Month: September 2022

After two years of disrupted cycles of architecture events, due to the pandemic, 2022 has been witnessing a resurgence: biennials, triennials, design weeks, and festivals are back in the picture, with bigger interrogations and larger thematic approaches, aligned with the challenges of the world of today.

In almost every Indian language, a colloquial term for “family” – ghar wale in Hindi, for example – literally translates to “the ones in (my) house”. Traditionally, Indian homes would shelter generations of a family together under one roof, forming close-knit neighborhoods of relatives and friends. The residential architecture was therefore influenced by the needs of the joint family system. Spaces for social interaction are pivotal in collective housing, apart from structures that adapt to the changing needs of each family. The nuanced relationship between culture, traditions, and architecture beautifully manifests in the spatial syntax of housing. 

Faced with a strong slope of the land towards the Mendihuaca river and a context of surrounding native forest, we proposed to carry out the least number of earthworks in the place, generating a narrow and extensive terrace to locate the project.

James Stewart Polshek, founding partner of James Stewart Polshek Architect, later Polshek Partnership, and currently Ennead Architects, has passed away after a 70-year-long career designing significant works of public architecture. In an era dominated by so-called starchitects, his work is often seen as a modest approach to architecture, prioritizing social values over aesthetic ones. Key projects completed by Polshek include the 1987 restoration and renovation of New York’s Carnegie Hall; the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (2000); the William J Clinton Presidential Center and Park (2004) and the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia (2010).

The surroundings of the villa are characterized by a relatively homogeneous structure of solitary houses at more or less regular intervals. Plots of the individual houses have gardens, which together form a continuous garden landscape. The proposed family house respects this typical intermittent development and occupies the site of the original house. At the same time, it tries to correspond in volume with the surrounding buildings by hiding about a third of its program on an underground floor.

The Jakob-Park Stadium, home of FC Basel, is getting an update to extend its lifespan after 20 years of use. Originally designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architecture reform aims to provide better hospitality to visitors by restructuring the access and optimizing security to keep the stadium open even on non-match days. The proposal also contemplates replacing the iconic facade with a sweeping roof to give the stadium a unified appearance and broadcast the events outside.

Reflecting on what the materials of the future will be like, we will talk about a material that is booming in Barcelona and which perhaps leads us to respond by suggesting that, as always, everything comes back.

In a recent photo series, Paul Clemence turns his lens toward Bjarke Ingels Group’s (BIG) Hôtel des Horlogers, located in the Swiss Village of Le Brassus in Switzerland. Previously known as Hôtel de France, which opened in 1857, Audemars Piguet reimagined the project. BIG, an international studio known for avant-garde architecture and experimentation, continues to see this claim to its end through the design of a compact structure made up of five floors, with its rooms connected in a single zig-zag path. Designed in collaboration with the Swiss design firm, CCHE, a futuristic structural form featuring layers of long ramps was assembled for Audemars Piguet’s vision of a luxury hotel.

“I am a Malaysian Hikikomori, and this is my story” is an online article that came about during the lockdown periods in the year 2020 that tells a story of an extreme introvert with her social discrimination and how she sees people follow society’s made-up standards where ones have to act a certain way to be accepted. It was only when the Covid-19 pandemic hit with its lockdowns, that she felt for the first time in life as if she was alive and normal, at least to the eyes of society, as she was living fully as before while others were struggling to cope for simply being at home. Introverse was born out of this social context, where the rights in our social perception could have been wrong and the wrongs were right. If we could ditch the influence of social perception in our minds, we may possibly find new paths to progress onward instead of wandering on the status quo.