The Architecture of the City

El equipo multidisciplinar liderado por el arquitecto japonés Sou Fujimoto ha sido escogido para construir la segunda edición de “Architecture Folie” del siglo XXI en Montpellier, Francia. Dentro de este equipo también se incluyen los participantes franceses Nicolas Laisne Associés (NL*A) y Manal Rachdi Oxo Architects

Man-Made Cliff
The unique condition of Lima and its relationship to the Pacific, with cliffs defining the boundary between the city and the sea, was a starting point in the conception of this project.

A green valley connecte the site with the sea. The UTEC campus project is conceived as a ‘new cliff’, continuing the sea edge, clearly stating and defining the University on its new ground.
The northern boundary of the site contains a busy road network. We see this northern boundary as the main façade of the project, visible from passing traffic and it is the register of the new campus in the public mind. We have positioned the special rooms of the University: the auditorium, the conference rooms, the theatre / movie venue, at the base of the ‘cliff ’ face, marking the northern boundary to the highway, encouraging cultural interaction with the wider public.

project in context - ocean, cliffs, city and motorway

PROJECT INFO
Client UTEC- Universidad de Ingeniería & Tecnologia
Size 35,000m2
Date 2011 (Competition)
Location Lima, Peru

COLLABORATORS
Local Architect Shell Arquitectos
Environmental Consultants BDSP
Structure & Civils GCAQ Ingenieros Civiles
Mechanical Consultants Gutierrez Cantillo Ingenieros
Electrical Consultants AT Consultores
Landscape Paisaje Vivo
Acoustic Consultants Jimenez & Moreno
Project Management GCAQ Ingenieros Civiles

MAD’s first residential project in Europe was revealed by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo earlier today. The building, called UNIC, will be located in the newly developed neighborhood of Clichy-Batignolles, a former brownfield site in the northeast of the seventeenth arrondissement, covering over fifty hectares. The tower will be adjacent to Martin Luther King Park and a courthouse by Renzo Piano that is currently under construction. MAD was awarded the design through an international competition, and the project is being developed in collaboration with Biecher Architectes.

French firm Antonini Darmon has completed a social housing block near Paris, featuring a white concrete facade surrounded on all sides by rows of arch-fronted balconies (+ slideshow).

Antonini Darmon designed the €4.2 million building for a former industrial site in Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb to the west of the city. It accommodates 33 apartments.

Named Arches Boulogne after its distinctive facade, the apartment block forms part of a wider redevelopment of the area that was once home to Renault car factories.

French artist Daniel Buren has covered the glass sails of Frank Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton building in Paris with an array of multicoloured filters (+ slideshow).

Named Observatory of Light, the site-specific installation was unveiled yesterday at the Fondation Louis Vuitton arts centre in Paris' Jardin d'Acclimatation.

The Museum of Modern Art announces A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, an exhibition focused on the work of architects and designers orbiting Pritzker Prize winners Toyo Ito and SANAA, on view from March 13 to July 4, 2016.
Providing an overview of Ito's career and his influence as a mentor to a new generation of Japanese architects, the exhibition offers a retrospective of recent works by three generations of internationally acclaimed designers, including Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. Displaying models, drawings, and images of more than 40 architectural designs, the exhibition highlights the renewed prominence and innovation of contemporary architecture from Japan since the 1990s.

A Japanese Constellation presents a survey of architectural production since 2000, and reveals a network of influence and cross-pollination that has become particularly relevant at the start of the 21st century. Departing from one of Ito's pivotal works, the Sendai Mediatheque, completed in 2001 (and part of MoMA's collection), as well as SANAA's 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition is organized through intersecting spaces separated by translucent curtains on which multimedia presentations are projected. This layout echoes the different connections and levels of influence among the selected architects.

With its idea of a network of luminaries at work, A Japanese Constellation is intended as a reflection on the transmission of an architectural sensibility, and suggests an alternative model to w...

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The late Zaha Hadid's first building in the Arab world, Iran's largest pedestrian bridge and a floating school in Nigeria are among the 19 projects competing to win $1 million in the 2016 Aga Khan Award for Architecture (+ slideshow).

BIG's huge urban park in Copenhagen, a power station in Baku and a university in Morocco are also shortlisted to win the triennial award, billed as one of the most lucrative architectural prizes in the world.

On a recent Sunday afternoon children sprawled on the gleaming white marble floor beneath the oculus in Santiago Calatrava's new transit and retail hub at the World Trade Center site. Young couples Instagrammed the white ribbed ceiling with light streaming through a strip of skylights. People hung out and marvelled at the space, a photo-worthy hall that at this moment serves no purpose at all. It was a rare moment in an un-programmed, un-planned, free space in a relentlessly commercial city increasingly defined by exclusion and surveillance.

Though on that day the hall resembled a public space, few will mistake it for one in the future. Referred to as the transit hub, Calatrava's largely underground building is, in fact, a vast shopping mall that happens to connect to a few commuter rail and subway lines. The signature oculus is actually an atrium that brings natural light — dramatically, even beautifully – into a two-storey shopping arcade that rings the space.

Early on, Calatrava hoped this space would bring light down to the train platforms running under the site. In the reality, the oculus serves as a magnet to pull in throngs of tourists from the plaza level below ground.

The all-white structure is dwarfed by the towers that surround it

Above ground, the all-white structure is dwarfed by the towers that surround it, including SOM's One World Trade, Rogers Stirk Harbour's Three World Trade, currently under construction, and Fumihiko Maki's tower Four. BIG's (or possibly Foster's) tower Two, for now, exists only on the boards. Calatrava gave his small peaked building greater presence with asymmetrical tines that crisscross over the skylights.

The relatively small number of riders exiting the platforms half a city block underground from the oculus/shopping atrium, which the Port Authority claims to be about 50,000 per day, are not enough to support all the retail space eventually planned for the site: 34,800 square metres. Revealingly, the Port Authority, the bi-state agency that built the complex, refers to the oculus at the Transportation & Retail Hub on its website for potential tenants.

This is where Calatrava's architectural theatrics do their real work. The thousands of New Jersey commuters are easily matched by the throngs of visitors milling around above ground who are there to see the 9/11 memorial and the country's tallest building, One World Trade. So Calatrava's task is to draw as many of those people down to the shopping concourses below as possible, converting tourists into consumers.

In August of last year, many of the most precious landmarks of the ancient city of Palmyra were damaged or destroyed by the forces of ISIS in a violent, iconoclastic attempt to send a message to the rest of the world. Since the UNESCO World Heritage Site was recaptured in March, the question in the architectural preservation community has been how to rebuild and preserve the buildings. That process will begin, of course, with a thorough assessment of the damage.

Shortly after Palmyra was recaptured Iconem, a French company which specializes in the digitization of archeological sites, arrived in Palmyra to lead the survey. In partnership with the Syrian DGAM (Direction Générale des Antiquités et des Musées), Iconem was granted access to the city to survey the damage to the temples of Bel and Baalshamin, the Monumental Arch, the Valley of Tombs, and the museum—all sites which are of the most cultural value and therefore were the greatest targets of ISIS's violence.

Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and Rem Koolhaas walk into a bar. What do they order? CAD Drinks, of course. It's a Singapore Sling like you have never seen before: drawn to scale, in elevation, and divided meticulously by content - ice cubes and orange slice included. Alcoholic drinks are colour coded, inventoried, organized and rendered in this downloadable DWG for Autocad. Architects rejoice: happy hour is that much closer to lunch hour.

Created by Autodesk Technologist Shaan Hurley, CAD Drinks are a playful twist on typical Autocad drawing tools. Row upon row of drinks are translated into drawings suited to the architect's brain, complete with instructions for preparation and consumption. The project has been immensely popular: Hurley has since released Whisky Drinks for Autocad and CAD Drinks for Engineers. According to Hurley, "this is a classic to enjoy plotted, not stirred."

Hungarian firm Napur Architect has been selected ahead of BIG, OMA and Zaha Hadid Architects to design a major new museum in Budapest's City Park (+ slideshow).

Budapest-based Napur Architect was selected ahead of 14 other firms for the Museum of Ethnography, which will be built alongside a concert hall by Sou Fujimoto and a national art gallery by SANAA as part of a huge new museum complex.

Architect Rafael Viñoly has spoken out about problems with his 432 Park Avenue skyscraper in Manhattan, currently the tallest residential tower in the western hemisphere.

Update: Rafael Viñoly sent Dezeen a public letter apologising for the comments he made about 432 Park Avenue. Read the full story »

As tenants begin to move in to the 1,396-foot (426-metre) tower on 57th Street, its architect has revealed that he is not entirely happy with the project.

"It has a couple of screw-ups," the Uruguayan architect reportedly said during a talk hosted by real estate brokerage Douglas Elliman at the building last week.

Bringing some minor changes implied by the demands of our time, today we could ironically build a complex of the same type as the one Sauvage built 50 years ago, and this achievement would have nothing to envy to all the most recent models. This example should encourage us to explore and exploit, with unprejudiced eyes, the future of the past. Antoine Grumbach (Excerpt from “H” Revue de l’habitat social n°30, May 1978)

“Frank still doesn’t know how to use a computer, I mean, except to throw it at somebody.”

The above quote — taken from the transcript of Sydney Pollack’s film “The Sketches of Frank Gehry,” released 10 years ago today — encapsulates the dry sense of humor pervading this legendary architect’s studio. Of course, Timothy Paulson’s comment was knowingly facetious — the 87-year-old Pritzker Prize winner has been utilizing computer-based technology for years with the help of a talented engineering team, even starting a spin-off company to advance BIM design software for the whole profession.

The desire to further these technologies stems from Gehry’s perpetual experiments with curvaceous, fragmented volumes, now famous around the world for their theatrical fluidity. However, before the digital journey begins for each project, Gehry uses far more traditional mediums to help him visualize the formal possibilities of a building. As well as models — a 3D collage of crumpled card and all manner of inanimate objects — the architect’s sketches have become synonymous with the dramatic aesthetics of his completed structures.

“I think of them as scribble,” says Gehry of his freeform line drawings. “I don’t think they mean anything to anybody except to me. At the end of the project we wheel out these little drawings and they’re uncannily like the finished building.” To mark exactly a decade since Pollack’s fascinating movie brought Gehry’s unique approach to a global audience, we take a closer look at seven of the architect’s most fluid scribbles, together with the iconic architectural landmarks they inspired.

Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's science museum with a skeletal roof that projects over a public plaza has opened in Rio de Janeiro (+ slideshow).

At the end of last year, zaha hadid architects unveiled their tower proposal for the city of melbourne in australia. the ‘582-606 collins street’ tower – ZHA’s first project in melbourne- is one step closer to receiving the go-ahead with construction as it has been announced that the scheme has been referred to victoria’s planning minister for approval without consideration by the city of melbourne’s future committee. working with local-practice plus architecture and developed by landream, the design of the 54-storey mixed-used tower features a façade composed of elegant colonnades of sculptural, curved columns. a delicate filigree gently envelops the building, with the scheme designed to use 50% less energy than a conventional mixed-use tower, this filigreed façade contributes to a reduction in the direct solar gain of the building and emissions

The house for the Romanian poet and Dadaist Tristan Tzara and his wife, the painter Knitson, was designed and built by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos between 1925 and 1926. Specific requirements of the artist were followed by the architect, but the formal process is well identifiable within Loos corpus of works.

Maurizio Scripanti (1916-1996) was an original figure in Italian post-war architectural panorama. You maybe remember another project of him that we featured here in Socks:  the Teatro Lirico for the City of Cagliari (1965)

His lifelong research was daring in every aspect of the architectural production (from the representation techniques, to the technological and spatial investigations) without ever being utopical.
His proposals tended to always keep a pragmatical approach and focus on feasibility even when they looked extremely visionary.

His entry for the competition for an office building for Peugeot in Buenos Aires (competition: 1961) deals with a double scale: the monumental, embodied by the skyscraper as a whole, and that of the single offices for the different companies which were to occupy the spaces.

The main volume is plastically fragmented in several blocks and the façade is composed by orientable brises-soleil plated with coloured elements and lights.
The brands of the offices could be integrated over this movable façade and changed throught time, merging completely with the architecture of the building. In Sacripanti’s words (our traslation from the Italian text) the Peugeot skyscraper was a “vertical neighborhood warped with lames upon which it is possible to write”

The introduction of a strong graphical component in the project underlines the architect’s awareness of the communicational role a building could play in the consumer society.

Dans cette quatrième séance du cycle "Les architectes au travail", Doina Petrescu sera l'invitée de Sandra Parvu.

Ecole nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris-Malaquais / Bâtiment Lenoir RDC / Entrée libre.

Architecte, docteur en études féminines à l’université Paris-VIII, Doina Petrescu est professeur d'architecture et de design activism à l'Université de Sheffield. Elle a dirigé et co-dirigé de nombreux ouvrages de référence sur les relations entre architecture et politique, parmi lesquels les plus récents sont The Social (Re)Production of Architecture (2016), Trans-Local-Act: Cultural Practices Within and Across (2010) et Agency: Working with Uncertain Architectures (2009). En 2001, Doina Petrescu a initié à Paris avec Constantin Petcou l'Atelier d'architecture autogérée (AAA), un réseau interdisciplinaire qui développe des 'stratégies' et des 'tactiques' de recherche et d’intervention dans la ville, au croisement de multiples points de vue, incluant urbanistes, chercheurs, activistes et habitants.
La rencontre a pour objectif d'interroger le montage, le rôle et la place de cette agence qui s'inscrit par sa relation à la commande architecturale en marge des modèles plus communément répandus dans la profession. Elle s'attachera également à discuter la façon dont cette pratique dite alternative suscite aujourd'hui un intérêt croissant dans les centres de pouvoir aussi bien industriels qu'universitaires.
Sandra Parvu est architecte et docteur en études urbaines (EHESS, Paris). Elle est chercheur dans le laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie (LAVUE UMR 7218) et enseigne à l'ENSA Paris Val de Seine. Ses recherches construisent une approche anthropologique et historique aux pratiques architecturale, paysagère et urbaine. Elle est l'auteur de Grands ensembles en situation. Journal de bord de quatre chantiers (Mētispresses, 2011).


Entrée libre, bâtiment Lenoir, rez-de-chaussée.