Hasta La Ideas

News: Danish firm 3XN has been selected as preferred architect to design a new headquarters for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

3XN was chosen ahead of 11 competing architects, including OMA, Toyo Ito and Amanda Levete, to develop its design for a new administrative home for the organisation governing the Olympic Games, to be built on a 24,000-square-metre site on the banks of Lake Geneva.

The new campus would consolidate the IOC‘s existing operations around Lausanne, creating offices for up to 500 employees.

The brief called for “a building that clearly reflects the values of IOC” and that could “serve as a catalyst for collaboration and interaction for the IOC Staff and Olympic Movement Stakeholders”.

“This is an incredible honour for our studio,” said 3XN principal Kim Herforth Nielsen. “The Olympic Movement has many expressions that are about people coming together in the best possible way.”

“We have designed the new IOC Headquarters as a physical expression of the Olympic Movement and its values expressed through architecture,” he added.

The design will be revealed after the IOC has made a final decision on the plans, following negotiations with the Swiss authorities.

Photograph of Lausanne, Switzerland, is courtesy of Shutterstock.

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headquarters for the Olympics appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Italy‘s design manufacturing capability is at risk of disappearing, according to the president of design brand Alessi.

The country’s producers could go the same way as its great designers of the last century and be outsourced abroad, Alberto Alessi told Dezeen.

“The risk is that it disappears,” he said in an interview in Milan last week during the Salone del Mobile. “Maybe Italian production will disappear.”

Alessi said that until the 1970s, Italian design was characterised by Italian designers working for Italian manufacturers.

“Then during the 80s we had some important change,” Alessi said, as Italian industry started to work with foreign designers. “Design expressed through the catalogue of Italian design factories was not any more Italian,” he said.

Today, he said, “maybe the second element, Italian production, will disappear.”

The company, which specialises in kitchen accessories and tableware, was founded in 1921 by Alberto Alessi’s grandfather Giovanni Alessi and today employs around 500 people at its factory in Crusinallo on Lake Orta in northern Italy. Its annual turnover is around €100 million.

One of the best-known of Italy’s design-led manufacturers, Alessi started out as a producer of stainless steel utensils for the catering industry but, like many successful Italian “design factories”, began collaborating with external designers in the fifties and sixties.

Famous Alessi collaborations include the 9090 espresso machine designed by Richard Sapper, the Juicy Salif lemon squeezer by Philippe Starck and the Record watch by Achille Castiglioni.

Foreign competition and Italy’s lingering economic woes are creating problems for Italy’s design houses. In May last year Claudio Luti, president of both the Kartell brand and the Salone del Mobile, said the failure of the country’s small, family run firms to seek investment and explore foreign markets was a “big, big mistake.”

Last September Patrizia Moroso, head of Italian furniture brand Moroso, said Italy was “in crisis” while Milan was “sitting in the past”.

“Italy… is very much in a crisis because it doesn’t want to change, doesn’t want to move and is becoming very old,” she said, adding that the country was “losing the culture behind production.”

Alberto Alessi said his company was committed to maintaining its production base in Italy but said he was “concerned” that Italian manufacturing would go the same way as Italian design, and migrate abroad.

But he added that, even if this happened, the notion of “Italian design” would continue, because of the country’s unique culture of collaboration between designer and manufacturer.

“I think that [Italy] will continue to have Italian design because it has not only to do with the nationality of the designer but it has to do with a culture,” he said. “We are a kind of mediator. The core of our activity is to mediate endlessly between on one side the best creativity in product design from all over the world and on the other side, customers.”

“This culture makes Italian design factories the best labs to offer to designers to make real their designs,” he added. “When they enter the door of Alessi, the designer or architect immediately feels he will meet people who will do their best to help him express what he has inside.”

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News: Italian architect and designer Massimo Morozzi, co-founder of influential architecture studio Archizoom Associati and later art director for furniture brand Edra, has died aged 73.

Born in Florence in 1941, Morozzi co-founded Archizoom in 1966 together with artist Andrea Branzi and architects Gilberto Corretti and Paolo Deganello.

Together with studios UFO and Superstudio, the founders became known as the “Italian Radicals”. Archizoom’s projects included pop-art inspired furniture and the influential but unbuilt “No-Stop City” proposal for a city built on an infinitely expanding grid. The studio disbanded in 1974.

Morozzi then pursued a successful career as an industrial designer, opening his own studio in 1982 and working with brands including Alessi and Cassina and developing a concept car for Nissan. He became art director of Edra in 1987.

Announcing his father’s death on Instagram, his son Guido Morozzi wrote: “Father, husband, friend freethinker, man of fine intellect, avant garde-minded artist, architect, inventor, creator of beauty through design, teacher, cook, grandfather. Bye dad, I’ll miss you.”

Massimo Morozzi was born on 28 January 1941 and died on 10 April 2014.

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News: architect Daniel Libeskind has hit back at his critics, comparing his own work to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and saying that he doesn’t try to be liked, at the launch of an exhibition in Milan this week.

Speaking to Dezeen at the launch of Where Architects Live, a major installation of pavilions, photographs and films about the homes of starchitects, Libeskind said that it takes time for the public to appreciate greatness.

“When things are first shown they are difficult,” Libeskind told Dezeen. “If you read the reviews of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it was a failure, a horrible piece of music.”

“You have to give it time. Architecture is not just for the moment, it is not just for the next fashion magazine. It’s for the twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred, two hundred years if it’s good; that’s sustainability.”

Asked if he was bothered by the high levels of criticism his recent work has received, Libeskind replied that he never reads his critics and said that he doesn’t try to be liked.

“It’s a democratic world, they can say whatever they want,” he said. “How can I read them? I have more important things to read.”

He also made reference to a passage from the Bible, adding “look at 6:26. “Woe be to the man who is liked by everyone”. So if you read the New Testament, don’t try to be liked by everyone and do what you believe in.”

Libeskind cemented his reputation as a major name with the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which opened in 2001, but in recent years has come under attack from critics of his angular style.

Speaking about Libeskind’s plans for the World Trade Centre rebuilding project in 2008, LA Times critic Christopher Hawthorne said: “anyone looking for signs that Daniel Libeskind’s work might deepen profoundly over time, or shift in some surprising direction, has mostly been doing so in vain.”

British philosopher Roger Scruton accused Libeskind of being one of a group of architects who “have equipped themselves with a store of pretentious gobbledegook with which to explain their genius to those who are otherwise unable to perceive it,” in an article in the UK’s Times newspaper in 2011.

In 2012, novelist Will Self accused Libeskind of putting money before art in an outspoken attack on high profile architects reported in British architecture magazine BD.

And last year architecture critic Owen Hatherley said that Libeskind’s students’ union for London Metropolitan University “was one of the first instances where it became crystal clear that Libeskind’s formal repertoire of Caspar David Friedrich crashing and banging was not, actually, about war or the Holocaust.”

“All of its vaulting, aggressive gestures were designed to “put London Met on the map”, and to give an image of fearless modernity with, however, little of consequence to actually do,” wrote Hatherley in BD.

Libeskind added that critics will become less relevant as we enter a new era of change where “everyone can compose Beethoven’s Fifth”.

“We don’t live in the era of the old fashioned idea of masterpieces done by the masters,” he said. “Everybody isn’t powered to be creative and in a democratic society – it is freedom that creates the beauty, it’s not authorities. I think that is the era of change.”

Photograph is by Davide Pizzigoni.

Below is an edited transcript from our conversation with Libeskind at the opening of Where Architects Live:

Journalist: Why did you decide to show your house in this exhibition?

Daniel Libeskind: It’s very simple, I decided to show my house because a house is not really private. I have no secrets, so all the secrets are shown and of course my house is not just about just furniture and light.

You know the house is the most important space because that’s where people live. That’s where they go to sleep, that’s where they meet, that’s where they have their intimate moments. So there can be nothing more important than the domestic environment. The domestic environment is no longer seen as some mechanical functionalistic machine to live in, in my view, and it is something that has to do with the global memory with where we are, where we are coming from and where we are going.

Journalist: How is this changing?

Daniel Libeskind: First of all, the house changes with every look of a person, with every glance, with every shift of the eye, with every face, with every piece of light that comes through the house. The house doesn’t just change, the house is actually heavy. It’s difficult to change the physical but today with objects, with furniture, with interiors, with internet, with the world-wide-web, we can live actually elsewhere to where we are. We can be in New York and be living in Tokyo, we can be in Africa and live in Milano. So we are interconnected and this is the connection which created completely a new social idea of the what the world is, what the genius loci is and where we are located.

Marcus Fairs: Daniel, your work sometimes gets a lot of criticism. Do you pay any attention to the critics?

Daniel Libeskind: You know, if you read the New Testament, look at 6:26. “Woe be to the man who is liked by everyone”. So if you read the New Testament, there is a warning, don’t try to be liked by everyone and do what you believe in. And of course, when things are first shown they are difficult. You know, if you read the review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it was a failure, they thought it a horrible piece of music. You have to give it time. Architecture is not just for the moment, it is not just for the next fashion magazine. It’s for the next twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred, two hundred years if it’s good; that’s sustainability. Sustainability is not just clever technologies. Having a house becomes part of something important.

Marcus Fairs: So do you compare your work to Beethoven’s Fifth then if people don’t understand how your buildings might be perceived in the future?

Daniel Libeskind: Hey, you know something? Today everyone can compose Beethoven’s Fifth. We don’t live in the era of the old fashioned idea of masterpieces done by the masters, everybody isn’t powered to be creative and in a democratic society, it is freedom that creates the beauty, it’s not authorities. I think that is the era of change. Everybody has the impetus to be an artist, to create their own house environment. To do something which is beautiful that is desirable by them and not just put to them through the market, through the power of systems, through ideology. I think we’re in a great Renaissance era of rediscovery and that human beings are at the centre, not technology.

Marcus Fairs: So you’re not bothered by your critics then?

Daniel Libeskind: Look I never read them. It’s a democratic world, people can say whatever they want.

Marcus Fairs: You never read them, did you say?

Daniel Libeskind: How can I read them? I have more important things to read.

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in their eyes too, says Daniel Libeskind appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Herzog & de Meuron has won a competition to design a hospital in a Danish forest, with plans for a building shaped like a four-leaf clover (+ slideshow).

Located north of Copenhagen in Hillerød, the New North Zealand Hospital will be Herzog & de Meuron‘s first project in Scandinavia and will be completed in collaboration with local firm Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects.

The building is conceived as a low-rise pavilion-like structure that never exceeds four storeys in height. A total of 24 medical departments will be housed inside and a large garden will be located on the roof.

Herzog & de Meuron says the structure will demonstrate that architectural ambition and functionality can be combined within a hospital.

“The choice of the jury is a seminal sign to architects and the entire health-care sector: low, flat hospital buildings can be better integrated in the city or the countryside than the high-rises structures that were often realised in the last decades,” said the studio.

“The hospital organically reaches out into the wide landscape. Simultaneously its soft, flowing form binds the many components of the hospital. It is a low building that fosters exchange between staff and patients, and it has a human scale despite its very large size.”

The building is scheduled to open in 2020, but could also facilitate an expansion in 2050.

“Herzog & de Meuron have designed a patient-centred hospital – a beautiful, healing and functional building that supports our patients’ recovery in the best possible way,” said hospital director Bente Ourø Rørth. “The hospital’s great strength is its highly successful and fundamental fusion of form and function.”

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