News: Zaha Hadid has masterplanned a 276-hectare site beside a lagoon in Izmir for Turkey’s bid to host the World Expo 2020.
Located just outside the city centre, the site is part of the Inciralti region designated as a future tourist destination and renowned for its hot springs. Zaha Hadid‘s designs would transform the region into one of Europe’s largest urban recreation areas and it would remain as a public park once the fair was over.
The theme for the fair is entitled New Routes to a Better World/Health for All and will focus on mental and physical well-being as well as the well-being of society and the environment. The site and its surrounding infrastructure are thus designed to be environmentally friendly with a low carbon footprint.
Izmir narrowly missed out to Milan on the bid for the Expo 2015, while its competitors for the 2020 fair are São Paulo in Brazil, Yekaterinburg in Russia, Ayutthaya in Thailand and Dubai. The Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) General Assembly in Paris is expected to reveal the winning city in November.
Ma Yansong of Chinese studio MAD is exhibiting architectural models and sculptures in a Beijing courtyard to illustrate his vision for a future city inspired by nature and shaped by human emotion (+ slideshow).
The exhibition centres around an architectural model of Shanshui City, a new urban development proposed by MAD for Guiyang, China. Inspired by a concept first developed in the 1980s by Chinese scientists, the city is named after the Chinese words for mountains and water and is intended as a model of how cities and their inhabitants can reconnect with the natural world.
In an accompanying book, Ma Yansong explains: “The city of the future development will be shifted from the pursuit of material civilisation to the pursuit of nature. This is what happens after human beings experience industrial civilisation at the expense of the natural environment.”
Ma Yansong’s “Shanshui City” Book Launch and Exhibition Held in Beijing
On June 6, 2013, Ma Yansong’s “Shanshui City” exhibition officially opened; the exhibition is displayed in a Qing Dynasty courtyard garden at Wu Hao in Beijing. More than twenty architectural models and works of art are scattered around the ancient courtyard. Among rocks, screen walls, bamboo groves, pools of water and beneath the sky, the scale of each piece varies and collectively they form a futuristic utopian urban landscape.
The pieces on display range from a fish tank to the conceptual model of the “Shanshui City” which represents a proposal of hundreds of thousands of square metres in size. All the pieces exhibited express the sentiment of humans towards nature and depict the “Shanshui City” as the social ideal of the future. The newly issued book “Shanshui City” – released simultaneously with the exhibition – is an important turning point for Ma Yansong’s ten years of architectural practice and theory.
In the book, he says: “The city of the future development will be shifted from the pursuit of material civilisation to the pursuit of nature. This is what happens after human beings experience industrial civilisation at the expense of the natural environment. The emotional harmonious relationship between nature and man will be rebuilt upon the ‘Shanshui City.'” This small brochure illustrates the young Chinese architect’s ideals concerning futuristic habitation. “It would be a great pity if the vigorous urbanisation could not breed new urban civilisation and ideal.”
Fake Hills
The famous Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen proposed the concept of “Shanshui City” in the 1980s. In view of the emerging large-scale cement construction, he put forward a new model of urban development based on Chinese Shanshui spirit, which was meant to allow people to “stay out of nature and return to nature.”
However, this idealistic urban concept was not put into practice. As the world’s largest manufacturing base, a large number of soulless “shelf cities” appeared in contemporary China due to the lack of cultural spirit.
Qian Xuesen pointed out that modern cities’ worship of power and capital leads to maximisation and utilitarianism. “Buildings in cities should not become living machines. Even the most powerful technology and tools can never endow the city with a soul.”
To Ma Yansong, Shanshui does not just refer to nature; it is also the individual’s emotional response to the surrounding world. “Shanshui City” is a combination of city density, functionality and the artistic conception of natural landscape. It aims at composing a future city that takes human spirit and emotion at their cores.
In the opening forum of “Shanshui City,” a round-table dialogue was held with the participation of Liu Xiaochun, Li Xianting, Bao Pao, Wang Mingxian, Jin Qiuye and Ma Yansong, leading to be, undoubtedly, a historic moment. Perhaps the “Shanshui City” ideology is the very progress that China’s urbanisation can contribute to the world.
Ancien abri durant la seconde guerre mondiale avant de servir de prison ou encore boîte de nuit, ce penthouse de 500m2 tout en béton située dans le quartier de Mitte à Berlin est le lieu de résidence du couple de collectionneurs Christian & Karen Boros et propose un aménagement intérieur impressionnant.
News: Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has revealed plans to raze the existing buildings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and replace them with a new solar-powered campus.
Commissioned by LACMA to bring the museum into the twenty-first century, the architect proposes the demolition of the 1965 building by William L. Pereira and a later extension by Hardy Holzmann Pfeiffer Associates, in favour of a glazed two-storey structure that will sprawl out across the Wilshire Boulevard site in a series of undulating curves.
A large flat roof will encompass the new building. Solar panels will cover its surface, intended to generate more than enough energy to power the building.
“I think we have a great opportunity here,” says Zumthor. “Having a big flat roof exposed to the sky we can produce all the energy we want with solar power.”
Instead of a traditional entrance and staircase, Zumthor imagines the building with various entry points that will enable visitors to find different routes through the galleries. In some places the structure will be raised up on legs, providing ground-level storage for artworks, plus the Bruce Goff-designed Pavilion for Japanese Art is to be retained alongside.
An architectural model of the project is on show at LACMA as part of the exhibition “The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA”, alongside former and unrealised plans for the museum from architects including OMA and Renzo Piano.
Although the architect has been working on the project for over five years, the design is still conceptual and is unlikely to break ground for several years.
Here are more details about the exhibition from LACMA:
The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA June 9–September 15, 2013 Resnick Pavilion, Centre Gallery
As part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. initiative, The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA marks the first time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has explored its own history in the context of an exhibition. The culmination of the exhibition is a proposed design for the future of the eastern side of the museum’s campus as envisioned by Pritzker Prize- winning architect Peter Zumthor introduced to the public for the first time, a project. The exhibition also offers an overview of nine other projects by the acclaimed architect, who has previously built only in Europe.
Exhibition Overview
The Presence of the Past contains approximately 116 objects, including architectural models, plans, photographs, drawings, fossils, film, and ephemera. Many of the historical materials are drawn from LACMA’s archive and have not been on public view in several decades, if ever. The exhibition’s chronology spans some 50,000 years, starting with actual Pleistocene fossils excavated from Hancock Park.
Peter Zumthor designed the exhibition space for The Presence of the Past, which is meant to evoke the architect’s studio, emphasising the process of design and research that continue to shape his evolving thoughts for LACMA’s campus.  Exhibition Organisation
The exhibition is divided into three sections, the first of which examines the museum’s buildings within the complicated history of its Hancock Park site. This section explores the development of LACMA’s campus and explains how financial restrictions, political compromises, and unrealised plans have prevented the museum from achieving both a unified aesthetic and an optimal art-viewing experience. In order to demonstrate the long engagement of artists with Hancock Park, The Presence of the Past includes the work of two scientific illustrators, Charles R. Knight and John L. Ridgway, who documented Pleistocene-era species at Rancho La Brea. These works are on loan from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The Presence of the Past marks the exhibition debut of Ridgway’s evocative watercolours of paleontological specimens which have only been illustrated in books to date. Knight’s renowned fifty-foot mural of the La Brea Tar Pits was installed at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for decades but has been in storage for several years.
The first section also examines the museum’s more recent history, including the work of five prominent architects and firms that have either built on LACMA’s campus or have contributed unrealised plans that nevertheless influenced its architectural evolution: William L. Pereira; Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates; Bruce Goff; Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA); and Renzo Piano. Among other stories, the exhibition details how Pereira’s original vision for the museum was dramatically compromised within a few years of the original buildings’ completion, when surrounding fountains – the driving concept of his “floating museum” – were paved over due to tar seepage.
This section also documents, with photographs, how artists have responded to LACMA’s architecture over the years, including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Asco; as well as seven artists (among them Chris Burden, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, and Barbara Kruger) whose architectonic artworks have shaped the campus in recent years.
The middle section of The Presence of the Past highlights aspects of Peter Zumthor’s architectural career most relevant to his plans for LACMA. Nine Zumthor projects have been selected to elucidate key aspects of the architect’s proposed design for LACMA: his interest in the geologic history of the site, his passion for materials, craftsmanship and the effects of light, and his commitment to an architecture of total integration. These convictions are examined in two films that discuss Zumthor’s architectural approach and methodology: a short documentary by German filmmaker Wim Wenders and a presentation of Zumthor’s past work narrated by actor Julian Sands.
The third and final section of the exhibition presents Zumthor’s preliminary plans to re-envision LACMA’s campus and his ideas for the possibilities of the museum in the twenty-first century. More specifically, Zumthor’s proposed design would replace LACMA’s 1965 William L. Pereira and Associates buildings and the 1986 addition by Hardy Holzmann Pfeiffer Associates while retaining and highlighting the Bruce Goff-designed Pavilion for Japanese Art, completed in 1988. The centrepiece of this section is an over thirty-foot concrete model designed by Zumthor and produced by Atelier Zumthor, positioned at a height intended to simulate looking into the building at street level. The model is complemented by a short film by Lucy Walker featuring a conversation between Zumthor and LACMA’s CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Michael Govan, about their plans for transforming the museum-going experience.
By Sam Bovarnick Roy McMakin opened Big Leaf Manufacturing in 1997 as a workshop for his furniture and architecture firms, but now maintains a level of independence that allows…
This house in Nagahama, Japan, by Tokyo-based Comma Design Office has half of its body raised above the ground to offer protection to a rooftop terrace (+ slideshow).
Positioned between a residential district and a series of rice fields, House in Nagahama has an approximately square plan with a ground-level floor on one side, an elevated floor on the other side and a semi-enclosed courtyard at its centre.
Architects Atsuhiro Koda and Momo Sano of Comma Design Office lifted the south-west corner of the house to screen the roof terrace from neighbouring houses, as well as to create a sheltered driveway.
“The first floor opens to the neighborhood, while the second floor opens to the distant view,” they explain.
Staircases at two corners create a continuous loop through the building. There are no corridors, so residents must pass through each room in turn, including the three bedrooms occupying the upper floor.
The facade is clad with grey fibre-cement boards that are broken up by stripes of golden aluminium. “It picks up various shades of light depending on the weather,” say the architects.
Most interior walls are painted white, while floors are covered with wooden boards that turn to follow the orientation of the outer walls.
Photography is by Takumi Ota, apart from where otherwise indicated.
Here’s some more information from Comma Design Office:
House in Nagahama
The house is located in Nagahama city, Shiga, Japan. Nagahama is an old town. There are more active relationships within the neighborhood community than in Tokyo. On the other hand, Nagahama is modernised with cars and shopping malls along the main roads. It is common in any local cities in Japan.
The site is bounded by the residential area on the south west; the road on the west is mainly used for the pedestrians. There is a peaceful landscape on the north east, where the rice fields and open space spread to Mt. Ibuki. However, there is a busy street on the north. The speed of the traffic is completely different from the slow pace living. There are several gaps in scale and difference in speed within the environment.
We planned a space that holds various relationships within the variety of environment. The space was created by providing a “buffer zone” instated of the space directly opens to a particular subject. The one-storey volume with the courtyard fills up the site; the first floor opens to the neighborhood, while the second floor opens to the distant view. The central unclosed courtyard simultaneously opens up to each surrounding environment. By looking at one’s own house over the courtyard, it looks like a house of others.
The facade is covered with the fibre-cement board accented with gold-stained aluminum, which often conveys the anonymous/neutral impression. However, it picks up various shades of light depending on the weather.
Wooden walls fade from dark red to yellow ochre on the exterior of this house that curves around an oak tree in Sollentuna, Sweden, by architecture and design studio Claesson Koivisto Rune (+ slideshow).
The architects planned a two-storey building with a curved L-shape, creating enough space for the client’s family without disturbing the old tree and without approaching the boundaries of the site too closely.
“The curved L-shape stems completely out of the zoning regulations,” explains Claesson Koivisto Rune. “The actual bend gives the house an interior spatial flow that would have been broken if we’d chosen a sharp corner.”
Timber cladding is arranged vertically around the facade and are painted with different shades of traditional Falu Rödfärg paint to create the gradient.
A double-height living room is positioned at one end of the house and features a large floor-to-ceiling window, while the roof overhead slopes up gradually towards the first floor.
A kitchen and dining room forms the centre of the plan. A dark red bookcase curves around the side of the room, concealing a set of generously proportioned stairs that lead to bedrooms on the first floor.
“With its slow climb, the staircase gives you a feeling of ‘proceeding’ rather than walking between levels,” say the architects.
A study is also located on this upper floor and offers a balcony overlooking the living room.
Marble covers the floors at the house’s entrance, while the bathroom floors and walls are lined with patterned green ceramics designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune for tile brand Marrakech Design.
Read on for more information from Claesson Koivisto Rune:
Fagerström House
The client had split his garden city plot in two and moved the old house to the one. The other had a more embedded position, including a big old oak tree in the middle.
The gross building allowance had to be fully exploited in order to create a large enough home for the growing family. The stipulated distance to the property line of course limited the positioning from the sides, while the desire to preserve the old oak tree blocked the middle.
The curved L-shape stems completely out of the zoning regulations. The actual bend gives the house an interior spatial flow that would have been broken if we’d chosen a sharp corner. The curving of course also makes for an iconic and sculptural exterior – something that the client specifically requested.
Another distinctive feature is the facade colour. Vertical boards are painted in different Falun red shades. An irregular transition from ocher (wide boards) to dark red (narrow boards) happens from the bedroom end to the living room end. The inspiration for the colour mixture was taken from the Swedish children’s book ‘Where’s the Tall Uncle’s Hat?’.
The house has two floors in its tall end. That’s where you find bedrooms etcetera. In the second lower end, the upper floor terminates with a balcony facing the interior living room with its high ceilings. The roof has a diagonal, pitch; from one end to the other and also backwards. This skews the house’s gables but also makes for the constant changing of room geometry as one moves through the house.
The house’s waistline houses the kitchen and, behind a bookcase, stairs. The kitchen thus is very much open while the stairs up to the more private spaces are more to the side. With its slow climb, the stairs gives a you a feeling of ‘proceeding’ rather than walking between levels.
All openings/glazing is carefully placed so that visibility from neighbours is avoided. This also creates a feeling that the house is located in a place far more sparsely populated than the area in reality is. As if it was just the house and the outdoors.
Instead of a larger number of conventional windows, the remaining placements are generously glazed. For example, the living room is completely glazed toward a conservatory. As an outside extension of the living room.
The entrance floor is made of Carrara marble. The tiles are laid perpendicular to the main facade, even where the room bends (like a fan). An integrated blood-red bookcase and staircase flows into an equally blood-red wood floor upstairs. The bathrooms are tiled (floor, walls and ceiling) with different patterns from Marrakech Design’s collection by Claesson Koivisto Rune.
We thought of the house as if it designed itself; that it was neither particularly strange or extreme. But everyone else evidently did not agree. When the house was finished or nearly finished three cars drove into the concrete blocks placed on the street right outside to prevent high speed in the area. Three drivers, three different occasions, who could not keep their eyes on the road.
Italian design studio Archiplan has installed a series of Corten steel, wood and concrete rest areas and information points along the banks of a river in Italy to enhance views of the surrounding countryside (+ slideshow).
The faceted surfaces of this library in the French town of Montauban by Paris architecture studio Colboc Franzen & Associés follow the lines of historical roads bordering the site (+ slideshow).
A former royal road created by Louis XIV influenced the alignment of the second floor, while the ground floor and first floor echo the orientation of a nineteenth century bypass.
There’s a foyer, auditorium, café and exhibition space on the ground floor, a large reading space on the first floor, and reference and work areas above.
Colboc Franzen & Associés twisted the top floor to face a different direction from the levels below, creating a mezzanine that projects through the centre of the building and a tiered seating area in the triangular space that connects it to the floor below.
A large overhang covers the entrance, sheltering visitors from the prevailing winds and noise from the nearby bypass.
Baked clay shingles that reference the brick typically used in the region cover the external walls.
The construction of Montauban’s new multimedia library is the spearhead of an urban redevelopment project in the eastern parts of town. It will form a gateway into the town, an create an identity for neglected neighbourhoods and provide an emblem for the town of Montauban.It also had to reinvent what a library is for. Knowledge is going digital, so what issues have a bearing on this kind of programme? Montauban’s multimedia library gives a spatial context to and a material representation of information and how it is shared.
The land on which the multimedia library is to be built is bordered and intersected by the geometrical lines left by history. The road that cuts across the site is a former royal road laid out by Louis XIV; the old layout and therefore part of the buildings neighbouring the library are governed by this geometry.
The road that runs along the southern side of the site is a 19th-century bypass, whereas the roads and buildings to the north are influenced by the construction of the Chaumes complex between the 1960s and the late 1970s. Designing the project induced us to divide the building into three equal parts – a citizens’ forum, a large reading space called “Imaginary Worlds” that encourages people to explore and meet each other, and reading and working rooms.
By setting the three different parts of the project on top of each other and swivelling the top floor so that it shares a diagonal with two storeys below it and then connecting them by triangulation, we establish an interesting internal space that addresses the project’s needs and takes account of the site’s geometry.
The ground floor and the first floor therefore follow the line of the 19th-century road. The overhang is slightly truncated to echo the bend in the bypass. The second floor is laid out perpendicular to Louis XIV’s road, ensuring that the building and the roof ridge are aligned with the geometry of history. Lastly, the triangulation matches the geometry of the recent urban development in the northern part of the site.
Visitors will therefore approach the library under the northern overhang from the areas where development work is ongoing. The building protects them from the noise from the bypass and from the prevailing southeasterly wind. It also gives architectural expression to the political desire to welcome in local residents, for who have lived through some hard times and whose future development is ongoing.The citizens’ forum on the ground floor is there for use by passers-by and to welcome visitors inside. There is a large foyer that gives the latest news, a literary café, a 120-seater auditorium, and an exhibition room.
It also contains the service entrance and the administrative offices. The central foyer has a direct visual link to the first floor, which houses the “Imaginary Worlds”, a place of exploration and discovery for visitors of all ages. It has tiered reading areas to ensure a visual and spatial connection with the second storey, which is positioned as a mezzanine above the “Imaginary Worlds”, giving it the benefit of natural light when the sun is high in the sky.
Big plate glass windows at the edges of the two flat reading corners frame the stand-out features of the surrounding area, which are the gateway into town, a copse of hundred-year-old trees, and Montauban town centre. The initial geometrical positioning of the building ensures that the interior of the library resonate with the town outside.
Positioning it this way lends structural support to the overhangs. Two main steel girders run along the top floor and carry it, and they are propped up by four posts. Two of these are positioned at the corners of the lower levels, while the other two hold up the points of the overhangs and situated on the sides of the lower floors. This means that there are no carrying walls inside, allowing for extremely flexible usage.
Basement plan
The building is cloaked in a baked clay skin, which is a reference to Montauban’s typical brick exteriors. This skin consists of shingles, which operate as shading devices on some of the ground floor walls. They keep the staff’s offices cool and private. Only the large glass panes of the reading areas pierce the unusual baked clay-coated mass. The use of dyed concrete for the outside areas brings to mind the pebblestones used in the pavements of the old town.
Brief: Subject reference areas, cafeteria, 120-seater auditorium, exhibition room, car parks
Sustainable development: – Green Building project (Targets 1, 4, 8 and 10) – Complies with RT 2005 thermal insulation standards – Use of certified materials – Balanced ventilation with heat recovery – Low noise pollution
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