Articles by Vladimir Belogolovsky

Gilles Saucier, one of the leading Canadian architects and a design partner at Montreal-based Saucier+Perrotte Architectes that was founded in 1988 invited me to his studio to discuss how he starts his designs and where he finds his inspirations. Simply by looking and even visiting his buildings one may think that the architect is all about performance and efficiency. His edgy, well-crafted edifices may recall Formula One racing cars. But when I stepped into Saucier’s office – dark, mysterious laboratory where he personally experiments with tree roots, branches, wood, glass, rocks, resin, beeswax, and other organic materials – the real intentions of his work started to reveal.

Gilles Saucier, one of the leading Canadian architects and a design partner at Montreal-based Saucier+Perrotte Architectes that was founded in 1988 invited me to his studio to discuss how he starts his designs and where he finds his inspirations. Simply by looking and even visiting his buildings one may think that the architect is all about performance and efficiency. His edgy, well-crafted edifices may recall Formula One racing cars. But when I stepped into Saucier’s office – dark, mysterious laboratory where he personally experiments with tree roots, branches, wood, glass, rocks, resin, beeswax, and other organic materials – the real intentions of his work started to reveal.

Gilles Saucier, one of the leading Canadian architects and a design partner at Montreal-based Saucier+Perrotte Architectes that was founded in 1988 invited me to his studio to discuss how he starts his designs and where he finds his inspirations. Simply by looking and even visiting his buildings one may think that the architect is all about performance and efficiency. His edgy, well-crafted edifices may recall Formula One racing cars. But when I stepped into Saucier’s office – dark, mysterious laboratory where he personally experiments with tree roots, branches, wood, glass, rocks, resin, beeswax, and other organic materials – the real intentions of his work started to reveal.

John Ronan (b. 1963, Grand Rapids, Michigan) is known for his sensual atmospheric buildings that tend to unfold layer by layer their spatial complexity, as one moves through them. His focus is on the use of materiality in ways that reinvent architecture. Ronan holds a Master of Architecture degree with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1991) and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan (1985). He has been teaching architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology since 1992. John Ronan Architects was established in Chicago in 1999, the year Ronan won the Townhouse Revisited Competition sponsored by the Graham Foundation. In 2006, the firm was featured in the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices and the Young Chicago exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2007, the architect was selected to build the prestigious Poetry Foundation in Chicago, out of a pool of 50 international contenders. His monograph Explorations: The Architecture of John Ronan was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. In 2016, the firm was named one of seven international finalists for the Obama Presidential Library. The following interview is a condensed version of our conversation at the architect’s studio in Chicago.

At 92 years of age, for his entire career Yona Friedman has occupied an unusual spot within the architecture world; his signature concept, the Ville Spatiale which he first proposed in 1956, combines the top-down megastructural thinking visible in later projects such as Archigram’s Plug-In City with a total freedom for occupants to design and build their own homes within the structure. In this installment of his “City of Ideas” column, Vladimir Belogolovsky interviews Friedman at his home in Paris to talk about the Ville Spatiale and his theories of mobile and improvised architecture.

Madrid architect Alberto Campo Baeza was born in 1946 in Valladolid, Spain and grew up in Cádiz. He graduated from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 1971 and earned his PhD there in 1982. Campo Baeza has been teaching architecture at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, ETSAM for more than 40 years. He sees architecture as building ideas and expressing them in the most essential and clear ways, consistently relying on such basic elements as firmly grounded rectangular platforms, thick solid walls with deep cavities and frameless cutouts, and flat thin planes propped up by delicate posts. Colors, complex curves, and diversity of materials are largely avoided to accentuate primary relationships between elementary prisms and to exalt magic out of sunlight. Campo Baeza’s architecture is about transparency and precision, as well as asserting such fundamentals as ground planes, straight lines, and precise corners. He has built relatively few projects and, for the most part, on a small scale. Yet, his legacy is remarkably complete, consistent, profound, memorable, and inspirational.

I am fortunate to have seen numerous beautiful buildings and spaces, so when I recently went to Olot near Girona, Spain, to explore the works of 2017 Pritzker Prize Laureates, RCR Arquitectes, I thought I was all prepared. But even though I was familiar with their works through publications, what I encountered firsthand, moved me in the most surprising and delightful ways. The sheer ingenuity and brilliance of these structures, so integral to their places and consequential of their given programs, empower architecture and yield sensations that are truly special and unforgettable.

Eliezer Armon was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1955. He tried a number of career choices, including studying engineering, mathematics, and serving three and a half years in the Israeli Defense Forces, before, at the age of 25, deciding on pursuing architecture. Along the way, he also dedicated himself to becoming a Kabala scholar and a martial artist, and after 50 years of practice he is a 6th Dan master in Dennis survival Jiu-Jitsu method. Both fascinations have contributed profoundly to his work as an architect. Also, after years of duty in reserve at the Israeli Defense Forces, he was discharged with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Armon graduated from the Architecture School at the Technion in Haifa in 1985. After working at a large office in Tel Aviv he was hired as the chief engineer of Immanuel, a small settlement in Samaria. A few years later he became the chief engineer of Be’er Sheva, the capital of the Negev and the largest city in the south of Israel, becoming, at the age of 35, the youngest city engineer in all of Israel. He was responsible for planning housing and infrastructure in the region, leading the design and construction of 10,000 dwelling units in Be’er Sheva, resulting in a rapid growth of the city.

Odile Decq was born in 1955 in Laval, France and studied at École Régionale d’Architecture in Rennes, Brittany. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure D’architecture in Paris-La Villette in 1978 and received her diploma from the Paris Institute of Political Studies in 1979. Decq set up her practice in Paris the same year and soon met Benoît Cornette who was studying medicine at the time but switched to architecture. By 1985 he received his architecture degree and the couple renamed their firm into ODBC. In 1996, ODBC won the Golden Lion in Venice for their drawings, selected out of a pool of invited emerging voices that included Zaha Hadid, Enric Miralles, and Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio. That was the beginning of the computer drawings, expressing movement, ambiguities, layering, and overall new dynamics that characterize Decq’s liberated forms and spaces.

Boris Bernaskoni (born 1977, Moscow, Russia) is the leading Russian architect of his generation. He is interested in what technology can do today, so his architecture would be able to utilize it tomorrow. His work is not about façade aesthetics, which the architect says is the thing of the past. Instead, he is proposing radically new methodologies and prototypes. In the future, Bernaskoni believes, buildings will be immortal because they will continuously evolve and attune themselves to the most current technologies and demands. The ability to transform with the times will be architecture’s most precious commodity.