Hasta La Ideas

News: construction has finally begun on a 216-metre skinny skyscraper designed by Foster + Partners for a site next door to Mies van der Rohe‘s Seagram Building in New York.

Foster + Partners first unveiled plans to build the residential tower at 610 Lexington Avenue in 2005, but was stalled by the 2008 recession. Replacing the old YWCA building, the 61-storey structure will sit alongside Mies van der Rohe’s 38-storey Seagram Building and SOM’s 21-storey Lever House, both of which were completed in the 1950s.

The building’s slender shape is intended by the architects to capture “Mies’s philosophy of rationality, simplicity and clarity”, and will feature a sheer glass facade that will stand in contrast to the dark bronze exterior of the Seagram.

“It’s not simply about our new building, but about the composition it creates together with one of the twentieth century’s greatest,” said Foster + Partners architect Chris Connell. “In contrast to Seagram’s dark bronze, our tower will have a pure white, undulating skin. Its proportions are almost impossibly slim and the views will be just incredible.”

A total of 91 apartments will occupy the tower, with many taking up entire floors, while a glazed atrium will connect the residences with a smaller building accommodating a bar and restaurant, as well as a spa and swimming pool facility.

Connell added: “Simplicity of design is often the hardest thing to achieve but in a sophisticated marketplace, people appreciate the timeless beauty that comes from it. Our design philosophy has always extended through the entire building and we will look to create interiors that blend seamlessly with the exterior approach.”

Construction is set to complete by the winter of 2017. Approximately 2000-square-metres of the building will be allocated as commercial space.

Here’s the original project description from Foster + Partners:

610 Lexington Avenue
New York City, USA 2005

This 61-storey residential tower at 610 Lexington Avenue continues the practice’s investigations into the nature of the tall building in New York, exploring the dynamic between the city and its skyline. Located on the corner of Lexington and 53rd Street, it replaces the old YWCA building in Midtown Manhattan. Formally, it responds to the precedent set by two neighbouring twentieth-century Modernist icons – SOM’s 21-storey Lever House of 1952 and Mies van der Rohe’s 38-storey Seagram Building of 1958. In the spirit of Mies’s philosophy of rationality, simplicity and clarity, the tower has a slender, minimalist geometric form, designed to complement these distinguished neighbours.

The entrance is recessed beneath a canopy that sits harmoniously alongside the entrance and pavilion of the Seagram Building. The entry sequence continues on a single plane from the street to reveal a glazed atrium that joins the tower to a smaller building on the right. The smaller building houses a bar and restaurant, a spa and swimming pool, the tower contains lounge areas and apartment levels. From the floor of the atrium, the tower rises up like a soaring vertical blade, the view up creating a sense of drama and reinforcing the connection between the summit and the ground.

Some of the larger apartments occupy the entire floor area of the higher levels. The tower’s slender form creates a narrow floor plate, allowing the interior spaces to be flooded with daylight and creating spectacular views across the city from every side. An innovative glazed skin wraps around the building, concealing the structural elements which are further masked beneath integrated shadow boxes. To preserve the smooth appearance of the facade, opening vents in the glazing flap discreetly inwards. The effect is a sheer envelope that shines in brilliant contrast to the dark bronze of the Seagram building.

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beside Mies’ Seagram Building appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Dutch firm Mecanoo has won the competition to renovate Mies van der Rohe‘s Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library in Washington DC.

Mecanoo, who recently completed the largest public library in Europe, teamed up with local firm Martinez and Johnson Architecture to plan the $150 million overhaul of the city library, which was Mies van der Rohe’s last building and was completed three years after his death in 1972.

The brief asked designers to explore two options for the building: to retain it as a stand-alone library or to extend upwards and convert it into a mixed-use complex. The architects will now work together with library staff to decide the best approach.

“My dream is that people will start to love this building so much that they even bring their books from home to read in the library,” said Mecanoo principal Francine Houben, during the design presentation.

She continued: “We will pay respect to Mies van der Rohe and research what is possible to prepare this building for the library of the future. But most important is bringing out the values of Martin Luther King. My dream is to make this building to reflect his ideals.”

Ten architects were originally shortlisted for the project, including OMA and SOM, and the list was whittled down to three at the end of 2013.

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to be overhauled by Mecanoo appeared first on Dezeen.

The Barcelona Pavilion as you’ve never seen it before: Spanish architect Andrés Jaque has filled Mies van der Rohe’s iconic structure with junk from its basement (+ slideshow).

Alongside domestic cleaning tools such as a vacuum cleaner, Jaque has found a number of items that reveal traces of the building’s history, not just from its reconstruction in the 1980s but dating back to its original opening in 1929.

The Barcelona Pavilion was dismantled in 1930, less than a year after its completion, but was reconstructed over fifty years later using black and white photographs as reference.

The basement area was deliberately created as a hidden storage and maintenance room. Most visitors to the pavilion are unaware of its existence, so Jaque imagined the things inside it to be like ghosts.

For the exhibition, entitled PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society, the architect presents each previously concealed item with a detailed description of its history. Several pieces of broken glass show early attempts to match the shade of the original windows in the Carpet Room, while a stack of cushions reveal how many visitors have sat on the iconic Barcelona chairs, wearing them out so that they need regular replacing.

A display of flags denotes the Federal Republic of Germany, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain and the European Union, all of which have been flown on the Pavilion’s flagpoles at different stages in its history.

Other items on show include a swinging door that had to be replaced after a breakage, salt once used to keep the pool water clear and cracked travertine from the pavilion’s floor.

The exhibition is the latest in a series at the Barcelona Pavilion, following an installation by Japanese architects SANAA and others by Ai Weiwei, Antoni Muntadas and Miralles-Tagliabue. It will remain open to visitors until 27 February.

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Here’s some more information from Andrés Jaque:

Andrés Jaque. Phantom. Mies as Rendered Society Intervention at Mies van der Rohe Pavilion

PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society is an intervention created by Andrés Jaque at the Barcelona Pavilion, resulting from the research which Jaque has carried out over the last two years, at the invitation of the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and Banc Sabadell Foundation. A significant portion of the items which are safeguarded in the basement upon which the Pavilion was built have been distributed at different locations throughout the Pavilion space. This basement is presented as the Pavilion’s ghost (PHANTOM), which had never drawn the attention of people who came to visit and study the Pavilion, but for which Jaque acknowledges an important role in the emergence of his architecture as a social type of construction. The team responsible for reconstruction of the Pavilion of ‘29 thought that the basement would facilitate the control and maintenance of its installations. It also decided that entry should be made difficult so as to avoid its future use as an exhibition space in which Mies and the Pavilion were explained. In the end, the basement has been used to store all of the material witnesses which provide an account of the social fabric involved in a shared project: every day reinterpreting the May morning on which the Pavilion of ‘29 was first opened.

The basement, like the portrait of Dorian Grey, contains everything that makes it possible to see the Pavilion as a monumental collective construction. However, it is concealed so as not to diminish the illusion that the product was received directly from an enlightened hand, that of Mies, who worked in Barcelona in 1929. The basement still houses the phantom public: a reference to the well-known text by Walter Lippman ‘The Phantom Public’ (New Jersey, 1925), from the societies which contribute to creating the Pavilion on a daily basis.

Above: exhibition plan – click above for larger image

As Mies himself pointed out, architecture is built in such a way that what is visible conforms that which is hidden. The Barcelona Pavilion is an arena of confrontation organized in the form of a two-story building, in which two interdependent notions of the political lie in dispute.

Above: exhibition contents – click above for larger image

The well-lit upper floor revives foundational concepts of the political (in which the extraordinary, origins and essences lead the way for that which is common), while the dark basement was constructed using contingencies and provisional agreements. The upper floor is physically transparent, but it conceals the social pacts which occur inside, to provide access to an experience of everyday ‘incalculability’. The lower floor is opaque, yet it is the place where the contracts, experiments and disputes which construct the Pavilion gain transparency. The Pavilion constructs a belief through the way in which its two floors operate: ‘the exceptional emerges in the absence of the ordinary.’ The intervention is based on the suspicion that the recognition and rearticulation of these two spheres can contribute new possibilities in which architecture finds answers to contemporary challenges.

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by Andrés Jaque appeared first on Dezeen.