#16 Jul/Aug 2007

News and observations

• The opposite of the typical white beach lounge: Thomas Heatherwick's East Beach Café in Littlehampton (UK) is a rough and rusty steel shell
• Zaha Hadid's design for Eleftheria square in Nicosia (CY) is cause for a political debate
• Book review: Superuse, on constructing new architecture by shortcutting material flows
• 14 new bar-pavilions by T2a in a former harbour area by the Danube river in Budapest (HU)
• Before & after: The Dutch embassy in Rome (IT) by Cepezed
• Reality check: VS architects' 'Nice Living' housing scheme in Bratislava (SK)
• and more…

New projects

• ALA's remarkable 'strange birds' in Helsinki (FI) provide a challenge for Finnish contractors
• Christian Kerez has won the competition for the new Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (PL)
• Urbanoffice and Bauart create space for dialogue with their Haus der Religionen in Bern (CH)
• Mehmet Kutukcuoglu and Ertug Ucar solve the spatial needs of Istanbul Maritime museum in Istanbul (TR) in a clever and pragmatic way
• As-if and raumzeit have designed a swimming pool in Montafon (AT) that looks like an artifical landscape
• A futuristic info tower by Kusus & Kusus will hopefully inspire similar plans elsewhere around Berlin's Schonefeld airport (DE)

Manuelle Gautrand: Does architecture have a gender?

Manuelle Gautrand does not believe there is such a thing as a feminine architecture. 'I have been interviewed more as a woman than about my architecture. By now, I'd like to be seen not as a woman but as an architect.'

New buildings

• Through their poetic pragmatism 3LHD have managed to insert a large building into the sensitive context of pitcturesque Bale (HR)
• Reinhard Angelis extended an old warehouse for the new Plagiarius museum in Solingen (DE), which is dedicated to copies, fakes and other froms of product piracy
• dRMM show the way in the English programme for 'Building Schools for the Future' with their renovation and extension to Kingsdale School in London (UK)
• Although LGLS's canteen is the smallest building on the University Campus of Coimbra (PT), it has great social significance
• Emlépont, a museum about the communist past in Hódmezovásárhely (HU) got a futuristic building designed by Attila F. Kovacs
• JKMM has given Turku (FI) yet another architectural work it can be proud of
• Alver Trummal Architects' 4 Ravala Avenue expresses Tallinn’s desire to build a new city (EE)
• Carl-Viggo Holmebakk designer a simple and clear entrance building for the estate of Sigrid Undset in Lillehammer (NO)
• Ulrike Mayer and Urs Hüssy made a 200-year-old house and barn in Schellenberg (LI) look brand new
• NEO_arhitekti's answer to a very constrained context for a commercial building in Uzice (CS) was to expand inwards
• The Tetris school in Genolier (CH) by IPAS looks like a playful fortress
• In Waidhofen/Ybbs (AT), a small medieval town, Hertl.Architekten cause a sensation with a modern rooftop superstructure
• Jasinski Kruszewski Architects have found an elegant solution for a brewery theme park in the town of Warka (PL)

Metal

As from the Bronze and Iron age, metals have played a fundamental role in the development of human civilization. Nowadays, thanks to the diversity of available metals, the ever-growing number of alloys and new processing techniques, metals offer architects virtually unlimited design freedom.

Technology transfer

The Internet has opened up a new world for many people, not least architects. Innovations in industries that were formerly a closed book to most architects, are suddenly accessible, thanks to the Internet. More than ever before, techniques and materials derived from, among others, aviation, shipping, mould-making, the medical and technical textile industries, can be transposed to architecture.

Focusing on European countries, cities and regions

• Germany's reconstruction debate comes to a head: Frankfurt's Old Town is to be rebuilt
• A tour Antwerp's and Brussels' 'Beacons of Renaissance' (BE)
• Profile: Philippe Rahm's experimental buildings illustrate his idea that 'architecture follows climate' (CH)
• Home: Pieter Weijnen's blue house in IJburg, Amsterdam (NL)

Buildings from the margins of modern history

Jean-Philippe Hugron goes back to the Front de Seine in Paris (FR), which started as a modernist project, but became infiltrated with postmodernism in the form of the Totem tower.