The Architectural Review articles from April 2008

The Architectural Review archives from April 2008

The RIBA President's Medal crits point up the need for good verbal delivery; Peter Cook discovers that the architectural generation game is full of both delights and pitfalls; visionary architecture critic, editor and writer Martin Pawley remembered.(view)(Royal Institute of British Architects)
April 1, 2008... INEXTRICABLY LINKED The United States is suffering from the inevitable role of being the most powerful country in the world; that is the fate of empires. Yet this is an 'empire' of an unusual sort. It involves neither conquest not...

This year's RIBA President's Medal crits showed the importance of good verbal delivery.(LOST FOR WORDS)(Royal Institute of British Architects)
April 1, 2008... RIBA President, Sunand Prasad, began the 3rd annual RIBA President's Medal crits by introducing this year's RIBA Royal Gold Medallist, Edward Cullinan. It was a busy week of Gold Medal events that seemed to both invigorate and fatigue the 76...

Levitate win with urban splash.(WISH YOU WERE HERE)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... Levitate's competition-winning strategy for Weston-super-Mare's Birnbeck Island focuses on rebalancing the nature of this unique habitat. Addressing issues that face many historic piers, an RIBA competition was launched that attracted 95...

Martin Pawley 1938-2008.(obituary)(Biography)
April 1, 2008... Martin Pawley was a brave, outspoken critic of a kind that is extremely rare in the field of architecture. Others might produce the occasional combative piece, but only Pawley kept it up consistently throughout his whole career. The timid and...

The architectural generation game is full of both delights and pitfalls.(view)
April 1, 2008... 'What can be done about us 40-year-olds?' It seemed an odd question, coming as it did from an active. upwardly mobile Harvard graduate about to return to a thriving corner of Asia where he would be landing somewhere near the top of a powerful...

Can do, will do: overseas architects are helping turn America's construction industry from can't do to can do.(comment)
April 1, 2008... If you have ever tuned into a home improvement channel on American cable TV, you would know it is wrong to suggest that Americans can't build. Equipped, bearded and ready to rock, what Chuck Key can't do with his supercharged carbide and...

The Gray Lady: the Renzo Piano building workshop extends its reach in the United States, designing its first high-rise tower, in Manhattan.(The New York Times)
April 1, 2008... Renzo Piano needs little introduction. Since the 1970s, he has been one of the most influential forces behind the best of European High-Tech. While thoroughly ltalian, epitomising many of the nation's best traits (charisma, passion and...

Boxing clever: Japanese rigour comes to New York's Lower East Side.
April 1, 2008... Transparency and refinement are the hallmarks of SANAA, the partnership of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, which won acclaim for their shimmering glass facades in Tokyo, and their crystalline art museums in Kanazawa and Toledo (AR November...

Denver's new MCA celebrtes radical art and architecture.(ART INCUBATOR)
April 1, 2008... Lying at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, Denver inhabits a particularly potent interface of geography and topography. Here, the horizontal meets the vertical, as the mind-blowing spaces of the High Plains collide with the backbone of America....

Grimshaw: performing arts centre, Troy, New York, USA.
April 1, 2008... Founded in 1824 'for the purpose of instructing persons... in the application of science to the common purposes of life', the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is one of the most venerable science universities in the US. From its leafy campus...

Hadid: art museum, East Lansing, Michigan, USA.
April 1, 2008... It's been five years since Zaha Hadid's first blistering foray into America with the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (AR July 2003), a project that confounded received opinion and demonstrated that she could actually build....

Chipperfield: two museums, Anchorage, Alaska, and St Louis, Missouri, USA.
April 1, 2008... David Chipperfield's most recently completed Museum, the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, won the 2007 Stirling Prize (AR October 2007), responding well to a complicated brief, on a difficult site, in a specifically German architectural...

Libeskind: Jewish Museum, San Francisco, California, USA.
April 1, 2008... One of the key points the client is keen to convey is that Daniel Libeskind was not a world famous starchitect (their term) when commissioned to design this building in 1998. In the intervening decade the author's identity has become something...

Repatriating innovation: Hopkins Architects lead by example with four new university projects.(process)
April 1, 2008... Within the UK, Hopkins' work is familiar to many. What is less well known, however, is how over recent years the practice has extended its reach across the world. Establishing the firm with wife Patty in 1976, founding partner Michael Hopkins...

American connection: in the first of an occasional series, Kenneth Powell talks to a group of leading architects about the state of practice in their home country and further afield. The series, in association with Keim paints, begins with the United States.(world view)
April 1, 2008... 'The revenge of the American colonists... an invasion more of vandals than of Goths' was the response of one prominent member of the British architectural establishment to the arrival of large American practices in London back in the 1980s....

Off the radar: more Stealth Bomber than house, this new dwelling is a challenge to convention.(ar house)
April 1, 2008... Honi soit qui mal y pense--when the authorities demanded a traditional German gable roof for a new family home in the leafy suburbs of Frankfurt, architects Meixner Schluter Wendt returned the volley tongue-in-cheek. Though the roof's gradient...

Stone age: Marc Newson's extraordinary marble furniture is an alchemy that coaxes sensuous line from solid stone.(product review)
April 1, 2008... In the early sixteenth century it took Michelangelo three years to chisel and wrest the muscular form of David from its obstinate casing of Carrera marble. Purchased at vast expense by the city authorities, the huge block had been languishing...

Olympic cities: city agendas, planning and the world games, 1896-2012.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Edited by, John R. Cold and Margaret M. Gold, London: Routledge. 2007. [pounds sterling]24.99 This series of essays is the Olympics without the sporting endeavour, the thrill of competition and the international media circus. Instead the...

Windtower.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... By Anne Coles and Peter Jackson with a Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales. London: Stacey International. 2007.[pounds sterling]35 This is a beautifully illustrated book on Bastakiya, the old quarter of Dubai, in which Coles, a social...

Mapping London: making sense of the city.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... By Simon Foxell. London:Black Dog Publishing. 2007. [pounds sterling]39.95 I found this a very satisfying and enjoyable book. The subtitle suggests that it is earnestly trying to make 'sense of the city' but, as the contents reveal page...

Gillespie, Kidd + Coia: architecture 1956-1987.(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Edited by Johnny Rodger. Glasgow: The Lighthouse. 2007. [pounds sterling]25 This weighty tome, and associated exhibition at The Lighthouse in Glasgow, mark the culmination of the so-called 'Gillespie Kidd + Coia Project'. The remit for...

Chronicling 40 years of provocation, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Austria's favourite radicals, chill out at the MAK.(BEYOND THE BLUE)
April 1, 2008... In 1968 Wolf D. Prix, aged 26, Helmut Swiczinsky, 24, and Michael Holzer, 25, founded Coop Himmelb(I)au in Vienna. It was a heady year, steeped in political and artistic ferment, pseudo sciences and avant-garde happenings. From the Paris riots...

Sutherland Lyall has a cyber spring in his step as he tours the electronic universe.(browser)
April 1, 2008... Methinks he doth protest too much Coming across Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, was a Kealsian 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' moment. But regular readers may remember that long before that epiphany this column had developed an...

Some architects subvert artistic ambitions; Anne Claxton, architect turned ceramicist, fulfils them.(delight)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... Parallels between architecture and art are common. Architects should fully engage in the act of doing as well as the act of designing, as disciplines are mutually inclusive. In other fields, artistic expression emerges once a broad range of...