The Architectural Review articles from February 2005

The Architectural Review archives from February 2005

Zaha to build in London.(Achievements and awards of Zaha Hadid)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Last month Zaha Hadid was announced as the winner of the design competition for the Architecture Foundation's new centre for architecture. Despite her international success, it was clear from her speech at the announcement party that she was...

Tsunami hits Bawa hotels.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... These pictures show the tsunami of 26 December hitting Geoffrey Bawa's Blue Water Hotel at Wadduwa, about 25km south of Colombo. They record the approach of the wave and water engulfing the hotel lobbies. Bawa completed several hotels along the...

Taliesin West.(works of architects)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... A photograph of Taliesin West by P.E. Guerrero, one of half a million images from the former Architectural Press archive recently donated to the RIBA Photographic Collection. Covering over fifty years from 1930 to the early '80s, the archive...

Richard Feilden (1950-2005).(Obituary)
February 1, 2005... Richard was my closest friend for 35 years; my partner for 27. Our partnership provided the initial vision for the practice and his unbounded energy was a constant driving force behind us all. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Meeting in our...

AR's transparency conference.(architectural services)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... In conjunction with this issue, the AR's international conference on transparency will be held at the RIBA in London on 1 March. Transparency was one of the main attributes of twentieth-century architecture, and as more and more new...

Rumbles in the Down Under jungle.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... They are officially the best of friends still, but you wonder why Glenn Murcutt and the godfather of Oz architecture, Harry Seidler, plus 80 or so like-minded Sydney architects decided to set up the Australian Architecture Association alongside...

Observing the playground bullies.(browser)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... I turned to a favourite Australian site for a sideways take on the above--at www.archsoc.com/kcas/researchinternational.html. This is the choleric but very funny site of the Key Centre for Architectural Sociology aka former Sydney University...

It's my football Yaaa.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Christmas is traditionally a time of suicide, murder or at least radical self-reassessment. Not least in the realm of the architectural websites. For that terrific website a-matter is kaput. It was edited by Michaela Busenkell in Munich and...

A canticle or two for AWN.(browser)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... The excellent Tim Brittain-Gatlin reminds me that the official site for A. W. N. Pugin, the sublime neo-gothicist and Ramsgate-based looter of wrecks is actually at www.pugin-society.org. You enter the url and there is a shadowy photo of the...

Initial uncertainty.(services of construction industry)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... I spent fruitless ages on the CIRIA website trying to figure out what CIRIA stood for. It must be Construction Industry something. And it is probably a very important organization if the extent of its simple and reasonably easily navigated...

Shanghai surprise.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... SIR: I was disappointed with Robert Turnbull's View From Shanghai (AR December 2004, p30), not only with its blatant factual errors but more so with the basis of judgement. In my 2003 article on the same city (AR February 2003, p30), I was at...

Krater landscape.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... SIR: It was with great pleasure that I saw one of the houses I have worked on as a designer published with a commendation in your December 2004 Emerging Architecture issue (p66). It was with dismay though that I saw that my name was omitted...

Engineering a credit.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... SIR: I have always found it disappointing that despite the general excellence of your review far better than what we get on this side of the Atlantic Rift--you so fully neglect engineering and engineers. So much you miss. But to read (alas...

Inspiring feast.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... SIR: As usual, your ar+d issue (AR December 2004) was an inspiring feast, with some courses more delicious than others. I was very impressed with the delightful chapel at La Calera in Colombia, in which after all these years after Archigram, we...

Why the winery?(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... SIR: A good crop of ar+d entries this year (AR December), but why the inclusion of the winery at Otago in New Zealand among the winners? It is no more than a podium with a long plastic roof over it. Dramatic enough in photographs perhaps, but...

Diary.
February 1, 2005... 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 PETER EISENMAN: BAREFOOT ON WHITE-HOT WALLS Until 22 May MAK,...

View from Minsk: still politically isolated on the eastern edge of Europe, the Belarus capital of Minsk is slowly coming to terms with a new world order.(view)
February 1, 2005... 'Minsk is to be turned into a European-model city where people feel comfortable, the president says.' (Pravda, 29 August 2002, Moscow) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The rapid pace of...

Park life: this new district centre in a Zurich park is a compact, curvaceous pavilion in the landscape.
February 1, 2005... Most architects are familiar with the experience of winning a competition, only to see their premiated design modified beyond recognition before (if ever) it gets built. Such was the case for the young Zurich-based practice of EM2N, but they...

Nothing there: the art and science of transparency is evolving from Modernism's preoccupation with light and lightness to intelligent skins.
February 1, 2005... In Jewish legend, King Solomon is reputed to have built a glass palace in order to reveal whether the visiting Queen of Sheba was a real woman, or, as suspected, a genie. When the Queen, not familiar with the illusory effects of glass, entered...

The art of transparency: the latest phase in the evolution of the Museum of Modern Art refocuses, refines and adds to a historic urban complex.
February 1, 2005... To colonize a large swathe of Manhattan is an opportunity afforded very few institutions and even fewer architects. The august Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) first moved into a townhouse belonging to John D. Rockefeller, at 11 West 53rd Street, in...

Urban cubism: signposted by a glass cube, this museum complex revives a Stuttgart square.
February 1, 2005... Stuttgart's Kleine Schlossplatz (Small Palace Square) was built in 1968, in an age when motorist freedom was the dogma of urban planning. It is situated diagonally across from the Neues Schloss, one of Germany's largest Baroque palaces. Barren...

Wellcome home: redeploying their pioneering lightness of touch, Hopkins Architects' most recent building balances mass, solidity and transparency.
February 1, 2005... As Britain's first bypass, the 'New Road' (constructed in the mid-eighteenth century as a fast route into the City and now Euston Road/Marylebone Road) has always been a place of passage. The buildings lining it, so varied in scale, style and...

Crystals in the land: this addition to a private girls' school on a lush rural site is organized around a series of glass lightwells that form a crystalline landscape.
February 1, 2005... 'Site, light, environment, and wonder', is how Roger Duffy summarizes his design of the new Upper School for Greenwich Academy, a private girls' school on a bucolic estate in suburban Connecticut. The complex of 20 classrooms, five science...

Monochrome palette: this studio for visiting artists at the Cesar Manrique Foundation is a glazed pavilion cradled in Lanzarote's tough volcanic landscape.
February 1, 2005... Characterized by its distinctive black basalt landscape, Lanzarote is the most easterly island in the Canarian archipelago. Here, only the hardiest vegetation thrives in a stark lunar geology studded with extinct volcanoes, but the equable...

Through the looking glass: transformation of a mews workshop into a place for art, bathing and contemplation.
February 1, 2005... Fledgling design companies offer unbeatable (and occasionally unprofitable) creative value to clients. Small-scale fit-outs, installations or refurbishments often come more heavily laden with analysis, consideration and conceptual rigour than...

Sense of history: this medieval palace has been imaginatively renovated to house a regional archive.
February 1, 2005... The wonderfully imperious sounding Palace of the Kings of Navarra in Pamplona dates from the twelfth century. Looming haughtily over the town from an elevated plateau, its medieval bulk is a prominent fixture in the urban skyline. The reuse and...

Tradition stood on end: sheathed by glass shutters, this house makes the most of a tight urban site.
February 1, 2005... The Glass Shutter House, which Shigeru Ban recently completed on a cramped site in the Meguro district of Tokyo, is the latest of the architect's experiments in blurring physical boundaries. It was commissioned by Yoshiharu Doi, a television...

Representation: from Ruskinian drawing exercises to advanced mathematics--with architecture, painting and sculpture in between--representation of ideas and objects lies at the heart of intellectual endeavour.
February 1, 2005... Robert Hewison Ruskin famously said that, 'the teaching of art is the teaching of all things', setting his pupils at the London Working Men's College the task of representing, by drawing, a white sphere by shading only. It had to be done...

Glass: Rob Gregory reviews new developments and applications of glass technology.(product review)
February 1, 2005... 500 GARTNER/ZADRA GLASS Gartner, the German market leader in facade construction, has recently completed the installation of more than 16 000sqm of glass, aluminium, steel, sheet metal and natural stone at New York's recently opened Museum...

Specifier's information.
February 1, 2005... Stone Age A stone that looks as beautiful and old as a Cotswold, but performs better and is less expensive too: indiscernible from a Cotswold in appearance, Old English has an aged face and edge and can be seen here in a random rectangular...

The Emperor's new clothes.
February 1, 2005... ANTI-ARCHITECTURE AND DECONSTRUCTION By N. A. Salingaros, with C. Alexander, B. Hanson, M. Mehaffy, and T. M. Mikiten. Solingen: Umbau-Verlag. 2004. [euro]19/US$22.80 (inc p & p); PDF (read-only) format [euro]6/US$7.25 Deconstruction...

Indulgence needed.(Space Replaces Us: Essays And Projects On The City)(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... SPACE REPLACES US: ESSAYS AND PROJECTS ON THE CITY By Michael Bell, with postscripts by Sanford Kwinter and Steven Holl. New York The Monacelli Press. 2004. [pounds sterling]27.50 There was a time when I read books such as this with a...

Network thinking.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... FEELINGS ARE ALWAYS LOCAL Edited by Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder. Rotterdam: NAi. [euro]27.50 Feelings Are Always Local is a collection of suggestive and critical, if not necessarily profound or penetrating, articles from a range of...

Essential diversity.(Environmental Diversity In Architecture)(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... ENVIRONMENTAL DIVERSITY IN ARCHITECTURE Edited by Koen Steemers and Mary Ann Steane. London: Spon Press, 2004. [pounds sterling]32.50 This book addresses the human response to the environment in and around buildings. It is diverse by...

Sacred games.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... NEW SACRED ARCHITECTURE By Phyllis Richardson, London: Laurence King. 2004. [pounds sterling]45 With its glossy illustrations and brief case studies, this book is, like the churches, synagogues and mosques it features, certainly easy...

Frank Gehry calls his way of drawing 'thinking aloud'.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Frank Gehry calls his way of drawing 'thinking aloud'. Drawings for 29 major projects are assembled in Gehry Draws, edited by Mark Rappolt and Robert Violette, London: Violette Editions (distributed by Thames & Hudson), 2005, [pounds...

Robert Smithson's sketch of his Island Project (1970).(Obituary)
February 1, 2005... Robert Smithson's sketch of his Island Project (1970). Smithson, the land artist most famous for his Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, died at only 35 in a plane crash. His work is comprehensively displayed in Robert Smithson, edited by...

delight.
February 1, 2005... NO MATTER HOW WELL YOU KNOW (OR THINK YOU KNOW) A GREAT WORK OF ARCHITECTURE, IT CAN CONTINUE TO SURPRISE AND DELIGHT IRRESPECTIVE OF HOW MANY TIMES YOU RETURN TO APPRECIATE IT. Who hasn't been disappointed when visiting some of the great...