#25 Jan/Feb 2009

News and observations

• Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp (BE) by Neutelings Riedijk
• Luigi Bocconi University, an Irish milestone in Milan (IT)
• Hungarian architecture centre KÉK homeless – again
• Update: Ticino
• A new Guggenheim near Bilbao?
• Splitterwerk's Frog King, Graz (AT)
• and more…

New projects

• Student housing, Paris (FR) by OFIS
• Sports hall, Cracow (PL) by Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak
• Mixed-use complex, Milan (IT) by DEMO Architects
• Towers and square, Tirana (AL) by 51N4E and De Architecten Cie.
• Office building, Preston (UK) by Moxon Architects
• Mixed-use complex, Budapest (HU) by t2a / Turányi & Turányi Architects

Mauri Korkka: The essence of the line

Seldom has an architect received as much tacit support from friends and colleagues as Mauri Korkka who, with two posters and a fine idea, had made it through to the final six vying for the honour to design the new premises of the Stockholm City Library. In the end Korkka shared third prize, but given that the international competition had attracted a massive 1170 entries, the inevitable disappointment was tinged with pride.

New buildings

• Residential and office building, Sofia (BG) by Aedes Studio
• Holiday cabin, Fosen (NO) by Fantastic Norway
• Two residential projects, Crans-Pré-Céligny (CH) by Group8
• School extension, Falmouth (UK) by Urban Salon Architects
• Office building, Warsaw (PL) by JEMS
• Gallery, Berlin (DE) by bfs d
• Bank building, Bilbao (ES) by NoMAD
• Hairdressing salon, Belfast (IE) by Robert Jamison Architects
• Time-out hotel, Amsterdam (NL) by GDA
• Apartment house, Ancona (IT) by Cherubino Gambardella
• Factory conversion, Tallinn (EE) by Ars Projekt

Pure plastic

The space-age fantasy of a plastics-dominated future did not come true in the form envisaged in the 1960s. But although we may not live in the world of Roger Vadim's Barbarella or Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (both films date from 1968), plastic is omnipresent in our world; we are surrounded by it in our daily lives, often without being consciously aware of it. Cars, mobile telephones, computers, clothing, furniture, packaging, paint and not least buildings, are unimaginable without plastics, however much we may aspire to ecological honesty.

Focusing on European countries, cities and regions

• Between the 1970s and the mid 1990s, little new architecture in Wallonia was worthy of note, but since then there has been a sense of change in the French-speaking part of Belgium
• A guided tour of restored modernist buildings in England
• Profile: Izaskun Chinchilla (ES)
• Office: Kusy Panak Architects' studio in a former water tower, Bratislava (SK)

Buildings from the margins of modern history

Anne Isopp reveals her sympathy for the brutalist University and City Library (1963-1967) in Cologne (DE), designed by Rolf Gutbrod. It is a building which the owner and user, Cologne University, does not fully appreciate, and which is already showing some worrying signs of decay.