The Architectural Review articles from May 2006

The Architectural Review archives from May 2006

Putting Modernism in perspective.(view)
May 1, 2006... Here in London Modernism is all the rage, at least in the world of museums and galleries. At Tate Modern, the work of Albers and Moholy-Nagy is displayed to magnificent effect; at the RIBA, an excellent photographic exhibition of Czech...

Spain reigns: Terence Riley wound up his MoMA career with a Spanish tour d'horizon.(Museum Of Modern Art)
May 1, 2006... It would appear from maps that guide visitors around the exhibition Site: New Architecture in Spain that the whole country has not seen so much building 'since the Romans unified the Iberian Peninsula with roadways and aqueducts during the...

Pop Art ... when is a pavilion not a pavilion?(pavilion design created by Rem Koolhaas)
May 1, 2006... In March, the RIBA claimed to have curated 'the world's first inflatable folly', installed by the architectural practice FAT (see story below). Last month, London's Serpentine Gallery announced the second--a design by Rem Koolhaas and Cecil...

World's first inflatable folly.(RIBA Enterprises and Fashion Architecture Taste creates a structure)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... An 8 metre inflated black sphere punctured by a half-timbered structure landed at the RIBA from 15 March to 2 May. The too-big structure was squashed awkwardly into the 7 metre high space of the Florence Hall at the heart of the RIBA's Art Deco...

AR awards call for entries.(view)
May 1, 2006... The Architectural Review Awards for Emerging Architecture are entering their eighth cycle. Inaugurated in 1999, the awards are intended to bring wider international recognition to a talented new generation of architects and designers under 45....

Designing tall buildings.(view)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The demand for aesthetic commercially viable tall building design is at its highest in the history of not only London, but the UK. How can you navigate the quagmire of guidelines and regulations to receive planning permission? And more so, how...

AR index.(view)
May 1, 2006... The six-monthly AR index is no longer printed but is available as a pdf on our website at www.arplus.com (under the AR in print category).

View from Muscat.(view)(Editorial)
May 1, 2006... Leaving Muscat Airport to drive to the Barr Al Jissah Resort it soon becomes apparent that the city of Muscat is very different from Dubai; not a tall building in sight. None of the embassies, schools, residential buildings or offices you see...

Architecture on the podium at RIBA.(RIBA Enterprises presents Royal Gold Medal to architects)
May 1, 2006... Every year since 1848, the RIBA has presented The Royal Gold Medal. Instituted by Her Majesty Queen Victoria, over the past 158 years its recipients have been many and varied, with the first being awarded to the brilliant Charles Robert...

Parkland parasite.(outrage)(description of San Francisco )
May 1, 2006... It is not unusual for modest domestic properties to be vandalised by low-grade conservatories. Mock Victorian are perhaps the worst, seen as a bad rash across Britain, somehow achieving the impossible: to cheapen the look of the country's most...

Peter Cook: reflections on Spanish lunches, Heidegger, and the gap between practice and theory.(english architects' works)
May 1, 2006... A morning session of muddled briefing and messed-up projection was rescued by the wit of the editor of 'Arquitectura Viva', Luis Fernandez-Galiano, getting us cleverly worked up in the round-table session about culture/life/real...

The value of everything: the value of architecture lies in the outcomes it enables, rather than the price of construction.(comment)
May 1, 2006... 'Well, nobody over five years old should expect to get everything they want.' --Ralph Tubbs One of the joys (some might say compensations) of being a quantity surveyor is that you get to work with a succession of architects. It was my...

Memory and struggle: an apartheid museum that celebrates the ordinary is South Africa's latest attempt to come to terms with its past.
May 1, 2006... The intense social and cultural convulsions of post-apartheid South Africa have given rise to a new museum type that attempts to address and commemorate the nation's troubled history. In the apartheid era, museums did not form part of the...

Container art: Shigeru Ban's inventive yet frugal Nomadic Museum berths on the Santa Monica beachfront.
May 1, 2006... For the past 14 years, Gregory Colbert has been filming the interaction of animals and humans around the world, creating images of great beauty. In 2002, he mounted an exhibition, Ashes and Snow, in the Corderia of the Venice Arsenale, and...

Diplomatic relations: a new embassy complex in Addis Ababa is an imaginative response to local conditions.
May 1, 2006... In their recent programme of embassy building in Third World countries, the Dutch are acquiring a reputation for promoting architecture that responds imaginatively to local culture, climate and sensitivities. Collaboration with local architects...

Cheap and cheerful: low-cost housing is given an eye-catching and inventive twist on Slovenia's Adriatic coast.
May 1, 2006... Premiated in the 2004 Emerging Architecture Awards for its imaginative addition to Ljubljana's City Museum (AR December 2004) Ofis is a young Slovenian practice now honing and testing its skills in a series of new housing projects with...

Colour field: a former warehouse is boldly revitalised to provide a community and urban focus.
May 1, 2006... El Centro del Pueblo in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles is the kind of building block that every inner-city community needs: a nonprofit institution, run by dedicated professionals and volunteers, which weans youths away from drugs and...

Dib dib dib: in the heart of Denmark's national forest, Chris Thurlbourne provides a platform for outdoor pursuits.
May 1, 2006... Peter Cook once described Chris Thurlbourne's approach to construction as one that is based on boy-scout technology; lashing together simple, affordable and traditional techniques to create an innovative contemporary architecture. In hearty...

St Catherine's, Oxford: in 1964 Reyner Banham called it the best motel in Oxford. With 130 new bedrooms, and slightly wider beds, it is time to check in to St Catherine's north quad.(place)
May 1, 2006... With twenty-five years of post-war expansion the University of Oxford doubled in size. St Catherine's was a new college, and from the outset Founding Master Alan Bullock was clear that it would have to contribute something distinctive to the...

Tree of dreams: a children's day care centre is animated by an arboreal fantasy, inspired by its young users.(interior design)
May 1, 2006... Die Baupiloten is an architectural studio at the Berlin Technical University (TU) founded and led by architect Susanne Hofmann who trained at the AA. Projects to date have been characterised by highly imaginative communal spaces that provide a...

Bijou box: this prototype for an easily transportable and economical house shows that small can be beautiful.(house)
May 1, 2006... First the tiny, tiddly Smart car (AR January 1999), now an ultra compact house which touts an equally impressive economy of space and resources. The challenge, from Munich's Student Housing Authority, was to create an economical, lightweight,...

Milano.(products)
May 1, 2006... This year's Milan Furniture Fair was the first to be held in the newly inaugurated Fiera megastructure by Massimiliano Fuksas on the north-west outskirts of the city. Within the centre, the showroom scene was as frenetic as ever, as furniture...

Specifier's information.
May 1, 2006... Komfort Workspace Komfort's Architectural Glass Division has completed a striking project for the medical equipment supplier, Cory Bros. The client's design brief was to maintain natural light throughout the office environment using glass...

Georgian visions.(Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... JOSEPH GANDY, AN ARCHITECTURAL VISIONARY IN GEORGIAN ENGLAND By Brian Lukacher. London: Thames & Hudson. 2006. [pounds sterling]40 Most of us know Joseph Michael Gandy (if at all) as John Soane's draughtsman. Soane was extremely...

The forgotten fixer.(Werner Hegemann and the Search for Universal Urbanism)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... WERNER HEGEMANN AND THE SEARCH FOR UNIVERSAL URBANISM By Christiane Crasemann Collins. London: W.W. Norton. 2005. [pounds sterling]35 Born in 1881, Werner Hegemann was of the Modernist generation but never trained as an architect and...

Horns of a dilemma.(Architecture and Its Ethical Dilemmas)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... ARCHITECTURE AND ITS ETHICAL DILEMMAS Edited by Nicholas Ray. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis. 2005. [pounds sterling]75 hardback, [pounds sterling]25 paperback While not pretending to be exhaustive, this collection of essays based on a...

Che stupendo.(Massimiliano Fuksas: Works and Projects 1970-2005)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... MASSIMILIANO FUKSAS: WORKS AND PROJECTS 1970-2005 By Luca Molinari. Milan: Skira. 2005. [pounds sterling]39.95 It is nearly ten years since Italian architecture lost Aldo Rossi, its ambassador. With Rossi theory and practice appeared...

Gabriel Fagan--Twenty Cape Houses.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Die Es in Camps Bay, Cape Town, Gabriel Fagan's remarkable house built with his wife Gwen in 1965, from Gabriel Fagan--Twenty Cape Houses, Cape Town: Breestraat Publikasies, 2005, ZAR460, [pounds sterling]42. Now 80, Fagan is the redoubtable...

Experiments in Porosity, Steven Holl.(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Detail of a new kind of perforated material developed by Steven Holl in collaboration with Italian company Albeflex. Designed to be lightweight and self-supporting, it takes advantage of CNC driven digital fabrication techniques. Laser-cut...

Sense of the city.(Book review)
May 1, 2006... The coupling of architecture and the city in the twentieth century was at its best a sad fumbling; at times it was brutal and heartless. Is it too late for these two tired partners to produce an alternative of equal optimism to the Beaux Arts...

Slipping away.(web browser management)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... You know those (usually) horizontal strips of thumbnails that slide left and right across the top or bottom of the screen activated by a mouse, needing a click or, worst of all, running automatically? They're the architectural version of those...

Hiding under a bushel.(browser)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Still sliding thumbnail strips is a way of coping with showing lots of buildings--and one that Herman Hertzberger, that personable, talented Dutch architect, has adopted for the pics on www.hertzberger.nl. Hertzberger is welcoming to surfers:...

Energy level on show.(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Simon Allford, hon RIBA education VP, will accuse me of nay-saying but the first thing that hits you at the site of Archaos, the UK architecture students' organisation, at www.archaos.org/index.html is a month-old announcement of the...

Blog bank.(browser)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... You look at the long list of CAD blogs at www.tenlinks.com/CAD/reference/blogs.htm and browse the linked sites: 'The General tab offers the usual opportunity to edit the Name and Description of your List Definition. The Applies To tab, shown...

Own up you blogcos.(browser)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Favourite-ise the main list above and move swiftly to a real blog at http://architectureyp.blogspot.com/. It is, if Henry Blogster at http://partiv.blogspot.com in a recent email is correct, one of the few UK blogs. In the best blog tradition...

Diary.(Diary entry)
May 1, 2006... AR'S CHOICE OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS AUSTRIA YVES KLEIN: AIR ARCHITECTURE MAK, Vienna Until 24 September Architectural projects and concepts by French artist Yves Klein famous for his, mostly blue, sponge...

Delight.
May 1, 2006... The Japanese might be said to have elevated compactness into an art form (bonsai, origami, capsule hotels), but lack of buildable space is a perpetual and pressing issue. Such constraints do, however, continue to generate responses that,...