You are browsing the archives of 2009 February.

The project wished to find the best architectural solution, which would respect building site principals and visibly present its function.
From the urban aspect the new building is closing a present housing block. To identify its function an organic shell was projected, which revises the building volume and relays it to the surroundings. Configuration of the [...]

Times began to improve in the West after 900. The climate was gradually becoming warmer, lengthening the growing season, and the population began to expand again. The raiders settled down, the Vikings being granted Normandy. The Arab sorties across the Mediterranean were curbed and the Huns turned to agriculture. Very slowly, people began to build [...]

The dialogue between building and landscape is the central theme of a villa in the south of Mallorca. Like a medieval castle it overlooks the spacious site with such a natural air as if it had always been there. Since Claudio Silvestrin, the architect had earth pigment from this area worked into the plaster, [...]

In England, in the second half of the 18th century, the term Gothic was freed of the negative connotations that had been attached to it by Renaissance art critics. This was a result of the early romantic infatuation with the Middle Ages, which saw medieval art as an expression of the national spirit; it was [...]

Besides reconstructing a historic villa destroyed in 1997, the architect added two more volumes; one creates an active street facade along the boulevard and a backdrop for viewing the villa; the other has the villa’s horizontal dimensions, vertically aligning itself with the apartment building to the left. Both volumes have complex, structured facades with strictly [...]

The reworkings of urban areas that took place during the 17th century were almost always related to overall systems of defensive fortifications, and these systems evolved steadily in terms of form and type. In response to the increased power of artillery, bastions became lower and wider, and ditches and moats were introduced on such a [...]

This 3-storey entertainment mall and events venue is part of the 1.7-hectare A.venue Makati mixed development along Makati Avenue. Departing from Manila’s typical mall formulas, the design is like a three dimensional puzzled; challenging to put together as a cohesive, viable whole. In a Modern Asian style this development has sidewalks shaded with [...]

For centuries the Louvre has served as the architectural representation of French authority in both the political and cultural realms, first as the royal residence and later as one of the world’s foremost museums. Thus the decision to undertake a major reconfiguration of the building signalled the importance of the grand projets. In 1981 President [...]

This restaurant for the staff of a sportswear manufacturing company is situated on a lakeshore in a woodland grove. Following the gentle topography of the site’s slope, an exciting spatial concept unfolds, inside and outside the building, comprising terrace-like areas, each with a different atmosphere. These atmospheres are accentuated by the changes in level, and [...]

Built in two phases in 1903-6 the Vienna Post Office Savings Bank is Otto Wagner’s most technically advanced building and most mature work of architecture. It epitomizes the state of modern architecture in Vienna in the early years of this century with its extensive use of new materials, especially aluminium, its neat rational structure and [...]

The extraordinary period of invention in the history of architecture ended as the increasingly hot, dry climate burnt the fields and desiccated the northern French vineyards which had funded much of this work. As the population continued to increase in spite of worsening conditions, ordinary people became poorer and wealth was increasingly concentrated among the [...]

Intentions in Architecture by Christian Norberg-Schulz – Published within a few years of Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of the City and Robert Ventun’s Complexity and Contradiction, Christian Norberg-Schulz’ (b 1926) Intentions in Architecture is equally a reaction against Modernism, in particular as realized after the War. Norberg-Schulz begins the book with an extended argument suggesting [...]