The Architectural Review articles from October 2005

The Architectural Review archives from October 2005

Designing for disaster.(view)
October 1, 2005... Recent events across the world have induced an understandable sense of paranoia about whether the built environment is capable of resisting what used to be called 'the elements'; that is to say extreme conditions in respect of earth, air, fire...

Shipshape and Bristol fashion.(view)
October 1, 2005... Brunel's SS Great Britain was the world's first iron-hulled passenger liner and forerunner to virtually all modern shipping. Through recent improvements led by Alec French Architects, this pioneering structure can now be preserved for...

AR Future Project Awards at MIPIM.(view)
October 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...

Housing competition time.(view)
October 1, 2005... There are two months left to register expressions of interest in one of the larger global architectural competitions of recent years, organised by Living Steel, a consortium of steel-makers from across the globe. The competition, which was...

Zaha's zeitgeist.
October 1, 2005... 'I am not a regionalist', asserted Zaha Hadid at the opening last month of the new extension to the Ordrupgaard Museum in a leafy suburb of Copenhagen. Though she professes to admire the imposing canon of Danish Modernism, her first building in...

Peter Cook: architect, teacher, critic and traveller, Peter Cook joins as a regular diarist.(view)
October 1, 2005... Icons require talent Hurrah for the icon, the iconic, the iconographic. These words--loved, hated, feared, derided--seem to be on everyone's lips just now. How many worried archihacks there must be, recoiling from the international trade...

Precious metal: a new era of bespoke systems of structure and cladding is testing metals and architectural imagination to their limits.(comment)
October 1, 2005... The Machine Age was the golden age of metals. Constituting both the means and end to production, machine tools and the goods they produced during the past 150 years fundamentally changed the way we live. Consumer society, for better or worse,...

Full metal jacket: the de Young Museum may appear tough and impenetrable, but in reality exploring its interiors is a delight; just like a wall in the park.
October 1, 2005... If you go down to the woods today, you're in for a big surprise; a very big surprise, but a welcome one at that. For the people of San Francisco the anticipation is over, and for Museum curators, the Board of Trustees, and the designers...

Steely determination: with a seamless skin of steel, this training centre is a subtly subversive urban presence.
October 1, 2005... Reutlingen, a picturesque Swabian town near Stuttgart, is the setting for one of the most intriguing architectural and urban design projects in Germany for many years. Munich architects Allmann Sattler Wappner, known for their radical...

Divine light: this chapel in Turku draws on a long tradition of remarkable Finnish churches in which religion, nature and light come together.
October 1, 2005... In a quiet backwater of fields and woods on the island of Hirvensalo in the south-west of Finland, St Henry's Ecumenical Art Chapel grows from its site--a hillock surrounded by pines and spruces--embracing context and the natural environment....

The joy of rust: clad in a coarse carapace of rusted steel, this housing block is a startling urban presence.
October 1, 2005... Ever since John Winter audaciously clad his seminal Highgate house in a skin of weathering steel back in 1969, Cor-ten's quasi industrial aesthetic of shipyard and factory floor has become globally ubiquitous. According to Neil Jackson, in his...

Cool quality: an ingenious greenhouse for Alpine plants required a design which maximises light--and cold air.
October 1, 2005... The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, one of London's great wonders, had its origins in the seventeenth century, when a private family estate development included a noted orangery. A century later, two neighbouring estates were amalgamated,...

Copper in architecture awards 12.(build-up of copper panels)(Bradley's Queen Mary University)
October 1, 2005... These awards are the 12th iteration of an event celebrating the use of copper in architecture in all its various forms. The jury this year was chaired by the editor of The Architectural Review, Paul Finch. It comprised Laurence Bain of Bain &...

Art education: children can lose themselves in art in this colourful educational labyrinth devised for LA's Getty Center.(Getty Center)(Roman Villa)
October 1, 2005... Planning and construction of the Getty Center in West LA stretched out over 14 years (AR February 1998) and it has taken another seven to remodel the Roman Villa in Malibu, which will reopen to the public as a centre for the antiquities...

Brass origami: delicate planes of patinated brass fold around this imaginative extension to a house in south London.(ar house)
October 1, 2005... Trinity Road in south London is a typical leafy Victorian suburb. Stolid brick houses with bay windows and big gardens exude an air of decorousness and prosperity. Yet even in a sleepy conservation area the urge to remodel is quite common....

Rob Gregory steps outside to look at exterior envelopes.(product review)
October 1, 2005... 501 ARCELOR The Ministry of Culture and Communications building in Paris, recently modified by architect Francis Soler, features 5000sqm of steel mesh by Arcelor. To harmonise the two buildings, each from different periods, the screen also...

Specifier's information.
October 1, 2005... Ecophon The architectural consultant responsible for designing an important new children's hospital in Dublin, Ireland has made extensive use of Ecophon's Focus XL product. Specifying a 2000 X 600mm module for the ceilings over circulation...

Red dawn.(China's New Dawn: An Architectural Transformation)(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... CHINA'S NEW DAWN: AN ARCHITECTURAL TRANSFORMATION By Layla Dawson. Munich; Prestel, 2005. [pounds sterling]25 China uses 54 per cent of the world's concrete production and some 36 per cent of its steel. No less than 90 per cent of the...

Reaching for the sky.(The American Skyscraper--Cultural Histories)(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... THE AMERICAN SKYSCRAPER--CULTURAL HISTORIES Edited by Roberta Moudry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]45 The skyscraper is a slippery, paradoxical subject--at once (as Spiro Kostof observed) materialistic...

Indian takeaway.(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... INDIGENOUS MODERNITIES: NEGOTIATING ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM By Jyoti Hosagrahar. Abingdon: Routledge. 2005. [pounds sterling]24.99 This is a short but nonetheless intelligent, well-organised, and well-illustrated investigation into...

St sandy the humanist.(An Architecture of Invitation: Colin St John Wilson)(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... AN ARCHITECTURE OF INVITATION: COLIN ST JOHN WILSON By Sarah Menin and Stephen Kite. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2005. [pounds sterling]60 Working as a practitioner, teacher, writer, researcher and critic, Sandy Wilson has been...

New Museums.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Palmach Museum of History, Tel Aviv, by Zvi Hecker, a museum devoted to the underground Jewish organisation that fought against British rule in former Palestine. One of the more interesting specimens from New Museums, by Raul A. Barreneche,...

Sean Godsell.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Kew House, Melbourne, by Sean Godsell, one of a series of houses by this talented and lively standard bearer for a younger generation of antipodean architects that explores contemporary notions of an Australian vernacular. A sensitive response...

unCurb your enthusiasm.(browser)(www.curbed.com)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... According to Manhattan's Village Voice, in May last year Lockhart Steele abandoned his gossipy eponymous website for the real estate trade and started up the much more elaborate magazine Curbed.com, at www.curbed.com. It is now an essential...

Comfy revisit.(browser)(www.archined.com)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... We used to mention the Dutch site Archined a lot. But for some reason, not for three years after we reported that it would soon be sporting an English version. It now does. Remember to hit the 'switch to English' text under the banner at the...

And the earth was without form and void.(browser)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... In the battle of the Titans for Mother Earth, Microsoft's Virtual Earth is slugging it out with Google's Earth. Apart from the admittedly deep satisfaction of peering at a fuzzy image of your own house from a long way up in the sky, plus...

On doing a lot less.(browser)(www.danieleatock.com)(www.mcchesney.co.uk)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Architect Ian McChesney suggested that I take a look at Daniel Eatock's site at http://www.danieleatock.com and click on 'about this site'. Eatock offers a free and copyright-free template, complete with code, for what turns out to be a really...

Less can be less.(browser)(www.geocities.com/widianto/wutomodesign.html)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... But maybe the Venturis were right. Less can actually be less. I think an example of this is designer Widianto UTOMO's website, which is at www.geocities.com/widianto/wutomodesign.html. I wondered if I had somehow got stuck because the site is a...

Pleasure principle.(browser)(www.yugop.com)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... And so to Yugo Nakamura's site at www.yugop.com. Turn up your sound. If you liked those very early ground-breaking graphic animations from the Film Board of Canada you will love these--not least because you have a modicum of control. At least I...

AR submission guidelines.
October 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...

Addendum.(Correction Notice)
October 1, 2005... In the article on Snell Associates' refurbishment of the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, England (pp20-21), the photographic credits were unfortunately omitted. They should have been--p20, small photograph, top right: Arnolfini archive; p21, top...

To celebrate Julius Shulman's astonishing 95th birthday, The Getty Center is holding a major retrospective of his work.(browser)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... To celebrate Julius Shulman's astonishing 95th birthday, The Getty Center is holding a major retrospective of his work, which also marks the Getty's acquisition of his archive. Shulman's tautly composed black and white photographs defined the...

Diary.(art exhibitions)(Calendar)
October 1, 2005... AR'S CHOICE OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS CANADA SUPER CITY Until 20 November Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal Curated by Douglas Coupland, the prophet of 'Generation X', this show explores ideals of the...

Delight.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... WITH SCULPTURAL COR-TEN TRUNKS AND A WARPED PERGOLA, THIS BOOK MARKET IS A LIVELY LOCAL FOCUS We're all familiar with the simple urban pleasure of browsing around open air bookstalls looking for that elusive first edition. In Paju Book...