Terence Riley to Head 2011 Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale
Photo courtesy Miami New Times
Terence Riley has been selected to head the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. After leaving his post as chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA, Riley set out to revamp the Miami Art Museum. Key to his tenure in Miami was a drive to move the museum into a new $100 million building designed by Herzog & de Meuron. But with economic downturn, the project stalled and Riley resigned in October of 2009.
The new appointment makes him the first non-Chinese curator to head the five-year-old event. The program, which will be announced next year, focuses on the unique character of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and on young cities in particular. As Shenzhen’s extraordinary growth has taken it from a fishing village to a major metropolis in only the past 50 years, it’s a natural fit for the event.
“The full program is still being developed, but our idea is to create a paradigm that considers the cyclical growth pattern of urban cities such as Shenzhen, where cities create architecture, architecture creates cities, and how the process continues without end,” Riley said in a statment. “At a time when sustainability is imperative, the idea of describing an open process that takes into account its own renewal and constant evolution is essential.”
Video: Chinese Hotel Climbs Fifteen Stories in Six Days
Chinese hotel built in just six days (DifferentEnergy Video)
Would you stay in a 15-story structure built in six days? Through the magic of prefabrication, one new hotel in Changsha, China was built erector-set-style at just such a fantastic pace and recorded through time-lapse photography. The better term might be constructed in six days, however, as the building’s foundation and the factory-made pieces were already finished at the beginning of this architectural ballet, but the feat proves rather amazing nonetheless.
While you might have never heard of Changsha, China, home to the new Ark Hotel, the country’s 19th largest city mirrors the building’s rapid growth. Changsha tripled in size between the 1940s and 1980s and today contains an estimated population of 6.6 million.
While such a quickly constructed building might seem prone to shoddy construction, the Ark Hotel is reportedly built to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake, meaning a quake over 1,000 times more powerful than January’s quake in Haiti. Call us skeptical, but we’d opt to be out of the building when disaster strikes.
Prefabrication, architecture’s “oldest new idea,” can have its green benefits. The Ark Hotel is thermally insulated and boasts only one percent construction waste. [ Via Gizmodo. ]
!melk in Milan
!melk designed pergolas for Milan's new CityLife development. (Photo: !melk)
!melk, a brand new landscape architecture and urban design firm, is set to join Arata Isozaki, Daniel Libeskind, and Zaha Hadid, among others, for CityLife, an enormous development planned for the historic Fiera di Milano neighborhood in Milan. The New York-based !melk, which was founded less than a year ago when Jerry van Eyck left West 8 and teamed up with Evan Rose, won an international competition to design a multi-level piazza, sculpture park, and butterfly garden/pavilion situated within Libeskind’s master plan. CityLife will include skyscrapers by Isozaki, Libeskind and Hadid, as well as a museum of modern art, commercial center, housing complexes, and a new subway station. !melk collaborated on its submission with the London-based landscape architect Gustafson Porter as well as One Works and Arup in Milan. Read More
Artek Acquires Aero Design Furniture
Artek's new acquisition (ADF)
At Artek’s 75th anniversary dinner last week, we heard the news that the Finnish furniture company had acquired the entire share capital of compatriot company Aero Design Furniture (ADF) from owner Juhani Lemmetti, allowing Artek to begin selling the full Ilmari Tapiovaara family of furniture owned by ADF. An admirer of Artek founder Alvar Aalto, Tapiovaara also used architecture as the foundation for his work and his pieces will be a great complement to Artek’s line. With the launch of Artek USA earlier this year and expansion in Europe and Japan, the company is poised to help the Tapiovaara collection find new admirers as well. Read More
And the World Architecture Festival Winners Are . . .
Perkins+Will's Sabah Al-Salem University College of Education in Kuwait won the Future Education category award. (Courtesy Perkins+Will)
The World Architecture Festival is in its third year of existence, and, despite the worldwide recession, seems to have more attendees, trade show participants, and strong projects in its awards program. In what is surely a sign of the times, however, there seem to be many more strong projects in the “future” category than completed buildings. As it has been for the past three years, AN was the event’s American media sponsor, and this year I juried projects in the category of “Future Health and Education Buildings.” Read More
Slideshow: Zonnestraal Sanatorium Saved From Ruin
Zonnestraal Sanatorium in Hilversum after restoration (Courtesy WMF)
Abandoned and nearly lost, the Zonnestraal Sanatorium in Hilversum, Netherlands has been meticulously restored to its former glory by Bierman Henket architecten and Wessel de Jonge architecten. In honor of their efforts, the two firms were awarded the 2010 World Monuments Fund / Knoll Modernism Prize. Alan Brake penned an article for the print edition of The Architect’s Newspaper:
Designed in 1926–1928 by Johannes Duiker and Bernard Bijvoet and completed in 1931, the sanatorium is considered a seminal work of early modernism. Though it was well known when it was built, the structure was eventually abandoned, and since then nearly subsumed by the surrounding landscape. Portions of the three-building complex were almost completely lost, so many parts of the sanatorium had to be meticulously reconstructed, including formerly mass-produced elements that had to be recreated by hand.
Karl Lagerfeld Picks Chilewich for Chanel Show
Chanel meets Chilewich (Chilewich)
Vinyl fabric manufacturer Chilewich has gone from table runners to the runway. Karl Lagerfeld, creative director for Chanel, chose the company’s stencil-like Cubic lace design for the Spring/Summer 2011 ready-to-wear show at Paris Fashion Week last month. The design, currently part of Chilewich’s tabletop collection, was reproduced into a sheer cocktail dress with feather trim and was one of the last numbers to float down the Chanel runway. (A note on the architecture: The Grand Palais was dramatically transformed into a seemingly post-apocalyptic formal garden with charred black hedges and white gravel.)
Lisbon 2010> Pedro Gadanho's Inside Story
Pedro Gadanho's Casa Baltasar in Porto, shown in this 2007 photograph by Fernando Guerra. (Courtesy Cristina Guerra)
The Lisbon Architecture Triennale may have aspirations to international importance, but is really more interesting for what it says about the city’s potential as a regional center rather than a world city like London or New York (more on that in my next post). While most of the Triennale’s three major exhibitions take place in large public event spaces, there is one “official” ancillary event in a small commercial art gallery that has something to contribute to the world architecture scene. Read More
Lisbon 2010> Portugal Talks Housing at 2nd Triennale
The Brazilian section featured the city of Recife. (Fred Jordão)
Under the banner Let’s Talk About Houses, the second Lisbon Architecture Triennale opened last night in three different venues around the Portuguese capital. A beautifully renovated electric generating plant featured the results of two competitions: one for the low-income immigrant Portuguese community Cova da Moura, and a second for a house in Luanda, Angola. Meanwhile, a second exhibit on artists working in the realm of architecture is being staged at the contemporary Museo do Chiado (I’ll have more on these two shows in a subsequent post). The most ambitious of the three exhibitions, however, is on view at the Museu Coleção Berardo along the city’s architecturally fascinating waterfront in a district called Belem. Read More
Stars Aligned at Serpentine
Zumthor (Photo: Gary Ebner)
Increasingly, the architects chosen each year to design the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London hail from a pool of the usual suspects. This past summer, it was Jean Nouvel. SANAA, and Frank Gehry ran up the mast in 2009 and 2008 respectively. The 2011 pavilion, we hear, will be by Swiss mystic architect, Peter Zumthor.
There’s certainly abiding fascination in a series of heavyweights forced to design a lightweight structure on the double-quick (about six months) but the young and restless might actually have more to explore and certainly more to gain than the big names. Then again, more than most, Zumthor has maintained his mystique as an architect. Lightweight he is not: For the 2002 Venice architecture biennale, he submitted a six ton concrete model of his Cologne museum that was too hefty to be contained in the vast Arsenale.
Lisbon's Next Up on the Triennale Trail
Talking about houses at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale.
There are so many architecture exhibitions today that call themselves “biennales” and “triennales” that the words have little meaning anymore. In most cases, rather than use the vernacular local word for an every two- or three-year exhibition (say, biannual) they use the Italian word, hoping I guess that the special magic of Venice will rub off on their event. Thus I am in Lisbon, Portugal today for the Architecture Triennale that the organizers are calling “Let’s Talk About Houses.” Read More
Irish Eyes Are Designing
Erosion Table by Joseph Walsh (photo: Andrew Bradley)
While it’s doubtful anyone would think of Ireland as a design powerhouse, a new show at the American Irish Historical Society on New York’s Upper East Side suggests the Emerald Isle deserves a second look. Curated by Brian Kennedy, the show includes furniture, ceramics, accessories, jewelery, a wall installation, as well as some models and sketches, and is an engaging crash course in Ireland’s emerging design scene. While there’s no one overriding style, an interest in organic shapes and natural materials is common in much of the work. Read More
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