The Architectural Review articles from January 2009

The Architectural Review archives from January 2009

Drmm house in east Anglia moves with the times; Jorn Utzon remembered; The architectural review wins the coveted IBP non-weekly magazine of the year award under the editorship of Paul Finch; AR emerging architects exposed; Peter cook in Korea.(view)
January 1, 2009... HOUSE PROUD One conspicuous feature of our more sybaritic pre credit crunch age was the apparently inexhaustible appetite for the private house--as a lifestyle statement, as a source of free money, as a place to be primped and pomaded and...

Jorn Utzon 1918-2008.(obituary)(Obituary)
January 1, 2009... Jorn Utzon, who has died aged 90, was almost the last of the giants of the north whose sensibility was largely formed in the 1930s, when Scandinavian idealism shone bright against the dark clouds of the great depression further south. The...

The joy of lunch.(The Architectural Review)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... As the AR editors prepare to hand on the responsibilities of making a fine monthly international architectural magazine over to a new team, we thought that readers might enjoy this souvenir photograph of the old bunch doing what they probably...

AR triumphs at IBP.(The Architectural Review to be awarded at International Building Press Awards)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... The AR has won the coveted Monthly Magazine of the Year in the annual International Building Press Awards. The Awards cover the UK based architectural, engineering and construction titles and competition is always intense. Commenting on the AR,...

Charlotte Ellis--AU revoir.(Obituary)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Charlotte Ellis who, with her husband Martin Meade, formed the Architectural Review's Paris correspondent died on 14 December. She trained as an architect at the Regent Street Polytechnic and worked in practice for several years, during which...

Emerging Architecture lectures.(view)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... At the end of November, the AR Awards for Emerging Architecture were presented at a prizegiving ceremony at the RIBA in London, followed by a dinner sponsored by Artemide. Winners were presented with their cheques by Claudia Huge of Wilkhahn,...

Finding encouragement in Korea.(Peter Cook)
January 1, 2009... As you leave the airport and head into town on the long, well organised road, the first clues about South Korea are readily there; industrial installations with rows of neat pipes sprout out of hillsides and the equally well organised housing...

Home truths: in an issue devoted to a selection of houses from the 2008 AR Awards for Emerging Architecture, Loos and Le Corbusier remind us how a study of architecture's smallest unit of currency can teach valuable lessons.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The arrival of Max Risselada's revised edition of Raumplan Versus Plan Libre on the AR's editorial desk was a serendipitous moment. Coinciding with the time when we were considering the feature list for this issue, Risselada's book reminded us...

Internal life: an inventive courtyard house in Toronto suggests a paradigm for inner-city living.
January 1, 2009... The courtyard house, a familiar and historic dwelling type, is given a fresh and offbeat twist in a project for a family home in Toronto. Its architects, the young partnership of Studio Junction, reinterpret this archetypal house form for an...

Living in a box: complexity and contradiction in an urban alley.
January 1, 2009... As demonstrated in the March 2006 issue of The Architectural Review, London has become a rich and fertile place for the careful insertion of contemporary private homes. Cassion Castle Architects extend this emerging tradition with this...

South side storeys: live/work urban infill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
January 1, 2009... It would be inaccurate to assume gritty urban infill only exists in Europe. As this project demonstrates, the American architects are also producing work that attains identity through the layering of pre-and post-industrial forms of expression....

Small wonder: this weekend house in historic Ljubljana is a neat essay in shrink to fit.
January 1, 2009... At a mere 43 sq m (about the size of a large studio flat in London), this compact dwelling lives up to its name as the XXS House. At first sight, it looks like another exercise in Japanese architectural bonsai, but is actually thousands of...

Light shafts: sculptural light shafts illuminate this house in a Japanese mountain resort.
January 1, 2009... This house for a young couple in Myoko City is an intriguing response to local climate conditions. Myoko City lies in Niigata Prefecture, on the northwest coast of Honshu, Japan's largest island. It is a well known mountain ski town, with...

New Haven: Paul Archer Design's south London retreat.(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... This elegant white garden pavilion, built at the end of a long and narrow south London terrace plot, was conceived as a place in which the client could retreat and meditate. Inward looking and calmly detailed, space is necessarily inward...

Write home: more Raumplan than free-plan, Austrian traditions endure.
January 1, 2009... The client for this detached house in Innsbruck, Austria, was so happy with their new home they wrote a letter of gratitude to the architect. This is not the first time that timid Tyrolean Daniel Fugenschuh has received such a letter. Modest in...

Space oddity: traditional pit dwellings and sci-fi combine in a Japanese suburb.
January 1, 2009... Even by notoriously eclectic Japanese standards, this house in the suburbs of Saijo appears to have hailed from a different space time dimension. A brooding, jet black pyramid, abruptly sawn off at the top, it has echoes of the famously...

Family friendly: together but apart-this house reflects the dynamics of its occupants.(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Set in a suburb of Hamburg, this family house for a young couple and their two children shows how a modest, low-cost, low-energy building can also be volumetrically inventive. The family wanted a house which felt like a unified space, but would...

Raising the bar: this weekend retreat is a simple pavilion in the forest.
January 1, 2009... The origins of the commission for this striking weekend house date back to 2003, when the clients, Mice and Eduardo Pinto Ferreira came across a site while water-skiing in the Peneda-Geres National Park. Founded in 1971, Peneda-Geres is...

Chilean labyrinth: a complex, labyrinthine plan is crowned and illuminated by a prismatic roofscape.(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... This family house in Chiguayante, a small town south of Santiago, takes the traditional Hispanic notion of the patio and fragments it throughout the dwelling. Instead of one large courtyard, there are nine small ones, open to the sky, providing...

Balancing act: Thornton and Smith find formal and spatial equilibrium in south-west France.
January 1, 2009... Situated in the Tarn et Garonne region of south-west France, on the ridge of a steeply sloping valley, this house uses formal distortion and spatial compression to bring internal and external forces into tense equilibrium, Locking into views to...

Twin peeks: conjoined twins, of the rural variety.
January 1, 2009... Located on Lake Rupanco, in south Chile, two linear forms create a delightful four bedroom home. As singular entities these elongated enclosures are contemporary in character; narrow suggesting efficient planning, double height recalling the...

Spare change: Della Valle Bernheimer, tracking the passage of time.(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... The architect's conception of this house was ambitious, 'conceived as a time-tracking device to register day-to-day environmental changes and measure the transformations of a nuclear family over months, years, and decades.' To the editors, it...

Niemeyer, Curves of Irreverence.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... By Styliane Philippou. London: Yale University Press. 2008. $65, [pounds sterling]35 Decades before his 100th birthday last year, Oscar Niemeyer had achieved cult status in Brazil and won countless international awards. His UK reputation...

Sir John Vanbrugh: Storyteller in Stone.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... By Vaughan Hart. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. 2008 [pounds sterling]35 The researches of twentieth-century scholars established the dates and factual details of Vanbrugh's masterpieces like Castle Howard, Seaton Delaval, and...

Fantastic Plastic.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... By Susan Mossman. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2008. [pounds sterling] 24.95. Sometimes you read a book and you are left wondering more what it tells you about design publishing in general than about that specific book itself. Fantastic...

Connell Ward & Lucas-modern movement architects in England 1929-1939.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... By Dennis Sharp and Sally Rendel. London: Frances Lincoln. 2008. [pounds sterling]35 The gratuitous and illegal demolition of Greenside, a private house in Surrey, a few years ago brought the names of Connell Ward & Lucas back to public...

Layla Dawson ponders what makes for good high-rise architecture.
January 1, 2009... At the end of last year, the biannual International Highrise Award was awarded to Foster + Partners for the Hearst Tower in New York. Shortlisted entries for the Award are currently on show at Frankfurt's Deutsches Architekturmuseum, in an...

A boon to mankind.(browser)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... BOOOOOOOM!, at www.booooooo.com, has the classic blog format: wide column on the left, narrower column down the right containing information, links and things like how to subscribe. This is a cornucopia blog so you can mix and match the...

The village in the sea.(browser)
January 1, 2009... Never mind those tales of submerged Kentish villages whose church bells peal underwater in times of national peril. Spare a thought for endangered Stiltsville which, in the words of local chronicler, Les Standiford, is a village of 'homes that...

Art imitates life.(browser)
January 1, 2009... Arne Quinze www.arnequinze.tv is the guy who last year did that wonderful Cityscape, a vast bird's nest-like structure on stilts made from long lengths of timber in Brussels. A similar timber spaghetti-like cloud, Uchronia, was torched at the...

Check mate.(browser)
January 1, 2009... With that naff 'archi' in the title, Archiweb, you sort of expect enthusiasm but not necessarily sophistication in the site itself. Mind you the plain prefix 'arch' makes you think of Noel Coward, and 'arch' of ye olde teashoppe. All three are...

Speed matters, so does size.(www.moxonarchitects.com)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... When a web designer tells you that loading up images takes lots of time, hire somebody else. I've had the technicalities explained and slow loading has something to do with the incompetently slow webbie using Flash. Fast loading of big images...

Welcome back Alice.(browser)
January 1, 2009... A while ago Alice the Architect at http:// alicethearchitect.blogspot.com announced that she was far too busy to spend time on her blog. Norman Blogster had said much the same not long earlier so in England we were sort of left, but happily,...

Delight.(Richard Bryant)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Richard Bryant's life has been dedicated to photographic architecture and that's how I got to know him. Over 25 year he has taken some marvellous pictures of our work, from the early days of TV am and Embankment Place. He is regarded as the...