Hasta La Ideas

World Architecture Festival 2012: in the next movie from our series running up to this year’s World Architecture Festival, programme director Paul Finch tells us how the jury were ”bowled over” by the hand-constructed Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre by Peter Rich Architects, winner of the festival’s World Building of the Year award in 2009.

Finch explains how indigenous building techniques had to be retaught to the South African community that built the centre because they were more familiar with modern construction. See our original story about the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre here.

This year’s World Architecture Festival will take place in Singapore from 3-5 October and will be the event’s fifth year.

Dezeen is media partner for World Architecture Festival 2012 and readers can save 25% on the early rate cost of entering the WAF awards. Simply enter MPVOUCH25 in the VIP code box when registering to enter online (see voucher above for more details).

Here’s some info about WAF:

World Architecture Festival is the world’s largest live architecture festival and awards programme.

Now in its fifth year, the World Architecture Festival has attracted over 8000 attendees to date. 2012 is a landmark year for the Festival, heralding our relocation to the Asian gateway and design hub, Singapore. WAF’s move brings with it unparalleled opportunities for east to meet west and for you to obtain inspiration, develop your global network and plan new exciting projects.

In 2011 over 400 architects from across the globe were shortlisted and battled for a WAF award. The festival saw over 30 international practices become winners of a revered WAF yellow W trophy.

To be at the centre of all WAF has to offer, and that includes global PR, doors opening, new connections and a celebration of your fervour for the power of life changing architecture, you need to enter the projects that you want to shout to the world about. You have less than six weeks to enter, so start yours today.

The World Architecture Festival Awards offers you multiple opportunities to showcase your best work and most exciting ideas to the world, including the most influential names in the design and development community. All you have to do is decide which projects will be representing your practice at the world’s largest, live architectural awards programme and festival.

There are 30 categories to choose from and projects can be completed buildings, future projects, landscape projects, masterplans or interiors. You can enter a project into more than one category (which will of course increase your chances of walking away with that rather handsome WAF award).

With 35 awards and prizes covering 100+ different building types, World Architecture Festival is your opportunity to promote your latest completed building, interior, landscape or masterplan globally.

How to enter the WAF Awards:

Entering the World Architecture Festival awards is easy. All entries must be submitted through our website www.worldarchitecturefestival.com

Just follow these simple steps:

»Open your WAF account or if you have entered WAF previously just log onto your existing account – log in here.
»Choose the section and category that you want to enter – remember you can enter a project into more than one category.
»Tell us what project you are entering
»Pay for your entry
»Create your online entry by adding images for the project, your details, a description and any professional credits – all entries must be completed by 30th June 2012.

Rem Koolhaas led OMA’s recently completed scenography project for Teatro Greco, or the Syracuse Greek Theatre, a historical landmark in Italy that dates back to the 5th century BCE. Every summer the theatre stages three classic plays, and for this season’s cycle they commissioned OMA to design a temporary stage that will remain up for Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound (directed by Claudio Longhi), Euripides’ Bacchae (dir. Antonio Calenda) and Aristophane’s The Birds (dir. Roberta Torre).

The stage—aluminum scaffolding clad with multilayer marine plywood—was designed in three parts, the Ring, the Machine and the Raft. The Raft, the name for the circular stage, “reimagines the orchestra space as a modern thymele, the altar that in ancient times was dedicated to Dionysian rites.” The Ring is a suspended walkway that makes a half circle around the stage and backstage area, providing actors with different ways to enter a scene. The Machine is the backdrop, which can be altered to suit different productions. A sloping circular platform seven meters high, it’s the mirror image of the stage. It can rotate, “symbolizing the passage of thirteen centuries during Prometheus’s torture; Split down the middle, it can also be opened, allowing the entrance of the actors, and symbolizing dramatic events like the Prometheus being swallowed in the bowels of the earth.”

(more…)

Patchy timber shields the glazed upper storeys of this extension to a historic town hall in southern Spain by architects Viar Estudio.

The extension creates a new entrance courtyard at the side of the original 16th Century town hall, a former prison decorated in the Plateresque style in the centre of the World Heritage town of Baeza.

Above the glazed doors to the extension, an extended first floor cantilevers outwards to shelter arriving visitors.

This first floor also bridges across from the rear of the building to connect with a second block just behind.

This new four-storey building has the same timber shades across its extruded windows and features a wooden staircase that ascends in front of a shimmering golden wall.

The interior walls of the original town hall remain exposed and intact, so the junctions between new and old are highlighted.

See more recent projects from Spain here, including an outdoor swimming pool and a concrete sculpture museum.

Photography is by Fernando Alda and you can see more pictures of this project on his website.

Here’s some more information from Viar Estudio:

The Baeza Township Project has been read as a unit in a duration, as a constant change process where the new design has been thought as an additional stratum, as the last sediment layer in time the building has created. The thought about the temporal process of architecture is fundamental.

Historical architecture is based on overlays, accumulating many different pasts in what could be called the «durée» of architecture.

Henri Bergson said that the ultimate reality is not the being, nor the changing being, but the continuous process of change which he called «durée» or duration.

Architecture has a way of being in time, a becoming that lasts, a change that is substance on its own.

The rythm of the duration and of the successive changes connotes a dissolution process, subtraction, addition, mutation or a change of uses that befalls all architectural ensembles through time.

The Baeza Township Project is entwined within the concept of architectural «durée».

It is designed thinking about the additive condition of the site, in the quality of change as the substance of the project and as a part of the character of the building in time.

World Architecture Festival 2012: in our second movie celebrating this year’s World Architecture Festival in Singapore from 3-5 October, WAF programme director Paul Finch explains why the super-jury headed by architect Robert Stern selected the Universita Luigi Bocconi by Grafton Architects as World Building of the Year 2008 in the festival’s inaugural year.

The winning project, a university faculty building in Milan, beat Opera House Oslo by Norwegian architects Snøhetta (below) to the prize and Finch explains why the Irish architects’ building eventually won the super-jury over. See our stories about Universita Luigi Bocconi by Grafton Architects and Opera House Oslo by Snøhetta.

The first World Architecture Festival was held in Barcelona in 2008 and this year’s event in Singapore will be the festival’s fifth year.

Dezeen is media partner for World Architecture Festival 2012 and readers can save 25% on the early rate cost of entering the WAF awards. Simply enter MPVOUCH25 in the VIP code box when registering to enter online (see voucher above for more details).

Here’s some info about WAF:

World Architecture Festival is the world’s largest live architecture festival and awards programme.

Now in its fifth year, the World Architecture Festival has attracted over 8000 attendees to date. 2012 is a landmark year for the Festival, heralding our relocation to the Asian gateway and design hub, Singapore. WAF’s move brings with it unparalleled opportunities for east to meet west and for you to obtain inspiration, develop your global network and plan new exciting projects.

In 2011 over 400 architects from across the globe were shortlisted and battled for a WAF award. The festival saw over 30 international practices become winners of a revered WAF yellow W trophy.

To be at the centre of all WAF has to offer, and that includes global PR, doors opening, new connections and a celebration of your fervour for the power of life changing architecture, you need to enter the projects that you want to shout to the world about. You have less than six weeks to enter, so start yours today.

The World Architecture Festival Awards offers you multiple opportunities to showcase your best work and most exciting ideas to the world, including the most influential names in the design and development community. All you have to do is decide which projects will be representing your practice at the world’s largest, live architectural awards programme and festival.

There are 30 categories to choose from and projects can be completed buildings, future projects, landscape projects, masterplans or interiors. You can enter a project into more than one category (which will of course increase your chances of walking away with that rather handsome WAF award).

With 35 awards and prizes covering 100+ different building types, World Architecture Festival is your opportunity to promote your latest completed building, interior, landscape or masterplan globally.

How to enter the WAF Awards:

Entering the World Architecture Festival awards is easy. All entries must be submitted through our website www.worldarchitecturefestival.com

Just follow these simple steps:

»Open your WAF account or if you have entered WAF previously just log onto your existing account – log in here.
»Choose the section and category that you want to enter – remember you can enter a project into more than one category.
»Tell us what project you are entering
»Pay for your entry
»Create your online entry by adding images for the project, your details, a description and any professional credits – all entries must be completed by 30th June 2012.

Movie: this timelapse movie by architectural photographer Paul Raftery and director Dan Lowe shows the final stages of construction for London skyscraper The Shard, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano.

Overlooking the Thames, the 72-storey mixed-use tower is currently the tallest building in Europe and is due to be inaugurated in July.

We first published designs for The Shard back in 2009, when construction had just begun – take a look here.

Music is by George McLeod.