News: the topping-out ceremony for the Gensler-designed Shanghai Tower, the world’s second-tallest building, takes place in Shanghai tomorrow (Saturday).
The 632 metre-high tower has now reached its full height and is second only to the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, which measures 828 metres.
The topping-out ceremony, to be held at the construction site in the Lujiazui development zone in Shanghai, will be attended by Gensler founder Art Gensler and senior figures from the Chinese government.
The twisting form of the tower is the result of wind-tunnel tests and is designed to reduce wind load by 24% during typhoons.
The 121-storey tower will be divided into nine vertical zones, with retail at the bottom and hotels, cultural facilities and observation decks at the top. The zones in between will contain offices.
Shanghai Tower is due to open in 2014. It forms the centrepiece of the emerging Lujiazui high-rise district in Pudong, which is located on a bend of the Huangpu river opposite downtown Shanghai.
The building already towers over neighbouring buildings including the 421 metre-high, pagoda-shaped Jin Mao Tower by SOM, and the 492 metre-high Shanghai World Financial Center by Kohn Pedersen Fox.
Here’s some text about Shanghai Tower from Gensler:
Shanghai Tower will anchor the city’s Lujiazui district, which has emerged as one of East Asia’s leading financial centers. Designed by a local team of Gensler architects to embody Shanghai’s rich culture, the 632-meter-high mixed-use building will complete the city’s super-highrise precinct. It is the most forward-looking of the three towers symbolizing Shanghai’s past, present, and future. The new tower takes inspiration from Shanghai’s tradition of parks and neighborhoods. Its curved façade and spiraling form symbolize the dynamic emergence of modern China. By incorporating sustainable best practices, Shanghai Tower is at the forefront of a new generation of super-highrise towers, achieving the highest level of performance and offering unprecedented community access.
Gensler’s vision for Shanghai Tower has taken tangible form after completion of the immense foundation. Soil conditions in Shanghai—a clay-based mixture typical of a river delta—meant supporting the tower on 831 rein- forced concrete bore piles sunk deep into the ground. For three days, a small army of workers assembled to complete the marathon, 60-hour continuous concrete pour. When the job was finished, more than 61,000 cubic meters of concrete had been used to create the six-meter-thick mat foundation.
The tower’s scale and complexity have created so many “firsts” for China’s construction industry that more than 100 expert panels have been established to analyze every aspect of the design. Workers are busy building forms for the concrete core and erecting the gigantic composite supercolumns—measuring 5 x 4 meters at the base and reinforced with steel plates that weigh 145 metric tons each—that will provide structural support for the tower. To carry the load of the trans- parent glass skin, Gensler designed an innovative curtain wall that is suspended from the mechanical floors above and stabilized by a system of hoop rings and struts. And the strategic division of the tower into nine vertical zones will supply the lifeblood of the building’s heating, cooling, water, and power throughout with less energy and at lower cost.
Gensler won the Shanghai Tower project in an invited multi-stage competition among leading international architects. What secured the win were the tower’s design and performance, and Gensler’s commitment to China. To refine the tower’s shape, Gensler’s team used a series of wind tunnel tests to simulate the region’s greatest natural force, the typhoon. Results produced a structure and shape that reduce wind loads by 24 percent—ultimately yielding a savings of $58 million in construction costs. A simple structure, public spaces within the double façade, and sky gardens based on Shanghai’s traditional open courtyards will make Shanghai Tower an unrivaled asset for the Lujiazui district.
News: UK architecture watchdog the Architects Registration Board has been described as “crackers” and “pathetic” after the body gave Dezeen 14 days to amend an article describing John Pawson as an architect (+ interview).
In a letter sent today, ARB wrote: “It has been brought to the Board’s attention that the article ‘St Moritz Church by John Pawson’ on your website, www.dezeen.com, refers to John Pawson as an ‘Architect’.”
The letter points out that Pawson – who is highly regarded internationally for his minimalist architecture – is not a registered architect and is therefore not allowed to use the title. ARB has the power to prosecute offenders.
“John Pawson is not a registered architect and therefore should not be described as such,” the letter states. “Could you please confirm in writing within the next fourteen days the steps you will be taking to update this article accordingly.”
Our article started with the sentence: “British architect John Pawson’s minimalist remodelling of a church in Augsburg, Germany, includes slices of onyx over the windows to diffuse light more softly through the space.”
However, since it was Dezeen referring to Pawson as an architect, rather than Pawson himself claiming to be one, we contacted ARB to ask if the body had any power to force us to amend our story.
“We’re quite limited by what we can do,” admitted ARB professional standards administrator Sarah Loukes, who wrote the letter. “It’s not like we’re going to take you to court or anything.”
But Loukes claimed it was “in the public interest” for Dezeen to use an alternative description for Pawson, and suggested “architectural consultant”.
Loukes admitted that, since Pawson’s studio does employ at least one registered architect, we could use the phrase “architects John Pawson” to describe Pawson’s company, but not “architect John Pawson” to describe Pawson as an individual.
Pawson studied at the Architectural Association in London but did not complete the lengthly period of study required to qualify as an architect – a prerequisite for being allowed to register with ARB.
“It’s a bit crackers,” said Pawson’s office manager Chloe Hanson. “He never finished his studies. That’s why he’s not allowed to say he’s an architect.”
“The whole thing is a bloody joke,” said Amanda Baillieu, editor of UK architecture magazine Building Design. “He’s as much an architect as Richard Rogers. Everyone knows that.”
Last year ARB apologised to Baillieu for writing to her to say that her publication could not describe world-famous architects Renzo Piano and Daniel Libeskind as architects, since they were not registered in the UK.
“All they can do is run around chasing after websites for calling people architects rather than going after the big firms who don’t pay their staff, who behave incompetently, or who bring the profession into disrepute,” Baillieu added. “It’s pathetic.”
The ARB was established 1997 to regulate the profession, following the introduction of new legislation protecting the title of “architect” in the UK. The legislation prohibits anyone from using the title “architect” in business or practice unless they are registered with ARB.
Here’s the transcript of the interview between Dezeen editor Rose Etherington and ARB professional standards administrator Sarah Loukes:
Rose Etherington: Why is it that we can’t refer to John Pawson as an architect?
Sarah Loukes: It’s because we work in accordance with the Architects’ Act 1997 and within that act – it’s actually section 20 of that act – it specifically protects the title “architect” and so in order for a person to use that title they need to be registered with us at the ARB.
So it’s protected by law, but the act as I think I mentioned in my letter is very specific and it does only protect “architect/architects” whereas the derivatives “architecture” and “architectural” are not protected under the act so we don’t have jurisdiction over those.
Rose Etherington: How should we refer to John Pawson in that case?
Sarah Loukes: I would suggest an “architectural consultant”. As long as it doesn’t specifically refer to “architect” then that’s fine – there’s nothing illegal there.
Rose Etherington: Is his practice registered, or is the problem with him as an individual?
Sarah Loukes: We register the individual so as far as I’m aware, I don’t think his practice is registered… Can I just get my files out if that’s all right? One moment.
I’ve had a look and I’ve just searched. As I say it’s generally the individuals who register under the act so I’ve just done a search generally for the practice and the name of John Pawson and it does bring up a Mr Benjamin Collins so actually you are right in the sense of the practice can be called architects because there is a registered individual.
[The issue] would be specifically related to [John Pawson] being called an architect or referred to as an architect.
Rose Etherington: The practice itself is called John Pawson – so we could say “architects John Pawson have completed a church” but we couldn’t say “architect John Pawson has completed a church”?
Sarah Loukes: That’s it. If that makes sense. It’s quite specific in what we can allow and can’t allow. But as I say, because I’ve located this Mr Benjamin Collins who is registered at the practice, in that sense reference can be made to “architects” as the practice and not as Mr John Pawson being an architect individually.
Rose Etherington: So we could say “architects John Pawson” even though there’s only one registered architect there?
Sarah Loukes: Yeah.
Rose Etherington: Does it matter if the person who’s a registered architect worked on the project we’re referring to?
Sarah Loukes: Not essentially, no. He’s essentially the architect at the practice so it allows him to use this title and the practice be called architects.
That would be okay because there isn’t any specific regulation over the plural or anything like that with regards to “architect/architects”. And yes, that would be fine in that context.
Rose Etherington: I’ve had a careful look at the PDF guidance you sent over, but in this case it’s not John Pawson calling himself an architect, it’s us as a media organisation.
Sarah Loukes: Quite right and that’s why essentially I’ve gone direct to you because it’s not him actively doing it himself but it is still an inaccurate way of describing him because he isn’t registered with us and he’s not an architect. So in that sense that’s why I’ve gone directly to yourselves and not to him individually.
Rose Etherington: So is it him that’s responsible for the way in which he’s talked about?
Sarah Loukes: Not essentially when it comes to on your website or on a publication because he’s not actively holding himself out as an architect himself. it’s slightly different if you see what I mean. But it’s still our responsibility to contact the publication or writer to advise you that that description is inaccurate.
Rose Etherington: Is there any chance that because of what we’ve written John Pawson will be in any trouble?
Sarah Loukes: No, hence why I’ve contacted you directly but we wouldn’t contact him.
Rose Etherington: If we didn’t amend the article, what would then happen?
Sarah Loukes: Well we’re quite limited by what we can do to be honest. It’s not like we’re going to take you to court or anything like that. But we would like to say that in the public interest it would be better to describe him as an alternative. Because in the way that it is, it’s kind of misleading because he’s not an architect.
Rose Etherington: When you say it’s not in the public interest, what do you mean by that?
Sarah Loukes: Because he’s not registered with us, he doesn’t fall under our jurisdiction and as we’re the regulator and, you know, architects are held to account and have to adhere to our code of conduct and regulations and guidance that we set out.
So when a person isn’t an architect they don’t fall under our jurisdiction and there’s not that protection there for the public.
Rose Etherington: So if John Pawson was going around calling himself an architect you could prosecute him but you don’t actually have the power to do that to publication?
Sarah Loukes: No, it couldn’t be dealt with in the same way.
Rose Etherington: Would it make a difference it we weren’t based in the UK?
Sarah Loukes: I think it does. The fact that if you’re based in the UK then there is that onus that if it is a UK-based business or publication it should adhere to the regulations of the act, whereas if it was outside of the UK it wouldn’t fall under our jurisdiction and legality.
Rose Etherington: But there’s not any legal reason why we need to comply anyway?
Sarah Loukes: No it’s very difficult for me to say you have to do this. But it’s our job to inform publications and websites of the correct way of describing the individual because it’s a protected title.
So we try and do our best to ensure that the individuals are described in as accurate a way as possible. Hence why we contact you directly if something like this is brought to our attention.
Rose Etherington: How would someone qualify to be called an architect under your regulations?
Sarah Loukes: They have to go through a process of registration with us. I couldn’t give you all the details myself because it actually falls under my registration team’s criteria but it is roughly around seven years of education and training to actually become eligible to register with us at the ARB.
As far at I’m aware there’s Part I, II, III and the final part is an exam here in order for the individual to pass and to enable them to register.
Rose Etherington: Is there a fee?
Sarah Loukes: The fee itself I’m not 100% sure. When we said about the examination, I know it’s over £1000 but when the individual is eligible to register with us there is an annual retention fee. This year it’s £98.50 so that’s what’s required for them to stay on the register.
Rose Etherington: Can people leave and come back?
Sarah Loukes: Yes you can come off the register and come back on at any point but there is a difference if you come back on within two years they don’t have to provide evidence of continuous professional envelopment, whereas if it’s over that two year period they have to show evidence of that.
Rose Etherington: Has John Pawson ever been registered with the ARB?
Sarah Loukes: It doesn’t look like he has. There are three individuals by the name of Pawson and I would be able to see if there was someone previously registered.
Spanish architects Taller Básico de Arquitectura hoisted this pair of concrete laboratories in northern Spain onto red metal stilts (+ slideshow).
Taller Básico de Arquitectura used the red structures to create flat levels for the box-shaped labs, which sit on a gently sloping site at a technology park in Vitoria, close to Bilbao.
Two beams cross beneath each block so the columns sit under the middle of each external wall. Each wall features a single square window or doorway.
The square boxes sit at a slight angle to one another, almost touching but connected by a short bridge that’s glazed on the sides and above.
The first block contains two small rooms and places to sit, while the second is a single open research space filled with work benches.
Black window frames stand out against the clinical white interior.
Taller Básico de Arquitectura have also designed a university complex in Zaragoza with a facade of overlapping white scales.
Here’s some additional information from the architects:
Biokilab Laboratories
Two boxes in the air and a structure as architecture
The technologic Park of Vitoria colonises a little bit of nature. The quality of the site and its steepness make us question where to build. Two boxes made from air rise above the slope. The structure become architecture carries on its shoulders these boxes, showing a new plane.
We investigate new ways of entering new places. Our place appears on a new level, determined by a four-legged and colourful structure. Two hollow boxes of concrete inhabit this new place on the structure. The whole complex in a permanent flight reveals a new gravity.
Quadruped anatomies
The metallic structure that raises the boxes in the air is a quadruped structure. Its two horizontal elements form a cross inscribed in the square floor of the boxes. The sides of these floors measure twelve and thirteen meters respectively. The horizontal beams where the boxes rest avoid any interlocking.
Consequently, the structure is visible in its entirety. The ends of the beams join vertical elements, which become the legs of this quadruped anatomy. Legs are as wide as beams, managing a continuity that makes all the pieces be understood as a unique element. Different lengths of the legs let the slope remain unaltered.
The box is thought as a second structure that replaces walls with beams and roofs with double slabs. The vertical faces of the box are beams as high as the box. These wall-beams have only one hole, defined by the maximum dimensions that let the beams work properly. Outside, the concrete structure is visible on all faces of the box.
Inside, plasterboards cover the structure. The window frame, drawn as a single line, stays hidden between both sheets. The gap between sheets, both in walls and slabs, contains all building systems, as plumbing, electricity, voice and data. This net of systems solves the flexibility needed by the laboratory for its continuous transformation.
Opinion: in this week’s column, Sam Jacob argues against the resurrection of Crystal Palace in London and urges us to “resist the pull of loss and nostalgia”.
When the dead return, the world of the living is thrown into turmoil, as we’ve just seen in French TV show The Returned that’s been spooking out British audiences for the last eight weeks. In The Returned, the undead are not zombies out to eat your brain, but far more puzzling entities. They are confused themselves at their return to the living.
The blurry distinction between states of being alive, dead and undead might be tropes of supernatural dramas and horror films, but their questions are part and parcel of the everyday landscape of architecture and cities.
The original Crystal Palace was built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. Designed by Joseph Paxton, it was a huge iron and steel structure, itself a technological triumph of the Victorian age. It housed a vast assemblage of the bounty and riches of imperial Britain and the marvels it could produce. After the exhibition ended, its contents were distributed to seed the museums of Exhibition Road.
The structure itself was dismantled, transported and rebuilt in Sydenham where it failed to ever really settle. Despite boasting that it hosted the world’s first cat show, visitor numbers were poor. Its decline was dramatically ended when it burnt to the ground in 1936. The architecture gone, its presence remains in the huge plinth that sits at the top of the park and the name bequeathed both to the area and its football team. The building’s absence, even as its name is remembered, is ever present.
Despite not being here, the Crystal Palace remains highly significant architecturally. Crystal Palace exists as a foundation myth for a certain idea of British architecture. High-tech claimed it as an inheritance, as part of the tradition of glass-and-steel engineering that eventually became the Centre Pompidou, the Lloyds building and so on.
It also gave us another architectural thread that winds through Modernism: it was in the Crystal Palace that German architect Gottfried Semper encountered the structure that was to become his primitive hut. A colonial reconstruction of a native hut, in other words, acted as his cypher for the essential. That it should take the apogee of the industrial revolution – the immense wealth and reach of high colonialism – to invent this primitivism is odd in itself. Though of course, the idea of the primitive can only be conceived from a position of un-primitivism.
So what of the idea to reconstruct the Crystal Palace? Its own history of building and rebuilding on a different site suggests it might be a more likely subject than many for this treatment, but perhaps Semper’s Primitive Hut inside a crystalline industrialised structure might make us think twice.
Any return – of history, primitiveness or anything buried in the past – can only be as perplexing as the undead are to the living. What would you do with your reanimated great great great great grandma? And what would she do in the here and now, brought back without her consent into the present, only to die again?
Even something as outwardly simple as food: think of all those artisanal breads, of peasant food remade as luxury dining on heirloom fruit and veg. These returned artefacts are only possible because of a highly complex, super-refined culture. When these things return to us, they return in a drastically altered form. Even if they are entirely the same in ingredients, shape, size, texture and so on, they are completely different. Re-animation can’t bring back the original but rather invents a new form of the present.
These plans for the Crystal Palace are not unique. In fact, we are surrounded by zombie architecture, re-animated Frankenstein’s monsters: Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, the Dresden Frauenkirche, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House, to name but a few. The Euston Arch and The Skylon are just other examples of the past that threatens to resurface in the present.
The state that this returned architecture takes is an idealised version of itself. The Villa Savoye, for example, spent very little time as the house it was originally intended to be: it was a cow shed for longer and a derelict building for even longer. That we choose to return it to an imaginary state is hardly an innocent decision. Rather, it’s one loaded with a contemporary idea of what that particular building and architecture in general is. We remake history in our own image.
Buildings exist in a time as well as space. They rot, crumble, break and leak. They require constant repair. In our quest for the authenticity of historic architecture, we often find ourselves running into Theseus’s paradox. It runs like this: on his return to Athens, the hero’s ship was placed in dry dock as a monument and in seaworthy condition. Over time, pieces of the boat were replaced as it rotted. At a certain point, the paradox emerged: if none of the original material remained, was this still Theseus’s boat? As it is for classical philosophers, so it is for contemporary conservationists. Where, in other words, does architectural or historical authenticity reside?
There is already a replica of the Crystal Palace, but in Dallas, not south London. It houses a technology office and data centre and its lobby contains a reproduction of the Crystal Fountain. The Infomart, as it is called, was honoured with a visit in 1986 by that renowned British architecture expert Prince Charles. In promotional material, the Infomart’s developer was quoted with what must be some kind of garbled and/or fabricated anointment: “England’s parliament declared the Infomart official successor to the Crystal Palace.” This of course reveals how history itself can be made a commodity. The statement shows how the Infomart’s developer attempts to fold the aura of the original Crystal Palace into its spec development.
Behind the innocent claims of honouring the past and righting wrongs done unto culture by acts of god or the wrecking ball, there is always another agenda. History acts as a convenient alibi for contemporary motivations. Though it presents itself as an innocent act, philanthropic even, we should remember Churchill saying that history is written by the victors. History, in other words, is not something that happened in the past but a function of contemporary power. Reanimating its form in the present is equally a function of contemporary power.
We may mourn the past. We may feel intense sorrow at the gaping voids left in the present by things that have vanished, but we should resist the pull of these feelings of loss and nostalgia. The Crystal Palace functions perfectly well in its absence (perhaps even more so than if it were still here). Its return as a ghost, zombie or otherwise undead form of architecture should be seen for what it is: a ghoulish pull on our tender heartstrings in the service of large scale development. Its construction, like the Infomart in its cheap cartooning of history, would only make our sense of loss greater.
Faceted aluminium panels rise from the ground to form this pipe-shaped pavilion at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France by architects Jakob + MacFarlane (+ slideshow).
Jakob + MacFarlane created the geometry of The Turbulences by extruding grids created across FRAC art centre‘s courtyard by the existing buildings in the public. The faceted surfaces form tubes topped with glass panels and entrances are inserted under raised parts of the undulations.
The new pavilion was designed as a reception area to funnel visitors towards the exhibitions housed in the main buildings. A tubular metal structure supports the secondary system of panels that cover the building.
Pre-fabricated concrete slabs clad the lower portion as a continuation of the courtyard surface. These are replaced by aluminium panels higher up, some of which are perforated and light up with LEDs at night.
The FRAC Centre sent us the following information:
Jakob + MacFarlane have brought to the fore an emerging dynamic form based on the parametric deformation and the extrusion of the grids of the existing buildings. As a strong architectural signal interacting with its context, this fluid, hybrid structure develop likes three glass and metal excrescences in the inner courtyard, in the very heart of the Subsistances.
The principle of emergence is extended to the immediate surroundings: the courtyard is treated like a public place, a topographical surface which forms the link between all the buildings and accommodate the Frac Centre programme. This surface goes hand in hand with the natural differences in level of the site towards the building’s entrance, reinforces the visual dynamics of the Turbulences and stretches away towards the city in a movement of organic expansion.
The destruction of a main building and the surrounding wall on Boulevard Rocheplatte has made it possible to greatly open up the new architectural complex to the city. Thanks to its new urban façade, the Frac Centre is connected to the cultural urban network of Orléans, and the inner courtyard has been turned into nothing less than a square. The new architectural presence has become the point of gravity of the Subsistances site, a new structure, and a new geometry. The architectural extension comes powerfully across through its prototypical dimension, which echoes the identity of the Frac Centre and its collection.
The glass and steel excrescences of the Turbulences house a public reception area and organize the flow of visitors towards the exhibition areas, situated in the existing main buildings.
The critical dimension of the work, conveyed by its structural complexity, is transcribed on all the project’s scales. The tubular metal structure, reinforced by a secondary structure supporting the exterior covering panels (aluminium panels, either solid or perforated) and the interior panels (made of wood), is formed by unusual and unique elements. The lower parts of the Turbulences are clad with prefabricated concrete panels, which provide the continuity of the building with the courtyard. The apparent disjunction between the two architectural orders is offset by the impression of emergence given by the Turbulences.
The light, prefabricated structure of the Turbulences has been entirely designed using digital tools. All the building trades involved worked on the basis of one and the same modelling file. The structures were subject to a trial assembly in the factory where the tubes were welded, before the permanent on-site assembly.
In this project, the at once conceptual and surgical approach to the urban fabric developed by Jakob + MacFarlane redefines the site in order to incorporate in it new points of equilibrium, “shifting” the architecture and offering contemporary art a dynamic and evolving image.
The architectural intervention, with its complex, facetted geometry, stands out against the symmetry and sobriety of the Subsistances site whose period structures and materials are left visible.
As “living” architecture permeable to urban ebbs and flows, the Turbulences – Frac Centre thus becomes the emblem of a place devoted to experimentation in all its forms, to the hybridization of disciplines, and to architectural changes occurring in the digital age.
The Jakob + MacFarlane extension, conceived like a graft on the existing buildings, introduces a principle of interaction with the urban environment activated by a “skin of light” on the Turbulences, designed by the artists’ duo Electronic Shadow (Niziha Mestaoui and Yacine Aït Kaci), the associate artist and joint winner of the competition.
Their proposal consists in covering a part of the Turbulences, giving onto the boulevard, with several hundred diodes, thus introducing a “media façade”, a dynamic interface between the building and the urban space. Using the construction lines of the Turbulences, the points of light become denser, passing from point to line, line to surface, surface to volume, and volume to image. This interactive skin of light, integrated in the building like a lattice-work moucharaby, will function in real time and develop a state of “resonance” with its environment, based on information coming, for example, from climatic data (daylight, wind, etc.) as well as animated image scenarios devised by the artists.
The building’s surface will thus be informed by flows of information, transcribing them as light-images. These luminous signs, the result of a computer programme, implement the merger of image and matter, turning The Turbulencess into “immaterial architecture”.
The Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century Architecture and The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture are inspiring sourcebooks for the ages, but as with many authoritative, lushly illustrated volumes, it is impossible to fit them in one’s pocket, unless one has very special pants. Fear not, culture-conscious traveler, because Phaidon has just released The Phaidon Architecture Travel Guide App, an iPhone- or iPad-ready resource that’s yours for $3.99 from the iTunes store. With some 1,500 projects from 840 architectural practices (cherrypicked from both atlases), the app can be browsed by location, project, practice, and building type. Plus, the bookmarking options make it easy to create a “To See” list of architecture marvels around the globe. And travelers, take heart: no Wi-Fi or 3G is required to run the app.
Got an app we should know about? Drop us a line at unbeige [at] mediabistro.com
These hyper-realistic computer renderings show a forthcoming concrete and glass house in Christchurch, England, designed by London-based Henry Goss Architects (+ slideshow).
Henry Goss Architects designed Staithe End for a site adjacent to a listed building and in a conservation area close to Christchurch harbour on England’s south coast, while the images were produced by sister company Goss Visualisations.
The house will sit right up against the listed property and border another building at a slight angle on the other side, so terraces and garden will also be angled to compensate.
An open plan living, dining and kitchen space will occupy the ground floor, leading out to the series of terraces linked by external staircases.
Two of the four bedrooms including the master suite will be located in the basement, across a sunken gravel courtyard from an artist’s studio topped with a green roof.
The other two bedrooms will be on the top floor, along with another living space at the back with a balcony overlooking the harbour and nearby Hengistbury Head Nature Reserve.
This steel-framed upper storey is to be clad with vertical strips of local larch on the street facade and will sit on top of the concrete ground and basement levels. Strips of glazing will separate these floors and the house next door.
“Pretty interesting job, this one, as the chances of it getting planning [permission] were virtually nil due to the historic environment, listed building, coastal flooding etc,” writes architect Henry Goss.” Somehow we got it through by a narrow margin at comity with full endorsement from the local planning authority”.
Construction is due to start later this year and the architects hope to complete the project in Autumn 2014.
This four bed private house on the banks of Christchurch Harbour represents a real coup and a major precedent for high quality contemporary architecture in the most sensitive of historic environments. Planning approval was gained largely due to the unusually progressive and enlightened planning authority in Christchurch, Dorset who champion all high quality design, contemporary or otherwise.
Sectional perspective
The dwelling is located in the centre of an important conservation area and adjoined to a listed building, part of which requires demolition to make way for the development. The uncompromising contemporary nature of the design was seen by the LPA as a positive aspect as it seeks to distinguish itself from the listed building thus providing a strong contrast in design that compliments and emphasises the design qualities of each.
Further constraints came in the form of coastal flooding. The solution was to treat the entire site as a tanked excavation including basement, courtyards and terraces which fall below the 4m AOD set by the Environment Agency.
A lightweight steel and glass box floats atop the exposed concrete ground work providing views across the harbour to Hengistbury Head Nature Reserve.
Natural light is brought into all parts of the plan at basement, ground and first floor by careful manipulation of levels and openings down the long narrow site. The result is a development which has an ambiguous relationship between inside and out, between built form and nature.
I recently saw the Tom Cruise flick Oblivion, which people apparently hated; but one thing I really dug was the shot you see above. Director Joseph Kosinski, depicting New York City in the year 2017, gives us our first glimpse of the completed One World Trade Center. The movie was released in April of this year, but as we saw earlier, in reality it wasn’t even until May that the spire was raised. And just this morning, I looked up to see the real deal still has glasswork to be done, and still has a construction elevator running up its side. Oblivion was the first convincing depiction I’d seen of the completed structure.
Kosinksi is an architect by training, and until recently was still teaching 3D modeling as an adjunct assistant prof at Columbia, so it’s no surprise that he took the time to get One WTC right. (Amusingly, had he swung the camera just a bit to the left in the shot above, we’d see Gehry’s ugly 8 Spruce Street; thankfully the framing precludes it, and I wonder if it was intentional.) But even directors with no architectural background are in a prime position to educate, or at least familiarize, the general public with different styles of architecture. With that in mind Architizer’s Zachary Edelson has written “A Brief History Of Modern Architecture Through Movies,” where he ticks off a list of flicks with such iconic backdrops that any layperson who’s seen them can get an instant frame of reference for what Art Deco, Art Nouveau or Modernism looks like.
By necessity Nelson’s list is far from complete, but it makes me wonder what films you guys would use to describe not just architecture, but entire design movements to laypeople. I first saw Blade Runner, with Deckard chilling out in the Ennis House, before I even knew who Frank Lloyd Wright was.
British architect John Pawson’s minimalist remodelling of a church in Augsburg, Germany, includes slices of onyx over the windows to diffuse light more softly through the space.
Slices of finely veined translucent white stone were laminated to glass and installed in the choir windows. “The effect of this is to generate the optimum light conditions, screening out direct sunlight and bathing the space in a haze of diffused luminescence,” John Pawson architects explained.
The apse is the brightest space in the church, followed by the nave where the altar sits on a new podium. Lighting in the side aisles is more subdued, where clerestory windows and carved sculptures of the apostles maintain links to the church’s Baroque past.
At night the illumination comes from LED lights concealed in the choir apse, at the base of columns in the nave and in rings round the cupola domes overhead.
The floor and altar are finished in Portuguese limestone, while the dark stained wood of the pews, choir stalls and organ provides a strong contrast with the otherwise pure white interior.
The St Moritz Church was founded nearly 1000 years ago and has been transformed many times over by fire, changes in religious practice and bombing. After the Second World War only the baroque outer walls remained and the church was rebuilt by German architect Dominikus Böhm in a simplified post-war style.
“The work has involved the meticulous paring away of selected elements of the church’s complex fabric and the relocation of certain artefacts to achieve a clearer visual field,” said the architects.
John Pawson is celebrated for his minimalist architecture and the firm was asked to renovate the church after the parish councillors visited his Novy Dvur monastery in the Czech Republic.
The church of St Moritz has been through many changes since its foundation nearly a thousand years ago. Devastating fires, changes in liturgical practice, aesthetic evolution and wartime bombing have each left their mark on the fabric of the building. The purpose of this latest intervention has been to retune the existing architecture, from aesthetic, functional and liturgical perspectives, with considerations of sacred atmosphere always at the heart of the project.
The work has involved the meticulous paring away of selected elements of the church’s complex fabric and the relocation of certain artefacts to achieve a clearer visual field. Drawing on existing forms and elements of vocabulary, an architectural language has evolved that is recognisable in subtle ways as something new, yet has no jarring foreign elements.
St Moritz is laid out according to the clear linear principles of a Wegekirche and this spatial character, with its strong forward focus on the apse, is retained and reinforced in the current re-ordering, with the eye purposefully drawn through the nave to the apse, which is designed as a room of light, heralded by the Baroque sculptor Georg Petel’s figure of Christus Salvator.
A key gesture of the intervention is the quiet transformation of the apse windows, which must function architecturally as a source of light and liturgically as an expression of the threshold to transcendence. The existing glass is replaced with thin slices of onyx. The effect of this is to generate the optimum light conditions, screening out direct sunlight and bathing the space in a haze of diffused luminescence.
The treatment of the apse windows represents the culmination of a wider strategy for light, whose aim is to achieve a clear distribution of light, with the apse as the brightest area in the church. After the apse, the area of the nave where the liturgy is performed is brightest, whilst the side-aisles revert to more subdued light conditions. The Baroque clerestory windows, relieved of their former function of illuminating the artwork and decoration, now serve as indirect sources of light.
In line with the requirements of the Second Vatican Council, the altar is relocated to a newly created island in the nave, bringing the liturgy closer to the congregation and making it possible to site the principal liturgical landmarks – the altar, the ambo and the sedilia – on a single level.
Project: interior remodelling, St Moritz Church Location: Augsburg, Germany Client: Diocese of St Moritz Project architects: Jan Hobel, Reginald Verspreeuwen Completion: April 2013
News: construction of China’s 838 metre-high Sky City tower has stalled just days after it began amid safety fears and a lack of necessary government approval.
Chinese media channel Xinhua news has reported that the construction of the world’s tallest building, set for Changsha in central China, is postponed until the project passes relevant safety examinations and gains building permits.
Authorities in the Wancheng District of Changsha are still examining the building’s structure and firefighting facilities, reported Chinese state publication The Global Times, adding that applications for official licenses are still underway.
This news comes only days after a ground-breaking ceremony was held at the site.
As previously reported on Dezeen, construction firm Broad Sustainable Building Technology plans to erect the tower using pre-fabricated components that slot together like a Meccano toy.
When completed the steel skyscraper will be taller than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and include schools, a hospital, office facilities, 17 helipads and apartments for over 30,000 people.
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