London: The Latest Architecture and News

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This conference will examine the unique challenges facing architects and designers when creating environments and technology for people with autism.

Key speakers will outline recommendations and concepts that show good practice in the design of buildings and technology. They will also give insights into understanding sensory issues for people with autism and how to take these into account when designing environments.

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Concrete polarizes opinion. Used almost universally in modern construction today, it is a material capable of provoking intense loathing as well as stirring passions. Its development can be traced as far back as Roman times. However, it was in the twentieth century that its full capabilities became realised. Over the past 100 years architects and engineers have seized upon the possibilities of concrete enthusiastically. Its widespread use in almost all building types we experience has given it a significance and meaning that has - for better or worse - leapt beyond buildings into politics, film, literature and art.

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Videos

The violent insertion of Daniel Libeskind’s Spiral into the Victorian neighborhood of South Kensington renders a cataclysmic disruption into a landscape of order and propriety. It envisions a rupture in the fabric of space and time, aggressively anachronistic from the building it adjoins, unapologetically appealing not to cultured humanism but to the mathematical logic of complexity and chaos. What is now textbook "Libeskind" was in 1996 a shocking non-starter for the London establishment, an unacceptable risk for a city perpetually torn between its agitated cosmopolitan energies and its quintessential impulse toward nostalgia and restraint. Nearly twenty years after the Spiral was selected as the winner of a distinguished international competition, this controversial extension proposal for the Victoria and Albert Museum remains unbuilt.

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Videos

Steven Holl Architects (SHA) has broken ground on London's newest Maggie's Centre across from the large courtyard of St. Bartholomew’s (Barts) Hospital, the city's oldest hospital. The structure, a branching concrete frame lined with perforated bamboo and matte white glass, was inspired by its historic site, which also neighbors the St. Bartholomew the Great Church. It was envisioned as a "vessel within a vessel within a vessel" embellished with colored glass fragments that recall "neume notation" of Medieval music in the 13th century.

"The word neume originates from the Greek pnevma, which means 'vital force.' It suggests a 'breath of life' that fills oneself with inspiration like a stream of air, the blowing of the wind. The outer glass layer is organized in horizontal bands like a musical staff while the concrete structure branches like the hand," describes SHA.

A video of Steven Holl detailing the center's design, after the break.

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EAA- Emre Arolat Architects, a leading international architectural practice based in İstanbul and London, presents an exhibition exploring the urban histories of both cities. Through a two way, dual city approach the practice will reveal “situations” that unite and differentiate these two great cities at the east and west ends of Europe in their development. The exhibition covers a timeline beginning with the mid 19th century that shows key events or turning-points in the course of their stories respectively. The exhibition is curated by EAA - Emre Arolat Architects, in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Murat Güvenç from Istanbul City University and London-based Urban Planning & Development Consultant Ömer Çavuşoğlu.

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Starting June 10, the RIBA will present The Brutalist Playground - an exhibition that is part sculpture, part architectural installation, which invites people of all ages to come and play, the Brutalist way. Occupying the entire Architecture Gallery, the immersive landscape is a new commission by Turner Prize nominated design and architecture collective Assemble and artist Simon Terrill. It explores the abstract concrete playgrounds that were designed as part of Brutalist housing estates in the mid-twentieth century, but which no longer exist. They became playgrounds unsuitable for play.

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As competition in the UK becomes tighter, architects are keen to find work overseas, often in such places where the prevailing human rights record has been a growing cause of concern and debate for some time.

Is the question of ethics in architecture a matter where business must be led by pragmatics of the head, rather than emotions of the heart? Or is compromise a defeat?