The Architectural Review articles from April 2006

The Architectural Review archives from April 2006

The good, the bad and the all too predictable.(international property festival )
April 1, 2006... MIPIM, the annual international property festival in Cannes, is an extraordinary phenomenon. More than 21 000 real estate professionals, including a substantial number of architects, pay [euro] 1400 each to register (work out the revenue for...

Olympic rebirth: Berlin's Olympic Stadium, long neglected for its historical associations, has been imaginatively and sensitively revived as the showpiece for this year's World Cup.
April 1, 2006... The Berlin Olympic Stadium has always been an extraordinary and contentious challenge for politicians, architects, engineers and athletes. The present stadium was conceived and masterplanned by Werner March between 1926 and 1933 on the site...

Peter Cook: from London to Vienna via Paris and Norway--the style is international.
April 1, 2006... The great advantage of the old, pre 1990s, idea of the 'International Style' was that you could apply it to such a wide range of stuff: usually flat roofed, white walled, strip windowed. Good, bad, ugly and often, to the trained eye,...

Good hosts: we consider the effects of Germany's willingness to be a receptive host for the ambitions of foreign architects.
April 1, 2006... One of the most formative experiences of my architectural education was an early '80s field trip to the newly completed Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. As callow students we were astonished by the scale and assurance of it all, beguiled by the...

Destination Wolfsburg: burg or a berg ... stronghold or floating mass?... Phaeno is open to interpretation.
April 1, 2006... This building study will not concern itself with the so-called superstar status of its architect. Neither will it adopt inappropriate superlatives that inaccurately place the building at the forefront of state of the art architectural progress:...

Modern Baroque: a provincial German art museum gets the Frank Gehry treatment.
April 1, 2006... Some of Frank Gehry's most innovative buildings are scattered across Germany, but only the Vitra Design Museum (AR December 1994 and the DG Bank in Berlin (AR August 2001) have attracted wide attention. MARTa, the museum of modern art and...

Cathedral of commerce: this new department store is a monumental shop window with wider urban ambitions.(Peek & Cloppenburg KG)
April 1, 2006... Since 1901, department store chain Peek & Cloppenburg has been a fixture in the lives of German shoppers, beginning life as a gentleman's outfitter in Berlin and thence expanding into ladies' wear and city centres across Germany. Fortunes...

Cottbus kaleidoscope: this library enlivens both the campus and civic realm of a former industrial centre striving to reinvent itself.
April 1, 2006... Cottbus, a banal industrial city near the Polish border, is worth a fast hour's drive on the autobahn from Berlin for its quirky Jugendstil theatre, and as an incentive to continue on to Wroclaw (the former Breslau), a repository of classic...

Designs on business: a management school in the Ruhr suggests new visions for the post-industrial world.
April 1, 2006... Now building outside her native Japan (the much anticipated Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art completes later this year), Kazuyo Sejima's first European project will be the Zollverein School of Management and Design, currently under...

Hamburg goes global.(urbanism)
April 1, 2006... 'When at night my thoughts turn to Germany there is no chance of sleep...' Nachtgedanken, Heinrich Heine What would the poet Heinrich Heine, whose death 150 years ago is commemorated this year, have thought of Hamburg today? His ambivalent...

Bathrooms to splash out on. Julia Dawson reports on recent innovations.
April 1, 2006... 501 SWAROVSKI Swarovski, world leader in cut crystal, has collaborated with German bathroom fittings company Kludi to come up with the luxury Dazzling Daydream bathroom. The world of the bathroom seemed a logical step for the crystal...

Specifier's information.
April 1, 2006... Marley Eternit Green fibre cement slates from Marley Eternit's 'Rivendale' range have been used on an award-winning new housing development built by Machynys Homes in South Wales. Marley Eternit's Rivendale slates were specified because...

Power of ten.(Team 10: In Search of a Utopia of the Present 1953-81 )(Book review)
April 1, 2006... TEAM 10, 1953-1981: IN SEARCH OF A UTOPIA OF THE PRESENT Edited by Max Risselada & Dirk van den Heuvel. Rotterdam: NAi. 2005. [euro]69.50 Team Ten was an international association of architects that grew out of CIAM, the International...

Architecture defined.(Isms: Understanding Architecture )(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... ... ISMS, UNDERSTANDING ARCHITECTURE By Jeremy Melvin, London: Herbert Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]9.99 This is the best value short guide to architecture this reviewer can recall. In 160 pages, packed with excellent illustrations,...

The case for sprawl.(Sprawl: A Compact History )(Book review)
April 1, 2006... SPRAWL: A COMPACT HISTORY By Robert Bruegmann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]17.50 Reader beware, there is a cunning tactic in the title: Bruegmann's book is not really about suburbs (though where else...

Swiss made.(Switzerland: An Urban Portrait)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... SWITZERLAND--AN URBAN PORTRAIT By Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron and Christian Schmid. Basel: Birkhauser 2005. [euro]44.90 Produced under the aegis of the ETH Studio Basel and its Contemporary City...

Slick work.(Norman Foster: Works 2)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... NORMAN FOSTER: WORKS 2 Edited by David Jenkins. Prestel. 2005. [pounds sterling]60 The Foster office deserves to have its work beautifully recorded, and this, the second of the six volumes that we are promised, does just that. Works 2...

Bayt al-'Aqqad: The History and Restoration of a House in Old Damascus.(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Part of the UNESCO World Heritage programme, a derelict principally fifteenth-century town house was painstakingly restored by the Danish Institute in Damascus after their acquisition of the house in 1997.A team of Danish and Syrian architects...

Radical unearthings: the new Morphosis exhibition in Paris explores a still optimistic and provocative Californian architectural vanguard.
April 1, 2006... Thom Mayne, the person, is remarkable for his open curiosity about things and about the ways things go together to make up our contemporary environment. Thom Mayne, the architect, is remarkable for his invention of forms that challenge...

The future of cities: the AR's recent London conference on masterplanning and the character of cities provided much food for thought.
April 1, 2006... Ever since council planning officers decided to segue their occupation (once a second-string activity of architects) into the loftier and less taxing realm of policing local visual issues, architects have had a difficult time of it. Now some of...

Lightly thrown graffiti.(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... In Manhattan there is now that guerrilla graffiti group who make cheap Throwies which they hurl carefully on to buildings which need cheering up and happen to have metal panels on their facades. A Throwie, as you will discover at www....

Semper hilaris.(browser)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Ever since the idea became fashionable of the rain-screen as a building's outer skin, architects and designers have been doing some very interesting things with the idea--including rereading the slightly dotty theories about building surfaces...

The dangers of dust.(browser)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... I won't bother to elaborate on R & Sie's Dusty Relief, the fur-like cladding which apparently results from enmeshing your building in ambient pollutant-attracting electrically charged wires (try the site...

Sweetness and light.(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... And then there is the site of French Canadian artist Francois Dallegret at www.arteria.ca. Dallegret's immaculate architectural connection commenced in the mid '60s with his illustrations for Reyner Banham's seminal Art in America article 'A...

Better than promised.(http://eyecandy-webcandy.blogspot.com/)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... An update on Eye Candy mentioned last month (at http://eyecandy-webcandy.blogspot.com/), Eric promised a weekly hyperlink to a new and interesting architectural site--but the reality is rather better than that--one maybe every three or four...

Diary.(Calendar)
April 1, 2006... AR'S CHOICE OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS AUSTRIA THE UNKNOWN LOOS: WALTER Architekturzentrum Wien, Vienna Until 22 May This exhibition is dedicated not to Adolf but to one of his younger colleagues and...

Delight.
April 1, 2006... On 15 February 1945, two days after the notorious Allied bombardment of Dresden, the burnt-out dome of the city's famous Frauenkirche finally collapsed. Of all the wartime destruction wrought on Europe's cities, the loss of the Frauenkirche,...