In the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated the eastern coast of Japan two years ago this month, the small town of Rikuzentakata has looked to the ruins for renewal.
This new social-housing complex in Champigny-sur-Marne, outside Paris, is dubbed Urban Collage, but what really is going on here is more of a suburban ménage à trois.
“How many works does an architect need to build to be valid? One,” said Steven Holl recently, referring to the late Lebbeus Woods's only permanent structure, Light Pavilion, which is embedded in (and juts out from) one of five towers that make up Holl's Sliced Porosity Block in Chengdu, China.
Collective memory was the driving force behind the latest incarnation of the annual, temporary Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei. To build a kind of manufactured archaeological site based on the previous 11 pavilions, the team created a drawing that fused the foundations of those structures into a single digital rendering, and then carved this form out of the ground.