Rahul Mehrotra is a practicing architect based in Boston and Mumbai and he has been teaching at Harvard’s GSD where he is currently Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and Director of the Master in Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program. Born in 1959, Mehrotra grew up in Lucknow, a city in Northern India and an important cultural and artistic hub. His father was a manager at a large machine tool company. The family moved a lot following Mehrotra senior’s frequent promotions, which led to changing residences owned by his company. Besides a few years in Lucknow and Delhi, they lived in different neighborhoods within Mumbai.
Text description provided by the architects. After World War II, the need for housing was at an unprecedented high. The Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, France was the first large scale project for the famed architect, Le Corbusier. In 1947, Europe was still feeling the effects of the Second World War, when Le Corbusier was commissioned to design a multi-family residential housing project for the people of Marseille that were dislocated after the bombings on France.
Espace Oscar Niemeyer is a cultural center designed by Oscar Niemeyer in the port city of Le Havre, France. The project’s location is inside the urban reconstruction area conceived by the rationalist architect Auguste Perret after the destruction of the city’s downtown area in World War II.
Theodore Prudon, the founding president of Docomomo US, recently stepped down as the organization’s head. (Robert Meckfessel is the new president.) “Docomomo” is shorthand for the group’s mission: the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites, and neighborhoods of the Modern movement. Prudon has had a storied career as a preservationist, architect, and educator, heading his own practice and teaching at Columbia University. In October, he was presented with the Connecticut Architecture Foundation’s Distinguished Leadership Award at the newly reborn Marcel Breuer building in New Haven, which began its life in 1970 as the Pirelli Tire Building and is now the Hotel Marcel (designed, planned, and developed by architect Bruce Redman Becker).
https://www.archdaily.com/992013/theodore-prudon-modernism-has-never-been-a-popular-movementMichael J. Crosbie
Chicago, The Windy City, Chi-Town, or The Second City. It’s a place that is known by many names, but to architects and urban planners alike, it’s famous for its history which has given us some of the best-known buildings and important advancements that have helped to shape other cities across the United States. From its inception, Chicago has long served as an architectural hub for innovation.
On August 27th, 1883, the volcano of Krakatoa in the Indonesian islands erupted. Ashes and rocks flew miles high. Barometers wobbled three and a half times as they recorded the atmospheric pressure wave circumnavigating the globe. The noise was heard across the Indian Ocean and Australia. And for years, small ash particles floated in the atmosphere, diffusing the sun’s light and scattering colors around the world.
Augusto Malta, Demolition Morro do Castelo, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, June 1, 1922. . Image Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional Digital Brasil, Fundação Biblioteca Nacional.
At the inauguration of the First Brazilian Congress of Eugenics in July of 1929, the physician and anthropologist Edgar Roquette-Pinto addressed an audience preoccupied with the question of how a country as vast as Brazil could best increase and improve its population. To accomplish this, Roquette-Pinto exalted “eugenia” as the new science that, together with medicine and hygiene, would guarantee the efficiency and perfection of the race. With the following words, the Brazilian scientist underscored a positivist agenda that brought architecture to the very core of the eugenics—the so-called science of race “improvement”—movement: “It is critical to emphasize that the influence [on our race] does not stem from the natural environment but rather from the artificial environment, created by man.” With these opening remarks to the Congress, Roquette-Pinto called attention to the crucial role that the man-made environment plays in the “amelioration” of what he called “the biological patrimony” of Brazil’s diverse population. In his invitation to social engineering, Roquette Pinto pointed to the environmental-genetic collusion that they hoped would bring with it the very possibility of progress.
Doreen Adengo, Ugandan architect and trailblazer, passed away on July the 22nd of this year, after battling a long-term illness. She founded Adengo Architecture, a studio based out of her home city of Kampala. A designer who studied in the United States, worked in firms in New York, Washington, and London, and was teaching at Uganda Martyrs University – her legacy is nothing short of extraordinary. It is a legacy that spans disciplines and geographies – but a legacy, too, that is deeply rooted in the context of Africa, Uganda, and Kampala.
The luxury hotel, as an architectural typology, is distinctive. In effect, it's a self-contained community, a building that immerses the well-off visitor into their local context. Self-contained communities they might be, but these hotels are also vessels of the wider socioeconomic character of a place, where luxury living is often next door to informal settlements in the most extreme examples of social inequality.
Few other materials can convey architectural atmosphere as well as the glass. A to-go choice for the modernists, due to its transparent nature, glass still holds a solid place within the material palette for architects around the globe. Such unique element is the subject of Archiving Flux / Stasis, a photographic exhibition by Erieta Attali hosted by the Greek Ministry of Culture in Casa Romana, Kos Island, Greece, set to open its doors in July 21st.
If one were asked to picture a Catholic Church, the first image to come to mind would probably resemble a medieval gothic cathedral with buttresses, pointed arches, and a spire pointing toward the sky. On second thought, many more styles could easily be identified as catholic architecture: the simple yet grandiose structures of the Romanesque or maybe the ornate styles of Baroque and Rococo. An image more difficult to associate with sacred architecture is that of Modernism. The Roman Catholic Church is a particularly conservative establishment. Modernism, on the other hand, is revolutionary; it is rational, functional, and technical; it rejects ornaments and embraces innovation. Surprisingly, in the years after the end of the Second World War, places of worship defied expectations. Blocks of concrete, raw materials, angular shapes, and exposed structures have all been employed to break from tradition and create churches that barely resemble a church. This article will explore Modernist mid-century Church architecture with the support of images from Jamie McGregor Smith.
Located amidst the vegetation, almost invisible to those who see it from the street, a jewel of modern Brazilian architecture is hidden in the São Paulo neighborhood of Jardim América. Casa Zalszupin, designed in 1960 by the Polish architect based in Brazil, Jorge Zalszupin, combines traces of local modernism with influences that the architect brought with him from Europe, notably Scandinavian architecture. In a recent photo series, Paul Clemence sought to capture through this house, "the architect's and designer's essence".
The Senate Building, Coruscant . Image via Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith / George Lucas
Depicting architectural visualizations of the future is no easy feat, so it makes much sense for designers to use aspects of our existing architecture as a foundation for these fictional worlds. Despite recent advancements in terms of animation technologies and CGI, there is still substantial use of existing architecture to provide tangible structural elements in film.
In terms of recycling architectural aesthetics, elements of the past and future are often integrated to create a hybridized style, an amalgamation of Retro, Dystopian, Modernist and Futuristic themes. From the resurgence of ancient pyramids and temples, to skylines reminiscent of the city of New York, visualizations vary depending on different notions of what our future may look like.
The year 2021 has been a turbulent one –coronavirus rages on, and the design and construction industries have been forced to keep adapting two years into a global pandemic. As virtual methods of working and communicating continue to be tweaked and honed, a plethora of virtual events has meant that architectural discourse outside the western canon and Eurocentric gaze, in a small way, has been able to claim space front and center in the global architectural conversation.
Villa Badran designed by Gamal Bakry . Image Courtesy of CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE
On view at the Center for Architecture in New York City, the exhibition features 20 projects in Cairo and a warning about the threatened future of Egypt’s Modernist heritage.
Cairo Modern, a new exhibition at the Center for Architecture in New York, features 20 demolished, extant, and proposed projects in Cairo dating from the 1930s to the 1970s and also shines a light on the wrecking ball-threatening Modern architecture here and elsewhere.
The National Provincial Bank in Plymouth, Southwest England, completed in 1959 and designed by the bank’s architecture department with BC Sherren serving as chief architect. . Image Courtesy of Elain Harwood
The term “mid-century modern” conjures up images of a sharp-suited Don Draper, slender teak cabinets, and suave chairs from Scandinavia. That is, at least, one perspective of the design movement and a view more of 1950s-era Manhattan offices than anything else. But in Britain, mid-century modernism manifested as something slightly different, coming in the form of schools, cathedrals, housing, and an era-defining festival, all eloquently described and illustrated by the prolific architectural historian Elain Harwood in Mid-Century Britain: Modern Architecture 1938-1963.
Design diagram for the City of Culture of Galicia, Spain. Image Courtesy of Eisenman Architects
If we define deconstructivism, it literally translates to the breaking down, or demolishing of a constructed structure, whether it being for structural reasons or just an act of rebellion. It is perhaps for this reason that many misunderstand the Deconstructivist movement.
Deconstructivism is, in fact, not a new architecture style, nor is it an avant-garde movement against architecture or society. It does not follow “rules” or acquire specific aesthetics, nor is it a rebellion against a social dilemma. It is the unleashing of infinite possibilities of playing around with forms and volumes.
.jpg?1597099445 "Parc de la Villette / Bernard Tschumi Architects. Image © Peeradontax | Shutterstock")
