“It was a quarry and then it became more of a construction site. The process was not deciding shadow but letting the light in and letting the view come in”
“Designing is a matter of concentration. You go deep into what you want to do. It’s about intensive research, really. The concentration is warm and intimate and like the fire inside the earth – intense but not distorted. You can go to a place, really feel it in your heart. It’s actually a beautiful feeling.”
“You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work....But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: ‘This is beautiful.’ That is Architecture. Art enters in.”
“Here we will build a monument dedicated to nature and we will make it our lives’ purpose.”
“ From the outside, the building looks like a lamp. It absorbs the changing light of the sky, the haze of the lake, it reflects light and colour and gives an intimation of its inner life according to the angle of vision, the daylight and the weather.”
“One person opposite another, arranged in circles in sweeping, suspended arcs around soaring crystal pyramids.”
“Remember the impression of good architecture ... namely, that it expresses a thought. You would like to follow it with a gesture.”
“Our transformation of the Reichstag is rooted in four related issues: the Bundestag’s significance as a democratic forum, an understanding of history, a commitment to public accessibility and a vigorous environmental agenda.”
“architecture is an art….the same as painting is an art or sculpture is an art. Yet, architecture moves a step beyond painting and sculpture because it is more than using materials. Architecture responds to functional outputs and environmental factors. Yet, fundamentally, it is important for me to stress the art in architecture to bring harmony.”
“The form of this building was inspired by the vaults of Seville’s expansive cathedral – I wanted to create a ‘cathedral without walls’ that would be ‘democratic’ – and also by the handsome trees already in the square.”
“The centre is like a huge spaceship made of glass, steel and coloured tubing that landed unexpectedly in the heart of the Paris, and where it would very quickly set deep roots.”
“The one thing we knew about this age is it’s all about change, if there’s one constant, it’s change ... So we said that we’d make massive floors, which were the size of two football pitches with no vertical interruptions, structure on the outside, mechanical service on the outside, people’s movement on the outside and theoretically you can do anything you want on those floors.”
On a day trip to the city of Birmingham in England, intent on seeing the Bullring shopping centre and Future Systems' Seifridges building, I had discovered a large construction project underway in Centenary Square - the largest public square in the heart of Birmingham. Interestingly, this urban square hosts, or adjoins, numerous performance halls and cultural institutions of the city: The Repertory Theatre, Symphony Hall, International Convention Centre (ICC), Town Hall, Central Library, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Baskerville House (Civic Centre). Originally designed in the early 20th century, the city council envisioned this area as a grand civic scheme - an urban territory for grand buildings and significant institutions. Today, Birmingham has grown to the second largest British city outside the capital London, densifying the urban core and expanding its metropolitan limits. The growing city fabric and condension of the city's cultural institutions has created a lack of cohesion and clear identity on Centenary Square, creating a strip-mall of grand buildings with little connection to the surrounding city.
The library as viewed from Centenary Square / August 2011
Rendering of proposed design by Mecanoo
View towards the East of Centenary Square, Symphony Hall
When the Birmingham Central Library decided on relocating due to physical restraints, the original plan was to build a new library in the emerging Eastside district by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, focused on urban linkages and public activity. However, financial concerns and reservations about the location would sink the project. Years later, a new site would emerge on Centenary Square, between the Repertory Theatre and Baskerville House, as the new home for the library. Shrouded in banners proclaiming "Birmingham: Global City, Local Heart", the project is viewed by council leaders as the "the flagship for the regeneration of Birmingham", hoping to highlight the city's intellectual and cultural credentials and draw more visitors to the city. Nearing completion by 2013, the Library of Birmingham will tower over Centenary Square with capacity to accommodate more than three million visitors a year, making the structure Britain's largest public library and a clear sign of the continuing global renaissance in the construction of grand civic building. The architects of the project, Mecanoo, explains that their design, projecting a delicate glass/filigree skin inspired by the artisan tradition of the industrial city, will "transform the square into one with three distinct realms: monumental, cultural and entertainment."
You can checkout a flythrough video of the project design here.
Cultural Condensation: Centenary Square
The 2011 Serpentine Gallery`s Pavilion in Hyde Park is the 11th installment in the Gallery's annual summer series, seen as one of the world's most ambitious architectural programs of its kind, even with some concern, as it relies on established architects/designers as an invitation-only commission. The Serpentine's Pavilion, conceived in 2000 by Gallery Director Julia Peyton-Jones, is sited on the Gallery's lawn for three months and the immediacy of the commission - a maximum of six months from invitation to completion - provides a unique model worldwide. This years installation was designed by Pritzker Prize award-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, which will be the architect's first completed building in the UK and includes a specially created garden by the influential Dutch designer Piet Oudolf (High Line, Millennium Park, among others). Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion will operate as a public space and as a venue for Park Nights, the Gallery's program of public talks and events. Park Nights will culminate in the annual Serpentine Gallery Marathon in October.
The concept of this year's pavilion is the Hortus Conclusus, a Latin term literally meaning 'enclosed garden', or as Zumthor puts it, "a contemplative room, a garden within a garden". The building's design acts as a stage, a backdrop for the interior garden of flowers and light. Through blackness and shadow one enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise, traffic and smells of London.
With this Pavilion, as with previous structures such as the famous Thermal Baths (Vals, Switzerland) or the Bruder Klaus Chapel (Mechernich, Germany), Zumthor has emphasised the role the senses and emotions play in the architectural experience, from the precise yet simple composition and presence of the materials, to the handling of scale and the effect of light, creating contemplative spaces that evoke a spiritual dimension of our physical environment. The construction is made of a lightweight timber frame wrapped with scrim and coated with Idenden. Exterior and interior walls have staggered doorways that offer multiple paths for visitors to follow, gently guiding them to a central inner garden, the heart and focus of the intervention. The covered walkways and seating surrounding this central space create a serene, contemplative environment from which visitors look onto the richly planted sunlit garden with a patch of sky gloriously framed like a giant oil painting above your head.
In creating the central garden, Piet Oudolf emphasized the natural architecture of plants, using expressive drifts of grasses and herbaceous perennials to create gardens that evolve in form throughout the lives of the plants. These are chosen for their structure, form, texture and color, showcasing many different varieties in his compositions. He has pioneered an approach to gardening that embraces the full life-cycle of plants. He states, "My work aims to bring nature back into human surroundings and this pavilion provides the opportunity for people to reflect and relax in a contemplative garden away from the busy metropolis".
“A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. It is close to us. There we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.”
Sculpture Gallery at the V&A Museum
When traveling, there is always a place or event that far exceeds expectations and makes a trip far more noteworthy. Overshadowed by so many other museums and attractions in the culturally-packed city, V&A is that place. The Victoria and Albert Museum (named after Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, abbreviated as the V&A), located in the London borough of Kensington, is said to be the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects in 145 galleries. Founded in 1852, its collection spans 5,000 years of design, from the cultures of Europe, North America, Asia and North Africa. The holdings of ceramics, glass, textiles, costumes, silver, ironwork, jewellery, furniture, medieval objects, sculpture, prints and printmaking, drawings and photographs are among the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
Architecture Gallery
The Architecture gallery in the V&A Museum is especially important (well, maybe just to me) because it is the UK's only permanent Architecture gallery, including a major partnership with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The gallery is divided on three principles: moments of conception, idea of function and use, and exploration into style and aesthetics. What makes this gallery so unique to me is the focus on process and 'conception' in architecture, which display those early stages of development that are so crucial and unique in the design practice. The gallery includes process sketches and drawings accessed through pullout drawers, plus accompanied study models, along with their finalized counterparts, to numerous significant projects in the last few centuries. You can see a video of the Curator of Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Abraham Thomas, discuss the Architecture gallery here.
The partnership with RIBA allows the gallery to produce temporary exhibits that deal with contemporary culture and ideas in London and throughout the world, along with lectures and conversations with current leading scholars and designers. What caught my eye was a symposium held at the V&A Museum in 2009, entitled "Sustaining Identity: Symposium II", which focused on the resistance to the icon and incorporation of local identity in architectural design. A review of the symposium was published in the V&A Online Journal (Issue no.3, spring 2011), entitled "Not quite Vegemite: An architectural resistance to the icon" by Ian Tocher.
“Is there an architecture of resistance that stands in the face of commercial globalisation: that rejects the iconic image; that celebrates the spirit of individual place?”
The event was centered around what cultural organization UNESCO coined as ‘whole life sustainability', or architecture to ‘incorporate local identity into the design process'. UNESCO argues that the idea of sustainable architecture should be widened to include the way a building relates to its social, cultural and geographic situation. Major architects from around the world - the USA, Chile, South Africa, Australia, Finland, the UK, Spain, India - provided case studies of architecture that related to their local contexts. The key-note speaker, Finish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, criticized much of today’s architecture as ‘mere representation' with no substance to relate to the local context.
Courtyard at the V&A Museum
This symposium seems to have addressed an important issue in contemporary architecture, but a clear definition of what exactly 'sustaining identities' means in architectural practice is still far from clear. Tocher states, "It was noticeable that while many speakers criticised the proliferation of computer-designed, so-called ‘iconic’ buildings throughout the world, plonked down in our cities without any thought to their context, no-one seemed prepared to give any specific examples. Sean Godsell made a useful point - anything has got the potential to become iconic – he gave the example of the Australian savoury spread, Vegemite – but, he argued, architects should not deliberately set out to create an icon, that will only lead to stupid buildings".
“Today’s fashionable architecture seeks to seduce our eye but it rarely contributes to the integrity and meaning of its setting”
The 500 acre Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford (July 2011)
In 2005, the International Olympic Committee decided that London will serve as the host city for the Games of the XXX Olympiad, the Summer Olympic Games of 2012, defeating proposals from Moscow, New York City, Madrid and Paris after four rounds of voting. The successful bid, which focused on sustainability and reuse, was headed by former Olympic champion Sebastian Coe. This will make London the first city to hold the modern Olympic Games three times, having hosted the games previously in 1908 and 1948. The Olympic win prompted a redevelopment of many of the areas of London in which the games are to be held (the vast majority of events will be held in a regenerated area in East London), while the budgetary considerations have generated some criticism.
The Olympic Velodrome
The 2012 Olympic Games will use a mixture of new venues, existing and historic facilities, and temporary facilities, some of them in well-known locations such as Hyde Park and Horse Guards Parade. In the wake of the problems that plagued the Millennium Dome, the organisers' intention is that there will be no problems after the Games and instead that a "2012 legacy" will be delivered. Some of the new facilities will be reused in their Olympic form, while others, including the 80,000 seat main stadium, will be reduced in size or relocated elsewhere in the UK. The plans are part of the regeneration of Stratford in east London which will be the site of the Olympic Park, and of the neighbouring Lower Lea Valley.
Boundary of the Olympic Zone
The Olympic Zone will encompass all of the facilities within the 500 acre Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. This park is being developed on existing waste and industrial land and will be an estimated seven minutes by the new Olympic Javelin train from central London. This new development in Eastern London has required the compulsory purchase of some business properties, which are being demolished to make way for Olympic venues and infrastructure improvements. This has caused some controversy, with some of the affected proprietors claiming that the compensation offered is inadequate. In addition, concerns about the development's potential impact on the future of the century-old Manor Garden Allotments have inspired a community campaign, and the demolition of the Clays Lane housing estate was opposed by tenants, as is that of Carpenters Estate.
The Olympic Stadium
As many are unaware, the costs of hosting the Games are separate from those for building the venues and infrastructure, and redeveloping the land for the Olympic Park. While the Games are privately funded, the venues and Park costs are met largely by public money. In Spring of 2007, the government announced to thea budget of £5.3 billion ($8.7 billion) to cover building the venues and infrastructure for the Games. On top of this, various other costs including an overall additional contingency fund of £2.7 billion, security and policing costs of £600 million, VAT of £800 million and elite sport and Paralympic funding of nearly £400 million. According to these figures, the total for the Games and the regeneration of the East London area, is £9.345 billion ($15.3 billion). The costs for staging the Games are funded from the private sector by a combination of sponsorship, merchandising, ticketing and broadcast rights. This budget is raised and managed by the London 2012 Organising Committee. According to Games organisers.
Olympic marketing in full effect
With 800 hot springs, 10,000 waterfalls, 15 active volcanos, and 4500 square miles of glaciers, Iceland offers an incredibly active and vast landscape that can not be ignored. Throughout history, the country's isolation as an island nation has helped deter major European influences for years, retaining local building practices and ideas, confirming the innate Scandinavian feeling for nature and its materials.
Icelandic Influence: The Basalt Rock Cliffs and Black Sand Beaches
Harpa Theatre and Conference Center (Reykjavik, Iceland): Facade Influenced by Iceland's Northern Sunlight and Rock Cliff Formations
Church of Stykkisholmskirkja (Stykkishólmur, Iceland)
Church of Askirkja (Reykjavik, Iceland)
Rural Church (Snæfellsnes Peninsula)
Farmhouse (Snæfellsnes Peninsula)
Modular Eco-Lodges (Stykkishólmur, Iceland): Use of Easily Available Materials of Construction Combined with the Ease and Simplicity of Design.
