From a historical perspective, visiting a significant work of architecture only amounts to a fractional part of what it takes to understand its importance. Context is crucial; every project responds to the society around it as much as it does the site that it inhabits, and it represents a synthesis of precedents and a point of inspiration for works that follow. As recently featured in Metropolis Magazine, these dynamics take center stage in a new exhibition staged in Norman Foster’s seminal Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a contemporary landmark built in 1978 on the campus of the University in East Anglia in Norwich, England. Entitled Superstructures: The New Architecture: 1960–1990, the exhibit explores the central trends in post-war 20th-century building design, highlighting the historical context of the Sainsbury Center itself on the occasion of the museum building’s 40th anniversary.
Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins—visual artists, conceptual writers, self-taught architects—believed that, through a radical recalibration of the built environment, humans could solve the ultimate design flaw: death. (Your move, Norman Foster.)
Arakawa and Gins completed five projects in their lifetimes—three in Japan, two in America—and to call them unconventional is a gross understatement. There’s an acid trip of a park; an eye-poppingly colorful, plucked-from-Pixar apartment building; and doorless lofts with bumpy, uneven flooring. Rather than whimsy or quirkiness, their ethos—dubbed Reversible Destiny—aimed to seriously promote longevity by activating and stimulating the body and mind.
What can’t be done on the dance floor? Not much, said the 1960s Radical Design collective Gruppo 9999, which argued that discos should be “a home for everything, from rock music, to theater, to visual arts.” Other artists and designers—including New York bad-boy painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, architect Peter Cook of Archigram, and Manchester’s “cathedral of rave” creator Ben Kelly—saw the dance floor as a more subversive setting: one where boundaries could be blurred and thresholds crossed, where partying and politics could be woven together in the dark to channel a cultural revolution. Night Fever at the Vitra Design Museum stitches together this conception of the nightclub as a social Gesamtkunstwerk.
Architecture, in its realized form, is neither the vision or the labor of a singular person. It is a practice which is inherently group and firm-oriented in its processes. But architecture as we know it is only celebrated after it is completed, and is very rarely celebrated for how it gets made. Few awards recognize the vast network of people that enables those at the very top of the field to put their name to completed works.
Metropolis Magazine has released a curated list of 19 new books to read this spring, with topics ranging from the evolution of social housing to Stanley Kubrick's unfilmed masterpiece to a fascinating tome on the architecture of Zionism. Not simply volumes detailing well-tread histories, these chosen titles explore every niche category through the lens of architecture. Ever wondered how Buckminster Fuller inspired six former gang members to construct his geodesic dome? Or what metro stations in North Korea look like?
Centro SCOP in Mexico City was shuttered after a series of devastating earthquakes. A new exhibition proposes rehousing its historically significant murals. Image Courtesy of Pablo López Luz/ Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura
It’s a slate-gray day in Mexico City’s Colonia Narvarte neighborhood and mounting gusts signal imminent rain. Centro SCOP, a sprawling bureaucratic complex, rises sharply against this bleak backdrop. The building is a masterful, if not intimidating, example of Mexican Modernism, an H-shaped assemblage of muscular concrete volumes designed by architect Carlos Lazo, covered in an acre-and-a-half of vibrant mosaic murals.
At its peak, the building accommodated more than 3,000 workers for the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (SCT). Today, save a security guard in its gatehouse, it is empty.
Not many architects will come across the challenge of building in outer space, but who knows what the future will hold... asteroid mining and space photobioreactors? In a recent article, Metropolis Magazine looks into the design of the International Space Station, examining how our conventional rules of architecture become obsolete in zero gravity. Walls, ceilings, and floors can be interchangeable, and "form follows function" is taken to the extreme.
2018 marks 20 years since construction first began on the International Space Station. The satellite is made up of 34 separate pieces, each of which was either delivered by space shuttle or self-propelled into space. With absolutely no room for error, the 13-year construction of the space station was perhaps one of the big success stories of the millennium, seeing 230 astronauts, cosmonauts and space-tourists visit over the past two decades.
The Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has developed data-driven space-planning models for workplaces that can be changed or adapted in real time. The team, led by architect Uli Blum and Arjun Kaicker, applies their research directly to ZHA projects, including the Sberbank Technopark at the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, Moscow, Russia (seen here), and the Galaxy SOHO Beijing, which was built in 2012. Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
In a recent video published byMetropolis Magazine, Ed Gaskin, a senior associate at Zaha Hadid Architects, takes us on a comprehensive tour of ZHA's 520 West 28th Street, the late architect's only project in New York City. The video describes the project's interesting relation to the adjacent High Line, as well as taking us through the lobby, courtyard and inside the residential units of the building.
The sun is setting fast over a half-frozen hill about five miles west of Oslo. Named Kikkut after a now-demolished villa, the site neighbors Ekely, the old estate of Edvard Munch (itself now half razed), and save for some graffiti-covered detritus and an early crop of spring wildflowers, its peak is totally barren. Squinting northward to Munch’s Winter Atelier some 500 feet in the distance, it’s hard to believe this is the proposed site for A House to Die In: one of the most controversial building proposals in recent Norwegian history.
The brainchild of Norway’s enfant terrible artist Bjarne Melgaard, the proposal for “A House to Die In” is a luminescent, UFO-like living sculpture that doubles as a studio and home for Melgaard and his parents. With financial backing from two of the most powerful property developers in the country, the Selvaags and Sealbay A/S—longterm friends of the artist who also supplied the plot of land on the outskirts of the city—the Oslo-based Melgaard approached local Norwegian firm Snøhetta in 2011 with his idea for a combined artwork, studio—and final resting place.
Spanish architect Anna Puigjaner has revealed how she is applying her “Kitchenless” housing typology within her own projects in a recent interview with Metropolis Magazine as one of their 2018 Game Changers. After receiving funding from the Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize for her controversial proposition in 2016 (after which ArchDaily published an interview with her), Puigjaner talks about the time she spent traveling the world and visiting the many different cultures that share her idea of communal cooking, adding that millennials are more inclined to co-habit or share resources.
The kitchen is the most provocative part of the house. It has been used as a political tool for a long time, to the point that nowadays we can’t accept living without a kitchen.
As a lifelong Chicagoan, Carol Ross Barney has seen the Chicago River transition from an effluent-filled cargo highway to a vibrant recreational spot, one where her grandsons go fishing. “They can throw their line in and pull out two- to three-inch fish immediately,” she says. It has even become a habitat for otters. As for people, the river has become an alternative commuting path: Some kayak to work. In many ways, these historically polluted stretches of Chicago now form a corridor offering a rich range of experiences and visitors. This dramatic reversal is thanks in no small part to the Chicago Riverwalk, which might be Ross Barney’s career-defining project. “The attitude of the people toward the river is really changing, and I think that’s the biggest story,” she says.
In a recent interview with Metropolis Magazine, Kenneth Frampton answered questions about his existing architectural influence and his opinion as it relates to the direction of architectural theory and criticism. Frampton has long been a prominent voice in the world of architectural theory and writing. He has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) since 1972, all the while publishing a large collection of critical essays and books on the topic of 20th-century architecture—the most notable of those being his 1983 essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.”
Even today, Frampton's evaluation of critical regionalism is still widely appreciated. In the interview, Frampton admits that he now sees the influence of critical regionalism primarily outside of "the Anglo-American world," but he believes that the implied importance of a "direct democracy" is what he sees as most beneficial.
This winter, France experienced some of the heaviest rains it has seen in 50 years. In Paris, the Seine flooded its banks, submerging parks, streets, and disrupting metro service. The deluge also claimed an architectural curiosity. On February 8th the Louise-Catherine, a concrete barge renovated by Le Corbusier, slipped below the murky waters of the Seine and came to rest on the bottom of the river by Quai D’Austerlitz on the east side of Paris.
As the floodwaters receded, the 100-year-old barge’s bow became stuck on the wharf, tipping it into the river, according to Le Parisien. Though firefighters were present and attempted to save the historic vessel, it filled with water and sank in a matter of minutes.
The argument, made by architectural historian Charles Jencks in the introduction for the recently released book Postmodern Design Complete, that Postmodern styles never truly left the architectural profession is stronger than ever. The movement from the late 70s and 80s which began as a reaction against the utopian canon of modernism has recently been re-entering the architecture scene and defining our present moment of architectural culture.
This brings up an important question: What is the current movement of architecture? And what came directly after postmodernism? If anything, it was an immediate cry of “No more Po-Mo,” followed recently by a wave of “save Po-Mo” perhaps best demonstrated by the rallying to save Philip Johnson’s AT&T Tower from a Snøhetta makeover. Even Norman Foster claimed that although he was never a fan of the postmodern movement, he understood its importance in architectural history. Postmodernism is making its recursive return with Stirling-esque rule-breaking jokes and pictorial appearances.
Ellsworth Kelly died in December 2015 at the age of 92, less than a year after he announced a gift of one of his most lasting creative contributions: plans for the artist’s only building, which had been sitting in his New York studio since 1986.
Titled Austin, this 2,715-square-foot work on the grounds of the Blanton Museum of Art on the University of Texas at Austin campus would be his final—and perhaps greatest—effort, an immersive space whose artistic value matches that of the marble panels and sculpture within. Unlike the Rothko Chapel in Houston, in Austin the artist and architect are one, says Carter E. Foster, the Blanton’s deputy director for curatorial affairs.
The designs by Snøhetta for the renovation of the building at 550 Madison Avenue have launched the building to the forefront of the debate about the preservation of Postmodern heritage. The plans include replacing the stone facade with undulating glass in order to transform the building's street presence. Should plans progress, the once prominent arched entry will sit behind fritted glass and stone covered columns will be unwrapped to create a hovering datum.
Microsoft is undertaking an ambitious overhaul of its 800 offices around the world and uncovering great insights about the intersections of technology and workplace design in the process. The technology giant’s global director of workplace strategies, Riku Pentikäinen, speaks to Metropolis’s Avinash Rajagopal about the company’s new workplaces, collaborating with designers and furniture manufacturers, and how his team takes a data-driven approach to office design.
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