The Architectural Review articles from March 2002

The Architectural Review archives from March 2002

Architects at their worst? (View).
March 1, 2002... The huge crowd that wound its way round the block on the opening night of the exhibition of design proposals for 'A New World Trade Center' at the Max Protetch Gallery is evidence of the immediate and urgent craving experienced by so many New...

Obituary.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
March 1, 2002... ERIC DE MARE 1910-2002 Eric de Mare changed the way we see. Born in 1910, he became immensely influential in the immediate post Second World War period, when his photographs transfixed two generations of young architects. His war had been...

Look but don't touch. (Browser).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... One theory says that architects like looking at pictures of buildings in the same way that submariners like looking at gatefolds. Well not exactly the same reason. Architects do it partly because that's the way they have operated since the...

Reverse charges. (Browser).(architectural group's web site reviewed)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... We last looked at the UIA site (www.uia-architectes.org) in 1999 and said things like 'stuffy... pompously self-promoting' and 'largely out-of-date'. Today this is a site whose design is such that you need to stick a biro deep into the muscles...

Letters. (View).
March 1, 2002... NAIVE AND SUPERFICIAL SIR: Your comment on the 'corrosive effects' of the leisure industry (AR February, p30, 'Destroying All the Things We Love') is the latest and perhaps most salient example of the Architectural Review's unsatisfactory...

View from Singapore: Under economic pressure from other Asian cities, Singapore is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century.(architectural firms)
March 1, 2002... Will Singapore survive for another hundred years? It is a question occasionally posed by my acquaintances in South-East Asia. When I consider cities in Asia which were formerly seats of power -- cities such as Angkor in Cambodia (802-1431),...

Bridging disciplines: Comprising a skeletal cuboid steel structure supporting a walkway, this bridge resembles a piece of jewellery in the landscape. (Design Review).(Marijke De Goey design)(Auckland, New Zealand)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... BRIDGE, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND ARCHITECT: MARIJKE DE GOEY One of the challenges of using standardized geometry is how to create a variety of forms. Dutch designer Marijke de Goey shows what can be achieved in her radical design for a...

The hospital as building type.
March 1, 2002... Hospitals are simultaneously almost machines for improving health and places for intensifying compassion and emotions. A new generation of buildings, particularly in Austria, shows how technology and humanity can be reconciled. With a...

Clinical precision: An extension of a distinguished ear, nose and throat hospital department is both efficient and lyrical.(Regional Hospital of Graz)
March 1, 2002... The Regional Hospital of Graz marks an important moment in Austrian social and architectural history. Built on a low plateau to the north of Graz between 1903 and 1912, it had an unprecedented 1940 beds and was organized by a new body, the...

Krankenhaus Kada: Hospitals are buildings for all, but they rarely offer proper public spaces. Here is a hierarchy of spatial experience ranging from the semi-private ward to the public domain.
March 1, 2002... If the economic and efficiency arguments for building hospitals in a rational modernist way persist, and if this means keeping largely to rectangular forms, regular column grids, and repetitive fields of cladding, Klaus Kada demonstrates that...

Colour moves: Slowly, a major hospital in Furstenfeld, Austria is being transformed with additions that are both lively and very responsive to patient demand.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The regional hospital of Furstenfeld belongs to the ambitious wave of care provision of the beginning of the twentieth century which included the Graz Regional Hospital and, like that larger example, it was fulfilled architecturally with a...

Healing wings: Articulated by a responsive plan and subtle tectonic gestures, this new local hospital in Graz tames and humanizes a complex programme.
March 1, 2002... The new Graz West Regional Hospital occupies flat land close to the western boundary of the city, growing up next door to the uninspiring Accident Hospital built in the 1970s. It enjoys good views of the hills to the west, but the local context...

Rewarding experiences: A new approach to hospital ward design based on patient needs at different stages of treatment.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Volker Giencke is one of the leading Graz architects (1) and was runner up in the competition for the Hartberg Hospital in 1992. Five years later he won the international competition for the Regional Hospital in Bregenz at the other end of...

Holistic grid: Designed in the late '60s but only now complete, this hospital in Mirano by Giancarlo De Carlo explores the notion of the grid as a flexible, neutral framework that sensitively orchestrates light and spatial relationships.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Few buildings designed in 1967 but not completed until the late '90s would command much interest, but Giancarlo De Carlo is among the most thoughtful and respected architects of his generation and despite the delay, several of his ideas have...

Danish dignity: the chapel may have been displaced from being the centre of the hospital (p40), but it can play its part in healing.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Lutherans (particularly the Scandinavian kind) have produced many of the most moving religious buildings of the last 100 years. Quiet manipulation of cool light, precise understanding of calm space, sensitivity to landscape are some of the...

Healing Architecture: For a long time, we have supposed that good design will improve patient well-being. Now we have figures to prove it. Bryan Lawson reports on how patient treatment and behaviour improved with new architecture. (Theory).
March 1, 2002... Most hospital patients may get the personal attention of a doctor for only a few minutes a day and slightly longer periods of personal care from nurses and therapists. However they often remain in bed, or if they are more fortunate sit, for...

Romanesque refuge: A new visitors' centre in an ancient French Romanesque abbey is conceived as a series of precisely crafted interventions.(Abbaye de Montmajour)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Romanesque ruins of the Abbaye de Montmajour dominate the surrounding Provencal landscape from the top of a hill about 5km north of Aries. When established in the tenth century by the Benedictines (it is thought as a sanctuary from the...

Raw discipline: Design of an apartment in a Toronto warehouse expresses the owner's desire for a disciplined existence, and the architect's love of sensual austerity.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... A penitentiary is defined as a place for punishment, for reform, but most of all, a place to inspire discipline. When Eric Yolles (son of renowned Canadian structural engineer Morden Yolles) asked designer Johnson Chou to 'think penitentiary',...

Garden parti: a garden pavilion uses High-Tech vocabulary to create a transparent garden room, mediating between leafy exterior and nineteenth-century house.(Simon Gander Associates)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The addition, by Simon Gander Associates, of a crystalline box to one side of a large nineteenth-century house in Canonbury, north London, transforms the ground floor confines of the old building and creates a new garden room. The client...

Modular lighting. (Product Review: Lighting).(lighting and luminaire developments)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The latest developments in lighting and luminaire design surveyed by Susan Dawson. Diabolo is a moulded rectangular lighting fixture which can be used in a variety of positions - on walls, ceilings, pedestal-mounted or back-to-back. It...

Concord: Marlin. (Product Review: Lighting).(Waterhall Modern Art Gallery lighting project)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Custom made lighting by Concord: Marlin was installed in the recently refurbished Waterhall Modern Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK. The main gallery space has rows of cast-iron columns supporting ornate barrel vaults, each more than 3m wide. Due to...

Martin. (Product Review: Lighting).
March 1, 2002... The new head office of Nykredit, designed by architect Schmidt, Hammer and Lassen, is a striking new building on Copenhagen's waterfront. The glazing on the north-east and south-west facades is defined by 24 horizontal ribs of granite, two per...

Trilux-Lenze. (Product Review: Lighting).(Advertising)
March 1, 2002... Three ranges of T5 luminaires are now equipped with electronic control gear units in multi-lamp technology for easy adaptation of illuminance levels. The ranges include 504/505-louvre and diffuser luminaires, 526-louvre luminaire, and...

Ghidini. (Product Review: Lighting).(Advertising)
March 1, 2002... Desy is a luminaire designed for exterior lighting which could also be used in interior spaces. The support frame is in die-cast aluminium, painted black, grey or white. The polycarbonate diffuser is slightly sandblasted to diffuse the light....

Castaldi. (Product Review: Lighting).(Advertising)
March 1, 2002... Boxer is an innovative range of floodlights suitable for a wide array of applications. It offers models with mono- or bi-directional light emission for modern and advanced discharge lighting sources. Equally wide is the choice of the available...

Forbes & Lomax. (Product Review: Lighting).(advertisement)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Frosted opal acrylic face plates available with silver dolly, button dimmer, dimmer knob or rocker switches. Socket outlets with matching face plates complement the range. Enquiry 508 www.arplus.com/enq.html

Leccor. (Product Review: Lighting).(Fia, Fiacco and Fiaccola lighting systems)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Fia, Fiacco and Fiaccola lighting systems are made in stainless steel to classic modern designs which allows them to be used in any setting, mounted on walls or ceilings, on poles or pillars. Enquiry 509 www.arplus.com/enq.html

Cini & Nils. (Product Review: Lighting).
March 1, 2002... TensoFari is a cable-mounted halogen luminaire for accent lighting at 230V. without transformer. It accepts from one to four modules which can be oriented in any direction. Enquiry 510 www.arplus.com/enq.html

Sullivan's City - The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan & Louis Sullivan - The Poetry of Architecture. (Ornament isn't Crime).
March 1, 2002... David van Zanten, London: W. W. Norton & Company. 2001. [pounds sterling]40 Robert Twombley and Narciso G. Menocal. London: W. W. Norton & Company. 2001. [pounds sterling]30 Understanding Louis Sullivan had been made difficult, at...

How Architecture Got its Hump. (Grimp in Mire).
March 1, 2002... Roger Connah, London: MIT Press. 2001. [pounds sterling]11.50 'Hijack' is Roger Connah's favourite word. This book is supposed to be about the way contemporary architecture has hijacked (or possibly been hijacked by) other disciplines such...

The Language of Ornament. (Ornament - Basic Pleasure?).
March 1, 2002... James Trilling. London: Thames and Hudson. 2001. [pounds sterling]8.95 Who outlawed ornament? How is it that the Berlin Wall of Modernism has come down and yet we are still denied the most basic pleasure of pre-totalitarian architecture?...

Heidegger's Philosophy of Art. (Nazi or What?).(new book)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Julian Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001, [pounds sterling]35 Martin Heidegger was a functionary of the Nazi party from the early 1930s until the end of the War; nearly all discussion about him nowadays, both on the...

Roberto Burle Marx: The Lyrical Landscape. (Botanical Abstractions).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Marta Iris Montero. London: Thames and Hudson. 2001. [pounds sterling]29.95 It is 10 years since the publication of the last book about Burle Marx. An artist with many talents, painter, sculptor and musician, he disliked writing about...

Radical Landscapes. (Designer Disaster).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Jane Amidon. London: Thames and Hudson. 2001. [pounds sterling]29.95 Although this is a terrific picture book it could have been a terrific book. There are two problems. One is the text, the other the idiotic design -- lots of totally...

The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation. (Urban, Why?).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Edited by Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz, London: E & FN Spon. 2001. [pounds sterling]19.99 The contributions to The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation range from a philosophical discourse on the nature of the...

Architecture in a Climate of Change - A Guide to Sustainable Design. (Do We Deserve to Surviver).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... By Peter F. Smith, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2001. [pounds sterling]17.99 There is a plethora of primer-type guides to sustainable architecture, and one might be forgiven in wondering if they are all necessary, not because there is any...

Twentieth Century Architecture 5: Festival of Britain and Brief City: The story of London's Festival Buildings. (Engineering Happiness).
March 1, 2002... Edited by Elain Harwood and Alan Powers, London: Twentieth Century Society. 2001. [pounds sterling]19.95 BRIEF CITY: THE STORY OF LONDON'S FESTIVAL BUILDINGS Directed by Maurice Harvey and Jacques Brunius, Massingham Production Ltd....

New Vernacular Architecture. (Modern Vernacular Possible?).
March 1, 2002... By Vicky Richardson. London: Laurence King. 2001, [pounds sterling]39.99 New Vernacular Architecture assumes its place among a growing library of books exploring the production and future of architecture after Modernism, Richardson states...

The Chosen City. (Unlovable Urbanity).
March 1, 2002... By Nicholas Schoon. London: Spon Press. 2001. [pounds sterling]18.99 Most of us know that every new analysis of urban issues has to repeat facts familiar for decades, and this author endears himself to this reader with his comment that the...

Tradition and innovation John McAslan + Partners.(profile of architect and his firm)
March 1, 2002... Founder of a practice known both for its responsive remodelling of existing buildings and innovative new work, John McAslan's lives in architecture are introduced by Martin Pawley. To date, John McAslan has had two lives in architecture,...

Delight.(description of Catalan region)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Exposed by a recent forest fire, the primeval topography of these Catalan Vineyard terraces has a potent grandeur shaped by both the forces of nature and the hand of human intervention. In the Catalan frontier area between Spain and France...