The Architectural Review articles from November 2005

The Architectural Review archives from November 2005

The problem of architectural research.(view)
November 1, 2005... Making architecture is an optimistic activity, engaged with the future and therefore speculative in nature. You might say that, with the substantial exception of repeat buildings or structures, to make a building is to undertake a piece of...

A whiter shade of grey: as her first major public building in Europe, the Phaeno science centre in Wolfsburg represents a significant moment in the career of Zaha Hadid.(view)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Opening later this month, seven years after the initial competition-winning commission, Zaha Hadid's soon to be completed science centre is set to become part of Wolfsburg's ongoing strategic vision to transform itself from industrial colony to...

King of Spain.(view)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Hard on the heels of the completion of the Torre Agbar in Barcelona, Jean Nouvel's second major Spanish project was unveiled in Madrid at the end of September. The new extension to the Museo Reina Sofia, Spain's national art museum and the home...

RIBA Gold Medallist: Toyo Ito.(view)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Korean-born, Tokyo-based architect Toyo Ito is this year's RIBA Gold Medallist. While remaining deceptively youthful, Ito is widely accepted to be one of Japan's leading architectural figures, ahead perhaps of direct contemporaries Tadao Ando...

AR submission guidelines.(view)
November 1, 2005... We are always happy to accept unsolicited material for publication, but within the following guidelines. A basic submission should comprise a short project description (in English), a set of drawings (plans, sections, site plan) and some...

AR Future Project Awards at MIPIM.(view)
November 1, 2005... The MIPIM AR Future Project Awards 2006 have just been launched. The awards are for unbuilt work in eight categories--offices; retail and leisure; masterplanned communities; big urban projects; residential; tall buildings; innovation and local...

Erratum.(Correction Notice)
November 1, 2005... The photographer of the Training Centre, Reutlingen, Germany (AR October, p62) was Jens Passoth, and not Roland Halbe.

Peter Cook: the tiger blinks, the scorpion twitches. Peter Cook delivers a warning shot to Western architectural glitterati from Busan.(view)
November 1, 2005... The lights dim, the famous name descends the staircase to the accompaniment of a movie theme tune, and another live performance begins. Four of us greyheads sit at the front and try to remain impassive for the duration of each of seven 40...

3 for 2 ... [pounds sterling]1 a scoop: Diana Cochrane from Urban Salon Architects considers the nature of places of exchange.
November 1, 2005... Places of exchange: commodities, ideas and service Everyone loves a bargain. One imagines places of exchange, predominantly commercial spaces, as inherently people focused, filled with action--trading, conversing, noise, activity, and...

Market forces: extolling the virtues of fresh food and a sense of community, Barcelona's Santa Caterina market takes its place in the dynamic of urban life.
November 1, 2005... Locked into the dense urban texture of Barcelona's Barri Gotic, close to the city's main medieval cathedral, lies Santa Caterina market. Tenaciously occupying the same site since the nineteenth century, it is the oldest covered market in the...

Lunch box: this addition to an Oxford College elegantly extends the historic continuum.
November 1, 2005... The centre of Oxford is a three-dimensional palimpsest. Many of the quadrangles and gardens date back to medieval times, when the colleges were religious foundations and all the dons in holy orders. Since then, the buildings have been altered...

History and memory: one of Berlin's great cultural institutions has been imaginatively remodelled to connect with the life of the city.
November 1, 2005... The Akademie der Kunste is a bit like the British Royal Academy except that it involves a larger spectrum of arts, including literature, theatre, film and dance as well as painting, sculpture and architecture, and that it draws its...

East of Eden: the Eden Project's latest building takes a design cue from plant geometries.
November 1, 2005... Given the success of the Grimshaw Eden Project (AR August 2001), the spectacular 'biomes' which enclose a series of environments and associated plants and trees, the task of adding an education centre was challenging. The client, Tim Smit,...

Shiny shopping: this Vancouver shopping mall reworks commercial and cultural stereotypes.
November 1, 2005... South of downtown Vancouver with its soaring high-rises and snow-capped mountains, the city peters out into the murky flatlands and flood plain of the Fraser river delta. Here, rolling acres of suburban housing are interspersed with huge...

Stealth tactics; Tadao Ando has exchanged his trademark language with hhstyle: an urban space invader.
November 1, 2005... You would not be blamed for failing to recognise Tadao Ando's hand in this his latest work. More known for architectural set pieces that are as laden with ritual as they are with Euclidean geometric orchestration and the purist (some may say,...

Market renewal: Borough Market, on the south side of the Thames, has won a new lease of life in recent years.
November 1, 2005... In summer this year, the president of Barcelona's La Boqueria market attended a London conference on the future of markets and fresh produce--and announced the 'twinning' of his market with Borough Market, arguably the oldest market in the...

Inside storeys: bank offices have been transformed by imaginative treatment of stacked atria.(HOK Architects)
November 1, 2005... The atrium is frequently one of the duller parts of big office buildings. What do you do with a void? Institutional art is one response, more or less self-conscious lighting another. Neither was really an option for this tower in Canary Wharf,...

Going with the flow: ramps and shallow stairs weave a spacious addition into the fabric of a nineteenth-century villa.
November 1, 2005... To preserve the picture postcard view over Lake Bled, an hour's drive from the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, the local authorities insist that every building and tree visible from the lake be preserved, including a decrepit hillside villa a...

Habitare, Finland's largest furniture and interior design fair, formed part of Helsinki Design week at the end of September. The theme of this year's Habitare design competition was 'my music': the development of spaces for listening to music. Of the 74 submissions, Jasper Morrison shortlisted four for their diverse and clever use of materials. Julia Dawson reports.(product review)
November 1, 2005... Aisti (Sense) was in Jasper Morrison's opinion the most impressive scheme as it is so cheerful, colourful and alive. By Inka Ahola and Karoliina Korhonen, assisted by Richard Widerberg and Kimmo Modig, it was certainly the funkiest, with...

Specifier's information.(Formica)(RIDI )(Eurogla)
November 1, 2005... Formica Formica was delighted to unveil its 'Range Additions 2006' at 100% Design. Expanding 'The Collection' in line with the latest European and global trends, the 'Range Additions 2006' includes new plain colour patterns and woodgrains....

Scholarly Sinan.(The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... THE AGE OF SINAN, ARCHITECTURAL CULTURE IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE By Gulru Necipoglu, London: Reaktion Books. 2005: [pounds sterling]60 Gulru Necipoglu has been the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard University...

Best in the west.(A History Of Western Architecture)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... A HISTORY OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE By David Watkin. London: Laurence King. 2005. [pounds sterling]24.95 Anyone attempting to write a book with a title such as this one faces daunting problems, not least the huge amounts of information...

Alexander the great.(The Nature Of Order: An Essay On The art Of Building And The Nature Of The Universe, vol. 3)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... THE NATURE OF ORDER: AN ESSAY ON THE ART OF BUILDING AND THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE--VOL III: A VISION OF A LIVING WORLD By Christopher Alexander. Berkeley: The Center for Environmental Structure, distributed by Routledge. 2005. [pounds...

The space between.(Revisions Of Space: An Architectural Manual)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... REVISIONS OF SPACE: AN ARCHITECTURAL MANUAL By Dick van Gameren. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. 2005. [euro]35 This book is essentially a piece of self-promotion, although it is an engaging one. Dick van Gameren is a Dutch architect whose...

Tibetan Pilgrimage--Architecture of the Socred Land.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Watercolour of the Maitreya temple, part of the fourteenth-century royal citadel of Tingmogang in Ladakh, from Tibetan Pilgrimage--Architecture of the Socred Land, by Michel Peissel, London: Abrams, 2005, [pounds sterling]19.95. Peissel, a...

OK, more is more.(browser)(www.douglasandking.com)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... I bang on about the virtues of simplicity for architectural practice websites, less is more, that sort of stuff. Not that I won't continue to do exactly that. But right now I have the website of fashionably Hoxton-based practice Douglas and...

Chameleon green.(browser)(www.noxarch.com)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... After all that, it seemed logical to take a look at the site of that great surreal blob Dutch lot, NOX, led by Lars Spuybroek. It is at www.noxarch.com. Like Douglas and King's site it is Flash-based, but I found the lower two thirds blanked...

Some useful academics after all.(browser)(www.artifact.ac.uk)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... I don't know why Browser hasn't mentioned Artifact before this. It is at www.artifact.ac.uk. One reason might be because I quite enjoy writing this column and don't want to give my secrets away all at once. Whatever, Artifact is a guide to arts...

A blog Virgil in the web Inferno.(browser)(http://rob.annable.co.uk)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... And so to more blogs. Since last month I have had a fascinating email conversation about blogs with architect reader Rob Annable. And there was that report in one of the British nationals about how, astonishingly, as many as a third of young...

Booga-looga blog.(browser)(www.reallysimplesyndication.com)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Blogs can be cheap and cheerful websites. They can be personal diaries; public ruminations on this and that; a collection of links; with an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed a constant source of information. The young simply do them. But an...

Up and down exhibition road.(www.thingsmagazine.net)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Blogs run out of steam just like websites. And then they unexpectedly raise their heads. One case in point seems to be a site Annable referred me to: Things Magazine at www.thingsmagazine.net. It belongs to that Royal College of Art/V & A...

Meet me in St Louis.(browser)(www.raimistarchitecture.com)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Don't not think about using the blog format for your practice website. Take a look at the site of St Louis architect Andrew Raimist at http://RaimistArchitecture.com. Raimist comes over as a nice bloke who any potential client would be...

Diary.(Calendar)
November 1, 2005... AR'S CHOICE OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS AUSTRIA MANGA--THE AESTHETICS OF A TRASH CULTURE Until 4 December 2005 MAK, Vienna The Japanese comic book phenomenon explored and explained. Unlike Western comics,...

Delight.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... THE NOTORIOUSLY MESSY JAPANESE STREETSCAPE IS TRANSFORMED BY THIS WITTY URBAN DESIGN PROJECT. The Japanese urban landscape is typically an irredeemably messy visual potage of utility poles and wires. This mess is nationally ubiquitous,...