The Architectural Review articles from July 2008

The Architectural Review archives from July 2008

China: Talking is better than shouting.(VIEW)
July 1, 2008... FOSTER + PRATETRS TO TO COPENHAGEN ZOO; POLEMICAL PUBLISHER OF HIS ERA, ANDREAS PAPADAKIS DIES; PROFESSOR ALFED PENG CHASTISES WESTERMN ARCHITECTS FOR USING CHINA AS THEIR NEW WEAPON TEST FILED; THE AR AWARDS FOR EMERGING ARCHITECTURE INVITE...

Elephants in context; Forster & partners' first zoo building opens in Copenhagen.(View)
July 1, 2008... Despite (or perhaps because of) the explosion of interest in television programmes about the animal kingdom, nothing beats seeing it in reality. Copenhagen's nineteenth-century zoo is Denmark's most popular attraction, with 102 million visitors...

Olympic design attack.(View)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... While much of the world has been looking on with awe at the construction and appearance of the Herzog & de Meuron Olympic stadium in Beijing, not everyone likes what they see. In a witty attack on every aspect of he design at a Harvard GSD...

Andreas Papadakis 1938-2008.(Obituary)
July 1, 2008... The world of international architectural publishing will miss Andreas Papadakis, who died after a short illness last month. For two decades, through his Academy Editions company, he promoted various strands of avantgarde architectural thinking...

AR awards.(view)
July 1, 2008... This issue contains entry details (see inside front cover) of the AR AWARDS for Emerging Architecture 2008 - the 10th year of the awards programme. Inaugurated in 1999, the awards have discovered and recognised talented new architects and...

Munster library gives cause for great hopes for Bolles-Wilson's Milan project.(View)(Viewpoint essay)
July 1, 2008... I have fallen victim to the disease suffered by those who talk and breathe architecture, conscientioulsy attend conferences, circulate among their peers and even keep up with the mages. I claim to be well informed, slapping my friends on the...

Made in China: as a great nation modernises with terrifying rapidity, architecture is caught in the slipstream.(Comment)
July 1, 2008... "To get rich is glorious,' declared Deng Xiaoping, an architect of economic reform as well as political repression, and his phrase (apocryphal or not) has become a mantra in China. A frenzied construciton boom began in the Special Economic Zone...

Bird's Nest Bowl: in scale and ambition, Beijing's National Stadium is an evocative symbol of the new China.
July 1, 2008... Most Olympic stadiums enjoy their two weeks of fame and then relapse into well-deserved obscurity. Some host cities, realising that the cameras will focus almost entirely on the athletes, settle for a mdeiocre design or upgrade an existing...

Vision on: OMA's CCTV is a challenging new paradigm of form, structure and the urban condition.(Office for Metropolitan Architecture's China Central Television Building)
July 1, 2008... Because of its unique profile, structural daring and prominent location, the CCTV building is likely to become Beijing's Eiffel Tower, an icon that identifies the city to the world. Indeed, it may supplant the portrait of Mao on the Tiananmen...

Campus calligraphy: this campus for China's leading art school is richly nuanced.
July 1, 2008... A monumental gift package, wrapped in red cloth and tied with a big bow, has been erected at the entrance to the China Art Academy. It celebrates the opening of a new campus for an institution that is celebrating its 80th anniversary as one of...

Curved air: Arata Isozaki brings Japanese rigour and sensuality to a new art museum.(Central Academy of Fine Arts)
July 1, 2008... Founded more than eighty years ago as a prestigious art college, the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) was transformed into a university of art, architecture and design in the 1990s, and relocated from the centre of Beijing to the...

Seeing the light: the tenacious presence of Christianity in China is marked by a bold new church.(Column)
July 1, 2008... Though not as firmly rooted as Confucianism, Taoism or Buddhism, Christianity has been a tenacious presence in China since the seventh century. The Silk Road brought the first missionaries and despite periodic attempts at repression, successive...

Found and frugal spaces: architecture for art; China's growing market for contemporary art has spawned an equally revolutionary crop of new buildings.
July 1, 2008... Nowhere is the Chinese counter-revolution more apparent than in the field of contemporary art. As recently as two decades ago, the doctrines of socialist realism were sternly enforced and dissenters were persecuted. During the Cultural...

Urban revitalisation: though much of the historic fabric of Chinese cities is being swept away in the dash for growth, some fragments of the past still remain and hold important lessons for future urban development.(urbanism)
July 1, 2008... Two models in Beijing/s Planning Exhibition Hall demonstrate how radically the capital has been transformed over the past two decades. A bronze wall relief shows the walled city as it was before 1949: a dense warren of narrow lanes and...

Raising the bar; Enlightened patrons and developers are key in China's struggle to forge a new architectural identity. Michael Webb talks to Zhang Xin about her development company SOHO and how it encourages designers to think outside the box.(interview)(Interview)
July 1, 2008... Zhang Xin embodies the entrepreneurial spirit and vaunting ambition of the new China. Born in Beijing in 1965 on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, she followed her mother to Hong Kong at age 14, where she worked in a sweatshop. A scholarship...

Building tall (and designing deep) in China; Thomas Kerwin of SOM considers the experience of Western firms working in China and looks at how its buoyant economy has acted as test bed for new forms of architecture, especially urban super-towers.(process)
July 1, 2008... In 2006, one of China's most talked-about television advertisements featured a famous ancient pagoda morphing into the 421m tall Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai's Pudong District. The ad resonated throughout China because Jin Mao was then the...

Flowering talent; Once the foreign architectural invasion abates, as it inevitably will, China's emerging generation of designers will be instrumental in shaping the country's future. Here we profile four young Chinese practice that are learning fast.
July 1, 2008... MAD, Beijing Forty people work for MAD in a converted factory, producing futuristic models beneath vintage wood ceiling vaults and brick arches, and that number is set to double. Ten projects are under construction or are sheduled to start...

Studio Pei-Zhu, Bijing.
July 1, 2008... The husband-wife partnership of Pei Zhu and Tong Wu established their office in 2005. He graduated from Tsinghua University, got his M Arch at UC Berkeley, and spent three years as a partner in the Bijing office of Urbanus ([p.sup.88]), where...

MADA s.pa.m., Shanghai and Xi' an.(Ma Designers and Architects: strategy, planning, architecture and media)
July 1, 2008... As the principle of an 80-person practice with offices in Shanghai and Xi' an and Dean of Architecture at the University of Southern California (USC), Ma Qingyun is equally at home in East and West, and his work draws on both cultures. He grew...

Urbanus architecture & design, Shenzhen and Beijing.
July 1, 2008... Thoughtful urbanism is the hallmark of Urbanus, a practice that was established in the southern city of Shenzhen in 1999, and branched out to Beijing in 2003. It was founded by Liu Xiaodu, Yan Meng and Wang Hui, fellow students at Tsinghua and...

Spring in Shangri-La: A hong kong firm puts a fresh spin on Japanese traditions in Beijing.(interior)(CL3)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... An anthology of Japanese cuisines is offered in Nishimura, a free-spirited interpretation of traditional decorative elements from that country. A sake bar of dark stained cedar and a tatami room with a backlit grille of blond wood flank the...

Engineering rivalries.(Architect and Engineer: A Study in Sibling Rivalry)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... ARCHITECT AND ENGINEER: A STUDY IN SIBLING RIVALRYBy Andew Saint London: Yale University Press, 2007. [pounds sterling]45. This lavish book is a collection of six architectural-historical essays on the common theme of architect and...

A Machine for reading.(Toward an Architecture)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... LE CORBUSIER: TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE Introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen. Translated by John Goodman, London: Francis Lincoln. 2007. [pound sterling]30 and [pound sterling]17.99 Since 1927, the English speaking world has relied on...

Esothric geometry.(The Symbol at Your Door: Number and Geometry in the Religious Architecture of the Greek and Latin Middle Ages)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... THE SYMBOLAT YOUR DOOR: NUMBER AND GEOMETRY IN RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE OF THE GREEK AND LATIN MIDDLE AGES BY Nigel Hiscock, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2007. [pounds sterling]55. Despite its quirky title, this book is a serious...

Cities in the sky.(Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... TOPOLOGIES: THE URBAN UTOPIA IN FRANCE, 1960-1970 By Larry Busbea, London: MIT Press 2007. [pound sterling]15.95 The received wisdom about French town planning is Haussmann dominates. Even Le Corbusier's 1920s schemes depend on and...

Building the Bird's nest.(Bird's Nest - Herzog and De Meuron in China)(Pierre De Meuron and Jacques Herzog)(Movie review)
July 1, 2008... A new film chronicles the building of China's Olympic Stadium Architecture is politics. Participating in the Beijing Olympics is a guarantee of not only frame, but also a few headaches. The stadium at the centre of the Beijing Olympics...

Sutherland Lyall cools down for summer with a delicious cyber sundae.(browser)(www.floresprats.com)(Website overview)
July 1, 2008... MOVIE MADNESS Just when it looked as thought architectural websites had collapsed into a slough of earnest, semi-pointless, corporate dullness, there's been a small rash of youngish sites which are casually and happily ignorant of the old...

AR's choice of international exhibitions from www.arplus.com.(diary)(Calendar)
July 1, 2008... CANADA WILL ALSOP: OCAD, AND URBAN MANIFESTO Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal Until 5 October Completed in 2004, the OCAD (Ontario College of Art & Design) Sharp Centre for Design was designed by Alsop Architects in...

Powered by the sun, this jumbo screen flashes and beguiles.(delight)(Zero Energy Media Wall)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... Jumbotron screens are proliferating in every major city, assaulting the senses with a frenzied turmoil of sports and advertising, talking heads and jigging bodies. What a relief then, to find a six-storey screen devoted to nothing but art. The...

Ideas that crossed the world: the rise and rise of gmp.(Introduction)(Von Gerkan Marg und Partner)
July 1, 2008... By the end of 2008 it is predicted that for the first time ever the majority of the world's pepulation will be living incities. The urban environment has finally superseded the countryside to become the predominant manifestation of humankind...

The importance of dialogue; Meinhard von Gerkan discusses his architectural philosophy with Xu Xiaofei of Tsinghua University, Beijing.(Interview)
July 1, 2008... Q: What were your first steps as an architect like? How did you initially come into contact with architecture? A: In 1965, the first year of our practice, during which we hardly made any money, we won 10 first prizes, some of them in...

Gmp HQ, Hamburg, Germany.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... The dominant, steamer-like, building of the complex consisting of the office, the house, a restaurant and a public outdoor area houses the main office of gmp architectural partnership. The cylinder of the top recessed storey - a counterpart of...

Casino, Bad Steben, Germany.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... The UPS and downs of gambling serve as a conceptual metaphone, which is expressed arhitecturally in the wave-like formation of the roof. This also alludes to the surrounding hilly countryside and the path of the small Steben strean. Five...

Mining archive building, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... The new archive building secures the extensive collection of documents on the technological and cultural history of the Harz Mountains. Until now, the oldest document from 1524 together with all other archive material were available for perusal...

Christ Pavilion, Expo 2000 Hanover.(Pavilion of Christian Religions)
July 1, 2008... The Pavilion of Christian Religions, a combined contribution of the Catholie and Photestant Churches for EXPO 2000, was intended to be a contemplative counterpart, to this self-promoting 'vanity fair'. Simple in structure, reduced to a few...

New trade fair, Leipzig, Germany.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... The underlying design principle is simple: the visitor arrives in a central valley, which is designed as a continuous landscaped park and runs one level below the exhibition halls. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ...

New Trade Fair, Rimini, Italy.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... Rimini's New Trade Fair is organised in the Neo-Classical way, ie, following axiality and perspective, and referring to the architectural traditions of the region, it employs modern construction methods and materials. The square in front of the...

National convention center, Hanoi, Vietnam.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... The whole NCC Hanoi complex is embedded in a park landscape, which integrates thematic and symbolic references to Vietnamese culture and traditions. The new buildings for the National Conference Center, along with a hotel and museum, are...

Olympic Sports Center, Shenzhen, China.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... Shenzhen's Olympic Sports Center consists of a sports stadium, swimming complex and multifunctional arena. All three elements are arranged in a clear geometrical order which follows a triangular layout. Touchig on wider eultural resenances, the...

Century lotus sports park, fosnar, China.
July 1, 2008... On the occasion of the 12th Guangdong Province Sports Meeting 2006, Foshan wanted to present itself to the public as a modern and growing city. A multi-purpose stadium and a swimming hall serve the demands of international sports competitions,...

New Tempodrom/Liquidrom, Berlin, Germany.
July 1, 2008... Public life, which in former days defined the Anhalter Bahnhof as 'gateway to the south', returned to this part of Berlin with the realisation of the new Tempodrom building. The main aim of the urban planning concept was to define the building...

Grand Theatre, Chongqing, China.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... With its proximity to the water, the Grand Theatre seems to hover above the River Yangtse. Surreal reflections of light create a poetic composition of reality and fiction, like the illusory world of the theatre. A stone platform base supports...

Maritime Museum, Lingang New City, China.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... Two light roof shells face each other and overlap in a maritime analogy of a sail. These create a distinctive identity for Lingang's new Maritime Museum. The large hall below this roof is intended for the exhibition of ancient ships considered...

Lingang New City, near Shanghai, China.
July 1, 2008... To accommodate the huge growth of population and industry in Shanghai, the city-planning department conducted an international competition for a new harbour city that incorporates the international deep-sea container harbour Yangshan. First...

Berlin central station, Germany.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... On the site of the historical Lehrter Bahnhof, the most important train station in Germany is now completed. An east-west and a north-south link of the InterCityExpress service connect here, supported by local train links. The north-south line...

Hamburg Airport, terminals 1, 2 and 3 Germany.
July 1, 2008... The linking backbone of Hamburg Airport is the aircraft docking zone in front of the terminals. Buildings form structural intervals within this spine, ensuring that the various architectural elements share a common framework. This gives a...

Villa Guna, Jurmala, Latvia.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... The primary feature of this design is not the actual mechanics of a villa, but rather the physical experience of the site, characterised by the dialogue between the surrounding landscape and the view over the dunes of the beach near Riga. ...

Restaurant VAU, Berlin, Germany.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... Down into the coal mine? Whoever enters the restaurant's basement bar at night will inquisitively study the brown coal bricks, stacked as books in a wooden wall unit. These evoke a memory of the coal cellar, a stylisation of the genius...

Modular wall, unit shelving system.(Furniture)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... Yet another wall unit, with so many already on the market? But as tables and chairs are continually reinvented, so it is with storage facilities. This elegant wall unit is based on the simple principle of the open grid. Multiplex boards...

Biographies.(Brief biography)
July 1, 2008... Volkwin Marg Prof Dipl-Ing Architekt BDA Both 15 October 1936 in Konigsberg/East Prussia, childhood in Danzig 1964 Dipoma in Arehitecture at the University Carolo-Wilhelmina, Braunschweig. From 1965 architect in partnership with...

Awards.(Awards list)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... More than 430 competition awards since 1964, including 230 first prizes Bucharest 2000, Romania Expo 2000 Plaza, Hanover Airports Berlin-Tegal, Mucich II, Moscow, Algiers, Hamburg National Library, Teheran, Iran Academy...

Practice.(Gerkan, Marg and Partners Architects)(Company overview)
July 1, 2008... gmp.von Gerkan, Marg and Partners Architects The architectural practice von Gerkan, Marg und Partner was founded by Meinhard von Gerkan and Volkwin Marg in 1965. Since its inception it has grown to include six additional artners and more...

Select bibliography.(Bibliography)
July 1, 2008... 1994 Architektur in Dialog Velag Ernst und Sohn Berlin 1997 Architecture for Transportation - Architektur fur den Verkehr Birkhauser Verlag Basel, Boston, Berlin Neue Messe Leipzig - New Trade Fair Leipzig ...