work (Vanity Fair indeed!); others noted that the average age of those polled seemed to be around 70.
But the biggest complaint, by far, was that the results seemed completely to ignore green architecture, arguably the biggest single movement in the field since the emergence of modernism a century ago. In response, Lance Hosey, a writer and an architect who worked for years at William McDonough + Partners, a Virginia firm known for a commitment to sustainable design, organized an alternative survey for Architect magazine in which he polled a number of leading green architects and others. (Hosey e-mailed me earlier this month asking if I’d take part in the voting, which I did not.) He used the same format as Vanity Fair: He asked each voter to name the five most important green buildings since 1980, and separately the single most significant sustainable building finished since 2000.
The results were released Tuesday. The winner in the first category was the Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, a building by McDonough + Partners that relies on solar panels, among other green-design features, to produce 30% more energy than it uses. (Hosey swears his old affiliation had no impact on the results, though the voters did include one current McDonough employee, Kira Gould. Unlike Vanity Fair, Architect has no plans to publish the contents of each ballot; Hosey did tell me, though, that one architect in the poll gave every one of his votes, six in all, to his own work.) Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which is topped by an undulating green roof made of native plants, was named the most important sustainable building since 2000.
I don’t have any issues with the winners of Hosey’s alternative survey: I admire both the McDonough and the Piano buildings, and I can understand the desire to confront the obvious limitations of the Vanity Fair project. (Similarly, given the way the Vanity Fair poll was set up, the Guggenheim Bilbao struck me as entirely deserving.) In the end, though, I have the same basic problem with Hosey’s effort as I did with the first poll: Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces results that give a skewed view of the way architecture — and more important, the way we think and write about it — has evolved in recent years.
Among critics and architects alike, there has been a rising understanding that architecture is not just about stand-alone icons but is tied inextricably to urban planning, real-estate speculation, capital flows, ecology and various kinds of networks — and similarly that architecture criticism means more than simply writing about impressive new landmarks, green or not, produced by the world’s best-known firms.
Indeed, sustainable design and its champions deserve significant credit for helping architecture as a whole adjust its values and move toward a wider, richer sense of how to measure its progress and chart its signal achievements. In that sense, it seems to me that Hosey wound up falling into the same trap as the Vanity Fair tastemakers whose shortsightedness he hoped to correct.
Maybe, in other words, the most important achievement in green architecture over the last 10 or 30 years is not a single building at all. Maybe it’s a collection of schools or linked parks or the group of advisors brought together by a young mayor somewhere. Maybe it’s a new kind of solar panel, a tax credit or a zoning change. Maybe it’s tough to hang a plaque on — or photograph for a magazine spread.
— Christopher Hawthorne, via Los Angeles Times (blog)
architect, architecture critic, eco building, Green Architecture, green building, green buildings, Green Built Environment, modern architecture, modern buildings, new buildings
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Los Angeles Times (blog), Vanity Fair
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Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic
Question: How do you feel about the progress on One World Trade Center?
Paul Goldberger: I’m disappointed in where things are at Ground Zero right now. I think it’s sad, on the other hand, I do think the people involved are trying reasonably hard, under the circumstances. But there’s really not a great deal of vision there. It begins really right back the morning of September 12th when Governor Pataki, who had the most authority in this situation, made the decision to keep everybody in place who was a player in this situation, the Port Authority, which owned the World Trade Center, the developer, Larry Silverstein, who had leased the Twin Towers. And most importantly, to keep the program in place. The program—by program, I mean the functions of the buildings. So, you know, the World Trade Center was 10 million square feet of office space plus some retail and some other commercial space, that’s what was transferred into the new project with the addition of a memorial and some cultural facilities and the, the prescription that it be in a different physical format, obviously, not 210-story towers again, but spread out around the site in a different way.
But you know, we never really looked into completely different uses for the site. We never really thought from point zero, we might say, about what the ideal thing to do there would be. Instead we took a program that goes back to the original World Trade Center in the early ’60s, and it was never really that effective or successful for most of its life, and decided to replicate it.
And then came all the complex political things that flowed from that, so it’s taken an inordinately long time, it’s cost a huge amount of money, and we still don’t really have anything that I think the world can look at and say, “This is a great achievement that shows us that the United States has come back from this thing in a noble way.” The office building that’s going up is sort of okay, but it’s not, I don’t think going to be a distinguished or particularly beautiful building. It’s not the… it doesn’t show all that we are capable of in terms of architecture.
Similarly, the other office buildings that have been planned for the site, most of which are on hold now because of the economy, are better than the average piece of junk on Third Avenue, that’s true, but that’s not a very ringing endorsement.
And then for this site that is so critical to the eyes of the world, where we had the opportunity to show the world that we could do something that was bold and visionary, we have really not succeeded at doing that.
I think a great tower would have had a place there. Either a pure tower, just as a symbol, like the Eiffel Tower of the 21st Century, we might say. Or, remembering that the United States is, after all, the birthplace of the skyscraper—a building form that we’ve now given to the world that is now common all around the world—what better place, if we’re looking to show the world that in fact we have not been defeated by this attack, than to come back to this place, in this country, in this time and build the most advanced skyscraper we could possibly imagine. The one that will bring the art of skyscraper design forward yet again.
And instead, we are not doing that. We’re doing a building that is not that different from a lot of commercial buildings built everywhere, and in fact, not as good as many of them. It’s going to be very tall, it’ll have a little more flair to it than the old Twin Towers did, but, you know, it’s not what it might have been.
Recorded on June 22, 2010
Interviewed by David Hirschman
architect, architecture, architecture critic, recession
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David Hirschman, Eiffel Tower, Governor Pataki, Ground Zero, Larry Silverstein, One World Trade Center, Paul Goldberger, Port Authority, Twin Towers
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