The Architectural Review articles from June 2005

The Architectural Review archives from June 2005

What price icons in a heritage world?(view)('Wien-Mitte' project)
June 1, 2005... Are contemporary 'icon' buildings, particularly tall ones, to be excluded from the increasing number of cities with World Heritage Sites within them? A UNESCO conference, on the dilemmas created by the skyscraper manifestations of globalised...

Lost in translation.(view)
June 1, 2005... Great exhibitions have long served as the laboratory of architectural experimentation, but is this still the case today? As ideas relating to the twenty-first century city emerge, with regeneration and urban stitching offering more appropriate...

Pillow talk.(Stadium construction)
June 1, 2005... On paper, it's a bad day for looking at buildings, but Herzog & de Meuron's new Munich stadium answers well to the drizzle, its translucent, ETFE duvet looming like a ghost on the agricultural motorway flatlands. The planned entrance...

The AR Awards 2005.(view)
June 1, 2005... The AR Awards for Emerging Architecture are entering their seventh cycle. Inaugurated in 1999, the awards are intended to bring wider international recognition to a talented generation of architects and designers under 45. Supported by Buro...

Saving Bruce Goff.(Architectural services)
June 1, 2005... The familiar images of Oklahoma are rural: the land rush of 1889, Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, and 'the wind comes sweeping down the plain' in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. But this prairie state, larger than England and Wales combined,...

Libeskind hits Hong Kong.
June 1, 2005... Daniel Libeskind's first Chinese project, in Hong Kong, is to be 'a lighthouse for the creative industries'. Back in 2002, Hong Kong City University, one of the Special Administrative Region's four Universities, held an international...

Architecture and the car: as the automobile evolved in tandem with modern architecture, it created myths, legends and new building types.(comment)
June 1, 2005... Gabriel Voison (1880-1973) gave up architectural studies to fly, and then to build aircraft for the French air force. After the First World War, Voison turned his hand to car manufacture, and, in partnership with his friend, the architect Noel...

Top gear: Zaha Hadid's new Central Building for BMW radically re-envisages the industrial workplace.(Cover Story)
June 1, 2005... A windswept plain outside Leipzig is an unlikely place to find the latest cross fertilisation of serious architecture and luxury cars. Looming through the frost and fog of a Saxony winter, BMW's new manufacturing plant materialises as a...

Ideas factory: Renault's new communications centre is an inventive remodelling and recolonisation of a former car factory.(Claude Vasconi )
June 1, 2005... In the relentlessly evolving world of car design, where the emphasis is on the new and the novel, Jakob + MacFarlane's communications centre for Renault is a rare example of reuse. The project upgrades and transforms an existing industrial...

Carchitecture? Shuhei Endo softens his curves with a new showroom in Toyonaka, Osaka.
June 1, 2005... Shuhei Endo is one of few contemporary architects who can truly claim to have invented their own highly distinctive architectural language. Having initially come to our attention in August 1997 with Transtation O, an early example of his...

World service: BMW's sales and events centre in Munich reflects an increasing urge for spectacle.
June 1, 2005... The hyper competitive world of the European car industry is forcing manufacturing companies to devise ever more elaborate events, spectacles and locations in order to sell their products. Next to Formula One racing, architecture has become a...

Stuttgart spiral: currently under construction, a new museum for Mercedes-Benz connects with automobile history.
June 1, 2005... Just before Christmas 1900, a 35 horsepower automobile made by Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft was delivered to Emil Jellinek, a wealthy Austrian businessman who raced cars as a hobby. Named after his daughter Mercedes, it caused quite a stir,...

Bamboo cage: enveloped in a skin of bamboo, this car park for Leipzig Zoo connects with nature.
June 1, 2005... Founded in 1878, Leipzig's zoo is one of the oldest and most important zoological gardens in Europe. As well as its work with threatened species, it is also a popular place for public recreation, being close to the city centre. The zoo needed a...

Going underground: this subterranean car park in Graz goes against type to civilise urban parking.
June 1, 2005... Underground garages are a territory lost to architecture. Usually dark, damp and stained, with imagined muggers lurking in the shadows, they are claustrophobic places to escape from as fast as possible. You hold your nose as you enter the lift,...

Double bass: this coastal retreat on the Bass Strait poetically responds to climate and views.
June 1, 2005... Architecture's endless quest for 'transparent' buildings can simply mean excessive use of glass. This then requires ingenious design to solve problems created by the designer. In many parts of the world, sunlight, far from being the essential...

Lighting: Rob Gregory lights up the products section.(product review)
June 1, 2005... TOBIAS GRAU Soon by Tobias Grau comprises a number of identical moveable translucent parts that can be adjusted to suit individual lighting requirements. Two flat steel bands run through the spine of the lamp, which insulate power feeds...

Specifier's information.(BEA)(Wright Style Systems)(Interface )
June 1, 2005... BEA A safety sensor, designed to prevent anyone from being trapped or injured in automatic doors, has been launched by door-safety specialist BEA. The fail-safe and monitored 4Safe is an active infrared detector that measures distance by...

Intelligence rating.(Intelligent Buildings: Design, Management and Operation)(Intelligent Skins)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... INTELLIGENT BUILDINGS: DESIGN, MANAGEMENT AND OPERATION Edited by Derek Clements-Croome. London: Thomas Telford Books. 2004. [pounds sterling]49.50 INTELLIGENT SKINS By Michael Wigginton, Jude Harris. Oxford: Elsevier. 2004....

Straw poll.(Building With Straw)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... BUILDING WITH STRAW By Gernot Minke and Friedemann Mahlke. Basel: Birkhauser. 2005. [euro]39.50 How many of us must have larked around on haystacks as children and disturbed neatly stacked bales in order to make snug little houses?...

Critics' choice.(10 X 10_2)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... 10 X 10_2 London and New York: Phaidon. [pounds sterling]45 In December 2000 I wrote here that 'scarcely anyone will buy' Phaidon's first 10 X 10, an expensive, heavyweight, glossy compilation of 100 recent projects chosen by 10...

Going green.(The Eco-Design Handbook)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... THE ECO-DESIGN HANDBOOK By Alastair Fuad-Luke. London: Thames & Hudson. 2005. [pounds sterling]16.95 The second edition of The Eco-Design Handbook is a source book containing a broad spectrum of over 570 environmentally favourable...

The politics of Pan Am.(The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream )(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... THE PAN AM BUILDING AND THE SHATTERING OF THE MODERNIST DREAM By Meredith Clausen. London: MIT Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]29.95 In the early 1960s my father, a construction worker, would come home from work complaining about a moral...

Montreal Thinks Big.(The '60s: Montreal Thinks Big )
June 1, 2005... Compared with dowdy London in the 1960s or decaying New York, Montreal provided a vision of urban reconstruction inspired largely by CIAM principles. Currently showing at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, The '60s: Montreal Thinks Big...

Defining Jewish identity.(Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture)
June 1, 2005... Is there a definable Jewish identity in contemporary architecture? If so, is it as authentic when the architect is neither an Israeli, nor Jewish by faith? The German and Dutch art historians, publisher and rabbi, Angeli Sachs and Edward van...

Images of England.(browser)(www.viewbuildings.com)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Images of England's website says that it is a unique site. But not necessarily so. There is the oddly named View Buildings at www.viewbuildings.com/app which gives the lie to this. This site claims that only around 20 per cent of the work of...

The light at the end.(browser)(http://www.tomato.co.uk/.)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... I usually grope for a useful answer when people ask for the name of a website designer they could hire. I tend to vaguely suggest Tomato Interactive co-founder. Joel Baumann, http://www.tomato.co.uk/. It's vaguely because he only does projects...

Eva the diva or little girl lost?(browser)(www.ejal.com)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Bitedigital also did Eva Jiricna's site at www.ejal.com. The home page has a drawing of a steeply peaked and warped gridshell dome so, if you didn't know already, you have a pretty good clue to where this practice is coming from. On the next...

Get the nav-strip back.(www.uwm.edu/~jwg)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... We don't often look at studenty websites, Matthew Jones always excepted and his is a grown up case. So it was with some trepidation that I took a look at the portfolio site of Wisconsin-Milwaukee university student Jonathan Goldstein at...

Architecture and technology.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... SIR: I am always interested to read what Colin Davies, who knows something about architecture and technology, has to say about my work (AR May 2005, p94). However, when he writes that I am 'dazzled by big names', I have to correct him. I...

Geography lesson.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... SIR: My name is Ines Martins, and I'd like to say that in your last maganize, there is a mistake about the ARX PORTUGAL blood bank project (p74), Coimbra is a Portuguese city, not Spanish. Portugal is an independent country since 1640, Portugal...

AP to UTP.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... SIR: I refer to the article by Peter Blundell Jones in your excellent March issue. I would like to make clear that the Hastings and Regan families did not sell the Architectural Press to Maxwell in 1987. We sold it to United Trade Press....

Outrageous demagoguery.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... SIR: I have to complain about the publication of Jan Kaplicky's letter in the April issue of AR. He is not only unfair but outrageously demagogic. I do not need to defend Peter Davey. His contribution to our understanding of architecture as...

Diary.(Calendar)
June 1, 2005... AR'S CHOICE OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS FINLAND IN ANOTHER WORLD Until 21 August Kiasma, Helsinki International and Finnish Outsider Art, exploring the edges of contemporary art and idiosyncratic art outside...

Delight.(bridge design)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... MILLAU BRIDGE JOINS THE LINEAGE OF AWESOME EUROPEAN VIADUCTS. I remember very clearly the first time I saw a model of the Millau Viaduct. It was at the MIPIM property fair in Cannes four or five years ago, where there was a competition to...