The Architectural Review articles from December 2004

The Architectural Review archives from December 2004

Cambridge faces closure.(outrage)(Cambridge University's Department of Architecture)
December 1, 2004... Regardless of holding a long established position as one of few architectural institutions with a truly global presence, Cambridge University's Department of Architecture may soon be closed. In today's university market economy, it would seem...

Josef Paul Kleihues 1933-2004.(obituary)(Obituary)
December 1, 2004... Professor Josef Paul Kleihues, who died in Berlin on 13 August, will be remembered for his devotion to the intellectual concept and physical form of the European city and, in particular, Berlin's development after German reunification in 1990....

Ezra Stoller 1915-2004.(obituary)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
December 1, 2004... Ezra Stoller, the great American architectural photographer, has died aged 89. Stoller's crisply elegant black and white images shaped and defined Modernism, visualizing the formal and spatial aspirations of architects such as Frank Lloyd...

Photography Prize.(obituary)
December 1, 2004... The biennial European Architectural Photography Prize (architekturbild ev award) is intended to explore the potential of photography as a critical medium in architecture. Entrants for the sixth award (2005) are asked to submit a series of four...

A life on the waves.(browser)(www.pugin.com. )(Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin )(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Pugin is one of the great British architectural heroes so I shouldn't have been so surprised to discover the Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin 1812-1852 site at www.pugin.com. It's a treasure trove and, boy, is it fast. There is just one page,...

Recreating history.(browser+)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... For those who can't get along to see the recreation of the Barcelona Pavilion you might care to take a look at the computer version at www.appfa.auckland.ac.nz/virtualtour/barcelona/. You can take a walk around this Modernist shrine whose...

Nesting.(browser)
December 1, 2004... I was about to send out a plea for further and better information about Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, the international journal of architectural theory when I found it at www.tu-cottbus.de/BTU/Fak2/TheoArch/wolke/cloud_1.html#. This is an online...

Just get on with it.(browser)
December 1, 2004... You reverently type in www.alvarosiza.com. All that come up are a line drawing of possibly two people possibly inspecting each other's entrails and the practice's addresses in Portugal and New York. Not much there for aficionados and would-be...

A frightfully Moderne movement.(browser)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... London's Twentieth Century Society used to be called The Thirties Society. Maybe because that name was too redolent of fast open sports cars bowling down to Maidenhead and Gussie Fink-Nottles, spats and strangled, chinless vowels. You suspect...

Parliamentary points.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... SIR: Congratulations to AR on a comprehensive review of the new Scottish Parliament. The beautiful photographs encapsulate my only criticism of the building, that is the lack of light and shade. The muted filtering suggests areas of gloom or...

Injustices of Occupation.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... SIR: In reply to the concern of Josef Habas (AR Nov 2004), no one doubts the talent of Israel's architects--in fact the work of Zvi Hecker and others have featured regularly in AR. As a student in the 1960s, I worked for Arieh Sharon, a key...

The bold and the beautiful.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... SIR: Gleneagles Community Centre (AR October, p67) is aesthetically very pleasing and appears to camouflage itself very nicely with the surrounding environment, not that I know anything about these things as I am only a lowly office manager....

Diary.(Directory)
December 1, 2004... AR'S CHOICE OF CURRENT INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS For an expanded and constantly updated list, go to our website: www.arplus.com/exhibitions AUSTRIA MARC CHAGALL Until 13 May 2005 Albertina, Vienna Major...

View from Shanghai: more than any other metropolis, Shanghai has become synonymous with the most brutal kind of urban development.(view)
December 1, 2004... Chosen in the late '80s to drive China's economic progress, Shanghai responded with unprecedented determination. By 2000, half of the buildings from the late '40s, the vast majority colonial, had been razed to make way for 200 000 high-rises...

Emerging architecture: work celebrated in the ar+d awards this year comes from all inhabited continents and represents a very wide diversity of building types and thoughtful responses to an extraordinary range of society, topography and climate.(comment)(Cover Story)
December 1, 2004... This is the sixth annual celebration of the ar+d awards, and a suitable moment for reviewing their history and present state. From the first, we were determined that they should celebrate talent, excellence, imagination and ingenuity so, unlike...

Plot in the landscape: a youth club produced on a low budget shows the potential of non-Euclidean geometry.
December 1, 2004... Amager is the big, often rather messy island in the Copenhagen complex. It is where traffic from the bridge over the Sound to Sweden arrives in Denmark. Ostamager (East Amager) is a strange area in which run-down industry is mixed with thriving...

Moving moment: a flexible little building gives a wide range of insights into the nature of numinous space.(Porciuncula de la Milagrosa at La Calera in Colombia)
December 1, 2004... Daniel Bonilla has a talent for expanding churches. In AR December 2002, he won an ar+d high commendation for his Los Nogales school chapel, where the walls swung back to allow a large congregation to assemble on the lawn outside and take part...

Grape expectations: an elegant celebration of wine-making in the far south contrasts with its sublime site.(Peregrine Winery)
December 1, 2004... Otago in New Zealand is the most southerly wine-growing region in the world (and so one of the coolest). In the middle of the dramatic scenery of the Southern Alps, it has a continental climate, with hot dry summers and crisp winters, schist...

Boxing clever: an exercise in spatial manipulation is made possible by innovatory technology.(Cell Brick House)
December 1, 2004... On a tiny corner site in a tranquil Tokyo suburb is Cell Brick House: a little white tower covered by a regular pattern of glazed openings. It is almost scaleless. At first, it is difficult to see what it is or what it offers: does it play an...

Concrete intervention: radical treatment of a nineteenth-century building creates dramatic new spaces.
December 1, 2004... When Aparicio+Fernandez-Elorza were asked to create an architectural documentation centre and lecture theatre in the arcades of the Nuevos Ministerios on the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid, they adopted two principles: first, the existing...

Civic subtlety: a run-down corner of a little Italian city has apparently effortlessly been brought into urban conversation.(Palazzo Arese)
December 1, 2004... Cesano Maderno is a small city some 25km north-west of Milan, where the country starts to rise from the plain of Lombardy towards the Alps. Its centre is still a magical network of picturesque events and spaces, and now they have been added to...

Light on last rites: imaginative understanding of materials makes this tomb a fitting set for rites of passage.(mausoleum)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Manuel Clavel Rojo's moving mausoleum in the wooded La Alberca cemetery on the edge of Murcia in Spain has already been celebrated in these pages (AR August 2004, p58). So it was happy to find that the international jury enthusiastically agreed...

Curving into the past: a bold initiative in Ljubljana's delicate core links past, present and future in space.(The City Museum)
December 1, 2004... In the historic centre of Ljubljana, buildings of all periods jostle in a dense mass. The City Museum is housed in a medieval palace that was heavily altered in Renaissance times, with the result that the collections were kept in a complicated...

Bamboo lessons: Bamboo is rarely used structurally; this school teaches universal lessons.
December 1, 2004... In Vietnam, the normal education system is privately funded, so the poor have few possibilities, and many remain illiterate. Ecole Sauvage was set up as long ago as 1901 to help educate underprivileged children of the Nha Trang region in the...

Krater craft: with an understanding of topography and local crafts, this house unostentatiously commands its magnificent site.
December 1, 2004... Krater is a house on Antiparos, one of the smaller islands of the Cycladic archipelago. It has a magnificent site at the top of the island's hill, looking down towards the village and offering views of Mykonos to the north-east, Paros to the...

Light on faith: a space for all faiths that has presence and avoids becoming anodyne.(Inter-Faith Spiritual Center)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The Inter-Faith Spiritual Center of Northeastern University in Boston is converted out of a large space in the Ell building on Huntington Avenue. The problem faced by the architects was to make the centre appropriate for all faiths while...

Folded box: totally changing with the seasons, this tiny building catches the landscape.(garden hut at Sant Miquel de Cruilles, Spain)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The garden hut by Eightyseven at Sant Miquel de Cruilles near the Franco-Spanish border in eastern Catalonia is the smallest building to be commemorated by the jury this year. The client considers his garden as an open-air room of the house,...

Monsoon cool: Singapore's main use of energy is in air conditioning. This design employs tradition to reduce cooling loads.(Moulmein Rise )
December 1, 2004... WoHa adopted the motto 'transforming commercial pressures into environmental devices' for their speculative residential tower block at no I Moulmein Rise in Singapore. In the tropical island state, air conditioning is the main consumer of...

Lake poetry: a bathing place created on a limited budget responds to and intensifies the natural beauty of its magnificent site.(Marco Castelletti's new bathing establishment)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Segrino is one of the small pieces of water at the southern end of Lake Como. Replenished by springs, its remarkably pure calm contents reflect the sky and almost untouched forested slopes (the surrounding area is a nature reserve). So any new...

Torch bearer: ingenious use of quite commonplace materials and technology light the way.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The extreme simplicity of Carl Fredrik Svenstedt's Glowgo lamp is what attracted the jury to the design. It is a lamp and a base from which it gets its power. A low wattage fluorescent bulb with a rechargeable battery allows the lamp to be lit...

Worb's weave: a warp of concrete and a weft of stainless steel clothe a sinuous little station.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... When we published Smarch's Worb railway station (AR August 2004, p67) a certain amount of heat was generated about whether or not it was a true exemplar of Gottfried Semper's Bekleidungstheorie, and whether that theory is relevant to current...

Irish lesson: a carefully transformed traditional farm shows how Bungalow Blight can be counteracted.(Wheatfield Courtyard )(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... As the miraculous Irish economy burgeons, prosperous parts of the countryside are being covered by a rash of villas, each separated from neighbours by a garden and total indifference to appearance, style, tradition, materials, massing and...

Snowscape: a little museum responds to its region's often extreme climate.
December 1, 2004... A strange brown tower can be glimpsed over the tops of the trees of a thick Japanese beech forest up in the Matsunoyama mountains of the Niigata Prefecture in the east of Honshu. It is the symbol (actually look-out) of the local natural history...

Reincarnation: a dowdy church has been transformed by light, imagination and faith.(Presbyterian Church of Encino)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... All members of the ar+d jury were convinced that the transformation of the First Presbyterian Church of Encino in California deserved a mention in the awards. Abramson Teiger Architects have taken a rather gloomy '50s A-frame based church and...

Swiss strips: a light-hearted yet rigorous pavilion radically altered a grim Madrid courtyard.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... In 2002 and 2003, the national flag formed the parti of the temporary Swiss pavilion built by 2b Architectes in a courtyard of the Conde Duque, Madrid for ARCO, the international art fair. A square cross was created by placing one rectangular...

Dragon tales: wit has transformed a heavy Prussian school into a lively and welcoming place.(rehabilitation of Erika Mann elementary school)
December 1, 2004... Die Baupiloten is a programme run by Susanne Hofmann to give architectural students of the Technical University of Berlin practical experience of building. Its first job has been the rehabilitation of the Erika Mann elementary school in...

Orgatec: Catherine Slessor surveys Cologne's biennial encounter with the world of contract office interiors. This furniture makes doing business a pleasure.(Product review)
December 1, 2004... 501 SEGIS A new addition to the Segis family--Nami stacking chair by Paolo Crescenti in recyclable polypropylene on a steel frame. Enquiry 501 www.arplus.com/enq.html [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 502 WILKHAHN Aline is a new...

Specifier's information.
December 1, 2004... Armstrong As the world's leading supplier of suspended ceiling systems. Armstrong's new Specification Guide can give truly informed and clear advice on which systems will best meet the specific requirements of each different project. The...

Architectural canon.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... PLANS, SECTIONS AND ELEVATIONS: KEY BUILDINGS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY By Richard Weston. London: Laurence King. 2004. [pounds sterling]28 In academic circles, a discipline is partially defined by the establishment of a generally...

Moses of the modern movement.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... REASSESSING NIKOLAUS PEVSNER Edited by Peter Draper. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2004. [pounds sterling]55 The 50th anniversary of the Buildings of England series, better known as 'Pevsners', began a round of conferences and publications...

Taking to the air.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... AIRPORTS: A CENTURY OF ARCHITECTURE By Hugh Pearman. London: Laurence King. 2004. [pounds sterling]40 Airports: A Century of Architecture is a beautifully illustrated discourse on the evolution of airports and their incarnation today as...

Heaven on Earth?(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... MODERNISM AND THE SPIRIT OF THE CITY Edited by lain Boyd Whyte. London: Routledge. 2004. [pounds sterling]24.99 Early Modernism was an atheistic movement that threw tradition out of the window, and with it all sentiment and...

Fauteull Grand Confort, petit modele.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... This photograph of the first prototype for the future Fauteull Grand Confort, petit modele, has emerged from the private archives left by Charlotte Perriand with other records she made in 1928-1933 while working with Le Corbusier and Pierre...

Delight.(simplicity of woven water device at urban park)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Over 2000 years ago, the authorities in Dujiangyan City in Chendu, Sichuan Province built one of the wonders of early Chinese agriculture. The Dujiangyan weir allowed irrigation of the whole Chendu Basin using a system in which water was...