The Architectural Review articles from October 2008

The Architectural Review archives from October 2008

Kindly take the stage: the eagerly anticipated Venice architecture Biennale kicks off three months of exhibitionism; swiss meister peter zumthor is awarded the praemium imperiale for architecture; peter cook has a hazy, crazy month culminating at the Venice biennale as curator of the Cyprus Pavilion.(view)
October 1, 2008... With the Venice Biennale fresh in the mind, and with the World Architecture Festival about to take place in Barcelona, the question of architecture's place in the world has come under sharp scrutiny. This comes at a time when two pressing...

The froth and flotsam of the Biennale permeate Venice.(VENEZIA INTERROTTA)
October 1, 2008... Frank Gehry has a word for it. Ungap/iukket from the perpetually expressive Yiddish meaning 'messed up, slapped together without form, excessively and unaesthetically decorated'. Gehry employed it to describe his contribution to the Biennale, a...

Peter cook: our peripatetic columnist gathers his thoughts after a few Venice Bellinis.
October 1, 2008... Crazy, crazy month. Even crazier than usual: Alexander's (1) 18th birthday on our lawn is an 'Instant City' of even faster instantaneousness than we could ever have imagined in the '60s. One admires the logic of the designers of el cheapo...

Height: between possibility and responsibility: height is the subject of the thematic exhibition at the inaugural World Architecture Festival in Barcelona this month. Curator Jeremy Melvin introduces the theme in relation to tall buildings around the world.(comment)
October 1, 2008... 'The new skyscraper is a miracle of power, technology and art. Why on earth does anyone oppose it?' Martin Pawley (in The Architects' Journal, 4 March 1998) set the terms for criticising tall buildings as celebrations of the possibilities they...

Torre Mexicana: OMA'S new landmark tower for Mexico city is a powerful symbol of identity, allied to propositions about density, history and the modern city.
October 1, 2008... Mexico City is one of the world's largest conurbations and its sprawling growth seems set to continue. OMA point out that it--and Latin America in general--has a deficit of tall buildings compared with other parts of the world with a similar...

Northern star: at the northern limit for tall buildings, Foster's daring Russia tower tests extremes of scale, structure and form.
October 1, 2008... The 600m tall Russia Tower will be Europe's tallest building and the world's third highest when completed, and it is almost as far north and in as extreme a climate as anyone will build this high. At this height, structure is a prime...

Dynamic hybrid: a cluster of towers ingeniously linked by a vertiginous bridge inverts the conventional relationship between tall buildings and the public realm.
October 1, 2008... In the Linked Hybrid, Steven Holl reverses the traditional relationship between towers and the public realm. Towers have always tended to be 'object buildings', and even when grouped together as in San Gimignano, Manhattan or the Plan Voisin,...

Green giant: consolidating his reputation as the doyen of eco-towers, Ken Yeang's provocative vision of vertical urban design continues to evolve.
October 1, 2008... In the Business Advancement Technology Centre tower, Ken Yeang takes all the activities and patterns of use that might take place on an urban ground plane, and flips them into the vertical. His concept of vertical urban design' brings together...

On the skyline: building high in New York after 9/11 invariably carries a huge weight of responsibilities, but also suggests new possibilities for city life.
October 1, 2008... As the first major development to be initiated in Manhattan following 9/11,55-storey One Bryant Park carried a series of responsibilities to the city and its people, but from them arose a number of possibilities that helped the developers and...

City subtleties: despite its scale, this speculative office tower for the City of London attempts to evoke a sense of place and respond to a sense of history.
October 1, 2008... Rogers Stirk Harbour see possibilities in the context and use of the Leadenhall Building to create an articulated, subtle and dynamic architecture for tall buildings, in contrast to the 'super-graphic' ideas where an abstract concept is all....

Garden tower: wrapped in a gridded skin that recalls a traditional masharabiya, this tower in Riyadh tempers and tames extremes of climate.
October 1, 2008... Perkins + Will's proposed headquarters of the Islamic charity the Albirr Foundation brings together many of the most salient points in tall building design. It has an important symbolic function as the visible emblem of an important social...

Cultured Pearl: working in the hot house of China, SOM attempt to radically redefine the relationship between tall buildings and their energy consumption.
October 1, 2008... Pearl River Tower (AR July 2008) shows how a tall office building can generate as well as consume energy. It may not reach the magic figure of'zero net energy consumption' when it is in operation, but it will be 58 per cent more efficient than...

Tropical twin towers: Foreign Office's proposal for residential high rise in Kuala Lumpur is shaped by climate and latitude.(Brief article)
October 1, 2008... KL Sentral is a large development which densifies the area around Kuala Lumpur's main transport hub. FOA's pair of towers, linked at roof level, have 52 storeys of residential accommodation and the design shows how high-rise living might work...

Ghanaian veils: finessing the challenges of climate and locale, high rise comes to West Africa in the form of a bold, 30-storey residential tower.
October 1, 2008... At 30 storeys, the tallest building at Villagio II is the highest in West Africa. It is also an exercise in how to build high-rise residential accommodation in a hot, wet, equatorial location, where earthquakes are a risk and the local...

Aussie rules: in the heart of Melbourne, the world's tallest residential tower acts as an agent of densification and regeneration.(Eureka)
October 1, 2008... At 300m the tallest purely residential building in the world (measured to the highest inhabited floor), Eureka has a dramatic impact on the changing cityscape--not just the skyline--of Melbourne. With 560 apartments it shows how height can help...

Dubai spire: the mantle of the world's tallest building will soon pass to the Burj Dubai, now rising up over the Gulf.
October 1, 2008... When it's topped out around the turn of the year, Burj Dubai will have more than 140 floors and be the tallest building in the world, but that's about as much as SOM are prepared to reveal about its height. It's part of the mystique that helps...

Le Corbusier the life of forms: 'the time of history ... a sea occupied by innumerable forms of a finite number of types.'.(history)(In memoriam)
October 1, 2008... 10 Photograph: Monte L. Bryer, RIGA Library Photographs Collection There is no single key to the enigmatic world of Le Corbusier. As well as being an architect and an urbanist, he was a painter, a sculptor, a writer and a designer of...

Milan elan: Milan's civic heart is animated by an elegant and ingenious new kind of big screen made of woven metal mesh.(product review)
October 1, 2008... For more information go to www.arplus.com/enq.html. In Blade Runner, that famously dystopian vision of the future, the Los Angeles cityscape is transmuted into a blizzard of images by pulsating light screens. As cinematic speculation is...

Crucial Words--Conditions for Contemporary Architecture.(Book review)
October 1, 2008... Edited by Gert Wingardh and Rasmus Waer. Basel: Birkhauser. 2008. [pounds sterling]19.90 Crucial Words Conditions for Contemporary Architecture is not to be mistaken for an architectural dictionary, of which many examples abound. Instead,...

The Endless City.(Book review)
October 1, 2008... Edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic. London; Phaidon Press. 2008. [pounds sterling]35 Numbers, numbers, endless numbers--or so it seems on first inspection of this weighty tome, Certainly this is not. your typical coffee table...

Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind.(Book review)
October 1, 2008... By Philip Ball. London: The Bodley Head. 2008. [pounds sterling]20 This reviewer wishes that the word 'iconic', like 'fantastic', would be given a rest: they are being badly mis- and over-used, and when he saw 'iconic' (in relation to...

Changing Hospital Architecture.(Book review)
October 1, 2008... Edited by Sunand Prasad. London: RIBA Publishing. 2008. [pounds sterling]45 The title Changing Hospital Architecture could be construed as a call to arms or the study of an evolving building type (or ideally both). This book was long in...

The Prefab House comes under Scrutiny at New York's MoMA.
October 1, 2008... In 1949, Marcel Breuer built an elegant, butterfly-roofed, cedar-clad house in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The commissioning of the house was prompted, so the story goes, by the appearance of a different kind of...

Browser.
October 1, 2008... Sutherland Lyall takes a break from being mellow and fruit full to go surfing. The big Gang show I'm not sure why architects feel they have to put mug shots of everybody in the office on their websites. Calling in a photographer with...

Delight.
October 1, 2008... To look at Andrea Palladio's drawings brings you so tantalisingly close to the hand and mind of a great master of architecture that HE is your guide. You can hear his thoughts on Roman ruins, through his measured drawings and sketches, in the...