The Architecture of the City

Heritage body UNESCO has added 17 projects by 20th-century French architect Le Corbusier to its list of internationally significant architecture sites, including the Unité d'Habitation housing in Marseille – arguably the most influential Brutalist building of all time (+ slideshow).

The 17 architectural sites that have been added to the World Heritage List are spread across seven countries. They were built over 50 years by the Swiss-born French architect, who has become one of the Modernist movement's most admired and controversial figures.

They include the Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh, India, where Le Corbusier collaborated with his cousin and fellow architect and designer Pierre Jeanerret to build and furnish an entire government city.

Schumacher met Hadid in 1988 at a symposium at the Tate gallery in London to coincide with the New York Museum of Modern Art's Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition.

With no built projects, Hadid was building a reputation as a radical architect through her artwork. The huge paintings of her competition entry for The Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong were included in the show, alongside projects by the likes of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Bernard Tschumi.

There’s so much to learn about architecture, yet so little time. The smart architect knows to have a variety of sources for their architectural knowledge, and that's why we’ve put together a shortlist of our Top 12 Architecture Channels on Youtube, and picked some of their best videos for you to see. Read more to find out the best architecture videos, from sketching and rendering tutorials to architecture documentaries.

The “Googleplex” is back on. After the Mountain View City Council announced last year that they would be awarding the majority of the land needed to construct the futurist masterplan designed for Google by BIG and Thomas Heatherwick to fellow tech giant LinkedIn, the future of the ambitious glass-canopied corporate campus seemed to be dead in the water, with the architects even releasing images of a pared down design that would occupy a much smaller footprint. But all of that has now changed thanks to a surprising property swap between the two companies that will see over three million square feet of real estate switch hands.

Interiors is an online film and architecture publication, published by Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian. Interiors runs an exclusive column for ArchDaily that analyzes and diagrams films in terms of space. Their Official Store will carry exclusive prints from these posts.

The visual medium of film has meant that style has always played a significant role in cinema. It’s one of the reasons why film and architecture have gone hand in hand for the past hundred years. In some sense, both mediums display complementary qualities; film as photography captures the structural aspects of architecture, while architectural design dictates cinematic space.

The same can’t be said for television – because even though television has undergone an aesthetic transformation in the past few years, with shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Detective, and The Knick, it’s still very much a character-based medium. The format itself allows for the close examination of characters over the course of many hours.

A key catalyst to the formation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was the demolition of the original Pennsylvania Station in 1963. The new body made it its mission to protect New York City’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings and sites by granting them landmark or historic district status, and regulating them once they were designated.

The past year has been a controversial one for landmarking, coincidentally on the 50th anniversary of the passing of the landmarks law, from a move to de-calendar landmarks to a bill that would have removed landmarks from consideration without being heard.

Looking back in history, here are ten controversial redeveloped landmark or historical buildings in New York City, as a reminder of the constant push and pull between landmarking and development.

Architecture is a broad field of practice, an industry where individual personalities are embraced as intrinsically part of the job. We’re all architects and we all live for design but we’re quite a varied bunch. Here we’ve cheekily compiled a list of the 21 different architects you’ll meet at some point in your career.

The Stealth Fighter

This architect manages to fly under the radar, seemingly just zooming in and out of Revit all day. You wonder how he keeps his job…until one day he sweeps in from underneath you and gets the promotion.

The Entrepreneur

Architects often have to wear many hats in the office and this one is particularly good at wearing the accountant hat and would probably find this article useful. Thanks for keeping the numbers out of the red!

The Project Manager

There has to be someone keeping all the silly little designers on their toes and that is the Project Manager. Awesome at management, but many of these types seemingly can’t manage to design.

The Silent Struggler

Most architects probably fit into this category: you try to keep your cool in the office as you work at your desk but inside you’re cursing the 300 pieces that still need to be glued onto the presentation model for tomorrow’s meeting.

The Groundhog

The difference between the Silent Struggler and the Groundhog is that the latter is happy to be doing the work, never seeing the light of day. This architect lives to work and is probably the first to arrive in the office and the last to leave…does this guy live here or something

French firm SCAU designed the undulating fibreglass roof of Marseille's football stadium, which is set to host the UEFA Euro 2016 semi-final between France and Germany this Thursday (+ slideshow).

Dans le cadre de l’édition 2016 du Monde Festival, Le Monde propose aux festivaliers d’explorer la thématique « Agir » sous l’angle de l’expérimentation et de la création collective. Le dimanche 18 septembre à 14 heures, Le Monde Festival vous invite à l’atelier « Construire un habitat minimum de vie », animé par l’architecte Olivier Leclercq. Gratuit et sur inscription uniquement.

Manger, dormir, s’abriter. Au-delà des fonctions vitales qui s’imposent à une personne en recherche urgente d’abri - migrant, réfugié, SDF - quels sont ses besoins et comment les intégrer à un habitat à construire ?

The challenge posed to the DVVD agency was huge, primarily involving the skilful management, with no overrun, of 17 months of works, divided into two phases. A rst phase of 7 months, for the renovation of the ice rink and the start of works on the main hall, with a 2-month interruption in works for an interim reopening to host the BNP Paribas Masters tennis tournament and some thirty concerts. The second phase of 10 months, to be executed at a brisk pace, was to involve the reconstruction of the concert hall, the ting-out of reception rooms, dressing rooms, public spaces, sports facilities, press rooms and show production facilities, the reworking of technical premises and the acoustic and thermal treatment of the outer shell of the building. All this was to be done without the slightest adjustment to due dates and costs, there being no possibility of an extension to the works budget of 110 million euros, and the Masters tennis tournament being an annual event. A just-in-time schedule, with an extremely precise sequencing of phases, was devised as a result. 

• Architects
  DVVD Engineers Architects Designers
• Location
  12th arrondissement, 75012 Paris, France
• Project Directors
  Vincent Dominguez and Daniel Vaniche
• Team
  Paula Castro, Céline Cerisier, Vincent Dominguez, Toma Dryjski, Bertrand Potel, Louis Ratajczak, Daniel Vaniche
• Area
  62000.0 sqm
• Project Year
  2015
• Photographs
  Courtesy of DVVD Engineers Architects Designers

USC architecture expert designs an award-winning game that explores ecology and urban planning The post Building better architecture through video games like Block’hood appeared first on Architecture Lab.

Architects are no strangers to technology. Even so, Jose Sanchez is a little less than traditional when it comes to his design tools.

Sanchez, an assistant professor at the USC School of Architecture, has earned acclaim for his architecture-inspired video game Block’hood.

Released for Windows and Mac in April, the indie title just won “best gameplay” at the 2016 Games for Change Festival. The annual event recognizes innovative games that explore health, education and social issues.

“It is really humbling to receive this award among incredible contenders like That Dragon, Cancer and Life Is Strange, Sanchez said. “The jury recognized how the mechanics of the game are fundamentally defining its ecological narrative. It means a lot for someone like me coming from architecture to be recognized outside my field, validating all the effort in attempting interdisciplinary research.”

The game lets players stack pieces and construct communities of their own design. Each piece has its own particular costs and effects: apartments, solar panels and shops all play different roles in the health of your building. Ecology is a key concern, with players being forced to think about greywater use and the effect of growth on the local ecology in a bid to maintain successful communities.

Sanchez was inspired by games like SimCity and Minecraft, open sandboxes that let players create their own designs. He was interested in exploring how gameplay could extend the kinds of debates architects have about urban planning to a wider group of people: What leads communities to weaken or decay? How do you take care of waste? How do you balance needs like electricity, jobs or food with population growth?

Asking these kinds of questions are “grand challenges” for architecture, Sanchez said. But he also wanted this game to appeal to more than just architects. He designed it to be playable for people ages 10 and up, with the hope that it could provoke these ideas in the minds of future creators.

“I think the architects of tomorrow will grow up playing Minecraft or games like this, where the ideas of systems are more pressing,” Sanchez said. “The game can simulate and model notions of gentrification, social change and segregation. These are problems that architects have to deal with at all times — and it’s doing it in a creative way.”

As a model for how architecture can affect society, Block’hood is fairly unique. Computational design has long been a part of the field; Sanchez said he was drawn to that side of the discipline from early on. He pursued a master’s degree that allowed him to simulate biological systems, using procedural generation to create complex, organic forms that would change shape under different conditions.

At the same time that he was studying architecture, Sanchez was learning programming. He used specialized software to explore the concepts that attracted his interest. But most of this software was designed for people with technical backgrounds — something he felt set a high barrier for entry to artists, tinkerers or others who would also enjoy exploring those concepts.

“If you use software designed for more people and people who aren’t highly technical, that software needs to teach you how to play,” Sanchez said. Create software that teaches people how to use it, and voila: Your program starts to look like a game.

It took a lot of experimentation to develop Block’hood. Along the way, Sanchez received help from Gentaro Makinoda, a graduate student at the USC School of Architecture, as well as Bryan Zhang and Alan Hung, graduates of USC Games. Sanchez collaborates frequently with the USC Games program more widely, where he gives lectures.

“I think Block’hood is a wonderful example of how many faculty at USC are involved in innovation in games,” said Tracy Fullerton, USC Games director. “It’s so great to have an architecture professor doing such deep work in games here.”

Towering bamboo poles encase this cylindrical wooden theatre in France, which opened in a fanfare last week, despite suffering vandalism just a few days before (+ slideshow).

Designed Paris-based British office Studio Andrew Todd, the Elizabethan theatre is located in the grounds of the historical castle Chateau d'Hardelot near Calais, northern France.

The Goldenberg House is a 1959 unbuilt project by Louis Kahn for an area in Montgomery County near Philadelphia. This work couples previous Kahn’s compositional themes with some degrees of experimentation in the spatial relationships between geometrical forms. The central patio is the center of the house and the departing core of the composition: a perfect square surrounded by a corridor opening on the service areas,  storage rooms and bathrooms lit by skylights. In the typical Kahnian separation between servant and served areas, the outer zones include only the living rooms and the bedrooms irradiated from the central core.

At this point the rigorous perpendicular composition is contrasted by the introduction of diagonal lines inciding the exterior geometry of the house and identifing the limits of some areas in the plan. The single-pitch roofs underline the formal autonomy of the single rooms which get progressively detached from the central core. In opposition with the free floor plan, (an architectural motif of the time), Kahn identifies the specificity of the rooms attributing a distinct shape to each one of them. The rooms are autonomous but not isolated, the plan establishing a relationship among each contigous space, encouraging the circulation among the living areas.

MDDM studio proposes gridded MALI square museum wing
 italian-german MDDM studio installs a grid within a grid for the ‘MALI square’ concept, created as entry for Museo de Arte de Lima’s contemporary art wing competition. awarded an honorable mention among 387 total proposals, ‘MALI square’ emphasizes flexibility in answer to the city’s complex urban situation.

Tomando como protagonista el Santuario de Pachacamac, surge un proyecto que tanto tiene de arquitectura como de paisajismo. Resultado de un profundo estudio sobre el proceso de conformación tanto arquitectónico como espiritual de la preexistencia, Patricia Llosa y Rodolfo Cortegana nos proponen un edificio actual pero respetuoso con el entorno y la preexistencia.
El Museo de Pachacamac nace del territorio, de su topografía, ensalzando como máximo protagonista a las edificaciones prehispánicas con las que convive. Un espacio que, inspirado en la idea del peregrinaje permite al visitante fluir en ese todo conformado por la preexistencia, la nueva pieza y el paisaje. Es evidente en esta propuesta que Llosa Cortegana Arquitectos entienden al visitante como algo más que un mero observador, interactuando ya con la arquitectura en la construcción de una realidad que lo prepara para la experiencia del Santuario Pachacamac.

Construction of a metal-clad residential tower in Brooklyn by Mexican architect Enrique Norten is almost finished, with tenants slated to move in by the end of this summer.

Called 300 Ashland, the apartment building is situated in Fort Greene, a vibrant district that is home to the Brooklyn Academy of Music performing arts venue. It was designed by Enrique Norten, founder of TEN Arquitectos, which has offices in New York and Mexico City.

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has been commissioned to design a residential tower for Vancouver that its developers claim will be the tallest hybrid timber structure in the world.

Called Terrace House, the apartment tower is slated to rise near the waterfront in central Vancouver, where a curved apartment tower by architect Kengo Kuma is also being built.

Although information about the Ban-designed structure's height has not yet been disclosed, a rendering of the building shows a glass-clad tower with a sloped roof. Its upper portion will be formed by a timber frame supported by a concrete and steel core.

"The project will set the benchmark for the tallest hybrid timber structure in the world, in addition to being Shigeru Ban's tallest project to date and first-ever project in Canada," said the developer, PortLiving, which is due to release more details about the project later this year.

From a list of 25 finalists released in May, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) has announced the winners of the 2016 European Prize for Urban Public Space. Awarded since 2000 to recognize “transformations and improvements in the public spaces of Europe,” this year’s prize names two joint winners along with four special mentions. All 25 finalists will have their work featured in an exhibition that will tour Europe over the next two years, and also will be published in an online archive that features past finalists.

Three decades ago the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC) Headquarters by Norman Foster emerged onto the architectural seen as an exemplary product of industrial design. The open layout with its exposed steel structure generated a powerful corporate identity for the bank. But the restrained atmosphere of white architectural lighting and the lack of distinctive façade lighting has lost its attractiveness after sunset. Now the colorful and dynamic relighting presents a remarkable example of how an architectural icon has shifted from a productivist ideology towards a scenographic image. To the western observer the multicolored light language may give off a playful impression, but to the local culture the transformation evokes grandiosity.

corten steel is a group of steel alloys which are exposed to natural weather conditions for several years in order to form a rust-like appearance. this material has been chosen by toti semerano as the architectural element for a detached wall which will circle a hotel in salento, italy. 

Just a few weeks after 40 projects were shortlisted for the 2015 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award, The European Commission and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe announced the five finalists today in London.

They are:

Ravensburg Art Museum in Ravensburg, Germany by Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei
Danish Maritime Museum in Helsingør, Denmark by Bjarke Ingels Group
Antinori Winery in Firenze, Italy by Archea Associati
Philharmonic Hall Szczecin in Szczecin, Poland by Barozzi / Veiga
Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, London School of Economics in London, United Kingdom by O’Donnell + Tuomey

With the 2016 Salone del Mobile now behind us, Romanian photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has shared his photos from Milan Design Week, along with his ranking of the top five architectural installations. Read on to see his exceptional collection of images accompanied by short descriptions of each project.

El premio Mies Crown Hall of Architecture ya tiene finalistas. Después de un largo periplo del jurado por las Américas varias, visitando los edificios seleccionados para esta segunda edición del premio –organizado por el IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) que fundara el mismo Mies van der Rohe y de cuyo edificio principal del Campus toma el nombre– se escogieron siete finalistas de entre los cuales se premiará al elegido en octubre. Un jurado conformado por Wiel Arets (director de la Escuela de arquitectura del IIT anfitriona del premio), Stan Allen (profesor y exdirector de Escuela de Arquitectura de Princeton), Ila Berman (Directora de la Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Waterloo, Canadá), Jean Pierre Crousse (arquitecto peruano de Barclays&Crousse, autores del galardonado pabellón de Perú en la bienal de Arquitectura de Venecia 2016) y Florencia Rodríguez (directora de la revista PLOT de Buenos Aires, Argentina), analizaron 177 obras construidas entre 2014 y 2015 desde Canadá hasta Chile. Si bien la primera edición del premio abarcó los primeros trece años del siglo, este galardón tiene carácter bianual y premia tres categorias: a la mejor obra, a la mejor propuesta de equipos emergentes y al mejor proyecto estudiantil. Los ganadores no reciben gratificación económica –como sucede con el Pritzker, el Imperiale o el Aga Kahn, por mencionar los mejor posicionados– sino que se invitan a los ganadores, como profesores del IIT.

Los siete finalistas fueron John & Patricia Patkau, por el Centro de Visitas del Sitio Histórico Nacional de Fort York en Toronto, Canada; Patricia Llosa y Rodolfo Cortegana, por el Museo de Sitio Pachacamac en Lima, Perú; SANAA, por las Granjas Grace en New Canaan, Estados Unidos; Grafton Architects, por el nuevo Campus urbano de la Universidad de Tecnología e Ingeniería de Lima, Perú; Michael Maltzan, por un edificio de departamentos en Los Ángeles, Estados Unidos; Alberto Kalach, por el edificio de oficinas en Constituyentes, en la Ciudad de México; y una casa de Angelo Bucci / SPBR arquitetos en Sao Paulo, Brasil.

An extension to the Historical Museum Bern, that was built by André Lambert in 1894 in an historic style that invokes Swiss architecture of the 15th and 16th century, this project is composed of two distinct elements. A 1000m2 temporary exhibition hall located beneath a new civic square and a monolithic six storey block along the southern side of the site that houses the Bern city archives, offices and a library. In the part under the square, the exhibition space is a double high ‘black box’ space suitable for a range of different visiting exhibitions. In close proximity, below the exhibition space, there are two levels for the storage of artifacts in secure climate controlled conditions. This relationship of archive and exhibition space facilitates the easy care and display of collections.
The second element has two very different faces. Towards the square
the building presents a transparent orthogonal modernist curtain wall. The activities within the building are clearly visible. In contrast the south façade rises up - a folded cliff of cast
concrete, punctured by small random openings and indentations. This concrete skin wraps around the building embracing and sheltering its contents. Behind the south wall, in a vertical slot, a triple height staircase connects the floorplates. Outside a sweep of board steps rise up to the square in front of the glazed north façade.