The Architectural Review articles from September 2004

The Architectural Review archives from September 2004

Bawa--genius of the place.(View)( Geoffrey Bawa )
September 1, 2004... The welcome retrospective at the Deutsches Architektur Museum charts the career of the great Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa (1919-2003). It traces a path from a mannered 'Tropical Modernism' to a highly personal synthesis of Modernist...

Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar.(View)(Architectural services)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... With just two months until practical completion, Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar has risen to become a popular new landmark for residents of the Catalonian capital, Barcelona. While local architects intellectualize and debate the structure's...

Sutherland Lyall samples the wares of the web and picks some sweet treats.(Browser)(Library architecture)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... I came across it quite by accident. It is the Middlesex University's Museum of Domestic Architecture website at www.moda.mdx.ac.uk. Was this not the former, notoriously radical, Hornsey College of Art, which spent the latter bits of the 1960s...

Bring on the word counters.(Browser)(Architectural services)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The US architecture/environment practice, Plasmatic Concepts, asked us to take a look at its new site at www.plasmatic-concepts.com. The home page is white with an elegant patch of blood in a bath of water, or a thick red waft of smoke trailing...

Dreaming spires.(Browser)(Architectural services)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... One website that grasps all this readability stuff is that of New York and Cambridge landscape architect Michael Van Valkenberg at www.mvvainc.com. Following a rather laborious load-up time during which you get views of various Van Valkenberg...

Filling the gap.(Browser)(Women architects)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Everyone says there aren't enough women in architecture but where are the celebrations for those women who do make it through the architectural longhouse? One answer is at the International Archive of Women in Architecture at...

Archisweets.(Browser)(Architectural services)
September 1, 2004... And so to Retrolounge: 'bringing you the best of bygone eras' at www.bitlounge.net/retrolounge. A dozen choices, are available: advertising, photography and, of course, architecture among them. You click near the feet of the clean-living young...

Atlas response.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... SIR: I read with interest your review of The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture (AR August), having spent two years on the book as project editor. I would like to take this opportunity to address a number of issues. I...

So here you go again, AR.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... SIR: Why does this wonderful architectural magazine, featuring every month an amazing array of some of the best of human creativity from round the world, feel it has to politicize its View section with distorted propaganda such as Abe Hayeem's...

Sculpture or architecture?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... SIR: The rejected Moscow mixed-use scheme by Erick van Egeraat (AR June, p30) raises the central issue of discussion in architecture in the twenty-first century: where do we draw the line between sculpture/painting and architecture? Is a...

Erratum.(Correction Notice)
September 1, 2004... The photographer of the August AR cover picture (Mausoleum in Murcia, Spain) was David Frutos Ruiz.

Diary.(Architectural services)
September 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 EERO SAARINEN: BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY Until I October Haus der...

The DinA range by Wilkhahn: versatile work interiors.(Advertisement Feature)(Interior designers)(Advertisement)
September 1, 2004... (Design: Udo Schill, Timo Kuchler) The rapid development of information and communication technology has resulted in fundamental changes in work environments. The core functions of office spaces are changing in line with the disappearance...

War broke the Mostar bridge, one of the most emblematic buildings in the Balkans. Now, it has been triumphantly restored.(View from Mostar)(Footbridges)
September 1, 2004... Lightning flickered in the mountains of the Mostar valley as its old pedestrian bridge was re-opened by Paddy Ashdown (the International Community High Representative) and the President of the Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina. A grand and...

Eye do: a verdant forest landscape forms the backdrop for this ingenious little Japanese wedding chapel.(Design Review)(Architectural services)
September 1, 2004... The modern vogue for weddings in unusual settings is also highly popular in Japan. Since most Japanese are not dogmatically religious, tending to cherry-pick aspects of Buddhism, Shintoism and Christianity, wedding ceremonies are not so firmly...

Building with the elements: in the quest to evolve a more ecologically balanced approach to living and building, humankind's immemorial and intuitive relationship with the elements offers the potential to bring nature and architecture into greater accord.(Comment)
September 1, 2004... To our ancestors, the ancient elements of earth, air, fire and water had profound significance. Each was regarded as a kind of spiritual building block from which all things were made, including human beings. They also symbolized forces of...

Blue lagoon: Herzog & de Meuron take the plunge into Barcelona's latest urban clean-up.(Herzog and de Meuron Architects)(Cover Story)
September 1, 2004... A big blue washing-up scourer has landed in Barcelona. Triangular, spongy and with a serrated metal soffit, Herzog & de Meuron's Forum is a truly absorbing building. As part of an ambitious clean-up operation in the Besos river area of...

Divine intervention: Renzo Piano's huge new basilica in southern Italy reconciles the spiritual and practical needs of modern pilgrims.(Architectural services)
September 1, 2004... Appropriately, for a nation at the epicentre of Catholicism, the Italians adore their saints. Padre Pio, a mystical Italian Capuchin monk famous for his bleeding stigmata and miraculous healing powers, is a recent and popular addition to the...

Geography lesson: this addition to a historic institution responds sensitively to context and landscape.(Architectural services)
September 1, 2004... Site of the infamous (and now unlikely to be built) Libeskind Spiral, London's Exhibition Road has been the focus of a long-running debate about the appropriateness of bold new architecture in sensitive historic contexts. Sweeping down from...

Flower Tower: wrapped in an outer layer of bamboo, this housing block is a vertical urban garden.(Residential construction)
September 1, 2004... Four years after completing his remarkable 'Sprouting Building' in Montpellier (AR May 2000), Paris-based architect Edouard Francois' appetite for offbeat solutions to standard briefs remains undiminished. His latest housing block in the 17th...

Water music: a new concert hall complex in Hamburg draws on the city's maritime history.(Architectural services)
September 1, 2004... Despite a wealth of historic buildings. Hamburg has little in the way of contemporary landmarks, but Herzog & de Meuron's proposed Philharmonic Complex, for a site in HafenCity, is due to change all that. Currently taking shape on a former...

Living with the elements: the Korean house; In Korea, the relationship between climate, culture and building generates a distinctive domestic architecture that works with, rather than against, the elements and has wider lessons for building and living in harmony with nature.(Place)(Architectural services)
September 1, 2004... Most architects know the famous photographs of the Katsura Palace at Kyoto in Japan and have marvelled at the subtle treatment of the ground plane: the apparently casual but carefully placed stepping-stones in the grass, the studied...

Seeing the light: in the best Baroque tradition, light is used to create spatial and atmospheric illusions in this new church.(Interior Design)(Konigs Architekten)
September 1, 2004... The old episcopal city of Regensburg has an impressive history of ecclesiastical architecture. Its cathedral and numerous Baroque churches and monasteries are among the finest in Bavaria. Today the city's cultural wealth is reinforced by a...

Living on the edge; Walters & Cohen's house: a threshold between suburbia and the South Pacific.(AR House)
September 1, 2004... Sydney's Bondi Beach is, rightly, one of the world's more famous crescents of sand, but its natural beauty is not matched by the architecture fronting it and sprawling over its cliff-top flanks. No single carbuncle but a plague of minor boils;...

100% Design.(Product Review)
September 1, 2004... Following the recent success of the inaugural 100% Moscow (AR May 2004), 100% Design is returning to London for its 10th year. As well as presenting the very best in new and innovative products, as part of this year's exhibition three...

Stone symphony.(Reviews)(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... MATERIAL STONE: CONSTRUCTIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE. Edited by Christoph Mackler. Basel: Birkhauser. 2004. CHF 109. [euro]65 The distinction in German between Architektur and Baukunst is more than a linguistic...

Vesely at last.(Reviews)(Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation : The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production)(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION By Dalibor Vesely. London: MIT Press. 2004. [pounds sterling]32.95 In the attainment of knowledge, learning is less important than unlearning. Perhaps this is why for Robin Middleton,...

Urban ideals.(Reviews)(Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City)(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... URBAN THEORY AND THE URBAN EXPERIENCE: ENCOUNTERING THE CITY By Simon Parker. London: Routledge. 2004. [pounds sterling]21.99 Encountering the City aims to realign the activities of experiencing and theorizing on the urban condition, in...

Humble approaches.(Reviews)(Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... GOOD DEEDS, GOOD DESIGN: COMMUNITY SERVICE THROUGH ARCHITECTURE Edited by Bryan Bell. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 2004. [pounds sterling]21.95 Here is an American equivalent of the useful Community Planning Handbook that...

Eating Architecture.(Reviews)(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 1, 2004... Urban Rock Design's satire on instant US architecture and food. From Eating Architecture, eds Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley, MIT Press, London, 2004, [pounds sterling]25.95. A compendium ranging provocatively over taste, sensuality, locus,...

Adoration of the Shepherds, out of From Flanders to Florence.(Reviews)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Perhaps the most wondrous moment in the pictorial culture of the fifteenth-century Renaissance was when Italian artists discovered the work of the Flemish: the Van Eycks, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling. Amazing, poignant investigations...

This planted wall on a Tokyo boulevard elevates a simple site hoarding into an extraordinary living work of art intended to engage with and stimulate the senses.(Delight)
September 1, 2004... By definition, building site hoardings are rarely things of beauty. But here on Tokyo's Omotesando Avenue, the humble hoarding is transformed into a living, growing, green entity. Behind the 274m-long fence a huge mixed development by Tadao...