Focus sur un projet original des architectes espagnols de la firme Selgas Cano : construire des bureaux au milieu d’une forêt proche de Madrid. Les bureaux sont à moitié sous terre. Les photos sont signées Iwan Baan. Une vie de bureaux sauvage à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.
Interview: Iwan Baan is the rock star of architecture photography, shooting buildings from helicopters and “living in a hotel 365 days a year”. With a new exhibition documenting his hectic schedule now open in Germany, Baan spoke to Dezeen about his unique lifestyle and technique (+ slideshow).
Iwan Baan started out as a documentary photographer but moved into architecture after a chance meeting with architect Rem Koolhaas. He has since become the most sought-after name in architectural photography and spends his life travelling the world to shoot buildings by names such as Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron and SANAA.
“It’s continuous travelling,” he said. “When you look on the map, it’s flying back and forth all over the world.”
Baan is known for eschewing the traditional approach of shooting buildings in isolation. He says his aim with every shoot is to capture the life both within and surrounding the built environment. “It’s still very much my interest to show what’s happening around these buildings, what people do there and what kind of role these projects have for people,” he explained.
For most shoots the photographer rents a helicopter to capture his subject from above. “It’s very important for me to give the larger overview and try to get some distance from the architecture. That really tells you where it is and that it’s not just a building that could be anywhere.”
The new exhibition, entitled 52 Weeks, 52 Cities, shows a selection of Baan’s photographs from the last year accompanied by short commentaries. “It’s really a view into a year of travelling with Iwan,” he said.
Subjects in the exhibition vary from glossy architectural projects to a settlement in Lagos where over 150,000 people live in self-built structures perched on stilts over a lagoon, a village in China where locals have excavated a network of underground caves to live inside, and a secretive Japanese shrine that is rebuilt every 20 years. It also includes the iconic shot of post-Sandy New York that threw the photographer into the limelight when it made the cover of New York Magazine in late 2012.
“Most people know my photography from the commissioned architecture work but there are also a lot of other places that fascinate me, that show how people are building informally. My work is about looking at all the different aspects of building and the built environment, from the very well-planned cities to what people build themselves out of necessity,” he said.
52 Weeks, 52 Cities is on show at the Marta Hereford gallery in Hereford, Germany, until 30 March.
Here’s a full transcript of the interview:
Amy Frearson: Your new exhibition is called 52 Weeks, 52 Cities. Are you on the road all the time, or do you get opportunities to go home?
Iwan Baan: I haven’t had a home for almost three years. I live in a hotel basically 365 days a year.
Amy Frearson: Talk me through how you go about shooting a particular place. How many cameras do you tend to take on a typical shoot?
Iwan Baan: I always get an idea very quickly about how I want to document a space from an architectural point of view. I work very light and I usually only want one camera with me. I don’t work with tripods or large cameras. It’s really all about capturing the life of these places. That’s what is important for me.
Amy Frearson: Do you try to shoot each project from the air?
Iwan Baan: More or less yes, it’s part of my visual language of describing projects. It’s very important for me to give the larger overview and try to get some distance from the architecture. Using a helicopter is always a good way to capture that kind of thing, and to give an architecture project its place in the city or landscape. That really tells you where it is and that it’s not just a building that could be anywhere.
Amy Frearson: Do you do all your own post-production on your images whilst you’re travelling?
Iwan Baan: Yes, but I do very little post-production on my images, usually only colour corrections, and I always do it right after the shoot.
Amy Frearson: Most architectural photography tries to present the building in isolation but your photos often capture the social and urban context as well.
Iwan Baan: Yes that’s very much the way that I take my commissions. They should be more than just architectural projects. They should be able to tell more about the story and the life around these buildings.
Amy Frearson: You didn’t actually start out as an architectural photographer did you?
Iwan Baan: Yes that’s right, I started out doing much more documentary photography. It was only eight years ago when I met Rem [Koolhaas] and fell into this whole architecture field. So it’s still very much my interest to show what’s happening around these buildings, what people do there and what kind of role these projects have for people. This exhibition tells that story by showing these unique areas and showing why these architecture projects are in these specific places.
Amy Frearson: Tell me about the exhibition.
Iwan Baan: Marta Herford approached me about nine months ago or so. I had worked for Marta Herford before, about three ago years on an exhibition of all the Richard Neutra houses all over Europe, which I documented. I came back about nine months ago and they asked me if I was interested in doing another exhibition. I thought, with all my endless travels, it would be interesting to show a diary of my last year of travelling. Not only showing the new architecture, but also all the other things that happen around it. It’s really a view into a year of travelling with Iwan.
Amy Frearson: Did you have an idea of what places you were going to be visiting across the year or did you work it out as you went along?
Iwan Baan: With my schedule, things always come up around a week before. It’s continuous travelling. When you look on the map, it’s flying back and forth all over the world.
Amy Frearson: Tell me about some of the cities and places you’ve captured over the year.
Iwan Baan: Most people know my photography from the commissioned architecture work but there are also a lot of other places that fascinate me, that show how people are building informally. I’m really interested in how people build themselves unimaginable living conditions, for instance in the slums of Nigeria, or in Lagos where people have built this whole city in water, basically in a lagoon. My work is about looking at all the different aspects of building and the built environment, from the very well-planned cities to what people build themselves out of necessity.
Amy Frearson: Is there an underlying theme that ties all the photographs together?
Iwan Baan: All the pictures are really about telling the stories of why a project is very specific for a place, whether they’re very large, like a Zaha Hadid building in Azerbaijan that could only have been built there, to the tiniest project where I flew across the globe to Japan to photograph a toilet by Sou Fujimoto. I like telling these kinds of stories with my pictures.
Amy Frearson: Do you have any favourite photographs in the exhibition?
Iwan Baan: That’s hard to say, there are so many of these incredible places. One that comes to mind is of underground houses in China. It’s a whole region in the centre north of China, around Xi’an, where for centuries people have dug out these courtyard houses that are basically carved out of the earth. They could only do it there because of the special earth, it’s a kind of loose clay soil, so it’s easy to dig it out. These people didn’t have money to buy materials to build new houses, so for them the most logical step was to carve them out, since it is only manpower they needed to create these incredible houses.
At the most recent count, almost 40 million people live there. It’s one of those things that is so specific for this area and reveals a lot about how people build and live in these places. These kinds of things always fascinate me.
Amy Frearson: Can you describe some of the more historical places that you’ve photographed?
Iwan Baan: One place that comes to mind was a couple of months ago. It’s the Ise Shrine in Japan. It’s an incredible story of a series of shrines in a village in Japan. They started building the first shrines there in the year 600, and since then they have rebuilt the shrines every twenty years. There’s this enormous tradition of craftsmanship, rebuilding all these frames every twenty years. I was very lucky to be there a couple of months ago during that whole rebuilding process and afterwards, when there were all these ceremonies there. So my pictures were really telling a story of this incredible architectural history, how people experience that, how people build it and how people have lived with it for 1400 years.
Amy Frearson: Did you find any of the places particularly challenging to shoot?
Iwan Baan: There’s a place in China, a series of incredible courtyard houses in the Anhui Province where I was last year. From the outside, you come into a village which is completely closed off. It only has narrow roads and you can hardly see any of the architecture, so it’s hard to document. When I came to this place I got a little frustrated about how I was going to shoot it, but then I found a doctor in a little village in the countryside and asked if I could tag along with him. I walked for two or three days with him and went to all these family houses. All the doors were open and I would step into all these incredible homes and was really able to photograph the life happening inside these places.
Amy Frearson: Can you tell me about any other countries you’ve been to?
Iwan Baan: Last January, I was with a whole team from Harvard University in India. There was an event that happens once every 12 years, it’s called the Kumbh Mela. It happens in the north of India near Varanasi, where the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers come together. It’s basically a big delta, but between December and April it’s dry season there so the water level drops.
Once every 12 years the Indians organise a festival there and it’s basically the largest human gathering in the world. Around 100 million people visit the site over a period of about a month and a half. It’s in this river bed that has dried out, so this piece of land about the size of Manhattan becomes available. They literally build a pop-up mega city for 100 million people there, including all the infrastructure. They build roads, they make electricity and there’s this whole city made out of bamboo sticks, saris and curtains. A city for 100 million people and after two months it disappears again.
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says Iwan Baan appeared first on Dezeen.
News: here’s a preview of the nearly completed Pérez Art Museum Miami by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, which opens tomorrow in downtown Miami and which suggests a new “kind of vernacular” for the city, according to Jacques Herzog (+ slideshow + photography is by Iwan Baan).
Taking over from the former Miami Art Museum, PAMM accommodates 3000 square-metres of galleries within a sprawling three-storey complex that features a huge elevated veranda, boxy concrete structures and large expanses of glazing.
Herzog & de Meuron designed the building to suit the tropical climate of Miami. The veranda, which in time will be filled with plants, is raised up on stilts to surround the building, creating an intermediate space between the galleries and the surrounding city.
“This building is just like a shelter,” said Jacques Herzog. “A roof just like the floor we stand on, under which volumes are assembled to collect, to expose and to show art.”
“Miami doesn’t have any local vernacular,” Herzog said on a tour of the building earlier today, explaining how he wanted to avoid recreating the “decorated boxes” of Miami’s iconic Art Deco District.
“It looks nice and it’s associated with Miami,” he said of the art deco buildings. “But in fact Miami doesn’t have any local vernacular. It has something that the tourists especially like which is this art deco style. This [the Pérez Art Museum Miami] is somehow deconstructing that. It’s the opposite: it’s not based on the box, it’s based on permeability.”
Herzog compared the architectural approach to the Miami building to Herzog & de Meuron’s barn-like Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, which was completed last year.
“As much as the Parrish is an answer to this more northern exposure and is a totally different typology, this is an answer for here, sitting on stilts, with the floods, with the shading, and especially the plants.”
“I think something that could become a kind of vernacular is a building that is specific for this place,” he continued, comparing architecture to cooking.
“The ingredients here are the climate, the vegetation, the water, the sun. The building should respond to all these things,” he said. “Like cooking in winter is different to cooking in summer because you don’t have the same ingredients so you shouldn’t make things that make sense in summer, in winter.”
Stilts support the base of the veranda, then turn into columns to support an overhanging roof that shelters both indoor and outdoor spaces. Clusters of suspended columns covered in vertical gardens by botanist Patrick Blanc hang from the roof structure.
“There’s a very thin layer between the inside and the outside,” added Herzog. “As soon as there are more plants, this will help to make that more accessible, and not such a shock.”
The interior is complete and the exhibitions are installed; when Dezeen visited earlier today contractors were still finalising the landscaping around the building and installing the vertical gardens.
A permanent collection featuring artworks from the museum’s 1800-piece collection occupy the two lower levels of the building. Special exhibitions will also be accommodated on the first floor, while the uppermost level is dedicated to education facilities.
PAMM opens with the first major international exhibition of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, alongside shows dedicated to Cuban painter Amelia Peláez and Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié.
The building is located beside a motorway near Biscayne Bay and is the first completed museum of a waterfront complex that will also be home to the Grimshaw-designed Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science when it opens in 2015.
Photography is by Iwan Baan.
Here’s the transcript of Herzog talking about the building at this morning’s press tour:
“Since the early 90s I have been coming [to Miami] with my wife, long before we knew we were going to be building and we were shocked about what is vernacular here: the decorated box. There’s this climate and this reputation, this didn’t make sense, but of course it looks nice and it’s associated with Miami.
“But in fact Miami doesn’t have any local vernacular. It has something that the tourists especially like which is this art deco style. This [the Pérez Art Museum Miami] is somehow deconstructing that, it’s the opposite, it’s not based on the box, it’s based on permeability. Also this transparency with water, vegetation, garden, city and art. Art is intertwined with all these elements.
“In some ways I think this is really interesting because we are here at a crossroads between south and north: South America and North America and other parts. We, with this Eurocentric, America-centric view, didn’t have any focus until not so long ago. The building should help make that possible. This building is just like a shelter, a roof just like the floor we stand on, under which volumes are assembled to collect, to expose and to show art.
“What makes it local? I think thats it’s local because, if we compare it with cooking, the ingredients here are really the climate, the vegetation, the water, the sun. The building should respond to all these things. This sounds simple and it is simple but it’s not easy to achieve, to not make it so boring and generic.
“It is I think something that could become a kind of vernacular, a typical building, a specific building for this place. Just like the Parrish [Art Museum] in the north, which recently opened. We’ve done other museums, the Tate Modern, that answer to what is already there. Like cooking in winter is different in summer, because you don’t have the same ingredients so you shouldn’t make things that make sense in summer, in winter. As much as the Parrish is an answer to this more northern exposure and is a totally different typology, this is an answer for here, sitting on stilts, above the floods, with the shading, and especially the plants.
“We’re very happy to have a Patrick Blanc working on this. Because when we saw the old museum, and you come into the museum over this very hot plaza, and there is a black glass door and that says this is outside and that is inside, it’s like boom! Such a shock, because what it gives way to is an air-conditioned, climatically-controlled box with a very thin layer between the inside and the outside.
“The plants here should be like a filter to make the transition between inside and outside. As soon as there are more plants, this will help to make that more accessible, and not such a shock.”
Here’s a detailed description of the design from the museum:
Pérez Art Museum Miami
Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the new Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) reflects the natural and urban landscape of Miami and responds to the city’s rapid growth as a cultural destination. The new facility borders the MacArthur Causeway with its front façade oriented toward the bay, making it a highly visible landmark amid Miami’s cityscape. PAMM includes 32,000 square feet of galleries as well as education facilities, a shop, waterfront café, and exterior plazas and gardens.
The new building supports the institution’s mission to serve local populations as a dynamic social forum, stimulating collection growth and enabling the Museum to better fulfill its role as the principal contemporary visual arts and educational resource in the region.
The Building and Landscaping
The three-story facility includes 200,000 square feet of programmable space, comprised of 120,000 square feet of interior space―a three-fold increase from the Museum’s previous facility―and 80,000 square feet on the exterior. PAMM sits upon an elevated platform and below a canopy, both of which extend far beyond the Museum’s walls creating a shaded veranda. Open to light and fresh air, surface parking will be located beneath the platform and surrounded by landscaping and terraces. Stairs as wide as the plot connect the platform to the bay and a waterfront promenade, creating a continuous, open civic space that conjoins community, nature, architecture, and contemporary art.
Designed by artist and botanist Patrick Blanc using his advanced horticultural techniques, native tropical plants hang from the canopy between the structural columns and platforms. The project team also worked closely with landscape architects Arquitectonica Geo to select a range of plant life that could withstand exposure to sun and wind as well as the city’s storm season. The platform provides a comfortable outdoor temperature by natural means. The intermediate space has the ecological benefit of minimizing the sun’s impact on the building’s envelope and reducing the cost of controlling the environment for artworks.
Curatorial Plan
In collaboration with the Museum’s leadership, Herzog & de Meuron developed a series of gallery typologies to best display and develop PAMM’s growing collection. Different modes of display are deployed in a non-linear sequence, allowing visitors to map their own experiences of the Museum’s collection and physical space. The permanent collection galleries are located on the first and second levels. The latter of which also houses special exhibitions. Offering natural light and views of the surrounding park and bay, outward-facing exhibition spaces alternate with more enclosed galleries that focus on single subjects.
Art is displayed throughout the entire building, including the garden and the parking garage. A mostly glazed envelope on the first and third levels reveals the public and semi-public functions within: entry halls, auditorium, shop, and café on the first level, education facilities and offices on the third. By offering a specific range of differently proportioned spaces and a variation of interior finishes, as opposed to a traditional sequence of generic white cubes, PAMM proposes a new model of curating and experiencing art.
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creates new “vernacular” for Miami appeared first on Dezeen.
Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima has added a circular courtyard and a renovated timber shed to her series of galleries on Inujima island, Japan.
Sejima, the female partner of architecture studio SANAA, has been working on the Inujima Art House Project since 2010, when she and art director Yuko Hasegawa opened three galleries and a small pavilion in the island’s village.
The two new buildings, entitled A-Art House and C-Art House, will join F-Art House, S-Art House and I-Art House to create a series of spaces that can host coinciding exhibitions.
Clusters of artificial flower petals decorate the acrylic walls of A-Art House, giving a colourful backdrop with shades of pink, orange and yellow to the open-air courtyard that makes up the space.
Instead of a precise circle, the structure has gently fluted walls that bulge outwards, creating an outline reminiscent of a flower shape. A rectangular opening forms an entrance through one of the walls, while silver stools offer a pair of seats for visitors.
C-Art House, the second of the two galleries, occupies a renovated nineteenth-century timber shed near the coastline.
The structure of this building is revealed inside, where ageing wooden trusses are supported by modern timber columns. Timber panels line the walls, while a panoramic screen provides a surface for film screenings.
To tie in with the opening of the new galleries, all five spaces are presenting a combined exhibition where each space is dedicated to the work of a different artist.
Kazuyo Sejima is best-known as one of the two founding partners of SANAA, alongside architect Ryue Nishizawa. The pair were awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2010 and past projects include the Rolex Learning Centre in Switzerland and the Louvre Lens gallery in France.
See more architecture by SANAA »
See more architecture in Japan »
Photography is by Iwan Baan.
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by Kazuyo Sejima appeared first on Dezeen.
Competition: we’re giving readers the chance to win one of five copies of a book about the Golden Lion-winning Torre David project presented at last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.
Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities contains photographs by Iwan Baan that document life in an unfinished 45-storey skyscraper in Caracas, home to more than 750 families. Pictures show how the residents have created a community for themselves, introducing a gym, a hair salon, shops and other amenities.
The images were displayed in an exhibition and restaurant by Urban-Think Tank of Venezuela and architecture critic Justin McGuirk at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012, which received an award for best project at the event.
For more information about the project read our story about it here, or watch the movies we filmed with Justin McGuirk and Iwan Baan at the biennale.
Edited by Urban-Think Tank and published by Lars Müller, the book also contains plans and diagrams of the structure, plus information about life in the vertical slum.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.comwith “Torre David” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
Competition closes 4 April 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
See all our coverage of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 »
See all our stories about books »
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to be won appeared first on Dezeen.
This Tokyo five-storey townhouse by Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa is fronted by a stack of gardens.
Located in a dense commercial district, the building provides a combined home and workplace for two writers. The site was just four metres wide, so Nishizawa designed a building that has only glass walls to avoid narrowing the interior spaces even further.
“My final decision of structure consisted of a vertical layer of horizontal slabs to create a building without walls,” said the architect.
Gardens are interspersed with rooms on each of the four floors of the building, creating a screen of plants that mask the facade from the eyes of passing strangers. Glazed walls beyond protect the interior from the elements.
“The entirety is a wall-less transparent building designed to provide an environment with maximum sunlight despite the dark site conditions,” added the architect. “Every room, whether it is the living room, private room or the bathroom, has a garden of its own so that the residents may go outside to feel the breeze, read a book or cool off in the evening and enjoy an open environment in their daily life.”
Above: floor plans – click above for larger image and key
Staircases spiral up through the building, passing through circular openings in the thick concrete floor plates. A similar opening cuts through the roof, allowing taller plants to stretch through to the upper terrace.
Above: west and north elevations
Bedrooms are located on the first and third floors and are separated from meeting and study areas with glass screens and curtains.
Ryue Nishizawa is one half of architectural partnership SANAA, which he runs alongside Kazuyo Sejima. The pair recently completed a new outpost of the Musée du Louvre in France, while other projects by the studio include the Rolex Learning Centre in Switzerland and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. See more architecture by SANAA.
Photography is by Iwan Baan.
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by Ryue Nishizawa appeared first on Dezeen.
American firm Morphosis has completed a museum of nature and science in Dallas where visitors begin their tour by taking an escalator journey to the uppermost floor.
Surrounded by glazing, the escalator streaks diagonally across the striated concrete facade then angles back inside the building. At the top, each visitor is faced with a view of the city before spiralling their way back down through five exhibition floors into the atrium where they first arrived.
The Perot Museum of Nature and Science is sited in Victory Park, downtown Dallas, and when it opens to the public next weekend it will replace some of the facilities of the existing Museum of Science and Nature, located further east in Fair Park.
Morphosis‘ founder Thom Mayne conceived the building as a large cube emerging from a series of landscaped lower tiers. These levels, designed in collaboration with landscape architects Talley Associates, are covered in stones and drought-resistant grasses that are typical of the landscape in Texas.
A 3D cinema, auditorium, cafe and shop accompany the eleven exhibition galleries inside the building.
Above: site plan – click above for larger image
“The Perot Museum of Nature and Science is a gift to the city of Dallas,” said Mayne. “It is a fundamentally public building – a building that opens up, belongs to and activates the city. It is a place of exchange. It contains knowledge, preserves information and transmits ideas; ultimately, the public is as integral to the museum as the museum is to the city.”
Above: exploded axonometric diagram – click above for larger image
See more projects by Morphosis on Dezeen, including a floating house for Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation in New Orleans.
Photography is by Iwan Baan.
Here’s a project description from Morphosis:
Museums, armatures for collective societal experience and cultural expression, present new ways of interpreting the world. They contain knowledge, preserve information and transmit ideas; they stimulate curiosity, raise awareness and create opportunities for exchange. As instruments of education and social change, museums have the potential to shape our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live.
Above: east-facing section – click above for larger image
As our global environment faces ever more critical challenges, a broader understanding of the interdependence of natural systems is becoming more essential to our survival and evolution. Museums dedicated to nature and science play a key role in expanding our understanding of these complex systems.
The new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Victory Park creates a distinct identity for the Museum, enhances the institution’s prominence in Dallas and enriches the city’s evolving cultural fabric. Designed to engage a broad audience, invigorate young minds, and inspire wonder and curiosity in the daily lives of its visitors, the Museum cultivates a memorable experience that persists in the minds of its visitors and that ultimately broadens individuals’ and society’s understanding of nature and science.
Above: north-facing section one – click above for larger image
The museum strives to achieve the highest standards of sustainability possible for a building of its type. High performance design and incorporation of state of the art technologies yields a new building that minimizes its impact on the environment.
This world class facility inspires awareness of science through an immersive and interactive environment that actively engages visitors. Rejecting the notion of museum architecture as neutral background for exhibits, the new building itself is an active tool for science education. By integrating architecture, nature, and technology, the building demonstrates scientific principles and stimulates curiosity in our natural surroundings.
Above: north-facing section two – click above for larger image
The immersive experience of nature within the city begins with the visitor’s approach to the museum, which leads through two native Texas ecologies: a forest of large native canopy trees and a terrace of native desert xeriscaping. The xeriscaped terrace gently slopes up to connect with the museum’s iconic stone roof. The overall building mass is conceived as a large cube floating over the site’s landscaped plinth. An acre of undulating roofscape comprised of rock and native drought-resistant grasses reflects Dallas’s indigenous geology and demonstrates a living system that will evolve naturally over time.
The intersection of these two ecologies defines the main entry plaza, a gathering and event area for visitors and an outdoor public space for the city of Dallas. From the plaza, the landscaped roof lifts up to draw visitors through a compressed space into the more expansive entry lobby. The topography of the lobby’s undulating ceiling reflects the dynamism of the exterior landscape surface, blurring the distinction between inside and outside, and connecting the natural with the manmade.
Above: west-facing section one – click above for larger image
Moving from the compressed space of the entry, a visitor’s gaze is drawn upward through the soaring open volume of the sky-lit atrium, the building’s primary light-filled circulation space, which houses the building’s stairs, escalators and elevators. From the ground floor, a series of escalators bring patrons though the atrium to the uppermost level of the museum. Patrons arrive at a fully glazed balcony high above the city, with a bird’s eye view of downtown Dallas. From this sky balcony, visitors proceed downward in a clockwise spiral path through the galleries. This dynamic spatial procession creates a visceral experience that engages visitors and establishes an immediate connection to the immersive architectural and natural environment of the museum.
Above: west facing section two – click above for larger image
The path descending from the top floor through the museum’s galleries weaves in and out of the building’s main circulation atrium, alternately connecting the visitor with the internal world of the museum and with the external life of the city beyond. The visitor becomes part of the architecture, as the eastern facing corner of the building opens up towards downtown Dallas to reveal the activity within. The museum, is thus, a fundamentally public building – a building that opens up, belongs to and activates the city; ultimately, the public is as integral to the museum as the museum is to the city.
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by Morphosis appeared first on Dezeen.
Slideshow feature: this set of images by Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan shows the scene in New York over the past week as the city recovers from the effects of Hurricane Sandy that swept across Manhattan last Monday, cutting the electricity and flooding the streets and subways.
Iwan Baan also photographed the city from the air, creating a striking photograph that made the cover of New York Magazine (above). The image shows part of the city in darkness, while the rest is is filled with light and colour. “It was the only way to show that New York was two cities, almost,” Baan told Poynter magazine. “One was almost like a third world country where everything was becoming scarce. Everything was complicated. And then another was a completely vibrant, alive New York.”
A week later the city is now getting back to normal, with power mostly restored, schools reopening and subways running again.
Earlier this year Iwan Baan photographed a vertical slum in Venezuela for an exhibition that won the Golden Lion for best project at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Watch the interview we filmed with Baan about the project.
See more photography by Iwan Baan »
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by Iwan Baan appeared first on Dezeen.
London firm Zaha Hadid Architects has completed a 330,000-square-metre retail, office and entertainment complex in Beijing (+ slideshow).
The Galaxy Soho building comprises four main domed structures, fused together by bridges and platforms between curving floor plates to create a fluid environment that surrounds a series of public courtyards and a larger central “canyon”.
“The design responds to the varied contextual relationships and dynamic conditions of Beijing,” says Zaha Hadid. “We have created a variety of public spaces that directly engage with the city, reinterpreting the traditional urban fabric and contemporary living patterns into a seamless urban landscape inspired by nature.”
There are 18 floors in total, including three below ground, with retail units surrounding the courtyards on the lower levels, offices from floors four to 15, and restaurants and bars at the upper reaches.
The exterior of the building is clad in aluminium and stone while the interior features glass, terrazzo, stainless steel and glass reinforced gypsum.
The firm is currently working on two more developments for the same client, Soho China.
The Sky Soho office and retail centre in Shanghai will also make use of large public courtyards and is scheduled for completion next year, while the 115,393-square-metre Wangjing Soho commercial complex, scheduled for completion in 2014, will comprise three pebble-shaped towers midway between Beijing Capital Airport and the city.
Read more about Wangjing Soho in our earlier story and see all our stories about Zaha Hadid Architects.
Photographs are by Iwan Baan.
Here’s some more information from Zaha Hadid Architects:
Zaha Hadid joined Soho China’s Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi, with 15,000 guests from China and around the world, to celebrate the completion of Galaxy Soho, Beijing
The Galaxy SOHO project in central Beijing for SOHO China is a 330 000m2 office, retail and entertainment complex that will become an integral part of the living city, inspired by the grand scale of Beijing. Its architecture is a composition of four continuous, flowing volumes that are set apart, fused or linked by stretched bridges. These volumes adapt to each other in all directions, generating a panoramic architecture without corners or abrupt transitions that break the fluidity of its formal composition.
The great interior courts of the project are a reflection of traditional Chinese architecture where courtyards create an internal world of continuous open spaces. Here, the architecture is no longer composed of rigid blocks, but instead comprised of volumes which coalesce to create a world of continuous mutual adaptation and fluid movement between each building. Shifting plateaus within the design impact upon each other to generate a deep sense of immersion and envelopment. As users enter deeper into the building, they discover intimate spaces that follow the same coherent formal logic of continuous curvelinearity.
The lower three levels of Galaxy SOHO house public facilities for retail and entertainment. The levels immediately above provide work spaces for clusters of innovative businesses. The top of the building is dedicated to bars, restaurants and cafés that offer views along one of the greatest avenues of the city. These different functions are interconnected through intimate interiors that are always linked with the city, helping to establish Galaxy SOHO as a major urban landmark for Beijing.
Design: Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher
Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects
Project Director: Satoshi Ohashi
Associate: Cristiano Ceccato
Project Architect: Yoshi Uchiyama
Project Team: Stephan Wurster, Michael Hill, Samer Chamoun, Eugene Leung, Rita Lee, Lillie Liu Rolando Rodriguez-Leal, Wen Tao, Tom Wuenschmann, Seung-ho Yeo, Shuojiong Zhang, Michael Grau, Shu Hashimoto Shao-Wei Huang, Chikara Inamura, Lydia Kim, Yasuko Kobayashi, Wang Lin, Yereem Park
Local Design Institute: BIAD Beijing Institute of Architecture & Design
Plot area: 46,965 m2
Total Floor Area: 332,857 m2
Above Ground: 4 Towers 15 Floors (12 Office Floors and 3 Retail Floors)
Max Height: 67 meters
Below Ground: B1 Floor Retail and B2, B3 Parking (1275 cars), MEP
Retail Floors: B1F,1F,2F,3F (90,000 m2)
Materials Skin: 3mm Aluminium Exterior Cladding, Insulated Glass, Stone
Materials Interiors: Glass, Terrazzo, GRG, Stainless Steel, Gypsum Board Painted
Structure: Standard Concrete Structure (8.4m spans)
Floor to Floor Heights: Retail floors 5.4m, office floors 3.5m
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Zaha Hadid Architects appeared first on Dezeen.
In a movie Dezeen filmed at his Golden Lion-winning installation in collaboration with Justin McGuirk and Urban-Think Tank at the Venice Architecture Biennale, architectural photographer Iwan Baan talks about how residents have built their own homes between the columns and floor plates of the unfinished Torre David skyscraper in Caracas.
“It’s basically a whole city they built in there,” he says while describing the homes, shops, church, hair salon (above) and gym the 3000 residents have created, each inventing their own construction techniques to create “a sort of architecture without architects”.
He tells how residents start by putting up curtains and tents (above), then build walls when they get chance, creating a patchwork facade where “every person decorates their place in their own way.” Construction halted before services were installed, including elevators, so taxis drive residents up and down in an adjoining 50-storey car park.
Baan’s photographs will be published in a book on the tower called Torre David: Anarcho Vertical Communities, written by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner of Urban-Think Tank.
Critic Justin McGuirk talks about how the project could set an example for new forms of urban housing in our earlier movie, asking “why should the majority of the poor in countries like Venezuela be forced to live in the slums around the edge of cities if there are empty office towers in the city centres?”
See all our stories about the Venice Architecture Biennale »
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without architects” appeared first on Dezeen.
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