The Architectural Review articles from November 2007

The Architectural Review archives from November 2007

A sense of the surface.(view)
November 1, 2007... Wittily entitled The Function of Ornament, the book edited by Farshid Moussavi, featuring the work of her Harvard students, raised a series of questions about our attitude to surface, decoration, colour and meaning in architecture. It reminded...

Heart of glass: Daniel Libeskind returns to Berlin to add a final coda to his Jewish Museum.(view)
November 1, 2007... Daniel Libeskind may work out of Manhattan nowadays but, as he said at the recent opening of his Glass Courtyard in Berlin's Jewish Museum, 'I never really left Berlin'. Libeskind has come full circle. His international career started with an...

Gone but not forgotten.(view)(Obituary)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... Two grand old men of architecture, Kisho Kurokawa and Oswald Matthias Ungers, died recently. Kurokawa, aged 73, was a leading figure in the Japanese Metabolist movement. Ungers, aged 81, was a powerful force in postwar Germany. Obituaries will...

AR Awards 2007.(view)(Public notice)
November 1, 2007... The AR Awards for Emerging Architecture were judged on 25 September by Shirley Blumberg, Peter Davey, Shuhei Endo, Jo Noero, Peter Cook and Paul Finch (jury chair). A stunning array of all winning and commended entries will be on view at...

Chipperfield wins.(view)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... David Chipperfield has won the 2007 RIBA Stirling Prize, for his German literature centre, Marbach (AR October). He had a second building on the shortlist of six: the Americas Cup building, Valencia (AR August 2006). Chipperfield faced stiff...

Time to enter Mipim/AR awards.(view)
November 1, 2007... Entries are invited for the Mipim AR Future Project Awards 2008. There are eight categories this year which will be presented at MIPIM in Cannes in March 2008. All entries will be featured in the official catalogue and will be on show at MIPIM....

Erratum.
November 1, 2007... The installation by Eriko Horiki featured in October Delight (p114) is located in the SOGO Department Store in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, and not Tokyo as stated. For further information, contact Simon Pilling at sjp@simonjp.plus.com

German practice von Gerkan, Marg & Partners have extended their impressive Oriental repertoire by winning a competition for a new Vietnamese parliament building in Hanoi.(view)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... German practice von Gerkan, Marg & Partners have extended their impressive Oriental repertoire by winning a competition for a new Vietnamese parliament building in Hanoi. Reflecting the idea of a historic sunken city, the building will sit on a...

Peter Cook: Helmut Richter, subject of a farewell exhibition at Vienna's Architekturzentrum, was the unsung hero of High-Tech.(Viewpoint essay)
November 1, 2007... There may be some reluctance among my friends and others to admit it, but surely it is time to realise that so-called 'High-Tech' architecture proved to be one of the most successful and identifiable mannerisms of the late twentieth century....

The trouble with ornament: revisiting past AR essays, and in discussion with four of Britain's most thoughtful contemporary architects, Rob Gregory considers meaning and significance in British architecture today.(comment)
November 1, 2007... 'The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects... Behold the true greatness of our age, that it can no longer bring forth ornament. We have vanquished decoration and broken through into an ornamentless...

Diocesan dialogue: Peter Zumthor orchestrates an angelic conversation between old and new.
November 1, 2007... Cologne must have one of the highest ratios of museums to population of any city in the world. From the brilliant Romisch-Germanisches museum (which celebrates the life of the colony founded by emperor Claudius) to the museum of chocolate...

Funky Fouquet: an upmarket hotel is reborn as a historical replicant.
November 1, 2007... Known for his architecture of witty subterfuge executed on limited budgets, Edouard Francois has moved up a gear with this latest project in the upscale and historically protected 8th arrondissement of Paris. Francois is more used to working on...

Earth and fire: a new glass museum synthesises industry and poetry.
November 1, 2007... The focus of crystal and glass making since 1571, Cristal Saint Louis is a historic industrial site in the heart of the Vosges forest. The current plant, dating from the nineteenth century, is still operational, and has been joined by a new...

Urban ornament: a temporary pavilion for Munster's international sculpture festival animates an urban backwater.
November 1, 2007... Staged once every 10 years, Munster's Skulptur Projekte is a world renowned event structured around a series of site specific sculptures and installations scattered across the city. Artists such as Hans-Peter Feldmann, Guillaume Bijl and Bruce...

Tracing lace: 'the death of ornament was not due to machines, but to the state of mind which led to the triumph of machinery.'.(Essay)
November 1, 2007... In his 1943 essay, 'Ornament in Modern Architecture', Kenneth Clark (then Director of the National Gallery) was witnessing an impoverishment of ornament that extended across architecture and the arts. Recalling the third-century shift from the...

Royal Festival Hall: it took three years to design and build the Royal Festival Hall. This year, its reopening represents the culmination of fifteen years of Allies and Morrison's stewardship.
November 1, 2007... Background 'Dr Martin and his colleagues have achieved something without precedent in this country and with very little precedent elsewhere: a modern building--modern in the sense of owing allegiance to no other age but ours...' This...

Aga Khan Award for architecture 2007.
November 1, 2007... After three decades and 10 cycles, the triennial Aga Khan Award for Architecture is still a beacon of enlightenment among architectural awards programmes. Ranging across a broad spectrum from contemporary design to urban development, the Award...

Sweet harmony: Jamie Fobert Architects sweeten up a slice of the Gherkin.(interior design)
November 1, 2007... The prospect of working within one of city's most iconic buildings did not discourage Jamie Fobert Architects from accepting the challenge of this commission. In fact the opposite was the case, with the complexities of this retail unit...

Writer's blocks: indigenous techniques combine with computer modelling in Costa Rica.(ar house)
November 1, 2007... This delightful pair of similar shape structures are on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. Built adjacent to a retained existing residence (more typical of the region), the project gave Gianni Botsford the ultimate privilege for any...

Specifier's information.(advertising for architectural service)
November 1, 2007... Advertisers wishing to promote their products on this page should contact Abigail Reed on 020 7728 4553 enquiries on card or at www.arplus.com/enq.html Corus South Dublin County Architects specified two Corus premium prefinished steel...

Harvard hothouse.(Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... INVENTING AMERICAN MODERNISM: JOSEPH HUDNUT, WALTER GROPIUS AND THE BAUHAUS LEGACY AT HARVARD By Jill Pearlman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2007. $40 What students experience at university stays with them long after...

Emigre lives.(They Laid the Foundation: Lives and Works of German-Speaking Jewish Architects in Palestine 1918-1948)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... THEY LAID THE FOUNDATION: LIVES AND WORKS OF GERMAN-SPEAKING JEWISH ARCHITECTS IN PALESTINE 1918-1948 By Myra Warhaftig, Tubingen & Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag. 2007. [euro]24.80 Warhaftig's book on the work of architects who attended...

Nelson's columns.(Building a New Europe: Potraits of Modern Architects)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... BUILDING A NEW EUROPE: PORTRAITS OF MODERN ARCHITECTS: ESSAYS BY GEORGE NELSON 1935-1936 London: Yale University Press. 2007. [pounds sterling]30 Paul Nelson (1908-86) was an American architect best known as a furniture designer for...

House proud.(The English House)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... THE ENGLISH HOUSE By Hermann Muthesius. London: Frances Lincoln. 2007. [pounds sterling]125 (boxed set containing three volumes) These days, when every bog-standard developer is ordering in his Huf Haus consignment, how refreshing it...

Stained Glass Masterpieces of the Modern Era.
November 1, 2007... Detail of St Peter's Boat, by Antoni Gaudi, stained-glass window for the restored Gothic cathedral in Palma, Majorca, completed in 1903. From Stained Glass Masterpieces of the Modern Era, by Xavier Barral i Altet, London, Thames & Hudson, 2007,...

Complete control: an exhibition which began in a former police holding cell explores the uneasy historical relationship between architecture, custody and surveillance.(reviews)
November 1, 2007... In 1993 I visited the Zeil Galerie, at that time a new shopping experience in Frankfurt am Main (AR October '93). The architecture used all the tricks of the trade, coloured up-lights and down-lights, a daylight flooded atrium, steel grid...

Archipomps: not on my watch.(browser)
November 1, 2007... You think of the architectural blog bit of the web as a casual, friendly sort of place. Not necessarily so. A note on the France-based Archiguide site at http://archiguide.free.fr/AG/sommaires.htm reminds us a) why architectural criticism,...

Round the world.(browser)
November 1, 2007... If another world architecture guide, The Archi-Tourist, has had similar problems, it is keeping stumm about them. At http://architourist.schtuff.com The Archi-Tourist was created two years ago by well-known architectural blog, Archidose (AR Jan...

Diary.
November 1, 2007... AR'S CHOICE OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS FROM WWW.ARPLUS.COM BELGIUM THE VOID: GONCALO BYRNE & AIRES MATEUS CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE IN BELGIUM Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels Until 30 November Huge models and scores of...

Delight: death in Romania is far from the usual sombre occasion at the 'Merry Cemetery'.
November 1, 2007... Saul Steinberg described his homeland of Romania as 'a masquerade country of costumed peasants and mustachioed cavalrymen' and he fled, first to Mussolini's Italy, and then to America, where he could satirise human folly profitably and without...