The Architectural Review articles from October 2004

The Architectural Review archives from October 2004

Venetian anthropology.(View)
October 1, 2004... City of skin deep surfaces, stage-set superficiality and swarms of visitors, Venice is the perfect setting for the array of circus-like distractions that constitute an average architecture Biennale. As in previous years, the frantic press...

Design for the emerging world.(View)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... The AR is supporting the new Cityscape awards for excellence in architecture from the emerging world. Entries to the Design for the Emerging World awards (for buildings and projects as yet unbuilt) are welcome from the Middle East, South and...

Speed, simplicity and clarity are the three essentials in a website, and the greatest of these is speed.(Browser)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... Speed, simplicity and clarity are the three essentials in a website, and the greatest of these is speed. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen values it so highly that his site at www.useit.com is text-only: no hanging round watching little meters clock...

Beauty in the eye of the beholder.(Browser)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... Arguably the function of an architectural website is, in the space of maybe ten seconds, to fill potential client-viewers with confidence in the practice's ability and experience and in the likelihood that it is staffed by people with whom the...

Bernard's beautiful buildings.(Browser)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... The two sites below may well have had pros at work but they have not been imbued with the urgency of that nice and talented bloke Bernard Tschumi at www.tschumi.com. But first you try altering the text size and, bizarrely, only the site's email...

Blobmeister eschews back button.(Browser)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... Greg Lynn is, kind of, the father of Blob and his Greg Lynn Form site is at www.glform.com. You get this nice pale green-yellow wire-frame of a blob more than somewhat like Hariri's Bahai temple--or is the other way round? You click all over...

Dreaming spheres.(Browser)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... So we're not so dumb that we don't know that a lot of the above silly twiddles are camouflage, diversions of attention for image files being secretly loaded. A colleague reckons that websites should have a mandatory 'skip introduction' button...

Hunt the button.(Browser)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... And finally I was going to suggest you look at the Angry Aliens site for Titanic in 30 seconds and re-enacted by bunnies, but far more authentically surreal and engaging is www.99rooms.com which has something faintly in common with the...

Letter from a layman.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: I'm not an architect, but I am a citizen aware of the importance of architecture and how it shapes our lives. Therefore, I was happy to see your special issue on Portugal (AR July 2004). What a delight to learn about the wonderful examples...

Building as icon.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... SIR: If we aren't to worship false icons, we have to discover the truth about buildings somehow. It's generally held that this is only possible through first-hand experience, but such truth exists only for intended users. This is particularly...

Errata.(Correction Notice)
October 1, 2004... In the Royal Academy Forum supplement (AR August, p84, left hand picture) the architect of the Noh theatre at Toyama is Kengo Kuma, and not Jonathan Burrows as printed. The photographs taken at the Goodwood Festival of Speed (AR August,...

Diary.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... AR'S CHOICE OF CURRENT INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS For an expanded and constantly updated list, go to our website: www.arplus.com/exhibitions AUSTRIA THE ERA OF MICHELANGELO Until 26 October Albertina, Vienna ...

Flat, originally poorly planned and with few noteworthy buildings, Toronto is beginning to raise its aspirations.(View from Toronto)
October 1, 2004... The sign of a great city lies in equal measures in its architectural innovation, the quality of its hotels, and in the kindness of strangers. Toronto is only partly there; a good city, but not a great one, known as Toronto the Good. ...

Unfurling the outskirts: Canada's new spirit emerges from prosperity, social democracy and environmental consciousness.(Comment)
October 1, 2004... During the last decade, architecture in Canada has prospered. A growing population and an increasingly strong economy, that has outperformed the rest of the world since the late 1990s, have prompted significant changes and the need for new...

Quartier renaissance: with two new buildings and two new public squares, Montreal has been busy correcting the mistakes of the 1960s.
October 1, 2004... Ten years ago, Montreal was down at heel, after several decades of political and economic uncertainty. Following the 1992 referendum, which by the slimmest of margins kept Quebec in Canada, Montreal has actively sought to change its economic...

Winding through the woods: to celebrate the cultures of the aboriginal peoples of Quebec and the natural landscapes in which they evolved, this pavilion in the Montreal Botanical Garden evocatively enhances and responds to the woods in which it is set.
October 1, 2004... Designed as a permanent commemoration of the great peace of Montreal negotiated by the French and the aboriginal people in 1701, the First Nations Garden Pavilion in that city's Botanical Gardens creates a place where visitors can learn about...

Shaw production: a sensitive addition, carefully knitted to a distinguished theatre, provides new facilities and civilized spaces for staff and public alike.
October 1, 2004... Niagara-on-the-Lake is a picturesque town at the point where the Niagara River flows into Lake Ontario. Set in the spectacular scenery of the Great Lakes near Niagara Falls, the town is the focus of the region's burgeoning wine industry and the...

Lighting the community: this luminous centre carefully responds to the topography, climate and the needs of the community.
October 1, 2004... The new Community Centre at Gleneagles, a suburb of West Vancouver, combines a familiar mix of social and recreational activities on a site that was created as a result of the realignment of a main road. On a long strip of land that was...

Practical experiment: as the first phase of a new campus, KPMB attempt to resolve the site's awkward geometry and topography.
October 1, 2004... Centennial College in Toronto was founded in 1966 to offer career-oriented training as an alternative to university education. The most recent addition represents the first phase in the development of a new campus with more innovative and...

Merritt distinction: within an area of previously untouched forest in British Columbia, a new technical institute seeks to merge aboriginal heritage and modern day sustainability.
October 1, 2004... Situated in a forest clearing on the northern side of the city of Merritt in BC, the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology is one of Canada's first post-secondary shared native/non-native institutions. By synthesizing aboriginal influences with...

Shim fit: Rundles restaurant and tower house in a riverside setting in Stratford, Ontario.
October 1, 2004... Life in Stratford, Ontario revolves around a summer Shakespeare festival that was started by Tyrone Guthrie in the early 1950s and has become a driving force of the local economy. In this setting, Rundles, a restaurant housed in a former...

Creche panache: by creating a complex series of small, enfolded spaces, the architects have tried to make this creche into a series of places with which little children can identify.
October 1, 2004... Childcare facilities for families of students, faculty and staff at the University of Toronto had, until recently, been located in several different buildings scattered across a campus in the heart of the city. Design of a new building to house...

Well conceived: a new walk-in clinic in downtown Vancouver.(Interior Design)
October 1, 2004... In the late 1970s, walk-in clinics emerged as a new kind of building type in Canada as traditional close-to-home general practitioners were increasingly unable to meet the needs of a busy, mobile population. Using vacant retail space in strip...

House on the hill: in pursuit of a plain architecture suited to an austere landscape, this house is honed to formal essence.(AR House)
October 1, 2004... Brian MacKay-Lyons has become known as the originator of a form of Nova Scotian minimalism in which details are pared to a minimum and forms are made as simply as possible (AR November 1990, May 1993 and July 2001). Working largely with...

Lighting: Rob Gregory flicks the switch on new lighting products.(Product Review)
October 1, 2004... 501 INGO MAURER Since beginning work in 1965, the Munich based lighting design team led by Ingo Maurer has produced many exciting lighting installations for clients such as the Fondation Cartier and Chanel. The team has recently completed...

Specifier's information.
October 1, 2004... LS Group LS Group, one of Europe's largest high performance door and doorset producers, has published a technical guide to help designers make informed choices and achieve compliance with regulations and standards when designing with...

Surreal technology?(Architecture's New Media Principles, Theories, and Methods of Computer-Aided Design)(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... ARCHITECTURE'S NEW MEDIA: PRINCIPLES, THEORIES, AND METHODS OF COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN By Yehuda E. Kalay. London: MIT Press. 2004. [pounds sterling]35.95 This is a very ambitious book and it delivers a lot of what it promises. The...

Mysteries in the library.(The Architecture of the British Library at St. Pancras)(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY AT ST PANCRAS By Roger Stonehouse and Gerhard Stromberg. London: Spon Press. 2004. [pounds sterling]65 The British Library is a major building and deserves a major book. This is a major book, but...

Architectural curate's egg.(Architectures: Modernism and After)(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... ARCHITECTURES: MODERNISM AND AFTER Edited by Andrew Ballantyne. Oxford: Blackwell. 2003. [pounds sterling]50 (paperback [pounds sterling]16.99) It is hard to see what the eight essays in this book have in common. The tendency of the...

Heroine mistreated.(Charlotte Perriand: A Life of Creation u An Autobiography)(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... CHARLOTTE PERRIAND: A LIFE OF CREATION-AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY The Monacelli Press, New York, 2003. $40 Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) was still very much alive when her autobiography, Une Vie de Creation, was first published in 1998: a lucid...

Health: why so uninspired?(Reviews)
October 1, 2004... HOSPITAL BUILDERS By Tony Monk. Chichester: John Wiley. 2004. [pounds sterling]50 With the current level of investment in the British National Health Service it is astounding that there is such a shortage of good books on hospital...

Offene Raume/Public Spaces: Boris Podrecca.(Reviews)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... Fountain in the Rathausplatz, St Polten, Lower Austria from Offene Raume/Public Spaces: Boris Podrecca, ed Matthias Boeckl, Springer, Vienna and New York, 2004, [euro]64. Podrecca shows that he is a master of urban understatement, gently...

Dani Freixes and Varis Arquitectes.(Reviews)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... A fountain in Dani Freixes and Varis Arquitectes by Mihail Moldoveanu, Lunwerg, Barcelona and Madrid, 2003, [euro]55. Moldoveanu, one of the best architectural photographers in Europe, uses pictures and words to lovingly explain the work of the...

A philosophical toy, based on nineteenth-century technology, is housed in a modern display case to enhance ambiguously the campus of the University of British Columbia.(Delight)
October 1, 2004... This Millennial Time Machine, and the pavilion designed to house it, were unveiled in 2003. The project, a collaboration between the artist Rodney Graham and designers Tim Newton, John Wall and Gary Smith, carefully integrates art and...