The Architectural Review articles from February 2007

The Architectural Review archives from February 2007

Engineering the future.(view)
February 1, 2007... Towards the end of Vers une Architecture, Le Corbusier said: 'Business has modified its customs: it bears a heavy responsibility today--cost, time, solidity of the work. Engineers in numbers fill its offices, make their calculations, practise...

Chill in the air.(view)(National Cold War Exhibition shown in new museum building)
February 1, 2007... This month the Royal Air Force Museum proudly opens the National Cold War Exhibition at RAF Cosford. Housed in a purpose-built hangar, designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley, the exhibition includes 17 original aircraft from the Cold War era and...

Peter Cook: an earnest plea for a return to the time-honoured art of punctuation in today's super saturated visual world.(view)
February 1, 2007... Maybe it was the January sales in the local big store, maybe it was getting back from a search for the sun (or nowadays, a search for the snow), maybe it was just this morning, coming in to work? You zig-zagged in past a plethora of familiar...

Architectural form: David Dunster considers the historical relationship between architecture and engineering, how it was tested during the early years of Modernism and how structure might yet fulfil its potential for expression.(comment)(Essay)
February 1, 2007... Major buildings increasingly demonstrate the ingenuity of structural engineers to provide distinctive form. Indeed, most buildings dubbed iconic by the press could be criticised as whimsical and arbitrary--the engineer's contribution. Which...

Harbour master: Boston's latest cultural landmark is a welcoming waterfront beacon and structural tour de force.
February 1, 2007... Boston is changing. The availability of waterfront sites and piers formerly used for shipping and marine services, together with the 'big dig', a large-scale urban infrastructure initiative that has successfully rerouted major roads underground...

Southern skies; Doing what they do best: Grimshaw re-create Melbourne's Spencer Street station.
February 1, 2007... Until recently, Melbourne's Docklands were characterised as grubby, dangerous territory to the west of Robert Hoddle's civilised nineteenth-century city grid. Scruffy, industrial and weathered this was Melbourne's badlands: off the grid, off...

Pod life: his largest building to date, Shigeru Ban's new library is a bold celebration of structure.(Seikei University library)
February 1, 2007... The soaring glass-walled atrium and concrete-framed book stacks of Shigeru Ban's Seikei University library seem far removed from the lightweight structures and recycled materials for which the architect is best known. In fact, several of Ban's...

Dance cage: dramatically enclosed by a skeletal concrete structure, this dance centre adds life to the city.(Rudy Ricciotti)(Vitrolles)
February 1, 2007... For over a decade, Rudy Ricciotti has celebrated the power of monolithic concrete structures, notably in an early project for a rock music stadium in Vitrolles (AR February 1996). Set amid slagheaps of bauxite, the stadium came wrapped in a...

Water colour: as lead designer, Cecil Balmond completes his first bridge, in Coimbra.
February 1, 2007... Cecil Balmond and Arup's Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) are well known for helping to make some of the world's most innovative architectural creations stand up. Working alongside leading designers, Balmond is no stranger to collaborations where...

Engineering architecture.(process)(Werner Sobek, Jurg Conzett)
February 1, 2007... The cliches are tiresome but as usual contain some truth: engineers and architects struggle to work really creatively together. They are, after all, distinct disciplines with separate bodies of knowledge, but also involve different ways of...

Structural engineering and architectural form: are engineers playing 'catch up', enabling forms far removed from structural ideals? Asks Matthew Wells.(riposte)(Column)
February 1, 2007... The capability of engineers to provide any progression or divergence in architecture is highly questionable. Contrary to David Dunster's suggestion in his Comment article introducing this issue's theme (p36), rationalist thinking in...

Twisting the bar: this new house in San Francisco's Bay Area is shaped by the folds of the landscape and sweeping views.(ar house)
February 1, 2007... The San Francisco Bay Area is often mocked for its unrestrained hedonism and libertarian politics, but its population is generally resistant to architectural innovation and prefers to wallow in cosy nostalgia. It would be easier to elect a...

100% Design Tokyo.(product review)
February 1, 2007... From cedar bags to twisting lights, we survey the range of imagination on display at 100% Design Tokyo. 501 & DESIGN Nekko, a witty colourful vase for a single flower from & Design, a collaborative of four Japanese product designers...

Specifier's information.
February 1, 2007... Hacel Lighting The Vici from Hacel's Desire catalogue is a contemporary and stylish fusion of etched glass and steel. Available in complementary Wall Light, Pendant and Duet Pendant versions with a multitude of high output Compact...

Lusty passions.(Visionary Architecture: Blueprints of the Modern Imagination)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... VISIONARY ARCHITECTURE: BLUEPRINTS OF THE MODERN IMAGINATION By Neil Spiller. London: Thames & Hudson. 2006. [pounds sterling]35 Apart from catalogues--or catalogue derivatives--there have been few attempts to celebrate the existence...

Confronting Inequality.(Structural Inequality: Black Architects in the United States )(Book review)
February 1, 2007... STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY: BLACK ARCHITECTS IN THE UNITED STATES By Victoria Kaplan. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. 2006. $65 hardback, $24.95 paperback This sociological activist study approaches architecture as a...

Catholic herald.(A Glimpse of Heaven: Catholic Churches of England and Wales )(Book review)
February 1, 2007... A GLIMPSE OF HEAVEN: CATHOLIC CHURCHES OF ENGLAND AND WALES By Christopher Martin, with photographs by Alex Ramsay, Swindon: English Heritage. 2006. [pounds sterling]25.00 English and Welsh Roman Catholic churches are undervalued, a...

Genesis of form.(Visions of Nature: The Art And Science of Ernst Haeckel )(Book review)
February 1, 2007... VISIONS OF NATURE--THE ART AND SCIENCE OF ERNST HAECKEL By Olaf Breidbach. Munich: Prestel. 2006. [pounds sterling]55 Ernst Haeckel is a natural historian caught between the world of art and design on the one hand and biology on the...

Riverlines.
February 1, 2007... Richard Long hard at work smearing mud mixed from the Avon and Hudson rivers onto a 20m high lift core wall of Norman Foster's Hearst Tower in New York. From Riverlines, Ivory Press, 2006, London. Long's twenty-first century 'cave painting',...

Monochrome vision.(reviews)(works of Swiss photographer Helene Binet )
February 1, 2007... In the same way that Julius Shulman's crisp black and white photographs became the visual embodiment of Californian Modernism, so the images of Swiss photographer Helene Binet have also come to epitomise a specific nineties/noughties...

Addenda.
February 1, 2007... Co-authors of the project for Maribor Sports Stadium, Slovenia (AR January, p59) are Multiplan arhitekti/Znidarsic-Zlajpah, who worked with Ofis. Bunyamin Derman is co-author of Dalaman Airport, Turkey (AR December 2006, p52).

Blogspats.(browser)
February 1, 2007... Those blogsters are getting all luvvie. I see that UK blog, named (affectionately) bollocks to architecture, at http://b2architecture.blogspot.com is retracting its link to PartIV following that blog's takeover from the retiring Norman Blogster...

Pages from the past.(browser)(Website list)
February 1, 2007... Naturally you've heard of Archigram, the magazine which gave the group its name. But what of Polygon, its kind-of predecessor or the contemporaneous Op Cit published in Naples and whose first 1964 issue had an article 'The New Icons'. Nothing...

A bunch of icons.(browser)(http://buildings.emporis.com)(Website overview)
February 1, 2007... And talking of icon architecture take a look at Emporis Buildings at http://buildings.emporis.com. Since more than 700 people in our and related trades including architects and real estate agents are contributors, maybe you know it already....

Sitting lightly on the earth.(browser)(Website overview)
February 1, 2007... Last month I suggested that http://graffitiresearchlab.com was an essential site for understanding something of the potential in-service life of buildings. I had forgotten the well-established practice of projection bombing, sometimes called...

Surreal samorost 2.(browser)
February 1, 2007... Here's a site which anyone with an interest, admittedly surreal, in man-made environments would want to share. It is at www.samorost.net/samorost2/ and try this for the cheats: http://samorost2.blogspot.com/. Sutherland Lyall is at...

Diary.(Diary entry)
February 1, 2007... AR'S CHOICE OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS AUSTRIA VERTICAL GARDEN: PROJECT TO PROTECT THE SCHINDLER HOUSE, LA MAK--Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna Until 4 March The results of an architectural competition...

Delight: Jun Aoki's shimmering pavilion continues the Japanese vogue for inventive wedding chapels.(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... It's entirely appropriate that Jun Aoki, who has sustained his Tokyo practice by creating glamorous stores for Louis Vuitton (in addition to inventive houses and an impressive new art museum at Amori), should now have designed a sensuous...