With a diverse and highly distinctive portfolio of projects, particularly notable for their innovative representations, the architecture office fala is marked by a bold, refined, and dynamic creative process. Established in 2013 by architects Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, and Ahmed Belkhodja, fala is headquartered in Porto, Portugal, and typically engages in projects across various scales, ranging from territories to birdhouses.
Unconstrained by the dogmas of established offices, new architectural practices can often challenge building norms and redefine living standards. The Young European Architecture Festival (YEAH!) is an event dedicated to highlighting these new and emerging practices and bringing their contributions to the built environment into focus. Many of these practices are challenging and redefining typologies of residential architecture. They are building upon ideas such as cooperative housing schemes, community-initiated developments, and circular economy. Others are exploring local identities and resources as a way to reinvigorate the profession while creating respectful and regionally relevant works of architecture.
This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights projects submitted by established firms. From a museum dedicated to Jewish history to a high-speed railway hub and a university student center, the following selection showcases a variety of concepts, design approaches, and programs developed by global architecture offices.
Featuring firms like KPF, Aedas, Fala Atelier, ADP Architecten, and Peter Pichler Architects, this week's selection of unbuilt projects explore architectural and urban interventions at different scales and at varying stages of their development. Whether conceptual works or ongoing, planned for execution, and even under construction, each project aims to offer an appropriate response to the spatial, functional, social, and environmental needs of its context.
Five emerging architecture studio profiles from Portugal, Spain, France, and the Czech Republic have been chosen by New Generations, a European platform that analyses the most innovative emerging practices at the European level, providing a new space for the exchange of knowledge and confrontation, theory, and production. Since 2013, New Generations has involved more than 300 practices in a diverse program of cultural activities, such as festivals, exhibitions, open calls, video-interviews, workshops, and experimental formats.
As architects rely heavily on imagery to convey abstract information to a broad audience, there is a recurrent conversation on the role of visualizations in architecture and how they impact the general perception of the built environment.
To avoid hyperrealistic renderings we have witnessed the emergence of other options for architectural representation which seduce the viewer, not for their overwhelming resemblance to reality but rather the opposite, its resemblance to everyday life's textures presented through unpretentious drawings inspired by collage, watercolor, and painting. Digital collage and other similar representation tools have gained more popularity when discussing how architecture can be communicated.
Horizontal City is one of two collective exhibitions (the other being Vertical City) at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. 24 architects were tasked by artistic directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee to "reconsider the status of the architectural interior" by referencing a photograph of a canonical interior from any time period.
Their challenge was in considering the forms and ways that their selection "might extrapolate out from the cropped photographic frame into a spatial and lifestyle construction across a larger, horizontal site" – in this case, a field of plinths, the size and positioning of which is a direct reference to the footprint of Mies van der Rohe's 1947 plan for the IIT Campus in Chicago.
Currently on display at the MoMA in New York is Zaha Hadid's concept painting for her seminal unbuilt project, The Peak in Hong Kong. The piece was made in 1991, on the edge of the digital revolution in architectural drawing fueled at its heart by the popularization of 3D CAD programs. The painting for The Peak arguably came at the end of the period of architectural drawing for its own sake, and the beginning of a period of scalable, scrollable renderings meant to show the real world. It only makes sense that this new software for image creation would usher in a new style of drawing with a function very different to the previous era: tool and process inherently constrain design by imposing a predetermined agenda for the user's interaction with them.
During this digital period, architects like Lebbeus Woods and Michael Graves, known for their mastery in the art of hand drawing, pushed back against the dominant narrative of hyperrealism in architectural drawing. However, according to Sam Jacob's latest article for Metropolis Magazine, we may be entering an age of "post-digital" representation. In the post-digital, architects return to the convention of drawing, but create new methodologies by reevaluating and appropriating the digital tools of the last few decades. Current techniques within this practice have leaned heavily towards the collage, but research into what post-digital drawing could mean continues in firms and universities.
The Chicago Architecture Biennial has announced the list of participants invited to contribute to the event’s second edition, which will be held from September 16 to January 7, 2018 in Chicago. More than 100 architecture firms and artists have been selected by 2017 artistic directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, founders of Los Angeles–based Johnston Marklee, to design exhibitions that will be displayed at the Chicago Cultural Center and throughout the city.
“Our goal for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial is to continue to build on the themes and ideas presented in the first edition,” explained Johnston and Lee. “We hope to examine, through the work of the chosen participants, the continuous engagement with questions of history and architecture as an evolutionary practice.”
“Re-Constructivist Architecture,” an exhibition now on show at the Ierimonti Gallery in New York, features the work of thirteen emerging architecture firms alongside the work of Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. The title of the exhibition is a play on words, referring to the De-Constructivist exhibition of 1988 at the Museum of Modern Art that destabilized a certain kind of relationship with design theory.
This reconstruction is primarily of language. The architects draw from archives—mental, digital or printed on paper—distant from the typical parametric and highly schematic rationales that characterized the last thirty years of design in architecture. Within the theoretical system that drives architectural composition, these archives inevitably become homages, references, and quotes.
