Laboratory buildings are often the graveyard of architects' good intentions, as stringent technical requirements leave little room for environmental and aesthetic concerns.
The Sky's The Limit: The expansion of a vast trade-fair complex satisfies demanding exhibition-hall requirements and figures into a city's plans for urban renewal.
Two teams of architects employ very different strategies to reinvigorate a pair of ambitious 1960s apartment projects, one in the north of England and the other in Paris. Bois-le-Pêtre, Paris The $15.4 million overhaul of Bois-le-Pêtre, completed in 2011, is a more explicit manifesto for renovation. Its roots are in a combined response by Lacaton & Vassal and Frédéric Druot to the French government's 2003 demolition plan: 'We were shocked by the idea that nothing could be done except tabula rasa redevelopment,' recalls Anne Lacaton. The two architecture firms embarked on a published research project which concluded that such buildings
Two teams of architects employ very different strategies to reinvigorate a pair of ambitious 1960s apartment projects, one in the north of England and the other in Paris. The enthusiasm with which Britain and France took to the construction of Mid-Century Modern social housing is equaled only by their present appetite for its demolition. In 2003, the French government announced a 10-year urban-renewal plan in which 200,000 dwellings would be replaced; in Britain, Alison and Peter Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens, completed in London in 1972, is one of many projects that once enjoyed international prestige and are now facing the
Barn Again: Mixing materials and methods from the vernacular and the modern, a Japanese architect creates a timeless retreat for the sculpture of two German artists.
Mixing materials and methods from the vernacular and the modern, a Japanese architect creates a timeless retreat for the sculpture of two German artists.
The tumult of Kiev's postwar history is evident in its architecture: The bombast of Stalin's elephantine classicism was abruptly superseded by swaths of grimly utilitarian housing after Khrushchev's turn against “unnecessary excess.”