“sue&til” – New City of Wood: A Hybrid Cluster

weberbrunner architekten

Architects: ARGE suetil - weberbrunner architekten ag and SOPPELSA ARCHITEKTEN
Location: Winterthur, Switzerland
Year: 2018
Photography: Beat Bühler

weberbrunner in collaboration with soppelsa architekten won the commissioned study “Housing development with commercial areas in Neuhegi, Winterthur” in November 2013. According to the tender, around 300 residential units, ground floor public-oriented commercial space, and an underground car park with around 200 parking spaces were to be built on two plots.

The meandering perimeter block figure creates an urban pocket park on Sulzer-Allee, defines an inner courtyard divided into three areas, and forms the final key element in the “hybrid cluster” masterplanning scheme.

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Party and Public Service Center of Yuanheguan

LUO studio

Architects: LUO studio
Location: Yuanheguan Village, China
Area: 545,9 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Jin Weiqi

Wudang Mountain Tourism Economic Zone in Shiyan City has been actively promoting B&B business and improving the surrounding environment of the scenic area. Yuanheguan Village is close to the entrance of Wudang Mountain Scenic Area and therefore was selected as a prioritized place for a pilot program. According to the plan, the plot where the original village committee office was situated and its surroundings will be transformed into a B&B reception demonstration area, so it was very urgent to relocate and construct a new village committee office. To guarantee services for the villagers, it was essential to figure out how to build it in a short time.

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Daring Cities: Pasig City

Julia Scott

Today we visit Pasig City in the Philippines. A regional trendsetter in tackling greenhouse gas emissions, Pasig City is now a model city nationally in terms of its COVID-19 response, which gives citizens the tools to grow their own food and use sustainable transportation.

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Electrical Ecologies II

Firas Safieddine

Read the first part at Electrical Ecologies

This text aims to illustrate a multiscalar validity of the main umbrella term presented, Electrical Ecologies, by going through several fundamental ideas and introducing terms that are central to conceiving the topic. Electrical Ecologies (EE) operate at the smallest scale unit (the electric) to maintain a unified approach to understanding and operating at the scale of the planet. Due to that nature, and because it is a plural term, ecologies vary in size and structure, and hence form “sub-ecologies” and more general ones. The multiscalar validity is meant to demonstrate how this type of operation could happen at various scales, from the microscopic to the urban, and beyond.

The electrical is a manner of functionally and operationally flattening all electrical objects (from charged matter to human brains) in order to define a new design agenda and enable a conception of a planetary-scale nervous system. While a lot of other elements can be capitalized on as a common denominator, the electric is of interest not only as a common ground but, first, as a flexible limiting criterion (as it is also quantitative) and, second, as an operational driver that allows action.

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Nature of Enclosure: Session 6

Jeffrey S Nesbit | Marcella Del Signore | Mariano Gomez-Luque | Shawn Rickenbacker

This a podcast from urbanNext exchanges, the urbanNext series curated by Ricardo Devesa and Marta Bugés.

In the 6th session from Nature of Enclosure, Jeffrey S. Nesbit is joined by Mariano Gomez Luque, Marcella Del Signore and Shawn Rickenbacker whose work examines the role of architecture, technology, and politics, that give rise to accelerated capital and planetary conditions within the Nature of Enclosure.

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Itinerant Tent: Nomadic and Ephemeral Structure

Fabrizio Pugliese | Gabriel Huarte

Architects: Fabrizio Pugliese & Gabriel Huarte
Location: Ceibas, Argentina
Area: 100 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Fabrizio Pugliese, Gabriel Huarte and Pedro Scarpaci

The project consists of a nomadic and ephemeral structure that can be assembled in a short time by just a few people in different locations. The mounting system consists of five elements.

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Into the Hedge: Temporary Landmark

SO-IL

Architects: SO-IL
Location: Columbus, USA
Year: 2019
Photography: Hadley Fruit

As one of the J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize recipients of the second edition of Exhibit Columbus, SO – IL took on the preservation effort at the Miller House and Garden and turned it into a temporary landmark for play in the city of Columbus, Indiana.

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Al Janoub Stadium: A Temporary Overlay outside the Permanent Footprint

Zaha Hadid Architects

Architects: Zaha Hadid Architects
Location: Al Wakrah, Qatar
Year: 2019
Photography: Hufton+Crow

Inaugurated on 16 May 2019 by hosting the Amir Cup Final of the Qatar Stars national football league, Al Janoub Stadium was the first new stadium commissioned for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), together with Aecom, began designing the stadium along with its new precinct for the city in March 2013. As one of the venues for the Qatar World Cup, the stadium will host the group and quarter-final matches of the tournament. It is located in the city of Al Wakrah, 20 km south of Doha and connected to the capital via the Red Line of the new Doha Metro system.

The client’s brief was for a 40,000-seat football stadium for the 2022 World Cup, which could be reduced to a 20,000-seat capacity in its legacy mode following the tournament. 20,000 seats is the optimum capacity for legacy use as the home field for the Al Wakrah Sport Club professional football team of the Qatar Stars national league. These temporary seats have been designed to be disassembled and transported to a developing country in need of sporting infrastructure for post-tournament usage. Further temporary accommodation such as concessions are required for the additional capacity of FIFA World Cup tournament mode. This has been built as a temporary overlay outside the permanent footprint and enclosure of the stadium in its legacy mode.

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Resilient Infrastructures

[bracket] | Neeraj Bhatia

Throughout the history of architecture, the role of the Architect has been to determine lines that ordered the world. In the past two centuries, however, as cities have rapidly expanded into vast urban territories that are organized through the negotiation of politics, economics, ecosystems, and cultural values, the ability to determine such lines has become progressively more complex and suspect.

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Pleat: Textile Design

Leanne Zilka

This essay is an excerpt of Floppy Logic by Leanne Zilka, published by Actar Publishers.

This chapter discusses a series of projects that revolve around the Pleat, a fashion and textile technique I have explored to develop an understanding around where fashion, textile design can be used to develop architecture, and how the differences in these approaches can be used to develop an architecture that considers material, structure, skin and form at the same time and not a separate processes. Through the design and fabrication explorations of the Pleat, I have applied the lessons learned from the previous collaborations with fashion and textile design, discarded peripheral directions, and established a way of operating for future projects. The projects discussed in this chapter include the Pleat Pod, Pleat Pavilion and Pleatent. These projects have used the process of developing smaller tests or croquis developed through the collaborations to inform the larger architectural propositions of the Pleat projects. The images in this section document the processes taken, problems encountered and resolutions to communicate the benefits and possibilities of working in the space between fashion, textile design and architecture.

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Swatch and Omega Campus

Shigeru Ban

Architects: Shigeru Ban
Location: Biel, Switzerland
Area: 25.000 m2 (Swatch HQ) + 5.596 m2 (Cité du Temps) + 16.614 m2 (Omega Factory)
Year: 2019
Photography: Didier Boy de la Tour and Philip Zinniker

The shimmering, curved silhouette of the new Swatch building extends over a total length of 240 meters and a width of 35 meters. At its highest point, the façade measures 27 meters. The unusual design breaks with the conventions of classic office building architecture and blends harmoniously into the urban environment. The building’s forms awaken the imagination – like a work of art, the interpretation lies in the eye of the beholder.

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Daring Cities: Pittsburgh

Julia Scott

In this episode, we visit Pittsburgh, USA. Despite ongoing challenges, the town that’s still known as “Steel City” has made extraordinary strides in forging a green post-industrial future. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto says fracking imperils that progress — and reveals his agenda for a healthy local economy.

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Coffee Production Plant: Vast Green Roof

Giorgi Khmaladze Architects

Architects: Giorgi Khmaladze Architects
Location: Tbilisi, Georgia
Area: 9.750 m2
Year: 2019

Located on a highway connecting the city to the airport, the site is sparsely developed. Surrounded with fields and pine trees, the project houses a coffee production plant, its offices, a coffee tasting area and small coffee exhibits.

Inside, all the programs are arranged in a continuous unobstructed space, with glass partitions as boundaries in between. From the highway, the building is a homogeneous concrete folded volume with no visible openings to define its programs. At the back, it opens onto the pine forest. From above, it blends into the surroundings with a vast green roof, where occasional openings in the form of atriums, terraces and skylights bring natural light indoors. This reduces the impact of the building’s large footprint, visible from planes taking off and landing next to the site.

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New Natures: Ábalos+Sentkiewicz’s Intermodal Station in Logroño

Stan Allen

The field of freedom shrinks with speed. And freedom needs a field. When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close.

Paul Virilio [1]

 

“Construction,” Walter Benjamin has written, “fulfills the role of the unconscious.” He was writing in the 1930s, describing the development of cast-iron construction in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In those years, cast-iron, coupled with glass, made possible the Parisian arcades and with them a transformative new space of social encounter was created. But, as Benjamin accurately observes, the integration of these new building technologies was not seamless. The arcades, with their hidden mid-block locations, entered by passing behind the limestone street walls of the Parisian boulevards, precisely mapped Benjamin’s divide between a collective conscious and unconscious of the city. In the nineteenth century railroad terminal these two worlds remained even more resolutely separated. Iron and glass were extensively used in the vast long-span sheds that housed the platforms and the rail lines, while the terminal building itself–the face to the city–took the form of an ornate palace, deploying all the apparatus of monumental classical architecture to mark entry into the city.

The representational logic of the beaux-arts architect and the functional logic of the engineer faced off without intermingling.

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The Collective Dream: Boundaries and the City

And The City | Hagar Abiri | Prima Abdullah

Read the related essay: The Collective Dream: Boundaries and the City by Hagar Abiri.

Architecture has always been a tool in the hand of governors, priests and those who wish to demonstrate or communicate power. In the current search for an architecture that represents the period and free democratic regimes, it is important to examine not only the style, but the whole procedure and the relevance of local politics that outline the boundaries and planning conditions.

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Squaring the Circle: The Urban Metamorphosis for a New Center of Barcelona

Arnau Pascual

Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes appeared for the first time as a square in 1859 in the Cerdà Plan for the Eixample of Barcelona, submitted to a competition for the expansion of the city, which was considered a pioneering project in the evolution of modern urban planning. The plan aspired to design a city through a square block grid, wide streets with integrated services networks (water, sewage system and gas) and green spaces; to give total priority to the citizens in contrast to the unhealthy situation inside the old city walls.

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Daring Cities: Turku

Julia Scott

In this episode we visit Turku, Finland. This city, dating back to the Viking era, will be carbon neutral by 2029. It has become a laboratory city for circular development, with a focus on reducing waste across sectors — solving the waste problem before it even starts.

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Saraceno’s Model of Models: The Magnificence of Aerocene

Kiel Moe

Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene is astonishing for many reasons. Foremost is the degree to which his experiment manifests the salient principle of thermodynamics as the motor of its operation: the universe abhors a gradient.[1] What is so cunning and breath-taking about this project, though, is how it deploys this principle. It projects the work of habitation and mobility aloft in the most abundant but lowest quality gradients on the planet: the dynamics of aero-solar exergy gradients in the atmosphere.[2]

ed-saraceno_moe

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Green Rooftops: New Leisure Space

Strelka KB

The COVID-19 pandemic has made green public spaces in cities inaccessible. However, the demand for leisure in nature has not gone anywhere. Greening rooftops could allow us to organize new leisure space while improving the environmental situation, preventing road flooding and reducing the costs of maintaining urban infrastructure. Today, we can begin protecting the megapolis from the crises of the future: a lack of access to green public spaces due to COVID-19, streets flooding during heavy rainfall, the heat island effect, air and water pollution, a lack of green spaces in the city center.

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Xifré’s Roof: “Floating” Wild Garden

MataAlta

Design: MataAlta Studio
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Area: 1500 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Carlos Barruz

When MataAlta Studio won the green roofs open competition promoted by the Barcelona City Council, founder Sergio Carratalá knew they had a unique opportunity to reintroduce nature into the middle of this densely built Mediterranean city. Els Terrats d’en Xifré is a rehabilitation project, both in the strict architectural-patrimonial sense and in the ecosystemic sense. This green roof is situated on top of an early 19th-century block of ten buildings. The project has restored the original elements of the historic building while also creating a “floating” wild garden that enhances urban biodiversity.

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Daring Cities: Orlando

Julia Scott

In this episode, we visit Orlando, USA. This central Florida city is not just the home of Walt Disney World. It’s also a leader in and a model for sustainability. We hear from Chris Castro, Director of Orlando’s Office of Sustainability & Resilience, about how the “City Beautiful” has turned its neighborhoods into ‘agri-hoods’ and pioneered floating solar arrays on its many pocket lakes.

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Project Olympus: Humanity’s Future in Space

BIG-BJARKE INGELS GROUP | ICON

“Building humanity’s first home on another world will be the most ambitious construction project in human history and will push science, engineering, technology, and architecture to literal new heights,” said Jason Ballard, Co-founder and CEO of ICON. “NASA’s investment in space-age technologies like this can not only help to advance humanity’s future in space, but also to solve very real, vexing problems we face on Earth. We are honored to begin our research and development on ICON’s “Project Olympus” and the “Olympus Construction System.”

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Empire of Platforms

Penelope Dean

Excerpt from The Building, José Aragüez ed., published by Lars Müller Publishers, 2016.

“. . . [T]he dimensions of a table or a house are very important—not, as the functionalists thought, because they carry out a determined function, but because they permit other functions . . . because they permit everything that is unforeseeable in life.” [1] Aldo Rossi, 1981

“Neither the Modern Movement nor post-modern have ever understood that a new architecture does not spring from a project method or from a language, but rather from the user’s different manner of using these things . . . architecture has never seriously bothered about the question of its own user culture.” [2] Andrea Branzi, 1984

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Houstonism: A Soft Theory

Matthew Johnson

This essay is an excerpt of Houston Genetic City by Peter Zweig, Matthew Johnson and Jason Logan, published by Actar Publishers and the University of Houston’s Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design.

Each year, hundreds of magazines around the world issue their own “most livable city” surveys. These questionnaires attempt to measure urbanism by the vague idea of quality of life. Vienna is perpetually at the top of this list, followed in short order by Vancouver, Zurich, Paris, Munich, Frankfurt, Sydney, and other places that we might have enjoyed on a vacation but are not lucky enough to live in. Most of us inhabit perfectly functional cities that will never appear on a “livability” list. These are places that the tour books tell us to skip, ringed by industrial sectors, agglomerations of infrastructure, nondescript suburbs sprawling out into the landscape. Their historic evolution has not been an attempt to preserve some fictive past but to provide a staging area for future developments. Houston is one of these. It is unlikely to ever rank on a “most livable” list, because it lacks the historic districts, quaintness, and walkability that seem to be prerequisites for inclusion in this club. Instead, it is comprised of mirrored glass towers, broken pavement, abandoned storefronts, ubiquitous strip malls, and other detritus of contemporary urban life (which are, incidentally, qualities that many Houstonians have affection for). It feels, at moments, much more like a relic of the developing world than a gleaming, wealthy northern metropolis.

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Tropical Chalet: Welcoming the Surrounding Environment

g8a architects

Architects: G8A
Location: Danang, Vietnam
Area: 400 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Oki Hiroyuki

The four-bedroom family villa “Tropical Chalet” reflects the simplicity of its idyllic context through a porous design that welcomes the surrounding environment of lakefront greenery. The rectangular plot is cushioned in a new town residential area in the Vietnamese coastal region of Danang, a tranquil area along the seaside.

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Between Accident and Control: Contrasting Traditions of Computational Design

Daniel Cardoso-Llach

This essay is an excerpt of WWW Drawing by Janet Abrams and Mehrdad Hadighi, published by Actar Publishers and Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Architecture, Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

Since architects began to flirt with computers in the 1960s, debates about the role of computation in architecture have often been framed antagonistically – as arenas for technophobes and technophiles to clash, each staking a claim on the unique value, or promise, of their respective practices. This dichotomy is tempting. On the one hand, images of automated design systems – offering creative freedom, managerial efficiency, or ‘personalized’ design solutions – abound in architecture’s six-decades romance with computation. Seductive and often reductive, these images outlined the contours of a computationally augmented practice of architecture, and captured the imagination of many architects in academia and industry, effectively ushering an entire academic sub-field.

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De Muze: Service Center for the Elderly

dmvA

Architects: dmvA
Location: Mechelen, Belgium
Area: 5,000 m2
Year: 2016
Photography: Bart Gosselin

The site of ‘de Muze’ has a long history. In 2006, the factory site was owned by a family that obtained a permit to build a nursing home. Characteristic of the site is its strategic location on the outskirts of Mechelen – between Mechelen, Brussels and the Dijle River. Located in the middle of a building block and on the edge of the village, the site provides a great view of the Dijle valley. The planting of trees transformed the factory site into a park. The new residential care center set up in the middle of this new park.

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Lot E8 ZAC Clichy-Batignolles: Landscape of Connection

Avenier Cornejo architects | Gausa + Raveau

Architects: Avenier Cornejo architectes and Gausa + Raveau
Location: Paris, France
Area: 16.025,30 m2
Year: 2016
Photography: Sergio Grazia
Jumps of Scale to Understand the Place

The site is integrated into the multi-urban network of Paris, the Grande Couronne and major green spaces and infrastructure networks. The ZAC Clichy-Batignolles is perceived as a new landscape of connection, a wide-open urban door along the major arteries towards the historic city.

The site becomes an important urban platform, a node of interchange inserted into the larger system of Parisian relational spaces. It plays the role of transition between different scales, whether territorial, urban, environmental, social, cultural, and infrastructural. The ZAC thus acts as a mechanism for resonance and multi-district transfer.

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Care Centre Machelen: New Residential Building

Korteknie Stuhlmacher

Architects: Korteknie Stuhlmacher
Location: Machelen, Belgium
Year: 2017
Photography: Luuk Kramer and Maurice Tjon

The new building for the residential care center at Parkhof replaces an existing elderly home consisting of two parts, one from the 1960s and the other from the 1990s. Neither building meets present-day standards and expectations. The earlier building has been demolished. The more recent structure, the “Q-building”, will be refurbished and used as an office building for the client, the social services agency of Machelen (OCMW).

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On Tents and Caves

Frank Escher

This essay is an excerpt of Being The Mountain by PRODUCTORA, published by Actar Publishers and the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture Press.
This book is the result of research PRODUCTORA initiated as winners of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) for Emerging Practice at Illinois Institute of Technology.

“The first space for living was the cave. The first house was the hollow mound of earth. To build meant: to gather and layer building material [and] mass, around voids for air [and] living [and] space . …
The technique of architect and sculptor was similar. …
The architectural design concerns itself with ‘space’ as its raw material and with articulated room as its product . …
The architect has finally discovered the medium of his art: SPACE.” [1]

Written in Vienna in 1912, a place and time marked by some of the most radical cultural shifts of the last century, Rudolf M. Schindler’s “Moderne Architektur: ein Programm” describes the origins of architecture and offers two directives for the architecture of that moment: first, that architecture must concern itself not with the object, but with space; and second, that architecture is to be from and of the earth.

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Skärvet Elderly Care Home

Kjellander Sjöberg

Architects: Kjellander Sjöberg
Location: Växjö, Sweden
Area: 5,500 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Max Plunger

The elderly care home is a part of the Skärvet city block, which is the starting point of Bäckaslöv, a new urban district in Växjö being developed along the railway connecting the city center to the Norra Bergundasjön lake. The L- shaped building is the first phase and the cornerstone of the city block, offering mixed forms of tenure around a spacious, shared courtyard.

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Huaxin Tiandi Campus: Nature in the Heart of the City

Ferrier Marchetti Studio

Architects: Ferrier Marchetti Studio
Location: Shanghai, China
Area: 51,000 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Luc Boegly

How can an office campus contribute to the life of the neighborhood in which it is located?

Here, the large garden that serves as a daily setting for all the employees is also a promenade offered to the city. A diagonal crossing allows passers-by to reach from Yishan Road to Tianlin Road through the heart of a natural landscape, away from traffic. The buildings have been positioned to open up the site, making this project a lively and welcoming space, bringing nature back into the heart of the city.

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Xpace Digital Park: An Urban Attractor

JL-OFFICE | STUDIO QI

Architects: JL-OFFICE and STUDIO QI
Location: Hangzhou, China
Area: 30,000 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Weiqi Jin

Xpace Digital Park recycles a compound of unused old factories in Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou, China, into a new startup campus for tech companies. The project updates the existing buildings forging a new identity for the site, transforming it in an urban attractor. The property has several large buildings and is surrounded by a differentiated perimeter with heavily trafficked roads and a stream.

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Lafayette 148: An Artifact of Architecture

Studio for Architecture

Excerpt from Marc Neveu’s introduction to Twisted: Lafayette 148 New York Factory in China by Mehrdad Hadighi, Marc Neveu and Tsz Yan Ng, published by Actar Publishers


Architects: Mehrdad Hadighi, Studio for Architecture, in collaboration with Tsz Yan Ng
Location: Shantou, China
Area: 21.000 m2
Year: 2014
Photography: But-Sou Lai Photography

Completed in 2008 by Mehrdad Hadighi of Studio for Architecture and Tsz Yan Ng, L-148 houses all of the functions of the Lafayette 148 clothing label. The building is organized around the flow of production, literally from conception to shipment of the final product. Office and design studios are placed at the top. Each stage of production is stacked on the floors below. The entry level functions as showroom and has the ability to transform into a runway. The building is, however, much more than a diagram of production. Throughout the building the architects deftly carved into the block to allow light to penetrate into the core and even provide exterior spaces that one is able to occupy. These spaces also help to mitigate the use of artificial cooling by drawing hot air from the building. Post-tensioned beams span the entire width of the floors, thus removing any need for interior columns. The result is a truly free plan that accommodates the wide variety of programmatic needs as well as offering bright and open workspaces.

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Dynamis: Addressing Time

Roger Paez

This essay is an excerpt of Operative Mapping by Roger Paez, published by Actar Publishers and Elisava.

The concept of Dynamis deals with how maps address time. Reality is constantly changing. Moreover, our perception of reality is also changeable. The history of mapping is also the history of changes in how we understand reality. Maps have always had to deal with the changing nature of reality. However, in modernity – and especially following the information revolution – there has been an exponential increase in the dynamic character of the world and our perception of it. This dynamism has only continued to accelerate, forcing mapping to address the issue of change explicitly. The confluence of this highly dynamic reality and an expansion of the map’s fields of application (far exceeding the previous disciplinary boundaries) has led to a high point in the incorporation of the temporal dimension in mapping. This has generated one of the most active and innovative fronts in mapping research and practice, especially when the interest in recognizing the changing nature of reality is coupled with the data capture and management capabilities (calculation, modeling and simulation; conceptualization, representation and visualization) provided by new digital technologies. Aside from new dynamic map formats – which develop over time, like animations or interactive interfaces – two-dimensional maps have seen very significant advances in terms of incorporating time-based characteristics into static and flat formats like paper or screens. The complexity and dynamism of phenomena are irreducible to the static two-dimensionality of conventional maps, but the same is true for the most sophisticated interactive formats imaginable. Projection, in the sense of a necessary reduction in the complexity of the map’s object, is not only inevitable, it is consubstantial with mapping itself.

Although at first it might seem like mapping tends to capture a particular moment, very often it is able to incorporate time-related parameters with great richness and precision. Time appears in the map through three aspects associated with the idea of change: first, movement – a change in place or position of a body or a phenomenon; second, transformation – a change from one state of reality to another; and, third, action – the manifestation of a force that causes a change in reality or in our perception of it.

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Topographic Architecture: Kenneth Frampton’s Interest in the Ground

Véronique Patteeuw

This essay is an excerpt of Being The Mountain by PRODUCTORA, published by Actar Publishers and the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture Press.
This book is the result of research PRODUCTORA initiated as winners of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) for Emerging Practice at Illinois Institute of Technology.

“It is said that architects always design the same building. In a sense I have always rewritten the same essay.”[1]

In 1980, just a few months before the opening of the first International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, British architectural historian Kenneth Frampton resigned from the curatorial team. His co-curators, Paolo Portoghesi, Robert A. M. Stern, Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Vincent Scully, had settled on an approach that emphasized the glorification of the past and positioned postmodernism as an architectural style of historicist eclecticism, in fierce opposition to Frampton’s ideology.[2] Although Frampton was critical of the legacy of the modern movement, he shared Jurgen Habermas’s commitment to “the unfinished project of modernity”[3] and argued for an architecture that would resist the universalizing hegemony of the postmodern times he was witnessing.
Frampton’s “criticism from within,” as Léa-Catherine Szacka has suggested, prepared the field for alternative sensibilities in architecture through which his interest in the ground becomes apparent.[4] In reaction to impending universalization, the historian argued for the specificities of place. In reaction to the postmodern reduction of architecture to images, he reclaimed expressive forms of architectural structure and tectonics. In reaction to the modernist tabula rasa, he emphasized the importance of site and topography. Frampton elaborated his vision in a sequence of texts, articles, books, lectures, and teaching modules,[5] an exploration that had started a decade before his involvement in Venice and would climax in his seminal essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” published in 1983.[6]

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Doha Metro Stations: Mobility as Placemaking

UNStudio

Architects: UNStudio
Location: Doha, Qatar
Year: 2020
Photography: Hufton+Crow

UNStudio created a vision for the station designs of the all-new Doha Metro Network and collaborated with the Qatar Rail Architecture Department on the development of an ‘Architectural Branding Manual’: an extensive set of design guidelines, architectural details and material outlines to assure the spatial quality and identity of the network. This comprehensive design manual served as a set of guidelines that were used by the appointed D&B contractors to deliver the different station types for the first phase.

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Glass Bridge: A “Transparent Corridor” in the Air

UAD

Architects: UAD
Location: Jiubei, China
Year: 2020
Photography: Lianzhou Qingtian Tourism Development Co., Ltd

A bridge is a structure built over the terrain, but also a sort of art that symbolizes connection and communication. Located in Lianzhou, Guangdong Province, the Glass Bridge in Huangchuan Three Gorges Scenic Area, created by the Architectural Design & Research Institute of Zhejiang University Co., Ltd. (UAD), becomes a local landmark that seems to “grow” out of the natural environment. By blending the structure into the natural surroundings and deploying innovative construction methods, the design team realized the seamless integration of nature and artifice.

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14 Degrees of Separation: Can Elasticity Stretch the Climate

IAAC

14 Degrees of Separation is a project of IAAC (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia) developed for the Master in Advanced Architecture MAA01 in 2020 by Deniz Akyürek, Rani Kamel and Stefana Zapuc and by the Self-Sufficient Studio faculty Edouard Cabay, Peter Geelmuyden Magnus and Oana Taut.

If self-sufficient architecture is self-providing and autonomous, the project ’14 Degrees of Separation’ aims to research the following question: Can elasticity stretch the climate?

In hot and humid climates, ventilation strategies are responsible for significant proportions of energy consumption. Set in such extreme environments, the project aims at designing a new way of achieving self-sufficient thermal regulation and thus, a new way of living.

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The Extracurricular as an Institutional Third Space

Cristina Mateo

Take your average university day in early spring this year. Yes, it was completely different from today’s. Then, university life consisted of curricular and extracurricular activities, which took place in different venues within the campus: studios, lecture halls, the library… as well as the in-between spaces such as the canteen, benches, and the many other public places we use to relax and recharge our batteries with other people. What’s more, research shows that active learning occurs outside the classroom settings, in informal, ad hoc, spaces (Journal of Facilities Management, 2012).

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Jakob Factory: Tropical Sustainable Architecture

g8a architects

Architects: G8A and rollimarchini architects
Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Area: 13,000 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Oki Hiroyuki

The Jakob Factory project offered the design partnership of rollimarchini architekten from Bern and Swiss-born G8A Architects the unique opportunity to propose a highly innovative and highly specific manufacturing space, set to become a design reference for tropical sustainable architecture. The factory houses the specialist steel rope producers Jakob Rope Systems, a high-quality manufacturing organization, specializing in custom-made steel meshing for private and industrial uses. The partnership of organizations applied their pillar value of sustainability, both environmental and social, to all phases of the design process, from conception to execution and projected developments.

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Typhoon Proof Coastal Reserve: A New Resilient Masterplan

Arcadis | Gossamer | Mandaworks

As part of an international competition organized by the Shenzhen Bureau of Urban Planning & Natural Resources, Mandaworks, Gossamer & Arcadis were commissioned to create a new resilient masterplan for one of Shenzhen’s last remaining natural coastlines. On the doorstep of one of China’s largest cities, the new Xichong Coastal Reserve enhances the natural seaside getaway experience, protects local ecosystems and communities, while supporting a new ecological tourism industry for a burgeoning Chinese middle class. The Coastal Reserve protects the region’s rich biodiversity and restores historic fishing villages.

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The Collective Dream: Boundaries and the City

And The City | Hagar Abiri

Listen to the related podcast: The Collective Dream Boundaries and the City by And the City.

Paul Rabinow interviews Michel Foucault about his interview for the Herodotus[1]. In reply to Rabinow’s question about the political nature of architecture at the end of the 18th century, Foucault says that in the 18th century we start seeing political literature about techniques for governance in society where architecture and urbanism play an important role. Authors begin reflecting deeper on the social order, asking “What is a city?”, discussing the need to eradicate epidemics, prevent coups and promote family life (according to accepted morality of the 18th century), addressing representation of the collective, infrastructure and how to build houses.

Architecture has always been a tool in the hand of governors, priests and those who wish to demonstrate or communicate power. In the current search for an architecture that represents the period and free democratic regimes, it is important to examine not only the style, but the whole procedure and the relevance of local politics that outline the boundaries and planning conditions.

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Densification, Social Distance and the City

And The City | Hagar Abiri | Prima Abdullah

Read the related essay: Densification, Social Distance and the City by Prima Abdullah.

Under a global quarantine, either self-imposed or mandated. It is hard to see how the future will be the same as before. Having the benefit of hindsight from past pandemics, we can characterize two outcomes to this current event: massive changes (i.e the new normal) or nothing at all–either because the pandemic is not significant enough, or the changes are already ongoing. We will look into two cases, the 1846 Broad Street cholera outbreak and the 1918 Spanish flu.

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ASI Reisen Headquarters: Inspired by a Symbiosis Between Nature and Humanity

Snøhetta

Architects: Snøhetta
Location: Natters, Austria
Year: 2019
Photography: Christian Flatscher

When developing its new head office, the international trekking and adventure travel company ASI Reisen sought to have its new space reflect the company’s working culture and commitment to offering sustainable trekking experiences for travelers around the world. Situated in Natters, just south of Innsbruck, Austria, this new timber building with an open office concept offers several solutions that will enable the long-term low environmental footprint of the office space. Inspired by a symbiosis between nature and humanity, the design concept was developed together with ASI Reisen’s employees and the design team from Snøhetta.

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How Will We Teach Next?

Mohsen Mostafavi

Notes for a conversation on the futures of architectural education.

Higher education is at a critical juncture. The ongoing pandemic, with its exponential consequences, has disrupted the sector in significant ways. Overnight, for reasons of safety and security, institutions everywhere had to close their doors, send their students away, and begin to teach online. Inevitably, faculties have had to go through a steep learning curve. So, too, have the students and the staff who provide administrative, technical, and emotional support. No one knows if the situation will ever return to “normal” pre-pandemic conditions. It probably won’t.

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MM34: Housing in a Historical Setting

Inca Hernandez

Architects: Inca Hernández
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Area: 620 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: João Morgado

Mexico City is a historical setting with an enormous cultural and architectural heritage protected in its magical neighborhoods. Tacuba is one of them. Located northwest of downtown, this neighborhood has undergone social and urban transformations that have lasted to this day and where vestiges forged at different times can be found. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Tacuba became one of the wealthiest areas of the city with large country houses. Over time, and due to different political changes, they were abandoned and many collapsed. However, among these vestiges, the house called “Mar Mediterraneo 34” remained.

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Esquina Tonalá: Double Façade Apartment Building

Bloqe Arquitectura

Architects: Bloqe Arquitectura
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Year: 2019
Photography: Onnis Luque

The general concept for Esquina Tonalá comes from the pursuit of making an apartment building with two sides facing the street covered in two layers of skin, a double façade, to get the maximum use of the natural air circulation and sunlight. This double façade also protects the residences as a natural wrapping that produces natural shade for all the exterior spaces.

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Odena’s Main Square: Simplicity and Formal Clarity

SCOB

Architects: SCOB
Location: Ódena, Spain
Area: 5.100 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Adrià Goula

The remodeling of the old city center of Òdena focuses on a new structure to organize and define the public space under the criteria of simplicity and formal clarity. The project extended a uniform stone paving material throughout the whole affected area, in which vehicles and people would coexist, giving priority to the latter.

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Stgilat Aiguablava: A Mediterranean Case Study

Enric Ruiz Geli / Cloud 9

Architects: Enric Ruiz Geli / Cloud 9
Location: Begur, Spain
Year: 2019
Photography: Gregori Civera and Jordi Alcalà / Itot Produccions

The main goal of this project was not to build a villa but a case study house.
What is a case study house? R. Neutra, who designed a case study house in Los Angeles in the 1940s, said:

You’re all building with stone, when we should be building with prefabricated modules that can be easily manufactured and assembled in a week.

It was a revolution, cutting costs and providing a path to the middle class. That was R. Neutra’s approach. (There are roughly 200 case study houses in the Los Angeles area.)

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How Much Public Space is Needed

Elisa Silva

Excerpt from Pure Space by Elisa Silva. Published by Actar Publishers.

If creating public space in spontaneous settlements were embraced as an effective investment to increase social inclusion and better integrate Latin American cities, how much would have to be built? Quantifying this endeavor and defining a target scope would help optimize resource allocation and public policy. To begin with, public spaces are not as prevalent in Latin American cities as they are in other latitudes of the world. Because of their scarcity, the few that do exist are often heavily overused, and their deterioration exceeds maintenance budgets. Others are almost completely overlooked by people due to their lack of upkeep and poor integration with the surroundings. Urban growth in Latin American cities during the 20th century occurred at an accelerated pace, with little or no regard for planning. Public space was not considered essential and even deemed undesirable since unattended space risked being illegally occupied with informal housing. When compared to economically developable property, public space appeared to be an inefficient use of land.[1] The scarcity of public space means that people have few experiences or memories in them and therefore their relationship to parks and plazas is very tenuous. They are seldom perceived as important urban cultural elements.

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Step by Step: “Time flows, and so should the architect”

Kengo Kuma | PLANE—SITE

PLANE—SITE travelled to the Tokyo offices of Kengo Kuma & Associates to discuss the topics of time, space, and existence as they relate to Kuma’s work. He discusses the role of humility in architecture, and his desire to bring architecture and nature closer together. He also discusses Japan’s so-called ‘lost decade’ after the 1991 financial crash, which necessitated his studio’s move from Tokyo to the Japanese countryside. During these years, Kuma worked on smaller scale projects, learning about materials from local craftspeople — “a most fruitful period”, as he recalls in the video. Many of these techniques and ideas influenced his later, bigger projects.

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BUGA Fiber Pavilion: Glimpse of Future Construction

ICD | ITKE

Architects: ICD and ITKE
Location: Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany
Area: 400 m2
Year: 2019

Embedded in the wavelike landscape of the Bundesgartenschau grounds, the BUGA Fiber Pavilion offers visitors an astounding architectural experience and a glimpse of future construction. It builds on many years of biomimetic research in architecture at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD) and the Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) at the University of Stuttgart.

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R-Values Are Not Our Values: Thermal Design of Timber Buildings

Kiel Moe

Excerpt from Wood Urbanism by Daniel Ibañez, Jane Hutton and Kiel Moe. Published by Actar Publishers.

Among the many mutual relationships in the scales of timber dynamics articulated throughout this book, the thermal propensities of wood are perhaps the most immediately sensible to us. There are a number of physiological reciprocities between our bodies and massive timber buildings. Among them is the often colloquial, but quantifiable, association of “warmth” with wood. The thermal properties and behaviors specific to wood are not fully articulated in building science or in the wood industry, but they could impact how we come to characterize the thermodynamics, thermal potential, and ecologies of timber building.

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Washington Fruit & Produce Co. HQ

Graham Baba Architects

Architects: Graham Baba Architects
Location: Yakima, USA
Area: 1500 m2
Photography: Kevin Scott

Surrounded by the world’s most high-tech fruit packing warehouses, the 16,500-square-foot Washington Fruit & Produce Co. headquarters is conceived as an oasis amidst a sea of concrete and low-lying brush landscape. Tucked behind landforms and site walls, this courtyard-focused office complex provides a refuge from the noise and activity of the industrial processing yards nearby.

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Multi-Label Urban Density Classification

Alejandro Cantera

The study of urban density helps us to understand better the complex organism of a city, analyzing not only quantity aspects, but also the quantities of life and activity, sheltered in a determined urban grid. In this way, the urban density reports about the critical amount of people needed for the efficient and fluid development of urban functions, while at the same time affecting the mixture of land uses, the variety of typologies and the vitality of public space. The goal of the project is the creation of a predictive model of urban density classification, based on the analysis of orthophotos of any city in the world.

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Densification, Social Distance and the City

And The City | Prima Abdullah

Listen to the related podcast: Densification, Social Distance and the City by And the City.

At the time this article was written, most of the world was under a global quarantine, either self-imposed or mandated. It is hard to see how the future will be the same as before. Having the benefit of hindsight from past pandemics, we can characterize two outcomes to this current event. First, the social implication will be a permanent condition: the new normal, where we will have to rethink the shape of our society and its most slowly affected derivation, urban design. The second possible outcome might be no change, either because the pandemic is not significant enough, or the changes are already ongoing. In the second outcome, quarantine is merely a hindrance. We will look into two cases: the 1846 Broad Street cholera outbreak and the 1918 Spanish flu.

The paper will look into each pandemic and attempt to infer what outcome is most likely to happen for this current pandemic.

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Outpost: Hybrid Structure

Skylab Architecture

Architects: Skylab Architecture
Location: Hood River, USA
Area: 275 m2
Photography: Stephen Miller

Outpost is a phased, hybrid structure merging recreation, retail and work environments to foster and reinforce a sense of community in a developing section of Hood River. As part of the city’s new Waterfront Masterplan, Outpost will eventually become a 60,000-square-foot development – a neighborhood of buildings that will functionally connect the city with the Columbia River waterfront. The site, formerly home to an industrial wastewater treatment and processing facility, largely underutilized the waterfront but will now become a new paradigm for future development in the region.

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Assen Station: Gateway to the City

Powerhouse Company

Architects: Powerhouse Company and De Zwarte Hond
Location: Assen, The Netherlands
Area: 3.015 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Sebastian van Damme and Egbert de Boer

Assen Station has been completely transformed thanks to an extraordinary wooden structure. The new station is defined by a triangular wooden roof that appears to float above the buildings below. It connects the railway line and the city with a single urban gesture. The construction of a new car tunnel under the station square has allowed a traffic-calmed public space to be created around the station. The station was designed by Powerhouse Company and De Zwarte Hond on behalf of NS, ProRail and Assen municipality.

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Flight Patterns: Routes Connecting Cities across Africa

Urban Age / LSE cities

The map of African commercial aviation has been transformed beyond recognition since the turn of the millennium. From very few international flights within the continent, and routes beyond the continent restricted almost entirely to century-old paths of colonial influence to European metropoles, Africa has quickly become criss-crossed by intra-continental flights run by African airlines, and connected by a widening range of intercontinental routes served by African and other non-European airlines. Breaking from decades of strict regionalism, airlines now race with each other to open non-stop services from east Africa and a range of cities over the full spread of the continent. More airlines connect more cities across Africa, and across the oceans, than ever before.

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Towards a Healthy City by Foot

Felixx Landscape Architects & Planners

Walking has great potential. It may not be the fastest or, according to some, the most comfortable way to get around, but it is the only type of movement which doesn’t require a vehicle. By walking more, we limit the influence of our movements on the environment. As a result, creating room for walking frees up space in the city, which can be used to tackle diverse social and environmental challenges. Oddly enough, the pedestrian is often forgotten in the design of our public spaces. This research by design is developed in close collaboration with urban psychologist Sander van der Ham (STIPO). It provides insight into the potential benefits of walking and identifies the necessary design tasks in our built environment to realize those benefits.

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Nou Parc: Renaturation of Urban Areas

ON-A

“Renaturing cities and gaining quality space for citizens is no longer just an interesting idea, it is a necessity,” says Jordi Fernández, one of the two founding partners of ON-A Architecture. This smart office based in Barcelona has specialized in renaturation and bioconstruction, conceiving in its 15 years of experience different ways of adapting green spaces in urban contexts, such as the proposed redevelopment of the Llano Amarillo Park in Algeciras or the Taichung Gateway Park in Taiwan.

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Shrinking Cities. Concepts to Action

Philipp Oswalt

Excerpt from Open City by Almudena Ribot, Enrique Espinosa, Diego García-Setién, Begoña de Abajo and Gaizka Altuna. Published by Actar Publishers.

How can the unplanned process of shrinkage be qualified? Strategies for action to date have failed to formulate a satisfactory answer to this question.

If we agree with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu that social space translates into physical space, it must be said that social problems are reflected in the crisis of physical space in shrinking cities, and that without efforts to address this crisis, little of substance can be said about the transformation of cities. But that is not all. Not only are social constellations expressed in urban space —which can be read as a kind of mapping of them— but social problems are reflected in the conception of the models for action themselves (and their crises).

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Taz Neubau: Structural System Network with Minimum Materials

E2A

Architects: E2A
Location: Berlin, Germany
Area: 5.417 m2
Year: 2018
Photography: Rory Gardiner, Yasu Kojima and Rasmus Norlander

From its special corner location on Friedrichstraße, the new building for the taz newspaper mediates between the traditional Berlin block and the solitary buildings from the time of the IBA in 1984. The combination of corner and block was solved simply: along Friedrichstraße, the Berlin eave height was adopted, and the block was continued. A gentle setback in the façade creates a clearly accentuated entrance. The street, corner and courtyard thus become the urban leitmotiv and transform the potential building envelope from the current development plan into a simple and concise volume.

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