Architect Kris Provoost, who lives and works in Shanghai, has captured Atelier Deshaus' new Shanghai Modern Art Museum through a series of photographs, displaying both the details of the building as well as its context on the Shanghai riverfront. The Shanghai Modern Art Museum is an adaptive re-use project on the old Laobaidu coal bunker, its industrial exterior kept and re-interpreted into a contemporary architectural project. Provoost captured the beautiful detailing of the project, as well as how it transforms during the cherry blossom season.
In celebration of its visitors, the Fondation Louis Vuitton is organising a photography contest on the theme of its architecture, designed by Frank Gehry. The contest is open to all, amateurs and professionals alike. A jury of representatives of the Fondation, led by Frank Gehry, will come together at the end of the contest to choose from 5 to 10 photographs.
When Spanish architect Rafael Moneo won the Pritzker Prize in 1996, the jury identified his ability to see buildings as lasting built entities—their lives extending beyond architectural drawings—as integral to his success. The South Souks, Moneo’s 2009 project in Beirut, Lebanon, indeed responds to a long history and anticipates a lasting future. After the city’s historic souq (outdoor marketplace) was destroyed during the Lebanese Civil War, developer Solidere began rebuilding the commercial area in 1991. As part of the project, Moneo designed an arcaded shopping district that follows the ancient Hellenistic grid and retains original street names.
Have you ever thought a building looked suspiciously similar to a futuristic tank? Or, perhaps a gothic spire was eerily reminiscent of a matchstick? You’re not alone. Rich McCor, aka paperboy, has been traveling the world since 2015 filling his Instagram account with whimsical photographs of black paper cut-outs that transform often serious works of architecture into playful cartoon-like images.
Taking Christoph Niemann’s surreal account abstractsunday as a starting point, McCor was inspired to disrupt the norms of architecture and embellish the everyday. Though the account originally began while McCor was exploring the UK “it's taken me way beyond London to corners of the world I never thought I'd see,” he says. It’s easy to see why his humorous images of golf ball domes, beach-side creatures, and a pyramid-turned-magic trick have garnered McCor over 350k followers.
The International Workshop RCR is born of a way of understanding Architecture and Landscape from a humanistic spirit. The coexistence in a space and time of different creative disciplines creates synergies for mutual enrichment between the parties.
There's an old, weary tune that people sing to caution against being an architect: the long years of academic training, the studio work that takes away from sleep, and the small job market in which too many people are vying for the same positions. When you finally get going, the work is trying as well. Many spend months or even years working on the computer and doing models before seeing any of the designs become concrete. If you're talking about the grind, architects know this well enough from their training, and this time of ceaseless endeavor in the workplace only adds to that despair.
Which is why more and more architects are branching out. Better hours, more interesting opportunities, and a chance to do more than just build models. Furthermore, the skills you learn as an architect, such as being sensitive to space, and being able to grasp the cultural and societal demands of a place, can be put to use in rather interesting ways. Here, 3 editors at ArchDaily talk about being an architect, why they stopped designing buildings, and what they do in their work now.
Architectural photographer Marc Goodwin captures the unique workspaces of architects around the world. So far, Goodwin’s photography has helped us imagine what office life might be like as an architect in London, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, the Nordic countries, and now, Barcelona. Read on to see the spaces where architects from Ricardo Bofill to Fermin Vazquez design solutions that impact our world.
In this fast-paced era a lot of little details are missed in a matter of seconds. Just like architecture that we see everyday and everywhere, the stunning beauty of it all are tend to be overlooked.
From Greek architect and photographer, Yiorgis Yerolymbos comes a book which captures the construction process of Renzo Piano’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in Athens, Greece. Yerolymbos carefully documented every moment where the superfluous Olympic parking lot became a cultural center and sloping park with waterfront views. For almost a decade, and from every angle, the photographer watched the site transform. Birds-eye imagery proved to be some of the most captivating. As photographs, they manage to possess the characteristics of an architectural drawing.
Queens, NY is one of the most diverse places in the world, so it should be no surprise that it’s residences reflect that diversity. From the Architectural League of New York comes Rafael Herrin-Ferri’s exhibition “All the Queens Houses.” An architect and artist, Herrin-Ferri compiled 273 photographs of homes in Queens. The ever growing photographic survey conveys themes of identity, differentiation, and adaptation.
French photographer Laurent Kronental’s latest photo series, “Les Yeux des Tours” views of Paris, are framed by the quirky windows of the Tours Aillaud, and by the subtle differences in which the spaces around them are inhabited. Kronental considers the towers as some of the most spectacular of the Grands Ensembles built in the post-war economic boom in France. For him, photographing these buildings was a form of nostalgia, a way of satisfying a deep sense of childhood wonder and curiosity that fostered in him as a young boy perceiving them from the nearby business and shopping center "La Défense," questioning the lives of the people who live there.
As a trailblazer of Brazilian Modernism, Oscar Niemeyer is celebrated for his bold, sinuous forms, and his use of the “the liberated, sensual curve.” Paul Goldberger described it best when he wrote that “Niemeyer didn’t compromise modernism’s utopian ideals, but when filtered through his sensibility, the stern, unforgiving rigor of so much European modernism became as smooth as Brazilian jazz.”
When Georgio Mondadori, chairman of the Italian publishing house Mondadori, commissioned Niemeyer to design the company’s new headquarters in 1968, he wanted the building to look like the Itamaraty Palace (also known as Palace of the Arches) in Brasília. Niemeyer agreed, but given his playful spirit, he deliberately deviated from the earlier design and proceeded to build what he would later identify as his favorite of the projects he completed in Europe. Read on to see a striking set of sixteen photographs of the Mondadori building by Milan-based photographer and visual artist Karina Castro, who was commissioned by Mondadori to capture their headquarters over 40 years after the building's completion.
The complications of war and violence demanded a bold piece of architecture to provoke the public's understanding of the impact it had on Germany. Daniel Libeskind chooses to engage with such events in his extension to Dresden's Military History Museum, by crashing a huge steel and concrete structure through the neoclassical facade, tearing apart the symmetry of the original building. Photographer Alexandra Timpau has captured the sharp edges and harsh angles of the museum's extension that convey the pain and the stark reality of war Libeskind and the museum refer to.
Deeply rooted in the phenomenological ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Steven Holl’s architectural philosophy is centered on human experience, materiality, and a thorough engagement with the site or context. But more than his experiments with space and material, he is best known for his mastery over what is perhaps his favorite material, or medium: natural light.
His design for the Visual Arts Building at the University of Iowa, seen here through the lens of photographer Aaron Dougherty, is one of his projects that best explores these concerns. Clad in weathering zinc and stainless steel, the four-story building houses studios, teaching spaces, galleries and faculty offices for all visual arts departments—from Ceramics, Jewelry Design and Sculpture, to Printmaking, Painting, Video Art, and 3D Design.
What do a lot of recent architecture college grads have in common besides their degree? Student loans and disillusionment (see point 1 in Megan Fowler’s 11 Things You Learn at Your First “Real” Architecture Job to understand what we mean by "disillusionment"). But with the emergence of the digital age and “side-hustle economy,” millennials are learning how to monetize their passions, and now 1 in 4 Americans are making money digitally. Side-hustling has become so popular that there is even a school for it. The difference between a side-hustle and a second job is that side-hustles aren’t just about giving yourself a raise. Your side-hustle is something you truly love to do, and would probably do anyway, but now you get to share it with the world and make a little extra cash in the process. So what side-hustle is right for you? Here is a list of side-hustles which suit the skillset of architects and designers.
The following photo set by Fernando Guerra focuses on Porto's Subway, a project completed in 1996 and projected by the important Portuguese Architect Álvaro Siza Vieira.
Designing a subway station in Porto is about influencing the daily lives of thousands of people, where they daily circulate, establishing flows and routes, in a urbanistic and architectural intervention with large-scale dimensions. Although it demands an extremely functional and austere design, it is possible to see the gestures of the architect through the details and surprises.
We look for materials which are as intelligent, versatile and complex as natural phenomena, in other words materials which don't just appeal to the eyes of the astounded art critic, but are also really efficient and appeal to all our senses. – Jacques Herzog
Like several other works of architecture by Herzog & de Meuron the Forum Building, known since the 2012 relocation of Barcelona's Museu de les Ciències Naturals as the Museu Blau, is remarkable for its sensitive use of materials. A triangular mass of gray-blue concrete punctured and split in places to reveal the contrasting use of reflective planes, the building is a hard one to ignore, especially for an architectural photographer.