Archive for November, 2007

Zumthor in Cologne: The Art Museum of the Metropolitan Bishop

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Facade of the Kolumba museum, photo: Clau­dia Strahl

The swiss archi­tect Peter Zumthor built an art museum around the wreck­age of the parish church St.Kolumba. com­mis­sioned by Car­di­nal Meis­ner (lately in the news with his com­ment of “Entartete Kunst” on Ger­hard Richter’s design for the window Koel­ner Dom) , the won com­pe­ti­tion in 1997 was finally real­ized 10 years later.The museum is an archaic castle for reli­gious art of 2000 years sycamore cul­ture as well for modern installations.

Kolumba con­sists of sev­eral peri­ods in archi­tec­ture his­tory: start­ing with the late Gothic church St.Kolumba, the chapel “Madonna in den Trümmern” ( “Madonna in ruins” ) was buillt in 1950. Inter­est­ingly enough, the archi­tect of this little chapel, Got­tfried Böhm, made now the very con­tro­ver­sial dis­cussed design for the Zen­tral­moschee Köln Cologne Mosque Project. Con­tin­u­ing 1973-1976 with the archae­o­log­i­cal exca­va­tion, final­ized by Zumthor’s new design.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Zumthor in Cologne: The Art Museum of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Bishop’

King Rem Shovelling Sand

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SSE break­ing ground cer­e­mony ( © OMA)

That was quick: The Shen­zhen Stock Exchange has broken ground. OMA won the com­pe­ti­tion just a year ago, now has moved a team of archi­tects to Shen­zen and starts building.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘King Rem Shov­el­ling Sand’

Prominent Spanish Architect Fired

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Teatro Canal, one of the most promintent build­ings under con­struc­tion in Madrid, has been sep­a­rated at birth from his archi­tect: Juan Navarro Baldeweg

News from Madrid: The developer’s panel in charge of the build­ing has decided to fire the archi­tect claim­ing delays and budget prob­lems. The comis­sion of the build­ing has been han­dled accord­ing to span­ish reg­u­la­tions via an open com­pe­ti­tion, with the result of an 80 mil­lion euro con­tract being adjudicated.

After the inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tion in 2000, Navarro made it to the final and won the con­tract for design­ing the build­ing, a rep­re­sen­ta­tive the­atre com­plex in the center of madrid called Teatro Canal, a 35.000 sqm chore­og­ra­phy and dance center. It was going to be one of the most emblem­atic oeu­vres of the then pres­i­dent of the com­mu­nity Alberto Ruiz Gal­lar­don. With an over­bud­get of 25% (100M euros in total – not that much con­sid­er­ing the scale of the works) and a delay of two years, the new pres­i­dent Esper­anza Aguirre has decided to ditch Baldeweg from the direc­tion of the building.

It is an open secret that dif­fer­ences between Gal­lar­don (now mayor of Madrid) and Aguirre played a role here. So far the inter­na­tional media has not writ­ten any­thing about it (as far as I know) so the links are mostly in spanish:

The span­ish archi­tec­tural comunnity has been call­ing for sup­port to Navarro – ‘Aguirre “despide” a Navarro Baldeweg’ (edgar​gon​za​lez.com)
William J.R. Curtis in ‘El Pais’: Mae­stro de la luz
And a whole list of promi­nent artist and archi­tects is protest­ing against the deci­sion – ‘Arquitectos y artis­tas declaran la guerra a Esper­anza Aguirre’

The Dawn of Contemporary Dutch Architects

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Y-Oevers Col­lage ( © unknown)

Back in 1992, the young and aggres­sive Dutch archi­tects that we know so well today, came together to work on a large project in Ams­ter­dam. The Ruimtelijk Sce­nario Y-Oevers Ams­ter­dam (Trans­la­tion: Spa­tial Sce­nar­ios for the Y-Waterfront Ams­ter­dam) shows a long list of heavy-​hitting archi­tects and urban­ists that now largely con­trol the Euro­pean archi­tec­ture debate.

The project was car­ried out by the teams of: OMA, Neutel­ings, van Berkel & Bos (now UN Studio), Chris­ti­aanse (now KCAP) and West8. The model was built by De Rijk Parthe­sius (includ­ing Vin­cent de Rijk). Even more impres­sive was the line-​up of the teams and to see where each of the mem­bers went on to. At times, they started their own offices, as with the case of Ale­jan­dro Zaera (For­eign Office Archi­tects), Winy Maas (MVRDV) and Rients Dijk­stra (Maxwan). The final book­let for the project reads as a whos-​who of con­tem­po­rary Dutch archi­tec­ture, and the designs and pre­sen­ta­tion meth­ods within are absolute pre­cur­sors to the styles devel­oped by each of the offices through­out the rest of the 1990s until today. You can almost tell which archi­tects worked on which draw­ings, it’s an amaz­ing period just prior to the launch of the many offices we see today in Rotterdam.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘The Dawn of Con­tem­po­rary Dutch Architects’

Dysturb International – The 2nd Wave

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If you’ve thought that Dys­turb is a bit quiet in terms of posts lately, please for­give us. We are grow­ing through an excit­ing phase and our energy is poured into the many changes in our per­sonal lives as well as into the direc­tion of Dys­turb itself. Over the past months, the core Dys­turb writ­ers of Clau­dia Strahl and Darrel Ronald and Thomas Stell­mach have been moving around the world. Clau­dia relo­cated to Cologne, Ger­many; Darrel has relo­cated to Montréal, Canada; and Thomas has tem­porar­ily relo­cated to Aleppo, Syria. Given this shift, we asked our­selves how to go for­ward with Dys​turb.Net.

Our con­clu­sion is to grow the site to fit the team. Build a net­work of archi­tects, urban­ists and design­ers that can cover the design cap­i­tals around the globe with first-​hand expe­ri­ences and views into how design is embed­ded into our daily lives, daily cul­tures, and cities. In this sense, we will con­tinue the strat­egy of Dys­turb, but we will enlarge its geo­graph­i­cal scope to cover more cities than just Rot­ter­dam, where us core writ­ers orig­i­nally were located. Rot­ter­dam has inscribed itself into this blog, and the archi­tec­tural energy of the city was instru­men­tal in our cre­ation of this project and our desire to con­tribute to this debate. That said, we do plan to keep the cal­en­dar Rot­ter­dam spe­cific, because this fills a spe­cific need locally; per­haps at some point we intro­duce local cal­en­dars, but for now we will not.

This is still an exper­i­ment, and we hope that you feel free to com­ment on our work, and its abil­ity to share inter­est­ing and appro­pri­ate con­tent. Of course, we do this for fun, and as I’ve writ­ten before, we aren’t CNN. To quote one of our orig­i­nal posts on the goal of Dysturb:

This web­site is our way to reflect, pro­pose, chal­lenge, get excited about, and SHARE the archi­tec­ture world around us. We’ve made all the web 2.0 good­ness avail­able to you: you can view our pic­tures via our flickr page, you can sub­scribe to our links via deli­cious, you can hook our dates into your google cal­en­dar or inte­grate it in your ical. And there are RSS feeds of all our con­tent, be it the arti­cles, the photos, or the cal­en­dar events. But we’d love even more to hear what you think, so com­ment on our arti­cles, send us that design that made you cry, or be a guest writer!

The core writ­ers and edi­tors are and will con­tinue to be:
Thomas Stell­mach (Rot­ter­dam, NL + Aleppo, SY)
Darrel Ronald (Montréal, CA)
Martin Sobota (Rot­ter­dam, NL)
Clau­dia Strahl (Cologne, DE)

We would like to already wel­come these new writ­ers and the list is grow­ing:
Edgar Gon­za­les (Madrid, ES)
Cor­nelia Redeker (Munich, DE)

So that you know our direc­tion, we are cur­rently attract­ing writ­ers in these cities:
Ams­ter­dam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brus­sels, Buenos Aires, Copen­hagen, Dubai, London, Los Ange­les, Moscow, New York, Paris, Shang­hai, Sao Paulo, Stock­holm, Tokyo, Toronto, Zurich and wher­ever the archi­tec­ture and urban­ism con­tent pours in from. If you feel the desire to be a part of this project, please feel free to con­tact us through the info page.

Haus der Kunst

HDK Podium with Koolhaas & Herzog & de Mauron

HDK Podium with Kool­haas, de Meuron and Mark Wigley, photo: Peter Scheller

Munich´s Haus der Kunst is turn­ing 70. After being inau­gu­rated by no other than Adolf Hitler in 1937 this build­ing is more than its neo­clas­si­cal archi­tec­tural expres­sion of fas­cist ide­ol­ogy. What makes this build­ing, designed by Ludwig Troost, so intrigu­ing is that its steel frame con­struc­tion actu­ally brings it closer to Amer­i­can 20th cen­tury hotels and banks and the con­cept of fake fas­sade than to the solid­ity of its appear­ance. The cur­rent direc­tor Chris Der­cons` gen­uine approach of `crit­i­cally dis­man­tling` the post war veil­ing of the build­ings` sym­me­try and scale in order to enable a con­fronta­tion rather than a diminu­tive of its orig­i­nal archi­tec­tural state is also prof­it­ing from this almost excul­pa­tory secret.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Haus der Kunst’