Located in the area between Sachsendamm and Berlin Südkreuz S-Bahn train station in Schöneberg, a new mixed-use complex, EDGE Suedkreuz Berlin, was completed last month by Berlin-based architect Sergei Tchoban and his firm Tchoban Voss Architekten with additional offices in Hamburg and Dresden. The complex comprises two freestanding structures—a larger Carré Building and a smaller Solitaire Building. Together they occupy their own block. The pair is now the largest hybrid-timber complex of buildings in Germany and one of the largest in Europe.

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Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946, Lodz, Poland) studied architecture at Cooper Union in New York, graduating in 1970, and received his post-graduate degree from Essex University in England in 1972. While pursuing a teaching career he won the 1989 international competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin before ever realizing a single building. He then moved his family there to establish a practice with his wife Nina and devoted the next decade to the completion of the museum that opened in 2001. The project led to a series of other museum commissions that explored such notions as memory and history in architecture.

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Architect Cino Zucchi (b. 1955) grew up and practices in Milan, Italy. He was trained at MIT in Cambridge and the Politecnico di Milano, but claims to be largely self-taught, although influenced by such of his countrymen as Aldo Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri. He is internationally known for diverse projects across Europe. Many are both abstracted and contextual residential complexes in Italy, particularly in Milan, Bologna, Parma, Ravenna, and, most notably, in Venice. Zucchi’s D residential building in Giudecca, attracted international attention and praise when it was completed in 2003. I met Cino Zucchi last year during the Venice Architecture Biennale; that meeting led to an extensive interview that we recently engaged in over Zoom between New York and the architect’s sunlight and books-filled Milan studio.

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Sergei Tchoban (b. 1962, Saint Petersburg, Russia) graduated from the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture at the Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1986. He started his practicing career in Russia but left for Germany in 1991, becoming a managing partner of nps tchoban voss in Berlin in 1995. Since 2006, he also heads SPEECH, one of the leading architectural offices in Moscow. Apart from building his successful career of a practicing architect, he is a collector of architectural drawings, publisher, and museum owner.

What follows this short introduction is my unusually personal interview with a Lebanese-American architect and artist Nishan Kazazian. His work is inspired by numerous sources that come from many directions such as Kintsugi, the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together, primary color geometric abstractions evocative of Russian Constructivism, as well as paintings by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. Yet, a stronger inspiration comes from his memories of home and family history. Layering and superimposition of cultures and languages were constantly present in his life since childhood and remain guiding forces to Kazazian, who is both a licensed architect and a professional artist.

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Belmont (Monty) Freeman (b. 1951) founded his New York-based, currently eight-person practice, Belmont Freeman Architects in 1986. Its active projects are half institutional and half residential, with a special focus on adaptive reuse, predominantly in New York and nearby states. Among the firm’s most exemplary projects are the LGBT Carriage House on the University of Pennsylvania campus, a series of restorations at the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, renovations at the Yale Club in Manhattan, and the renovation of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, designed by Kevin Roche. Current projects include an expansive but minimalist residential compound on Martha’s Vineyard, branch library renovations in New York City, and redevelopment of a former meatpacking building into a new Innovation Hub for Columbia University’s Business School.

American architect Brian Mac grew up near Detroit. He graduated from the Architecture School at the University of Detroit in 1988 and for the next five years worked for a preservationist firm, Quinn Evans Architects in Ann Arbor. There he learned to love historic architectural detailing, and, while working at the firm, in 1992, became a licensed architect. Then followed a short period of disillusion with the profession and moving to Ohio to work in a residential treatment center for adolescent felony offenders.

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Examining the work of Tokyo architect Toyo Ito (b. 1941) – particularly his now seminal Sendai Mediatheque (1995-2001), Serpentine Gallery (London, 2002, with Cecil Balmond), TOD's Omotesando Building (Tokyo, 2004), Tama Art University Library (Tokyo, 2007), and National Taichung Theater (2009-16) – will immediately become apparent these buildings’ structural innovations and spatial, non-hierarchical organizations. Although these structures all seem to be quite diverse, there is one unifying theme – the architect’s consistent commitment to erasing fixed boundaries between inside and outside and relaxing spatial divisions between various programs within. There is continuity in how these buildings are explored. They are conceived as systems rather than objects and they never really end; one could imagine their formations and patterns to continue to evolve and expand pretty much endlessly.

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Vladimir Belogolovsky talks with Mexican-American architect Francisco Gonzalez-Pulido on his exhibition 30 Projects/30 Years/30 Stories now on view at the Museo Metropolitano in Monterrey, Mexico.30 Projects/30 Years/30 Stories, a large retrospective on the work of Mexican-American architect Francisco Gonzalez Pulido, was opened on June 18 at the Museo Metropolitano in Monterrey, Mexico. The exhibition will remain on view until September 21.

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Swiss architect Mario Botta is known for his geometrically imposing, spatially captivating structures that are invariably dressed in zebra-like horizontal stripes in either black and white or red and white combinations. These both traditional and strikingly modern villas, chapels, wineries, schools, libraries, museums, company headquarters, banks, and residential blocks are scattered throughout towns and mountainous villages in the architect’s native Ticino region in southern Switzerland, extend all over Europe and can be encountered in places as far away as China, India, South Korea, Japan, and the USA.

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Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks with Antoine Predock about the soon-to-be-built Bahías, a community of 13 houses in Costa Rica, inspired by a vision of manmade foliage.

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Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks with American architect Rick Joy about his early inclinations towards architecture, what kind of architecture he likes to visit, and about designing his buildings as instruments. 

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Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks with Russian architect Totan Kuzembaev about flexibility in buildings, the freedom in design, and that even after leading a successful practice for almost twenty years, he still keeps searching for how to make architecture.

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Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks with Christoph Hesse over Skype between New York and his office in Korbach, Germany to discuss his pioneering projects and why working in the countryside is relevant.

Videos

Every city has its odd building. Paris has Centre Pompidou. London –Lloyd’s of London. New York –the Guggenheim. Naturally, Chicago, the architectural capital of the world, has one too. Here it is –James R. Thompson Center, named so in honor of four-term Illinois Republican Governor (1977-91) who was brave enough to get it built in 1985. Home to offices of the Illinois state government the building is unlike anything you have ever seen before.

Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks with Chinese architect LI Xinggang of Beijing-based office Atelier Li Xinggang about the particularities of working within a design institute, the architect’s philosophy referred to as “poetic scenery and integrated geometry,” and his role in the design of the Bird’s Nest and why he thinks it is the most important piece of contemporary architecture in China.;

Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks with architects Yingfan Zhang and Xiaojun Bu, co-founders of Atelier Alter, about architecture in motion, their faith in tabula rasa, and the widespread rapid urbanization process in China.

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Even though Eric Owen Moss’ buildings are easy to spot it is hard to categorize them. They constitute a clash of forms and surfaces that collide, break, contort, superimpose onto themselves, bend, split, melt, and explode seemingly out of control –all to avoid being subscribed to anything that may even remotely evoke a design methodology of any kind.

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