The Architectural Review articles from January 2003

The Architectural Review archives from January 2003

Mies in Europe. (View).(Mies van der Rohe's architectural exhibition is examined)
January 1, 2003... Two recent exhibitions in New York chronicled the two phases of Mies's career. The second, dealing with American Mies, is not coming to this country; but we now have a slightly abridged version of the German Mies Exhibition at the Whitechapel...

Drawing distinctions. (View).(Howard Gilman Collection of Architectural Drawings is discussed)
January 1, 2003... The vision of mid-town Manhattan plastering the horizon from the elevated train to Queens, provides a great, if hard to compete with, preamble to this exhibition. Yet once inside the big blue box that is MoMA's temporary home (AR October 2002),...

Athens on sea. (View).(Faleron Group of architects and planners come up with a plan involving Athens and the sea)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Faleron Bay was traditionally the principal opening of the Athens plain to the sea, where the city's first harbour was located before Piraeus was developed to the west. In about 1870, the first train from Athens to Piraeus was built, starting a...

Ar's conference. (View).(Architecture Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... The Architectural Review will hold a conference on Greening the European City at the RIBA in London on 19 March. We face a world ecological crisis of unprecedented proportions in which cities and their buildings are eating up the planet's...

Arplus. (View).(Architectural Review's website is examined)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... The Architectural Review's own specialized website http://www.arplus.com greatly adds to information provided in the magazine. Besides reproducing selected features from the paper product, the site has up-to-date world-wide news on...

Browser. (View).(Column)
January 1, 2003... Sutherland Lyall energetically explores the byways of architectural cyberspace. What is it about Edward Cullinan Architects? Ted Cullinan is a British architectural institution: Royal Academician, founder of the first (of very few)...

Letters. (View).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2003... AR+D PUZZLE SIR: Your December ar+d issue was lively and had many good things in it, but I was surprised at some of the decisions of the jury. For instance, giving the Wilkinson Eyre bridge in Gateshead a mere highly commended, and at the...

Susan Lasdun goes for a lakeside stroll in Zurich, Switzerland. (View From Zurich).
January 1, 2003... People may differ in their views about Switzerland as a country, but there is little disagreement over its scenic splendour, and it is no surprise that many Swiss cities have been built with the dramatic impact of its rivers, lakes and...

February.
January 1, 2003... In the next issue we look at innovative uses of light. We range from Tadao Ando's powerful Osaka Museum to the luminous Harnosand library, Sweden by Tirsen & Aili. Daryl Jackson's inner street in the Victorian County Courthouse, Melbourne...

Womb service: a machine for living provides a movable feast, allowing its occupant to juggle the volumes. (Design Review).(Johnson Chou's adjustable room invention stands for work, office, home, base)
January 1, 2003... Womb, the name of Johnson Chou's invention of an adjustable room, stands for work, office, home, base. As a starting point for design of this prototype room (built for last year's Interior Design Show in Toronto), the word also expresses Chou's...

The stuff of life: throughout history, human progress has generally been the result of attempts to control water, but beyond this mastery, our relationship with water can embody cultural, social and spiritual dimensions. (Comment).(Column)
January 1, 2003... Following the inauguration of Berniai's Fontana dei Quauro Fiumi in the mid seventeenth century, it became customary for themore privileged inhabitants of Rome to hold a corso on the flooded Piazza Navona on Sunday mornings." Everyone who...

Cruise control: built like a ship, Yokohama's new port terminal is an audacious fusion of architecture and engineering that creates a topographic landscape for public activities.
January 1, 2003... In Japan, the economy has been mired in recession for at least a decade. Banks are sagging under the weight of bad debts, the social contract of guaranteed lifetime employment is beginning to fray. and yet construction is booming. Jean Nouvel,...

War stories: Daniel Libeskind's trophy building for the imperial War Museum is a key element in the regeneration of Salford's defunct docks.
January 1, 2003... Salford Quays, Manchester is a former dockland recently redeveloped with housing and commerce. There are two cultural cherries on this cake: Michael Wilford's theatre and gallery complex, The Lowry (AR August 2000), and Libeskind's War Museum...

Home and dry: a mix of uses is replacing the industrial area round the river port of Duisburg. This housing development is inspired by the waterside cities of northern Europe.
January 1, 2003... Duisburg was once the biggest inland port in Europe. Its inner harbour was carefully carved out of the banks of the Rhine and lined with warehouses and mills. Like all nineteenth-century ports, Duisburg has collapsed economically and its trade...

Naval power: Falmouth's new maritime museum responds to and is inspired by the muscular vernacular of nautical buildings.
January 1, 2003... Falmouth is one of the best natural harbours in Northern Europe and its deep water can accommodate the largest ships, so it used to be a convenient stopping off place on the Atlantic run, and it has always had a fishing fleet. It served as the...

Venice reformed: forming part of a wider urban revival, this Venetian housing block is a lucid, modern addition to the city fabric.
January 1, 2003... Venice owes its very existence to water, founded in and forged by a centuries old relationship with its protective lagoon. Yet though the demands of the modern world may have been grudgingly accommodated, it is still a city in profound and...

Adriatic station: a civilized new services building in the historic port of Otranto aims to consolidate and expand Italy's Adriatic connections.
January 1, 2003... Otranto port accommodates yachts, local fishing boats, and freighters that haul cement products across the Adriatic. Also to be found here are vessels of the coastguard and customs service as the Italian state monitors the waterways between...

Urban mosaic: a new arts centre gives a provincial Belgian city in urban square and 10 theatres for performing arts. (Interior Design).(Leuven is the city)
January 1, 2003... The STUK is one of the best and most innovative art houses in Belgium, known particularly for theatre and dance. Founded as a student arts club in the 1970s, in the ancient university town of Leuven (Louvain), it is an independent body, funded...

A cut above: on a rocky site over the Pacific Ocean, a Mexican house exploits the prospect and arid beauty of the site. (House).(Steven Harris Architects is involved in building Weiss House)
January 1, 2003... The Weiss House, by Steven Harris Architects, has been built into the rocky contours of a headland, 75m above the Pacific Ocean in Cabo San Lucas; it is the southernmost private house at the foot of the Baja Peninsula, one of the few places in...

507 Dramex. (Product Review).
January 1, 2003... Studio BAAD has designed a new office building for TFL International in Preston, UK. The south facade of the two-storey building is formed of an inner layer of glazed sliding doors to the office spaces; they open onto a terrace screened with...

502 Corus. (Product Review).
January 1, 2003... The Imperial War Museum at Salford, UK, by Daniel Libeskind, is clad with flat natural mill-finish aluminium panels, screw-fixed to the structure with dome-headed screws. The tower, 50m high, is an 'external' space clad with 300 x 100mm hollow...

503 Okalux. (Product Review).
January 1, 2003... Designed by Rem Koolhaas, the 11-storey high Central Library in Seattle is under construction, to be completed by the end of 2003. The prismatic shape of the building is clad with a curtain wall facade of insulating glass panels set in a...

504 NBK. (Product Review).
January 1, 2003... Fletcher Priest have designed a new headquarters for Vodaphone on a 15 hectare site just outside Newbury, UK. It takes the form of seven linked two-storey buildings grouped around a lake. The facades are clad with brick red terracotta...

501 Haver & Boecker. (Product Review).
January 1, 2003... A cladding panel system of stainless-steel woven wire cloth backed with absorbent material offers an effective solution to the problem of traffic related noise. Lined with recycled polyurethane foam or mineral fibre for noise absorption, the...

506 Birdair. (Product Review).
January 1, 2003... Tensile canopies of translucent PTFE fabric membrane will form part of the renovation of Grantley Adams International Airport, Barbados. A large two-masted canopy will shelter the terminal entrance, with canopies over passenger drop-off,...

508 Moeding. (Product Review).
January 1, 2003... The new headquarters of the Vogtland savings bank at Plauen, Germany, has a first floor facade of storey-height windows set between panels of clay tiles. The tiles are a warm shade of red with a sand-blasted finish, a reference to the historic...

505 Covertex. (Product Review).
January 1, 2003... An enclosure at Zurich Zoo, known as the Masaola Rain Forest, recreates the conditions and ecological system of Masoala, a peninsula north-east of Madagascar. At 120m long and with an area of about 10,600[m.sup.2], the enclosure is, it is...

509 GKD. (Product Review).
January 1, 2003... Designed by Dominique Perrault, the new Town Hall Gallery in the heart of Innsbruck comprises shopping arcades, hotels, restaurants and offices for city administration departments. The hotel facade is a layered composition of transparent,...

PollardsFyrespan. (Specifier's Information).
January 1, 2003... PollardsFyrespan has installed a main entrance at Beagle House, London, the headquarters of P & O Nedlloyd. The original revolving door to the main entrance on Camperdown St has been replaced with curved bi-parting external doors and a set of...

BioLab UK. (Specifier's Information).
January 1, 2003... William Pye, designer of water features such as Charybdis, at Seaham Hall, Sunderland, used BioLab's specialist water treatment to maintain the quality of the water. The Fountain Fresh water treatment will sanitize the water and correct its...

Carpet concept. (Specifier's Information).
January 1, 2003... Tec Wave, a carpet woven with a metallic yam pile, combines the qualities of woven carpet with the durability of a hard floor covering. The metallic yam gleams over the coloured ground and becomes iridescent under light. The carpet is available...

Glazing Vision. (Specifier's Information).
January 1, 2003... Glazing Vision's latest product for the domestic and commercial market is the Walk-On Flush Glaze rooflight. It can be installed, for instance, in an external upper floor terrace with a timber deck the glazed surface fits flush with the deck...

Graphisoft. (Specifier's Information).
January 1, 2003... The US Coastguard is using Graphisofts ArchiCAD 3D CAD package to create intelligent 3D models of its buildings. The information is for use in space planning, quantifying building efficiency and prioritizing capital improvement projects. Highly...

Vetrotech Saint-Gobain. (Specifier's Information).
January 1, 2003... Fire-resisting glass was installed in two adjacent buildings at the manufacturing plant of Sun Microsystems at Linlithgow, Scotland. A facility has been built next to the existing building and fire-resisting glass used on the adjacent facades...

Kawneer. (Specifier's Information).
January 1, 2003... The new Sports Science and Research building at Edinburgh University, designed by architect FaulknerBrowns, has just been completed. The four-storey building has a facade of Kawneer 501 top-hung ribbon windows coupled together and installed...

Wright style. (Specifier's Information).
January 1, 2003... A new fire-resistant glazed door system has been developed by one of the UK's leading steel glazing system suppliers. The door system, meeting BS 476 Part 22, achieves an integrity fire-resistant rating of three and a half hours, making it the...

Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. (More than Common Decency).(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Andrea Oppenheimer and Timothy Hursley. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. 2002. [pounds sterling]21 'The land through which the Black Warrior [River] curls is rich with defeat. One only has to kick at its red surface to detect...

Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders. (Monumental Faith).(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Vaughan Hart. London: Yale University Press, 2002. [pounds sterling]35 Like Soane, Hawksmoor was rediscovered in the twentieth century when the starkness and originality of both architects exercised a special appeal. Hart's enthralling...

Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. (Arts of Darkness).(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Frederic Spotts. London: Hutchinson. 2002. [pounds sterling]25 The idea that aesthetic policy was an integral part of National Socialism has been established at least since Peter Cohen's unforgettable documentary 'The Architecture of...

The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. (Biospheric Fears).(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Vaclav Smil. London: MIT Press, 2002. [pounds sterling]21.95 'Finally we have an accessible, highly integrated account of the environment: wise rather than clever, responsible rather than glib, comprehensive rather than confused,...

Letchworth: the First Garden City. (A Greenfield Site).(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Mervyn Miller. Chichester: Phillimore. 2002. [pounds sterling]25.00 In 2003, Letchworth, the first of the two towns founded by Ebenezer Howard to bring his the-ones to life, reaches its centenary, and a revised version of Mervyn...

An extraordinary Baroque fusion of architecture, sculpture and abstracted nature, the Fontana Di Trevi still brings aquatic splendour and drama to the middle of Rome. (Delight).
January 1, 2003... Possibly the most famous fountain in the world, Rome's Fontana di Trevi is an urban oasis whose essential functions of supplying the populace with water and providing relief from the City's heat have long been surpassed by its symbolic and...