Hasta La Ideas

Slideshow: German architects Schneider+Schumacher have completed an underground gallery that creates a bulge beneath the lawn of the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt.

Almost 200 circular skylights arranged in a grid across the lawn let light filter down into the exhibition hall, while the artificial hill creates a domed central ceiling.

The garden remains accessible to visitors, who can walk over the translucent skylights.

Entry to the new gallery is via a staircase in the museum’s main foyer.

Schneider+Schumacher won a competition to design the extension in 2008 – check out our earlier story to see the original renders.

You can see a selection of other underground projects on Dezeen here.

Photography is by Norbert Miguletz.

Extension of the Städel

In Fall 2007, the Städel Museum held a competition for extension work to be carried out on the museum, whereby eight prominent German and international architecture firms were invited to take part: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York; Gigon/Guyer Architekten, Zurich; Jabornegg & Pálffy, architects, Vienna; Kuehn Malvezzi Architekten GmbH, Berlin; Sanaa Ltd / Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa & Associates, Tokyo; schneider+schumacher Planungsgesellschaft mbH, Frankfurt/Main; UNStudio, Architects, Amsterdam and Wandel Hoefer Lorch + Hirsch Müller, Frankfurt/Main.

In February 2008, an international jury chaired by Louisa Hutton (architect BDA, Berlin) announced Frankfurt architects schneider+schumacher as the competition winners. “An excellent choice,” were the words used by the press when reporting on the announcement. “A shining jewel by day, a pool of light by night,” applauded the competition jury.

The new building adjoins the garden wing completed at the start of the 20th century and itself the first extension of the original museum building, which was built on Frankfurt’s Schaumainkai in 1878. In contrast to any of the extension work carried out to date, the new section of the museum will not be above ground; the generous new space planned by schneider+schumacher will be located beneath the Städel garden.

The new exhibition space will be accessed via a central axis from the main entrance on the museum’s river side. By opening the two tympanums to the right and left of the museum’s main entrance foyer, visitors will be able to reach the Metzler Foyer level.

A staircase will then lead from this area down into the 3,000-square-meter museum extension beneath the garden. The garden halls’ interior the will be characterized by the elegantly curved, seemingly weightless ceiling, spanning the entire exhibition space. 195 circular skylights varying between 1.5 and 2.5 meters in circumference will flood the space below with natural light as well as form a captivating pattern in the garden area above.

Outside, the green, dome-like protrusions, which visitors will be able to walk across, will lend the Städel garden a unique look and create a new architectural hallmark for the museum.

“Frankfurt will not only gain a new, unique exhibition building,” declared the competition jury, “but as a ‘green building’ it will also be very much abreast of its times.” The generously spacious, light-flooded garden halls will be the new home of the contemporary art section of the museum’s collection.

Dezeen Wire: cancer care charity Maggie’s are hosting a silent online auction to sell a unique model of the OMA-designed Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow signed by Rem Koolhaas.

Bids can be made by following this link from now until Saturday 17 March.

Maggie’s Centres for cancer care have opened up across the UK in recent years – see some of them here.

Here’s some more information about the auction from Maggie’s:

We have a fantastic opportunity for you to win a one of a kind architectural model of the OMA-designed Maggie’s Centre at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow. The model has been created by OMA and is signed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Rem Koolhaas.

The 3D model, made from printed polymer and sitting on an oak wood base, is displayed in a 31 x 31 x 14 cm acrylic perspex showcase and comes with a customised transport crate. Scale: 1:200.

Maggie’s Glasgow Gartnavel is OMA’s first completed work in the UK since the Serpentine Pavilion in 2006 and is located in the grounds of the Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow. The centre is a single-level building in the form of interlocking rooms surrounding an internal, landscaped courtyard. The centre opened in October 2011 and has earned OMA a nomination for a 2012 Design Award, “the Oscars of the design world,” in the Architecture category.

All proceeds from the sale of this unique model will go to Maggie’s Centres, an organisation that creates places providing the emotional, practical and social support that people with cancer need.

The online auction runs from 10am, Friday 17 February to midnight, Saturday 17 March 2012.

Dezeen Screen: this next movie in our series by architectural film studio Factory Fifteen depicts an imagined post-nuclear landscape where a team of researchers are attempting to use fungal technology to soak up the radiation that has infected cities around the world. Watch the movie »

Think of the possibilities of a world where social entrepreneurs are funded by venture capitalists. For the people behind COMMON, this is the world that they have made a reality with their series of COMMON Pitch events. As co-founder John Bielenberg explained in our Core77 Guide to COMMON, “COMMON Pitches are American Idol meets VC pitches.”

Last week, Core77 was on-hand in Cape Town, South Africa to cover the first international COMMON Pitch event. Promoted as a satellite event for the Design Indaba conference, eleven incredible entrepreneurs pitched their ideas for affecting social change across Africa to a packed house of enthusiastic supporters, but more importantly, a judging panel of five experts— Ian Moir (CEO of Woolworths), Serame Taukobong (CMO of MTN), Ory Okolloh (Policy and Government Relations Manager for Google Africa) Carlo Ratti (Director of SENSEable Cities Labs at MIT) and John Bielenberg (Co-Founder of COMMON).

Set against the backdrop of Cape Town’s City Hall, the entrepreneurs shared their plans for tackling some of the continent’s biggest problems—urban farming, early childhood education, recycling plastic waste and empowering women. The winning idea was also the simplest. Dr. Johnny Anderton, a native Capetonian, captivated the audience to his EarthBagBuild System, a straightforward construction system that combines ancient building techniques with 21st century technology. His winning pitch won the project a cash and prize project worth R220,000 (almost $30,000USD)

Earthbag construction is not a new concept. The idea of building structures of layered sacks filled with locally available materials was employed in military bunker construction and flood control. What separates EarthBagBuild is a locally developed and patented high strength polypropylene bag created with recycled materials. Dr. Johnny explains more in the exclusive Core77 video below.

The homes and buildings created with EarthBags are attractive, inexpensive, structurally sound, durable, energy-efficient, acoustically efficient, rot and corrosion proof, fire resistant, non-toxic and bulletproof! The polypropylene bag, made from an industrial by-product, is re-usable and recyclable. Once the structure is built, it can be finished with stucco. The EarthBagBuild concept encourages the establishment of community home-building projects where groups learn to build their own houses, training others in aspects of the system, thus creating a viral growth of jobs, micro-businesses and self-financed or government grant assisted homes. Dr. Johnny Anderton walks us through some of the EarthBagBuild projects below:

Jouberton Preschool The Faculty of Architecture, University of Nottingham, UK, designed the project to build a preschool in Jouberton township near Klerksdorp in South Africa. The students then came over and did the construction themselves.

(more…)

Competition: we’ve teamed up with stationery brand Moleskine to give away four architectural monographs from their new series of books called Inspiration and Process in Architecture.

The first four in the series feature interviews, writings, drawings and notes by Zaha Hadid, Giancarlo De Carlo, Bolles+Wilson and Alberto Kalach.

Each book is cloth-bound with a cardboard cover and features the rounded corners, elastic band and inside pocket typical of the Moleskine brand of notebooks.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Moleskine” 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 3 April 2012. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions.

Here are some more details from Moleskine:

Inspiration and Process in Architecture

Moleskine publishes new series of monographs exploring the design process of international architects.

Moleskine, the legendary manufacturer of tools for creativity, introduces “Inspiration and Process in Architecture”, a collection of cloth-bound monographs, curated and edited by Francesca Serrazanetti e Matteo Schubert, exploring the design process of architects. The first four books of the series have been released in December 2011 and feature interviews, writings, drawings and notes from four international architects: Zaha HADID, Giancarlo DE CARLO, BOLLES+WILSON, and Alberto KALACH.

“Inspiration and Process in Architecture” is a series of monographs on key figures in modern and contemporary architecture. It offers a reading of the practice of design which emphasizes the value of freehand drawing as part of the creative process. Each volume provides a different perspective, revealing secrets and insights and showing the various observation techniques languages, characters, forms and means of communication.

The “Inspiration and Process in Architecture ” allows an intimate look into the creative process of the architect, and a celebration of the everlasting power of free hand sketching even in the AutoCAD® era. With this series Moleskine introduces a new clothbound format inspired by a classic clothbound style first used by typographer Giambattista Bodoni at the end of the 18th century to protect unbound books. The spine of each book is covered in cloth and front and back cover in raw grey cardboard while maintaining distinctive Moleskine features such as the elastic band, round corners, and inner pocket. Each book is designed to allow a 180 degrees flat opening so the reader can enjoy high- quality images on a warm matt paper.

The “Inspiration and Process in Architecture ” series follows the successful publication of the Moleskine “The Hand of…,” series, currently including “The Hand of the Designer”, “The Hand of the Architect” and “The Hand of the Graphic Designer”. Like its predecessor, the “Inspiration and Process in Architecture ” features beautiful photography and takes a close look at the process of design as practices across the world.
Download the Full Media Kit here.

Series and Book Editors: Francesca Serrazanetti, Matteo Schubert
Graphic Design: A+G AchilliGhizzardiAssociation

Featured Architects

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid, the founding partner of Zaha Hadid Architects, was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. She is an architect who consistently pushes the boundaries of architecture and urban design. Her work experiments with new spatial concepts, intensifying existing urban landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields of design, ranging from urban-scale works through to products, interiors and furniture.

Best known for her seminal built works such as Vitra Fire Station, Land Formation-One, Bergisel Ski- Jump, Strasbourg Tram Station, the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, the BMW Central Building in Leipzig, the Hotel Puerta America in Madrid, the Ordrupgaard Museum Extension in Copenhagen, and the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, her central concerns involve a simultaneous engagement in practice, teaching and research.

Giancarlo de Carlo

Giancarlo de Carlo (1919-2005) was an Italian architect, planner, writer and educator. He was one of the founding members (along with Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, and Jacob Bakema, among others) of Team X, a group of architects challenging the modernist doctrines as set out by CIAM and was a key figure in the discourse on participation in architecture. Much of de Carlo’s built work is located in Urbino, where he proposed a master plan between 1958-64, which has slowly been implemented over the past forty years. Combined with his social housing at Terni, the built work has provided a foundation for his views on the involvement of users and inhabitants in the design process. De Carlo’s writings supported this architectural approach; he was editor of the bi-lingual journal, Spazio e Società published beetween1978-2001, An inspiring educator, he also founded the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urbanism (ILAUD). In 1993 he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal. He has received a multitude of international awards, honorary degree and the Italian Republic’s Gold Medal for Culture. His work has been featured in many solo exhibitions (among these: Triennale di Milano, 1995; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004; MAXXI, Rome, 2005).

BOLLES+WILSON

In 1980, Julia Bolles-Wilson and Peter Wilson set up their architecture practice, the Wilson Partnership, in London, and in 1987 the renamed BOLLES+WILSON transferred its base once and for all to Munster.

The practice’s main works include: the Suzuki House in Tokyo (the recipient in 1994 of the Gold Medal award from the Institute of Japanese Architects); the Public Library in Munster; the Bridge Watcher’s House and the landscaping of the Kop van Zuid harbour in Rotterdam; the Luxor Theatre in Kop van Zuid; the European Library in Milan; the Bibliotheque Nationale of Luxembourg; and the masterplan for Monteluce, Perugia. The practice is currently working on numerous urban-scale projects in the Netherlands. Peter Wilson has lectured in Tokyo, Barcelona,Venice, Amsterdam and Milan. From 1994 to 1996, he served as a professor at the Kunsthochschule fur Gestaltung in Berlin-Weissensee. Since1998, he has been an External Diploma Examiner at the London Architectural Association and at Cambridge University.

Alberto Kalach

Born in Mexico, in 1960, Alberto Kalach studied architecture there at the Universidad Iberoamericana and at Cornell University, New York. He lives and works in Mexico City, and his concern about the emerging problems of that immense metropolis is reflected very often in his work. Indeed, it is an integral part of everything he has done, from his $5,000 minimal house, through his housing developments, to the largest project ever conceived for Mexico City, called Mexico Ciudad Futura (Return to the City of Lakes), which embraces the city as a geographical whole. His designs have appeared in numerous specialist journals.