10 Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings Nominated for UNESCO Distinction

From the Statute of Liberty to the ruins of the Chaco Culture, the United Staes has fewer than two dozen landmarks designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Now, ten of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings—built from 1906 to 1969—are the first modern works of American architecture to be considered for a global list, which already includes Walter Gropius’s early Modernist Fagus Factory, Josef Hoffmann’s secessionist Stoclet House, and a host of cultural landmarks from Angkor Wat to Stonehenge. The UNESCO designation neither outlines nor provides any specific protections or provisions for the preservation of the buildings, but would formally elevate them to an international standing. The nomination was forwarded by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving Wright’s built legacy. The next steps are site visits by the World Heritage Committee throughout 2015 and possible inclusion by summer 2016.

The ten buildings are located in seven states: California (Marin County Civic Center, Hollyhock House), Arizona (Taliesen West), Oklahoma (Price Tower), Wisconsin (Taliesen, Jacobs House), Illinois (Unity Temple, Robie House), Pennsylvania (Falling Water), and New York (Guggenheim Museum). An earlier 1991 nomination of two Wright works—Taliesen and Taliesen West—was rebuffed by the UNESCO Committee in favor a comprehensive list of works nominated from Wright’s entire oeuvre. Beginning in 2004, a group of Wright scholars embarked on the slow process of distilling the list, documenting each work and justifying its inclusion. Here are the ten works and highlights from the Wright committee’s recommendations.

From: Metropolis

Óbidos Technological Park Main Building by Jorge Mealha

How does one create a main piazza in the absence of a surrounding urban fabric that typically encloses a Piazza? The design team around architect Jorge Mealha drew from its traditional Portuguese typologies and conceived the Óbidos Technological Park Main Building in the countryside north of Lisbon as contemporary interpretation of a Terreiro.

While just recently completed, the project has already garnered a respectable nomination for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2015. (...)

 Fonte: Archinect

We Want World Wonders

MVRDV's The Why Factory Considers the Possibilities

Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Winning the first Finlandia Prize is the latest achievement for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, designed by Finnish firm Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects. The Finlandia Prize for Architecture is awarded to a design or renovation of an outstanding new building or complex completed within the past three years. The prize also recognizes Finnish architects and firms for a project built within Finland or abroad.

After Lahdelma & Mahlamäki won the international competition in 2005, the museum -- which is located in a World War II-era ghetto -- was completed in 2013 and then recently opened its main exhibition on October 29, 2014. (...)

Bustler

Siemens’s Lean Efficiency

With its pale geometric fins, suspended spiral staircases, and long facades, Siemens’s new Middle East headquarters in Masdar City is an ode to the architecture of efficiency. It is also a sign that Masdar, billed as the world’s first carbon neutral city in 2006, might finally be becoming more than just a visionary idea.
Originally conceived by Foster + Partners to stand on a podium above a network of driverless cars, Masdar had to revise its plans after the financial crash of 2008. Post recession, the city has dropped its zero carbon and waste taglines, and is a leaner and more pragmatic beast. Siemens’s building, designed by U.K. architects Sheppard Robson, is the first LEED Platinum–certified office building in the emirate. An eloquent expression of Masdar’s pared-down but pioneering ambitions, the structure offers an impressive 46 percent in energy savings (as per the Ashrae benchmark), a 50 percent reduction in water demand, and a 65 percent reduction in energy demand—all for the cost of a high-quality office building in Abu Dhabi. (...)

MetropolisMag

Witnessing History - René Burri's career

(...) The photographer René Burri, famous for his architectural photography and his portraits of the twentieth century's greatest creative and political figures, died yesterday at 81. The news was reported by the Magnum Photo agency, where Burri had worked since 1956. "His contribution to Magnum and his unrivalled ability to tell stories and entertain us over this time will be part of his enormous legacy," said Martin Parr, President of Magnum Photos, in a statement. Burri had donated his archives, containing some 30,000 photographs, to the Musée de l'Élysee in Lausanne.
The following article, published in our March 2004 issue, has been edited to reflect Burri's passing.

It would be difficult for young photographers today to recreate the career of René Burri, who came of age in the 1950s—when being a generalist was considered a sign of artistic strength. In a career spanning more than 50 years and several genres, he has covered wars, revolutions, and all manner of political upheaval; shot street scenes of his beloved Paris and other world capitals; and created intimate portraits of some of the twentieth century's most significant figures.

Born in Switzerland in 1933, Burri took his first photograph at age 13; it caught a regal Winston Churchill riding in the back of a limousine. He joined the legendary Magnum photo agency at the age of 26 and soon after became a protegé of Henri Carton-Bresson.Burri also cultivated a lifelong interest in architecture. "In art school I had a professor from the Bauhaus, Hans Finsler," he says. "Finsler instilled in me what he called 'the new essential things' about lines and buildings, and that seeped into my consciousness." The photographer was present at the opening of Ronchamp and later became friends with Le Corbusier, compiling a 1999 book on the master. Burri collaborated with Luis Barragán on a kind of prose-poem book that combined his images with the mystic musings of the architect. His book, René Burri Photographs (Phaidon Press, 2004), brought much of this impressive work into a single volume, creating a memorable portrait of the second half of the twentieth century.

Metropolis Magazine

Blood Simple

© Coen Brothers, Blood Simple, 1984

Artist "Vandalizes" Villa Savoye (Photoshoped)

(...) Delory presents this alternate Villa Savoye with head-on images of its four elevations, confronting viewers with hypothetical vandalism and a mastery of trompe l’oeil Photoshopping. Among the typical aerosol scribblings of signatures and swears, a diving shark and the text of Le Corbusier’s Five Points are also visible. The unnamed vandals have thrown rocks through the windows, leaving some shattered, others boarded up or covered in plastic. Weather, too, has played its role in this fantasy of ruination—large slabs of whitewash have chipped and fallen from the once-pristine facade.
 Overall, Delory’s provocation is an attack on the idolization of architecture. The shock induced by his images is perhaps evidence that the Villa Savoye, as an icon of function and utilitarianism, is now too often treated as a precious object. In fact, the contemporary state of the building—pristine, untouched by the ages—is the result of an extensive reconstruction and restoration process that began in the 1960s. During the Second World War, the house was commandeered first by the German military, which used it as a hay barn, and then by the American army. Both damaged it heavily, and the Villa was in reality far more of a ruin than even Delory’s talented hand could fabricate. (...)

Metropolis

Apelo à Petição | Pelo Direito à Arquitectura

Qual a diferença entre um Arquiteto e um Engenheiro, passo à destrinça, é a mesma que entre um Psiquiatra e um Psicólogo, o primeiro é terra a terra, prescreve medicamentos, que tem consequência prática no seu bem estar, o segundo, tenta nos convencer, que a dolorosa aprendizagem do cinismo, é a panaceia para os nossos problemas. Se acha cínico, que outros profissionais recebam por fazer projetos de Arquitetura, então assine on-line esta petição... antes medicado do que cínico!

Make More than a Banker? Become a Farmer!

Seriously, it's the best job in the 21st century. Down on the farm, incomes are up.

If you want to become rich, Jim Rogers, investment whiz, best-selling author and one of Wall Street's towering personalities, has this advice: Become a farmer. Food prices have been high recently. Some have questioned how long that can continue. Not Rogers. He predicts that farming incomes will rise dramatically in the next few decades, faster than those in most other industries — even Wall Street. The essence of his argument is this: We don't need more bankers. What we need are more farmers. The invisible hand will do its magic. "The world has got a serious food problem," says Rogers. "The only real way to solve it is to draw more people back to agriculture."

 Time Magazine

Buckminster Fuller

He demanded you ask yourself “how big can I think?” Meanwhile he was only 5 foot 1, cross-eyed, with one leg shorter than the other, was latterly deaf, and declared himself of “low-average” intelligence.

If we do more with less, our resources are adequate to take care of everybody. All political systems are founded on the premise the opposite is true.’ So began Bucky in his interview with Playboy in 1972. As usual it runs to many pages, but the kernel is right there. So, in telling us that we were running spaceship earth backwards, was he right? (...)

Bucky’s critique of specialisation was not intended to deny our talents as top darts players or pole dancers; blinkered mediocrity is better understood by avaricious bankers, politicians and ambitious academics; the first being a business we should have grown out of, the second a phoney diversion and the third a contradiction in terms. To avoid oblivion man would improve his thinking, abandoning stooge-like religion, treasure, art, culture and much else besides. Sunrise and sunset would be replaced by ‘sunsight’ and ‘suneclipse’ and even ‘up’ and ‘down’ were controversial.

Firmly believing a home was not a house (and perhaps not in homes at all) and with declarations such as: ‘If humans pass their cosmic exam as local Universe problem solvers and continue on the planet in to the twenty-first century, there will be no thoughts whatsoever of earning a living. There will be no thought of, or even such words as business competition, money or lies for such phenomena will be historically extinct’, Bucky became popular with the more adventurous hippies.

However, he was simultaneously wildly unpopular with the more politicised strain, those who saw him as a capitalist provider of military ordinance to Vietnam. Bucky said he had never designed the domes with military purpose in mind, but it certainly helped to pay the bills. (...)

Academics are shy of him. As Leonardo da Vinci crossed with Charles Lindbergh, Bucky attracts enthusiasts, romantic technocrats and children. But at least in a frontier-prone era of burgeoning futurians, Bucky was almost unique in saying that if we took to his synergetics seriously we would not end up mining rocks for food or seeing out our days on Aldebaran II. (...)

The Architectural Review

Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, Liberty Place

Project Description:

Liberty Place is not a singular tower form but a rich interplay of three slender architectural forms inspired by the unique qualities of this wonderful Sydney city site. The development unites public, corporate and hospitality architecture into a cohesive environment. It is an amalgamation of five sites comprising of a Premium Grade forty-four storey commercial tower, a penthouse apartment, a heritage-listed building (Legion House) and a three storey office and retail building (167 Castlereagh street). Liberty Place occupies a prominent site in Sydney’s Central Business Districts, with dual frontages to 161 Castlereagh street and 242 Pitt street. Collectively, it is an articulate assemblage of elements (ground plane, street walls, tower elements and landscape). The architectural forms create a dynamic public space and reinvigorates a previously run down mid-city area.
ANZ tower with its distinctive sinuous form and striking glass-walled facade has seamlessly redefined the city skyline. The skyline of Sydney is an integral part of the city’s identity. The tower has become an iconic reference point, with a rooftop feature thats dramatically captures and breaks the light. This layered silvery tower gently turning towards the Harbour and terminating in an arch of louvres, makes a dramatic contribution to this great city skyline.
The commercial tower provides 57,000sqm of Premium Grade NLA with efficient floor plates with access to outstanding views for occupants. ANZ Tower has achieved a 6 Star Green Star Design (Design V2) from the Green Building Council of Australia. Significant energy savings are achieved through the use of efficient light fittings, low temperature VAV air conditioning with perimeter active chilled beam technology. The building also features two gas fired cogeneration units to minimise its carbon footprint.
The base of the tower invites the energy of the city into the development, consisting of a retail and dining precinct, public open spaces, a sunlit plaza and pedestrian lane way connecting Castlereagh Street and Pitt Street. The light-filled pedestrian lane way provides a unique ground plane and entry into the commercial tower.
The Castlereagh street frontage features the heritage-listed building Legion House, originally constructed in 1902 by the YWCA and operated as a women’s hostel and outreach service for 60 years. Legion House is heritage listed and protected due to its social significance. Consideration of the site’s rich history led to the authentic juxtaposition of new and heritage elements.
Restoring and redeveloping Legion House enhanced its overall utility and environmental performance. With a 6-Star Green Star- Office v3 Design rating, the six-storey ‘Autonomous Zero Carbon Life Cycle Building’ generates renewable electricity on site resulting in zero net carbon emissions. Receiving little sun or wind, Legion House receives its energy from a process called biomass gasification. This technology converts biomass (plant sourced) materials to a combustible gas that generates electricity. Whilst traditional gasification plants utilise standard wood chips or briquettes (made from compressed waste sawdust), Legion House can use the commercial paper waste generated from the adjacent office tower through shredding and compressing this waste to form paper briquettes (which can be used in the gasification plant). Essentially, this means Legion House creates its own renewable electricity on site resulting in zero net carbon emissions and is disconnected from the electricity grid with any surplus power created by its independent system (to be supplied to the storey commercial office tower on the site).
Legion House incorporates three retail tenancies to the ground floor, and has been extended with two new office floors and a western extension providing additional office space. The lift and stair case have been located external to the building in an elegantly detailed, curved glass enclosure to minimise the heritage impact while creating visual interest and a new laneway entry.
In addition to energy efficiency, Legion House has been designed to be water balanced. This means that in a year of typical Sydney rainfall, all the amenity and operational water needs of the building will be met through rain captured on the roof. This is achieved through the use of advanced water conservation technology, high efficiency fixtures, vacuum toilets and the use of high quality rainwater recycling.
Collectively, Liberty Place is not only celebrates the public domain, but embodies significant architectural and environmental innovation. The development successfully balances urbanism, heritage and sustainability considerations with commercial requirements to create a rich and considered architectural expression.

® Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp

World Architecture Festival

Gone Girl

© FINCHER, David, Gone Girl, 2014

An awkward interview with Le Corbusier!

On meeting Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, Taya Zinkin realises the great architect has designs on something other than large buildings:

"As we were getting off the plane he asked me what I was doing that evening: “Catching a train, I am afraid,” I said. “ Pity. You are fat and I like my women fat. We could have spent a pleasant night together.” He said this quite casually. He was not being offensive, he was being factual, so involved in his own ego that it did not occur to him that it might have been better put and more gallant to spend some time on preliminaries. So gigantic was Corb’s egotism that he probably considered it enough of an honour for a humble mortal to provide a genius like him with a night’s relaxation."

 The Guardian

Stadthaus M1 by Barkow Leibinger

The subtle strength of Barkow Leibinger's Stadthaus M1 derives from its passive house standards and connection to local environment. The basic polygonal form of the overall structure, which includes a hotel and street-level shops separate from apartments, is jointed by a “pocket park” that serves as a serene connector between the complex’s private-public areas as well as a transition space to nearby streets. Located in the “sustainable model district” of Vauban in the already so-called “green city” of Freiburg, Germany, Stadthaus M1 is right at home aesthetically and ideologically.

Archinect

Is Le Corbusier the real grandfather of Hip-Hop?

Supor que a Beat Generation e depois o Hip-Hop, estes fedelhos... de calças largas e ténis volumosos, que calcorreiam as nossas cidades, emsimesmados no seu mundo, pelos seus headphones e faixas de Public Enemy, foi criação dos enormes subúrbios descaracterizados, que se tornaram imagem de marca das nossas cidades, é asseverar, que como tudo, somos a soma do ambiente e das circunstâncias... se a música é repetitiva e o loop idem, então, prestemos vassalagem a este senhor:

"In the late 1920s, Le Corbusier created a plan for Paris," Ford says. "Its most celebrated portion was called 'Towers in the Park.' [...]
Think unremarkable, high-rise apartment buildings. Think low-income housing projects. [...]
"Many of hip-hop's most prominent artists were born, raised, and perfected their crafts in those very same housing projects. Hip-hop was a result of the economical, political, and sociological deprivations instituted by the housing projects across America."

metrotimes

Tula House, Canada, Patkau Architects

Patkau Architects releases images of award-winning family dwelling on Quadra Island
Settled quietly on the shores of Quadra Island, British Columbia is a 4,500 sq ft private residence designed by Patkau Architects. Completed in 2012, the single-family dwelling has only just been made publishable to web publications having received multiple industry accolades over the past few years including the Canadian Architect Award of Excellence and the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture.
This exquisite site on the edge of the Pacific Ocean provided a wide breadth of inspiration for Patkau Architects. ‘One site is actually many sites’, the team explains in a design statement, in reference to the variety of rich and luscious foliage, and the driftwood-littered rocky shores of the island.
Tula House wraps along the craggy contours of the coastline with a cantilevered terrace which enables the residents to bask in the natural beauty that surrounds them. The steel-framed wooden decking provides a dramatic contrast with the raw concrete finishes of the walls within the home and concrete floors which halt at the cliff-edge.
Patkau Architects has drawn from the unrefined nature of the site, with low rock walls signalling a gravel approach to the home. The concrete walls of the residence are clad in staggered fibre-cement panels which are black in hue to reduce the visual impact of the man-made form in its forested location. The design studio has also used moss and native ground covers across the roof to ensure continuity within the locale. 
The interior of Tula House speaks repeatedly to the rugged address, with a ledge of moss-covered rock in the bedrooms, far-reaching views across the Pacific Ocean, and the solidity of the concrete floors which reference the cliff-face into which they are set. A sheltered entry courtyard with a simple water feature provides landscaped outdoor space for entertaining and quiet contemplation.

Architects: Patkau Architects.

WorldArchitectureNews

Siza's Floating Chemical Headquarters

Sometimes architecture appears as the stuff of dreams — take this office by Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, built for the Shihlien Chemical Industrial Jiangsu Co. in an industrial park in China. It is an elegant, curved building, complete with green roof that sits atop a lake in an industrial park. (...)

Architizer

Jesolo Lido Pool Vila

An interview with Jacopo Mascheroni, founder and lead architect at JM Architecture, reveals the story behind the design and construction of Jesolo Lido Pool Villa — the first villa to be completed as part of a series planned in Jesolo, a town close to the Venice Lagoon in Northern Italy. Mascheroni explains how using Mosa's ceramic tiles Quartz collection inside-out contributed not only to a highly sustainable and low-maintenance solution, but also completed the architectural language of the space — both aesthetically and functionally: “Using Mosa presented a 360-degree solution: we could use the tiles indoors and outdoors; on walls and floors; in the pool and around the pool."

 Jacopo Mascheroni, Jesolo Lido Pool Vila, 2013

Regionalismo Crítico ou Neo-Racionalismo

A expressão ou corrente Arquitetónica surge em meados de 1960, em contraponto com as premissas e conceitos do Modernismo. A principal característica, reside na compreensão dos padrões das cidades europeias, nas suas evidentes formas básicas mais ou menos permanentes, que se tornam comunicadoras de ideias e valores culturais, desta forma, as ruas, os edifícios, assim como os monumentos, são essências para determinar o carácter do edifício. Como podemos ver no Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Galiza, do Siza Vieira, uma forma aparentemente simples, escamoteia uma estranha complexidade interior, gerada por uma resposta à história do local onde foi edificado, pelas constantes ligações entre os monumentos vizinhos e a organização formal da ruas.

Regionalismo crítico é uma abordagem arquitetural que tenta remediar a indiferença em relação ao lugar onde está situado o objeto arquitetural moderno. Através da utilização das forças do contexto, visa enriquecer a significação da arquitetura. O termo foi introduzido por Alexander Tzonis e Liane Lefaivre e posteriormente pelo célebre crítico e historiador da arquitetura Kenneth Frampton.(...)

O Regionalismo Crítico é portanto uma prática marginal que, ao mesmo tempo que se recusa a abandonar aspectos progressistas, repreende a arquitetura desumana que privilegia a estética e a cultura dominante tão modernizada. Mas não o faz de maneira utópica. E em um ambiente onde o arquiteto tenta ser maior que sua obra, os regionalistas davam ênfase maior ao território onde a obra estava inserida. Contra a tendência da ‘civilização universal’ que privilegia o ar-condicionado, fazem da luz, do terreno, das condições climáticas, as bases que sustentariam o projeto. Fazem do aspecto visual uma característica secundária, na medida em que enfatizam o táctil, as diferentes temperaturas em ambientes distintos, assim com o aroma, os sons, a ventilação e até mesmo o acabamento dos pisos e paredes que são convites ao tato. Isto provoca involuntariamente mudanças sensoriais, de postura, psicológicas, etc. Tentam rigorosamente se apropriar de referências externas, tanto formais quanto tecnológicas, mas sem deixar de lado o que é local.

Siza Vieira, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Santiago de Compostela