Working Sketch

VOL. 6 ISSUE 5 SEPTEMBER 2010

Welcome to the fifth annual Working Sketch design issue. Even with the Great Recession continuing into a
third year, there is still a lot of fantastic architecture being built. The projects included run the gamet of large
to small, permanent to temporary or unbuilt, national & international. There are plenty of links to the
buildings & the architecture firms’ web pages so you can check out what else they are doing. Hope you enjoy
& learn something. gw

THE DESIGN ISSUE

Sebastien Wierinck's public furniture projects seem to lend themselves to
some interesting misinterpretations. For instance, when first seen they look
like tentacles of some kind of furniture-laying machine. In other words, from
the tangle of tubes suspended from the ceiling would, when needed, come
coiling down to take the shape of whatever furniture you desired at the time:
a bench, a table, a love seat, perhaps even a rug.
When you no longer need that particular chair, bench, or nightstand
anymore, the coils would simply rewind upward into a canopy of tubes (or
perhaps even be withdraw themselves into a machine somewhere in the
center of the room. After a long day at work, then, you would walk into your
house – which has no permanent furniture – and you'd see a shimmering
mass of tubes swaying in a slight evening breeze above your head.
You'd push several buttons, and the system would begin to move, drooping
down in long loops and turning back and forth in tight corners and curves, all
laying out the forms of temporary furniture – bed, table – as you get ready for a quiet night at home. Of course, this
admittedly somewhat willful misinterpretation of the evidence at hand is not entirely wrong: after all, though
Wierinck's pieces don't uncoil from the ceilings in ad hoc patterns, forming zones of temporary furniture throughout
empty interiors, they are meant to be (literally) flexible, (somewhat) mobile, and easy enough to reprogram for other
spaces.

Hollenbeck Police Station

When the city of Los Angeles announced it wanted to redesign 13 of the
city’s aging police stations, architect David Martin set his sights on a station
in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in town: Boyle Heights. The
Hollenbeck Police Station routinely responds to gang violence and drug
problems in the neighborhood, and the brutal design of the old building
matched the area’s toughness with a hard, unwelcoming exterior. With the
replacement station, AC Martin sought to change that. The entrance is
located in an undulated glass façade featuring roughly 70 bent frosted-glass
panels. Each panel consists of two pieces of bent clear glass laminated
together with a translucent interlayer, creating a semi-opacity that obscures
what’s going on inside, but still allows light to filter through. The pieces
attach to a curtain wall system with a custom aluminum bracket designed in-
house at AC Martin, and then further engineered by Dallas-based Curtain
Wall Design & Consulting. The effect is a sculptural, staccato display that
serves Martin’s idea of literal and figurative transparency, an important tool
in building trust with the community. The façade is oriented toward the
street, with a fronting plaza area that looks onto a nearby park. The intent was to make a deliberately open area that
could be used by the community—and become part of it. A publicly available multipurpose room is designed into the
building, so local groups can hold events there. Double doors open the community room up into the plaza, allowing
events to spill out into the neighborhood. Ensuring the security of police personnel was a top priority in determining
the location of windows, holding cells, and detainee processing areas. And while the glass panels on the façade are
not bulletproof, the glass behind them is. Just to be certain, officers took the material to the LAPD’s firing range to
verify the manufacturer’s claims.

The new Musical Instrument Museum, which opened in April in Phoenix,

displays artifacts that are played with the hands, the mouth and, in an at least
one case, the nose.

With more than 12,000 instruments from around the globe, the $150 million,
190,000-sf building spans two floors that feature light-filled galleries, a
classroom, a garden courtyard, a performance hall, a recording studio, a
restaurant, café, and a store. Among the highlights: the first Steinway piano
(built in founder Henry Steinway's kitchen in Germany); the piano on which
John Lennon composed Imagine; a Belgian dancehall organ (at $100,000 it's
the single most expensive artifact in the museum's permanent collection); and a guitar that Paul Simon played in his 1991
Central Park concert. While those objects may pack star power, others are curious by nature — a turtle shell from Mexico
that's played with drumstick antlers; a curved African xylophone with gourd resonators and a nose flute from Southeast
Asia.

Richard Varda, FAIA, and the Tempe, Ariz., office of RSP Architects crafted the Indian limestone façade to blend with the
colors of the surrounding desert.
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Architect Designs New Home from Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet Scraps
At over 230 feet long, 193 feet wide, and 60 feet tall, Boeing 747 jumbo jets were once
the largest commercial planes in the sky. But many airlines retired their 747 fleets as
newer long-haul planes came on the market. Architect David Hertz thought about that
fact when his client, homeowner Francie Rehwald, approached him with a request. It
became clear a retired 747 would make a perfect home!

The aircraft was cut up into pieces for transport. Some larger parts had to be brought to
the hills of Malibu by helicopter and crane. The wings now make the home's roof, the
fuselage will comprise the guest house, and the cockpit windows form skylights. It took
clearance from 17 different government agencies to pull it all off. "We closed five major
freeways to transport it at night," said Hertz. The structure has to be registered with the
FAA so pilots don't mistake it as a downed airliner. New, the plane cost 200 million. The
scraps cost $35,000, and all of its nearly 4.5 million parts will be used.

Howeler + Yoon’s Eco-Pods Bring (Green) Industry Back to the City

In the contemporary sustainable design movement, it’s become common to propose

infrastructure that promotes urban farming, but Howeler + Yoon go a step further with
their Eco-Pods by promoting industrial power generation in cities. Though the technology
for the Eco-Pods could be deployed anywhere, the initial site the firm has considered is
on Washington St. in downtown Boston, along a stretch of declining retail shops. The
site was first home to the flagship store of clothier Filene’s Basement. The store closed
in September of 2007 and developer Gale International bought the site and tore down
the building with the intention of building a 32-story luxury condo and office tower. By
July 2008, the project had stalled completely when banks rescinded their funding for the
project, leaving a five-story hole in the ground and a partial skeletal façade during a
worsening economy that made credit a scarce commodity.

Howeler + Yoon has proposed a system of pre-fabricated algae bioreactor modules that slot into the remaining building’s shell. Algae
bioreactors contain nutrient-infused water that can be exposed to LED lighting and natural sunlight to grow algae rapidly. This algae
would then be separated into natural oils and other organic byproducts via mechanical crushing or chemical solvents. Algae oil can then
be refined into fuel (most likely off-site, in the case of the current Eco-Pods design), much the same way that soybeans are refined into
biodiesel.

The Eco-Pods project is porous and open and could reach up to any building height. Howeler + Yoon envision that the spaces where
pods are not slotted into the structure could be used for algae biofuel research and development or simply vertical park space, with
walls covered in other kinds of flora. The project would use mechanical arms to manipulate its pre-fabricated algae units. These arms
could move and rotate modules for ideal exposure to sunlight. They’re also meant to make the system more flexible and adaptable than
the structures they’ve attached themselves to. The arms will allow the Eco-Pods to be deployed quickly, and, should a building husk’s
original funding be re-secured, quickly removed and sent to another location.

Dutch Profiles is a series of short documentaries about architects, graphic, product and fashion designers in the
Netherlands. Dutch Profiles focuses on the conceptual, context-oriented and research-based practice of Dutch
designers and includes interviews with, among others: MVRDV, 2012 Architects, Jurgen Bey, Claudy Jongstra,
Gerard Unger, Paul Mijksenaar, Marlies Dekkers, Alexander van Slobbe and G-Star. Check out Benthem
Crouwel Architects & Hella Jongerius.

In the daytime, unStudio’s Haus für Musik und Musiktheater (MUMUTH) is a mysterious
presence among historic houses on Lichtenfelsgasse Street in Graz, Austria’s second-
largest city. A fine, stainless-steel mesh attached to gently curved steel frames
completely masks the four-story, glass-and-steel structure as well as the spectacular
concrete spiral that is the heart of the building. During the day, when only students and
staff of the Kunstuniversität Graz (KUG) use its teaching and administrative spaces, they
enter the building from the adjacent park at the west. But at night, interior lighting brings
the building’s public identity as a theater to life, and the visitors enter the music house by
a separate entrance on the south.

As a response to the 1998 competition program, the Amsterdam firm’s principals, Ben
van Berkel and Caroline Bos, divided the building structurally according to a concept van
Berkel calls “blob-to-box and back again.” The foyer and public circulation spaces at the
south form the blob; the theater at the north is the box. Joining the two—and organizing the whole—is a concrete spiral much like a
Möbius Strip, a single-surface form the architects explored in their Mobius House built in Het Gooi, the Netherlands, in 1998.

A number of factors delayed the beginning of construction of MUMUTH. First, the city did not want to detract attention from other
projects it was sponsoring, such as Peter Cook and Colin Fournier’s nozzled, biomorphic Kunsthaus Graz. Furthermore, political
changes jeopardized MUMUTH’s funding, which was only reinstated after elections in 2005. In the interim, the architects transformed
the structural spiral from steel to a composite of steel and concrete.
 W.S. V.6/I.5 3

Rolex Learning Center

Envisioned as a hub for the prestigious École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s
(EPFL) small campus of mostly nondescript buildings in Lausanne, Switzerland, the
new Rolex Learning Center designed by SANAA (2010 Pritzker Prize winners) houses a
library, student work spaces, offices, a restaurant, and a café spread out over 215,000
square feet on one open, rolling level. A basement level contains parking and additional
stacks. It’s hard to resist likening the structure to a thick-cut slice of Swiss cheese, its
rectangular form punctuated by a dozen or so variously-sized holes, or patios, as the
architects call them. The patios bring daylight to all areas of the building, and the larger
ones serve as entrances where their sloping forms touch the ground. To access them,
visitors walk past the impenetrable glass facades and slip beneath one of the building’s
peaks. It’s an unorthodox, but strangely evocative procession that also exposes the
glossy underside of the rippled floor slab’s concrete.
The concrete—in some areas almost 3 feet thick—was poured over a precise formwork
of sloping geometries created from 1,400 individual molds. The complex curvatures are
supported by 11 highly reinforced arches, with spans as great as 280 feet. Prestressing in the slab over the basement provides added
support, though the curving form around the largest patio in the building’s southeast corner required a structural wall and column. A
steel-and-wood roof billows in response to the concrete waves for a consistent 11-foot ceiling height (except in the taller multipurpose
hall). Between floor and ceiling—the former blanketed by a mousy gray carpet, the latter a stark white sound-absorbing surface—is a
remarkable space that’s a hybrid of built and natural environment that takes its cues from the nearby Alps, visible from inside. The
building, a flowing landscape, is unencumbered by walls, allowing views across its interior and through the patios; overhead is a
continuous plane.

EXPO 2010 Shanghai pavilions

Shanghai Surprise Hundreds of thousands of daily visitors, about 200 buildings,
$4.2 billion spent: Shanghai’s lavish world expo, which opened on May 1 and runs
through the end of October, is a chance for China’s largest city to announce itself as a
cultural and economic powerhouse. It’s also a stage where the nations of the world can
show off—to visitors and each other—through architecture. The theme of the fair is
“Better City, Better Life”—a phrase that resonates deeply in a society undergoing the
most rapid urbanization in history. One focus inside the German pavilion is Herzog & de
Meuron’s concert hall in the HafenCity area of Hamburg; in the vast “urban best
practices” zone, representing 55 world cities, a Bilbao-sponsored tribute to Frank Gehry
is one highlight. And the massive Expo-sponsored themed pavilions offer a complete
education in city planning. It would take a month to see not just the architecture, but the
architecture-related exhibitions, at this expo.

Dano Secondary School

As the sun beats down on the West African dust and shrub at 100-plus degrees
Fahrenheit, students at Dano Secondary School in Burkina Faso keep their cool. How?
Natural ventilation is the answer. Its cooling touch flows through the Dano school’s three
615-square-foot classrooms, 560-square-foot computer room, and teacher’s office, which
make up the bulk of the low-slung, red-brick, L-shaped structure. The school sits among
trees in a roughly groomed, red-gravel clearing, approachable from all directions as,
more likely than not, its 150-odd students are walking/cycling here from every which way.
Two of the classrooms are attached, each with separate entrances. An oval outdoor
common area separates this part from the third detached classroom, which forms the
base of the “L” as it turns up toward the small computer lab and teacher’s office. Hanging
over the entire structure is a single unifying piece—the gleaming scalloped roof, made
from corrugated tin and sitting on latticed rebar trusses. It’s a striking feature popping out
against the flat red dust of the Burkinabe plain, catching the eye along with little vertical splashes of primary color—the long, low lamella
windows. As it turns out, these are the main components of the ventilation system bringing sweet relief from the heat.
Francis Kéré left his small village in Burkina Faso in the early 1990s to make good. He was drawn to Germany by a locally administered
development scholarship after working as a carpenter. As he was studying he became increasingly more engaged with the idea of
building a school back in his hometown of Gando after villagers told him the old school was nearing collapse. He raised the funds and
finished the Gando Primary School in 2001, while he himself was still a student at the Berlin Technical University.

Surry Hills Library Architect Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp

Surry Hills has long been an idiosyncratic Sydney neighborhood. The run-down,
poverty-stricken area immortalized in Ruth Park’s 1948 novel, The Harp in the South,
has witnessed a bonafide revival in the last decade, with trendy shops, design offices,
pubs, and restaurants now lining its streets. The opening last year of the Surry Hills
Library and Community Center is but the latest evidence of the neighborhood’s claims
for the busiest, liveliest scene in town. The project represents a bit of a gamble for the
city, since the building houses a hybrid of community resources—the library, a child-
care facility for 26 kids, and a community center with meeting rooms, yoga spaces, and
a commercial teaching kitchen, which have no precedent in Australia for being
colocated.
The library’s sleek glass design stakes a claim in the quaint heart of Surry Hills, with a
notable location on the main commercial strip, Crown Street. The library’s east
elevation, directly on Crown, presents the welcoming gesture of a frameless glass facade on the ground floor, where people lounge in
white leather sofas, sipping coffee and reading books. The glass facade extends up to the second and third floors, where it’s fitted with
vertical timber-veneer-clad louvers that shift to provide solar and glare control.
By far, the most radical gesture is the south facade—or “environmental atrium”—which faces a new green space that conceals a
subterranean tank used to store rainwater. This facade features double-skin glazing with an array of triangulated internal cavities
serving different purposes. Four of the cavities pull in outside air from the roof, running it over coils supplied with cool or hot water from
geothermal heat exchangers under the building. The air is then filtered through plants growing up from containers installed at the
bottom of the cavities, before it enters a gabion rock wall labyrinth that surrounds the basement foundation in a void created between
excavated rock and an internal “dry wall” needed to prevent water seepage. During summer, the labyrinth cools the air by several
degrees; the labyrinth is then recharged using a night-flush strategy. The other two glass cavities act as supply ducts, feeding each
building level and ceiling cavity, where variable air volume boxes provide further conditioning as required.
 W.S. V.6/I.5 4

Livraria da Vila
When the Livraria da Vila, a bookstore intent on becoming a chain, approached São
Paulo architect Isay Weinfeld about designing a store on a street called Alameda
Lorena in the Jardim Paulista area where the streets are lined with exclusive fashion
and lingerie boutiques, he devised a scheme that would place books themselves at the
forefront by using pivoting bookcases at the main entrance and making the
merchandise itself the principal element of the interior design. When it is closed, the
store presents no visible entrance — just rows of glass-encased bookshelves smartly lit.
When it is open, customers walk between one-story-high walls of books that have
swung open to reveal the store’s interior. Such an entrance recalls Brazil’s informal
corner bars, called botequins, which spill out onto the street. Weinfeld is known for
designing dramatic entries to his buildings, a tendency that many critics chalk up to his
love of cinema. Above the pivoting bookshelves sits a stark rectangular cement facade,
adorned only at the top with the store name. While film-loving architects are hardly rare, few have made their own films as Weinfeld
has, codirecting the cult film Fogo e Paixão (Fire and Passion) with fellow architect Marcio Kogan. To visually connect the basement to
the street level, Weinfeld cut an oval opening in the ceiling of the lower level and — of course — lined it with books. So in a single
gesture, he both brings light into the lower level and creates a wonderful sense of books overflowing. The cutout also allows parents on
the main floor to peer into the children’s area, where bright lights and colorful, play-friendly furnishings cater to a younger age group. A
straight stair topped with an aluminum-framed skylight runs along one side of the store, connecting all three floors.

One Shelley Street

The original idea for the new Macquarie Group office at One Shelley Street in Sydney
was more akin to a scene from a Pixar movie than to the perception of a modern
banking institution. Inspired by the nearby Darling Harbour—where containers were
loaded and offloaded from cargo ships with heavy cranes before the area was
redeveloped into a tourist district—West Hollywood, Calif.–based Clive Wilkinson
Architects imagined a large gantry at the top of a 10-story atrium that could carry
moveable meeting pods to preordered locations. Though far more static than the
original scheme, the realized design is still a far cry from the buttoned-up board rooms
one might find on Wall Street. Working with local firm Woods Bagot, Wilkinson
designed a light-filled, brightly-colored, and highly efficient working environment. The
atrium still serves as the center of the project and the meeting pods as focal points—26
glass-enclosed cubes, with candy-colored furnishings and finishes, that cantilever into
the void. In addition to the pods, the rest of the 330,000-square-foot office space also
bucks convention.
Macquarie partnered with Dutch workplace consultants Veldhoen + Co. to study the work patterns of its employees and decided to
implement a strategy called Activity-Based Working (ABW). Instead of a traditional desking environment, the space is divided into a
series of flexible workspaces—“neighborhoods”—that each accommodate roughly 100 employees. In accordance with the principles of
ABW, employees do not have assigned seats, but rather they can choose each day from collaborative bench seating, breakout spaces
and lounges, or small private stations that can be used for solo projects. To foster community within the building, the architects
developed a series of seven themed plazas,The Square, Garden, Dining Room, Tree House, Coffee House, Library, and Playroom all
have communal workspaces and are branded using supergraphics, plants, and color.

Prayer Pavilion of Light

Phoenix First Assembly has grown considerably since its founding 75 years ago. Today,
its 65-acre campus, which borders a residential neighborhood in north Phoenix, has a
collection of facilities, including its main sanctuary, a Southwestern-style, stucco and
clay-tile-roof building that holds about 5,000 people. In the mid-1990s, the church hired
DeBartolo Architects to conceive a campus master plan. The firm was then
commissioned to design a series of modern buildings: an early childhood education
center (completed in 2000), a youth pavilion (2002), and a children’s pavilion (2004). In
2003, the firm was charged with creating the final piece of the master plan: a prayer
chapel. Its atmosphere needed to be conducive to meditation and appropriate for events
such as funerals and weddings. It was to be constructed on the highest point on
campus, a 3-acre parcel flanking Stoney Mountain.
The client wanted a highly visible “place of light” that offered city views. In response, the
architects perched a 2,500-square-foot glass box bordered by
courtyards on the elevated site. Envisioned as a “lantern on a hill,” the cube glows
brightly at night and can be seen from miles away. One of the architects’ primary goals
was to isolate the chapel, to make it a truly serene environment. And so, the visitor
experience begins at the base of the hill, where one enters a zigzagging path that
gradually ascends 28 feet to the pavilion. Tall, weathered steel plates line the paved
walkway, creating a tunnel effect. At its pinnacle, the path deposits visitors into a
landscaped plaza overlooking Phoenix.
After exploring various shading strategies (such as steel mesh) and finding them
aesthetically insufficient, DeBartolo Architects conceived a double facade that protects
the interior from the scorching desert sun. The inner enclosure, supported by Vierendeel
trusses, is triple-glazed. The outer facade, which cantilevers off the trusses, is laminated
frit glass. From a distance, the building envelope seems to float. In fact, it rests on
black concrete walls at the volume’s four corners, leaving an 8-foot gap between the
ground and the bottom of the facade system. On three sides, the lower portion of the
chapel features sliding glass doors that stack at one end, eliminating the boundary
between inside and out. The fourth side, on the west, serves as the building’s formal
entrance. Here, one finds a fixed glass wall with two custom-made bronze doors
inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer.

Designer Ingrid Fetell tries to answer the question: How does design contribute to, or detract from, our feelings of
happiness? in her Aesthetics of Joy blog.
 W.S. V.6/I.5 5

Much of today’s focus on prefabricated design is for residential projects, including the
Make it Right initiative in New Orleans. UK-based architect Robert Gaukroger,
however, has devoted his energy to a replicable, prefab office/classroom model.
Completed late last year, the first Forest Classroom Pods reside on the Elleray
Preparatory School campus in Lake District National Park, Windermere, UK.
Constructed from ribbed timber frames and clad in English chestnut shingles, the
three pods are organized in a triangular formation and connected by a deck which
also serves as an outdoor classroom, and is comprised of timber and recycled milk
jugs. Elevated on Douglas fir stilts to minimize the environmental impact, the pods
seem to come alive much to students’ delight and resemble creeping creatures from
afar. Operable windows allow for passive ventilation with automated reflective blinds
controlling solar gain. Solar panels (for lighting) and vacuum tube solar water heaters
decrease the need for fossil fuels and a tank collects water for reuse in the gardens.
Sheep’s wool provides a more natural insulation than chemical options.
The zoomorphic structures serve as a fun learning space for the students, while also
providing them with an important connection to the natural environment.

Charles H. Shaw Technology and Learning Center

When the team from Chicago-based Farr Associates interviewed in 2005 for the
commission for the Charles H. Shaw Technology and Learning Center, they were
given a tour of the site: a red-brick powerhouse filled to the brim with boilers, coal
chutes, and the flotsam and jetsam of Chicago’s industrial past. The building originally
supplied heat and electricity to the vast Sears, Roebuck and Co. campus on the city’s
West Side; Sears vacated the property in the early 1990s. The current owner, the
Homan Arthington Foundation, was determined to include the powerhouse in its
ambitious revitalization of the adjacent historic neighborhood of North Lawndale. A
partnership with Chicago Public Schools’ Renaissance 2010 project—charged with
creating 100 new charter schools—and the Henry Ford Learning Institute clarified the
program for the renovation: The powerhouse would be a green charter high school.
Completed in 1905, the Nimmons & Fellows–designed powerhouse incorporated
neoclassical cornices and decorative medallions in its facade. The great hall, which
occupies the entire northern half of the 90,000-square-foot building, was filled with
generators until the 1950s, when Sears moved to the power grid and the space was
turned over to air conditioning equipment. Nimmons & Fellows finished the hall’s
interior in glazed Tiffany brick, with large windows and a lengthy ribbon of skylight.
The building’s south side held the boilers.
Before the renovation could begin, an extensive interior demolition process was
necessary. To see how much could be preserved, the architects climbed a series of
“Piranesi-like catwalks,” examining beams and bearing walls for structural stability.
Despite their best efforts, surprises emerged throughout the construction process.
Upon removing the coal bins, for instance, they discovered that beams deemed more
than sufficient to support infill floors had in fact been eroded by sulfur. And toxic
materials necessitated extensive remediation. When the building opened three years
later, in time for the 2009 school year, all signs of the epic design and demolition
process had been erased. Today, students enter into the restored great hall, which
still retains its glazed brick and much of the original floor tile. Anything too damaged to
be retained was replaced with in-kind materials. The space is now used for
assemblies and as a cafeteria; a mezzanine houses a teachers’ lounge.

LA-based designer Ramon Coronado recently undertook a project to transform

discarded items in urban LA. He took a shopping cart & turned it into a swing, chair,
table & lamp, making a statement about the lack of parks & rec spaces in LA. In the
designer's own words:
Mercado Negro is a Spanish word for Black Market. This 12-week project deals
with reclaiming an ordinary, everyday object and transforming it into something
with a completely different purpose.
 W.S. V.6/I.5 6

930 Poydras Street

Few American cities embody “place” quite like New Orleans, where European,
African, and Caribbean traditions are blended in a kind of cultural jambalaya. The
city’s architecture reflects this same multiculturalism, particularly in the French
Quarter, which still bears the lasting imprint of Spanish rulers. Their insistence on
masonry construction produced an explosion of Creole townhouses—buildings with
thick, solid walls punctuated by breezeways leading to courtyards, fountains, and
lush interior gardens. These European antecedents of the old city were inspiration
for Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, whose design for a new high-rise apartment tower at 930
Poydras Street draws on the building patterns of the city’s historic quarter—and their
social implications.
The scheme for the 21-story apartment building in the city’s business district does
just that, seeking to create a sense of community among its residents. In this case,
however, people proceed to the semi-private realm along a vertical, rather than
horizontal, path. Placed on top of a rectangular podium consisting of eight levels of parking, the L-shaped residential tower consolidates
tenant amenities on the ninth floor. This level functions like the inner courtyard of a Creole townhouse—a shared space that is the
social heart of the complex. Anchoring the ninth floor is the sky lobby, a dramatic glass box that cantilevers off the building façade. This
double-height lounge—which features polished concrete floors, bar counters set into bright yellow walls, and informal groupings of
furniture—serves as an extension of tenants’ living spaces. It also houses the elevators serving the residential floors. Outside the sky
lobby is the pool deck, with tiered seating rising alongside the narrow pool. Tucked beneath the bleachers is the facility’s fitness center.
Five two-story townhouses create an architectural edge along the south side of the deck, producing the effect of a courtyard on the
garage rooftop.

New Carver Apartments

At six stories tall, the New Carver Apartments doesn’t exactly tower over the Santa
Monica Freeway that zips past its windows. Yet the drumlike structure is impossible to
miss, even at 65 miles per hour. Los Angeles–based architect Michael Maltzan’s
design is as formally iconic as the cylindrical Capitol Records building, which makes
the fact that it was built for one of L.A.’s neediest populations—the chronically
homeless—even more surprising than the novel architectural expression.
The client was the Skid Row Housing Trust, a nonprofit that has spent more than two
decades building supportive housing—first by renovating dilapidated hotels near
downtown L.A., then by embarking on new construction. The Rainbow Apartments
(completed in 2006), Maltzan’s first building for the organization, is adjacent to Skid
Row (otherwise known as Central City East), but the New Carver Apartments is
farther afield, sited in South Park, a rapidly developing neighborhood near L.A. Live
and the Staples Center. The location is strategic on two levels. It houses residents in
an area with access to transit and grocery stores, and it is a statement to Los Angeles:
Affordable housing is not a blight that needs to be hidden away.
The interplay between urban fabric and the community that is fostered inside the
53,000-square-foot building begins with the ground floor, which hosts gathering
spaces and tenant support services: a communal kitchen and garden, counseling
rooms, and staff offices. There, Maltzan expressed the public character in exposed
concrete, a choice inspired as much by the elevated freeway just outside the lobby
doors as by the material’s economy and durability. The concrete continues into the
central courtyard, forming a dramatic stairway (that also doubles as stadium seating).
The New Carver’s 97 units loop around the central courtyard. Fins of custom-made
bent galvanized sheet metal form a privacy screen around the 40-foot-diameter void
and disguise the structural steel columns, roof drains, and guardrail posts. Individual
apartments are efficient: At 304 square feet, they’re monastic studios with small
kitchens—so residents rely on the shared spaces. They gather on the sixth-floor deck
to smoke and take the occasional yoga class. Painted bright yellow, the space offers
residents a sweeping view of the city.

The Opposite House

The Sanlitun neighborhood in the Embassy District at the center of Beijing was once an
entertainment strip where karaoke music wafted from open doors and barkers called
visitors inside. Today, Sanlitun has been rethought and rebuilt as a 3,229,173-square-
foot development on two sites — North and South. Kengo Kuma’s design for a hip hotel
called Opposite House provides an anchor for the new neighborhood, attracting an
affluent crowd drawn to its art and urbane vibe. Sanlitun Village, which was also master
planned by Kuma, contains 250 retail establishments in 19 major, low-scaled shopping
and entertaining buildings by contemporary designers such as New York architects LO-
TEK and SHOP.
The name Opposite House derives from the traditional Chinese siheyuan, or courtyard
architecture, in which a secondary structure for guests, typically facing north, sat
opposite the primary residence. In another sense, the word opposite in the name
announces the individualistic hotel as set apart from its peers, turning Beijing’s
traditional ideas of hotel design around. Kuma set the pattern for other buildings at
Sanlitun with a gridded exterior structure that has been repeated by other builders. The
silk-screened green-glass facade establishes a sleek pattern related to adjoining
structures and the street, stepping down at one point to a bamboo-filled courtyard
adjacent to the dining area. Kuma has used the term “urban forest” to describe his
intent for the overall structure within the Sanlitun Village.

Ferrari World Abu Dhabi Slated to be the world’s largest indoor theme park,
the complex will contain more than 20 “high-octane” attractions, such as a 60-meter-
high freefall ride called the “G-Force Tower” and the world’s fastest roller coaster, which
will reach speeds in excess of 200 kph. The building is being constructed near the Yas
Marina Circuit, which is home to the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The architect is Benoy, a
UK-based firm founded more than 60 years ago
 W.S. V.6/I.5 7

The Yas Hotel

When Asymptote principals Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture won a 2007
competition to design a 500-room luxury hotel and marina on Abu Dhabi’s Yas Island,
northeast of the mainland, the directive was firm: to create an iconic complex around a
Formula 1 racecourse and complete it in time to host the country’s inaugural Grand Prix
on November 1, 2009.
Like a mirage, the sweeping form of The Yas Hotel — part of the first phase of an
ambitious master plan by developer Aldar Properties to convert the 10-square-mile
desert oasis into an alluring tourist destination — evokes the speed and excitement of
the event and the lifestyle it celebrates. Plus, the 914,932-square-foot project was
realized in under 24 months, thanks to a skillful pragmatism comparable to that of the
drivers who shared the spotlight on opening day.
Rashid and Couture collaborated with the BIM specialists at Gehry Technologies and
Stuttgart-based engineer Schlaich Bergermann to develop the structurally independent
outer skin. Comprising 5,096 lozenge-shaped, coated-and-fritted-glass panels, framed
in steel, the grid shell, as it’s called, serves as a solar-shading and heat-chimney
device. The 712-foot-long faceted expanse also provides a continual surface that
reflects beautiful, luminous effects as the sun moves across its surface during daylight
hours.

Ex Machina : Aurora Borealis

Even as a young playwright, Québec City’s Robert Lepage, the prolific artistic director
responsible for such productions as Cirque du Soleil’s Kà in Las Vegas and the
upcoming staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New
York City, wanted to make his mark on the Bunge. The massive grain-storage terminal
blocks city views to the Saint Lawrence River, and Lepage has been staring at the
1,968-foot-long building since 1997, when he moved his production company, Ex
Machina, into a converted firehouse facing its 81 silos. In 2008 he began to realize his
vision.
Working with longtime collaborator Martin Gagnon, principal of Ambiances Lighting &
Visual Design, Lepage created The Image Mill, a series of video images condensing
Québec City’s 400-year history into 40 minutes, which he displayed around two outer
walls of the structure using 27 freestanding Christie projectors. During its first season,
the projection — presented by the City of Québec, with the Bunge of Canada and the
Port of Québec, to celebrate the city’s 400th anniversary — attracted hundreds of
thousands of viewers. The resulting Aurora Borealis is a light installation that washes
the Bunge with a re-creation of the northern lights via 574 LED luminaires integrated
into the landmark.
High School #9
High School #9 commandeers your attention, even as you’re zooming along the
Hollywood Freeway in central Los Angeles. Ringed by a roller-coastering ramp, the
school’s tower comes into view, a triangle topped by a cantilevered box, like a beach
ball balanced on a seal’s nose. Just as Encounter, the futuristic “spaceship” restaurant
at the city’s gateway airport, announces the local tone, the school’s dynamic 140-foot-
high sentinel has immediate “only in L.A.!” impact. But this landmark’s high visibility and
iconic exuberance also make it an unexpectedly complex symbol: a lightning rod for
controversy. The bottom line is HS #9’s final price tag: $232 million for 230,000 square
feet (completely fitted out), widely translated as a stunning $1,000 per square foot
(though construction and landscaping costs of $171.9 million bring it closer to $745 per
square foot). Meanwhile, the project’s most publicly recognized element, the tower,
remains an empty shell, pending uncertain completion of its spectacular room at the
top. So, for now, this component is purely symbolic, a billboard along the freeway,
entangled in a disconnected ramp to nowhere, configured whimsically as an unraveled
number 9. And that’s just one piece of an ambitious, unconventional, and eclectically
expressive design, making it awfully easy to fault the architecture. But for all its quirks—
and the challenge of separating this architecture from the complicated forces behind
it—the design has much to commend. The scheme, by Coop Himmelb(l)au, is often
likened to torqued chess pieces—with a tilted, conical, freestanding library, clad in
gleaming steel; rhomboid light chimneys projecting from the cafeteria; and blocky
classroom buildings, punched with oversize portholes.
In 2000, the notoriously overcrowded and under-resourced Los Angeles Unified School
District (LAUSD), with unprecedented bond funding, engaged AC Martin Architects to
design a traditional high school for the 9.8-acre downtown site, formerly LAUSD
headquarters. By 2001, AC Martin’s scheme was, according to Coop Himmelb(l)au,
“fully designed and engineered through construction documents.” Yet billionaire
philanthropist Eli Broad, with other local leaders, convinced the district to switch course
and create instead a high school composed of four “academies”: music, theater, dance,
and visual arts. The idea was to exploit the educational opportunities of the site,
bordering inner city and Grand Avenue’s cultural district, along with Gehry’s Disney
Hall, Isozaki’s Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and Moneo’s Cathedral of
Our Lady of the Angels. Instrumental to Disney Hall’s realization and the future Grand
Avenue Development, Broad wanted an architectural luminary (and later contributed $5
million) for HS #9.
 W.S. V.6/I.5 8

Alpha Tomamu Towers

Located in the forest covered mountains of central Hokkaido, the alpine resort town of
Tomamu is an outdoor recreation paradise. Standing in this beautiful landscape are the
40-story hotel towers of the Alpha Resort, built during the economic boom of the late
1980s. Now twenty years old the two towers needed re-cladding, so the resort’s owners
asked Klein Dytham architecture to develop a colour scheme.

Wanting to reduce the impact of the towers KDa decided to use camouflage, but the
difficulty was that the natural environment surrounding the resort changes constantly
with the seasons. KDa’s solution was to camouflage one tower to suit winter conditions
and the other to suit summer - one tower fades from black to white, and the other from
green to white. While KDa wanted to dissolve the buildings’ mass, they didn’t want
invisibility and so inserted a few red panels to liven things up. Their inspiration was the
cheerful red baubles on a Christmas tree - rather than being around for just one day a
year, the red panels create smiles year round. The extraordinary size of the buildings
and the boldness of the colour scheme creates a surreal scene – KDa’s scheme
produces in the real world a scene normally only possible in computer renderings!

Herning Museum of Contemporary Art

The museum, known by its coy (in English) acronym HEART, occupies 10.4 acres of
Birk Centerpark, a singular art museum, sculpture park, design school, and office
building enclave that was once the home of a shirt factory. Steven Holl’s abstractly
conceived, 60,278-square-foot structure leaves alone the art galleries totaling 15,812
square feet. Two discrete precast-concrete volumes form the inner core of the museum,
one for permanent exhibitions, the other for temporary ones, and movable walls of
lightweight construction allow art to be displayed in orthogonally arranged spaces. The
architectural whammy occurs above the hang, so to speak. Here the roof fills out the
gestalt, with five white tubular shells bending and twisting to create convex ceilings that
billow over the galleries and perimeter areas containing the lobby, bookshop, offices,
café, library, and an auditorium for concerts. On the exterior, convex and concave walls
echo in the elevation the curves overhead. Although the exterior white walls, made of
poured-in-place reinforced concrete, seem rather blank from afar, up close you find the surface rutted with creases. To achieve this
thickly textured effect, the architects had trucks drive over vinyl mesh tarp, then staple-gunned the wrinkled material to plywood forms
for the pour. Much has been said about how Holl’s convex roof elements look like shirt sleeves, sliced and folded, and how the
wrinkled exterior concrete resembles shirt fabric — both quite apropos of the products of the manufacturer who founded the original
Herning Art Museum on the site. The imaginative intersection of art, light, and architecture offers a fittingly dramatic setting for the
exhibitions, and not surprisingly, the museum recently received one of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ International Architecture
awards for 2010.

Mainz Markthäuser 11-13

Plenty of bad buildings hide behind their facades. Like an amateur stage design where
a paper-thin painted streetscape creates the illusion of a grand setting, a promising
building exterior can often veil quite ordinary or unpleasant spaces. Sometimes,
however, the opposite is true. For a new building on a historic market square in Mainz,
Germany, a false front conceals a bold design. The illusionist in this case, Massimiliano
Fuksas, is not necessarily the perpetrator of the deception.
The Roman architect has wrestled with the complexities of designing under the burden
of history before, but the Mainz project presented him with an unusual challenge—how
to merge a completely contemporary design with a historic facade (or series of
facades). As it turned out, the existing facade, however charming, was a fraud.
Destroyed along with 80 percent of Mainz’s architecture during air raids in 1945, the
buildings in question were hastily rebuilt in 1955 with a simple facade, only to be
“retrofitted” with a facsimile of the original—itself an 1890s replacement of Gothic
architecture—beginning in 1979. For better or worse, thorny questions about
reconstruction are being addressed in cities across Germany with different results.
Following a 2003 competition win, Fuksas was charged with designing a mixed-use
development behind this new “old” facade. The buildings that had stood there—housing
a rundown cinema and apartments—were to be demolished to make room for the new
shopping center and housing complex. But salvaging the facade while razing the rest of
the building proved impossible, and further complicated a preservation case that was
already on shaky ground. It was just as conceivable then to design an entirely new
building, facade and all. The town opted instead for what could be considered an
extreme measure. It would rebuild the rebuilt, though never landmarked, facade.
Thousands of 2-inch-wide, painted white ceramic bars clad the upper portion of
Fuksas’s facades. (The ground level features glass storefronts.) The bars are
rhythmically arranged on an aluminum framework, with large gaps that reveal the
substructure beneath, containing openable windows and insulated metal panels. Boxy
windows are also randomly inserted between bars. The varying degrees of opacity and
transparency, coupled with the cadenced spacing of the bars, create a striking overall
effect. Several sections of the ceramic-clad framework mechanically fold open to reveal
terraces embedded within the sloping roof. Fuksas carried the ceramic cladding over to
the walls of the main interior space, a multilevel atrium, at the building’s core. Entered
from the market square or one of two side streets, the atrium is exposed to the
elements, with natural light, wind, and sometimes rain sneaking through from the
partially open roof. Within the atrium, three soaring columns emphasize the entirety of
the space, which spans from the basement to the glass roof and beyond.
 W.S. V.6/I.5 9

Liège-Guillemins TGV Railway Station

Liège has a long and storied history. For centuries, the bustling town, thought to be the
birthplace of Charlemagne, was a cultural, religious, and commercial crossroads.
Located in present-day Belgium’s French-speaking Walloon region, Liège’s recent past
is less illustrious, since the metal and coal-mining industries that sustained it in modern
times have slowly disappeared. The city was ripe for a makeover. By the early 1990s,
discussions were under way to build a high-speed-railway station to spark renewed
interest in the medieval metropolis and capitalize on its strategic position between major
cities in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. From a short list of likely as well as
surprising architects — from Nicholas Grimshaw to Aldo Rossi — Santiago Calatrava
was selected in 1997 to design the new landmark.
The new station would replace an unremarkable 1950s building that occupied a much
smaller lot on the same site and accommodate new tracks for high-speed train travel,
which railway authorities throughout Europe have in recent years endeavored to make
as seamless as possible between countries. The transition to the new station would
also have to be seamless, as the old one continued to operate while construction
proceeded.
The roof of the Liège-Guillemins station is as spectacular as they come. Rising 115 feet
above the five platforms and nine tracks, the steel-and-glass assembly ushers in a new
era of rail travel, achieving an openness and transparency about which designers of
Victorian-era stations could only dream. The vaulted structure was built in sections,
each literally pushed forward as it was completed using a construction technique
developed to reduce disturbance to the active train traffic below. In total, the 39 “ribs”
span 518 feet to cover the full length of an arriving train. Narrow canopies extend south
like fingers past the main roof to shelter extra passengers during peak travel times,
when the number of cars on a train almost doubles. Calatrava’s facadeless structure
offers clear views of the city spread out before the platforms, which are raised about 15
feet above the ground. Ten circular shops animate the concourse level at grade. The
slab between the two levels is supported by concrete arches — cast on-site —
separated by glass block.

1111 Lincoln Road

In the Pantheon of Building Types, the parking garage lurks somewhere in the
vicinity of prisons and toll plazas. So a project in Miami’s South Beach
consisting of a drive-through bank and office building renovation with a new
parking garage as its crown jewel hardly seems a likely commission for
Pritzker Prize–winning architects to take on. But when developer Robert
Wennett approached Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron with this three-part
program for 1111 Lincoln Road, the architects (who are also designing the new
Miami Art Museum) saw possibility in addressing the urbanistic significance of
the site, the climate, and the mix of uses. Plus, with an individual client—who
collects art—they identified a ripe opportunity for experimentation and another
chance to flip a stereotype on its head. A robust house of cards, 1111 Lincoln
Road is a composition of cast-in-place concrete slabs that function as floor
plates, columns, and ramps winding through the compressions and
expansions in heights of the six parking levels, which range from 8 to 34 feet.
The building is anchored by ground-floor retail and topped by a restaurant and
Wennett’s penthouse. A canopy above the retail spaces continues across the
existing building to the new one, marrying the two structures that are otherwise
linked only by bridges at each level. To carry life up off the street, the team
wedged a boutique between the garage’s decks. And the soaring seventh-floor
parking level does double-duty as an event space, hosting fashion shows,
parties, and concerts.

Pittman Dowell Residence

Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell, both respected painters and teachers, lived in a
1,200-square-foot Richard Neutra—designed house on the northern edge of
Los Angeles and needed more space. Although small, their 1952 house —
designed for Neutra’s secretary, Dorothy Serulnic, and her husband, George —
sits on a 6-acre site that Neutra planned so it could be subdivided into three
parcels. Since purchasing the entire property in 1997, Pittman and Dowell had
built a small pavilion and cactus garden on the second parcel and saw how the
site’s various pieces all worked together. So instead of just building a bigger
house on the third parcel and using the Serulnic residence as a guesthouse,
they approached the new building as an integral part of a larger composition.
Michael Maltzan responded with a design that at first blush seems to contradict
Neutra’s — introverted and opaque rather than outward-looking and transparent, polygonal rather than orthogonal. But the
more you get to know his house, the more you see how it picks up Neutra’s ideas and gives them a new spin. While
Maltzan certainly uses contrast as one means of relating the new to the old, his strategy is more sophisticated than simply
doing the opposite of what Neutra did. By slicing and dissecting his seven-sided structure into a series of triangles and
polygons, Maltzan creates a geometry that challenges conventional notions of household order. As soon as you enter,
you can look into the master bathroom on one side or to the living room in front. From the living room, you can walk out to
a covered balcony overlooking the valley or up one step to the courtyard. The bedroom on the other side of the court
faces the living room with floor-to-ceiling glass (though shades can be pulled down). A galley kitchen occupies an
interstitial space between the dining room and a library.
 W.S. V.6/I.5 10

tree-trunk garden house

The Tree trunk garden house in Hilversum, Netherlands is a house made from
logs for Dutch musical performer Hans Liberg. The home is all carved from
stack of logs which is truly an inspiration for those who think that the wooden
houses are not appealing. Designed by Piet Hein Eek, the house is constructed
at the edge of the woods. The house is fully ventilated with the sliding windows
that are fitted into specially designed frames made from simple plastic and
steel.

Tree House
Inspired by that magical space sheltered beneath leafy, deciduous branches,
Tree House, designed by Mount Fuji Architects Studio, revolves around a
single column measuring 4 feet in diameter that supports frames (aka
“branches”) of engineered wood. While these “boughs,” which radiate outward,
hold up the structure’s spiraling roof, the trunklike pillar firmly roots the rustic
one-room dwelling to the ground. Maintaining a connection to the earth was
essential to the clients, a husband and wife with a green thumb. Yet their
flagpole-shaped parcel amid a Tokyo suburb was not ideal for plant cultivation.
Hemmed in by existing buildings on all four sides, the “flag” portion of the
property hardly had enough room — or sunshine — for a garden. And the 49-
foot-long “pole” tethering it to the street was not much help since it acts as
emergency vehicle access. But the 1,744-square-foot plot’s separation from
the busy road appealed to the architects, who saw its dark, cramped condition
as an opportunity for invention. Following the gradual slope of the site, up 5 feet between the middle of the “pole” and the
rear of the “flag,” the architects devised a tiered, tradition-inspired floor plan. From the front door, which is placed at a
diagonal to the access road, the plan resembles the historic ta no ji layout, shaped like the Chinese character for “rice
paddy.” It is divided in fourths by the column — serving as a daikokubashira, or main pillar — at the intersection. Each
quadrant steps up 8 inches as it winds around this central point and corresponds to one of the home’s four main domestic
functions: cooking, dining, living, and sleeping. The floor is made of concrete (the area of the traditional doma, usually
composed of compacted earth) in the busy kitchen/entrance area. It then transitions to oak on the raised surfaces where
wear is less of a factor. A second-floor study loft sits atop the bath and storage areas — the only places concealed by
doors.

Fortaleza Hall
The basis for a building’s design is often rooted in something seemingly
inconsequential: a napkin sketch, a material sample, or, in the case of the new Foster +
Partners–designed Fortaleza Hall, on the SC Johnson campus in Racine, Wis., an
airplane. This isn’t just any plane, however, but the Carnaúba—a replica of a 1930s
twin-engine Sikorsky S-38 amphibious plane. The late SC Johnson chairman Sam
Johnson flew the plane to Brazil in 1998, with his sons Fisk, the current chairman and
CEO, and Curt. The father-and-sons flight team replicated (down to the aircraft) a
15,000-mile-roundtrip journey made 63 years earlier by Sam’s father to see the source
of the Carnaúba palm, the waxy leaves of which are used to make what was then the
company’s most famous product. When Sam died in 2004 and the idea for a memorial
building took shape, his plane became the central theme.
The building includes employee eateries, a wellness center, bank & company store in
addition to the centerpiece airplane. Along the stair connecting the levels a living green
wall with 2,500 different plants native to Central & South America creates a sense of a
tropical landscape.

The current fascination in architecture with complex geometries and expressive

forms had a precedent in the HOK-designed St. Louis Planetarium, a citation
winner in the 1960 P/A Awards program. Its hyperbolic, thin-shell concrete roof,
consisting of straight lines rotated around a central vertical axis, created a
circular shape that flared out at its base to cover a perimeter porch and glass-
enclosed exhibition area and that opened up at its top to encircle a platform
initially used for star-gazing. A 60-foot-diameter aluminum planetarium dome
originally stood inside the structure, with a suspended spiral ramp leading up to
the observation deck. Classrooms, offices, and support spaces occupied the
lower level. Time has proved the 1960 jury correct. While the jurors liked the
“sculptured form of the exterior,” they found the shape “totally unrelated to the
concealed dome” and “the resulting space between the two surfaces …
awkward.” In the intervening years, an 80-foot-diameter dome replaced the
original, which forced the removal of the ramp and the closing of the observation deck. Exhibition standards also changed,
and the once-tall, glass-enclosed display space around the dome acquired hung ceilings, with walls covering the glass.
And the growth of the institution, with a large science center attached underground to the planetarium, has led to the
removal of the lower-level classrooms and the transformation of that space into a reception area. The elegant hyperbolic
roof remains, however, as a testament to the flexibility of complex forms that have a loose-fit relationship with their
functions.
 W.S. V.6/I.5 11

limonLAB
It’s an urban laboratory. That’s how architect Enrique Limon explains why his New York
City—based firm is called limonLAB. Established in 2005, the two-to-four-person firm’s
bent toward experimentation has yielded a number of completed and on-the-boards
projects, including a bar in Philadelphia, a gallery in New York City’s Harlem, a guest
house in Hawaii, an auditorium for a school in Kenya, a resort in Thailand, and a
prototype soccer park slated to be developed in 20 U.S. locations. When Limon
returned to New York City following his studies in London, he was awarded a Smithsonian Fellowship at the Cooper-Hewitt, National
Design Museum. The research he did there was for an exhibition that never actually materialized. Despite that fact, Limon says that
what he learned from the experience of researching the “complex transparency” in the work of artist László Maholy-Nagy continues to
influence limonLAB’s current work. One important thread he’s currently working on has to do with a competition he just completed for
the 2012 Expo in South Korea, centered around preserving the Earth’s oceans, which are threatened by toxic waste.

Housing Stack
Robert Venturi’s iconic 1964 house for his mother in Chestnut Hill,
Pennsylvania, a departure from the “less is more” ideal of his architectural
peers at the time, offered a strong but subtle statement. In his own words, its
gabled form created “an almost symbolic image of a house.” These days, you
can forget subtlety. A string of recent projects takes an in-your-face approach
to revive the gable once again. In Tokyo, Sou Fujimoto stacks prototypical
house shapes three stories high in a wood structure. In Zaandam, the
Netherlands, Delft-based WAM Architecten goes further, or higher, with its 12-
story, blocklike composition of traditional cottages from Holland’s northern Zaan region. Herzog & de Meuron plays a
game of Jenga with extruded versions of the same shape for VitraHaus in Vitra’s architectural park in Weil am Rhein,
Germany. Fittingly, the buildings are, respectively: collective housing, a hotel, and a showroom for home furnishings — in
essence, a permanent home, a temporary home, and an ideal home.

A woven shelter designed by Jiyoun Kim and a lightweight structure

made of prefabricated modules by Gene Kaufman shared first place
in the first annual Ideas Competition organized by the AIA’s Young
Architects Forum and the Committee on Design. Eric Polite took third
place with his design of a portable dwelling unit fabricated from
recycled plastics and polymers. The competition challenged
participants to devise a scheme for post-disaster housing on the site
of Houston’s Astrodome.
Kim’s design uses donut-shaped fabric panels that unskilled workers
on-site can fill with sand, mud, straw, or refuse and then weave together. Once
filled and connected, the fabric panels serve as both skin and structure. Kim
explains that her design was a response to a statement by a planner at the
United Nation High Commission for Refugees who said it is very hard to
replace time-tested tents, no matter their limitations. So instead of starting from
scratch, she used tent fabric, but adapted it so it could create permanent, as
well as temporary, housing. Kim worked on the project as her senior thesis at
the New York Institute of Technology.
Kaufman designed a system of prefabricated modules that nest within each
other for shipping, then slide out on-site. Pivoting solar panels and wind
turbines on the roofs provide power, while rain is collected for drinking water, and dry composting toilets eliminate the
need for sewage connection. As a result, the houses can operate even when a city’s power grid has collapsed.

Making Waves
When Carlos Ferrater, principal of Office of Architecture in Barcelona (OAB), won the
competition to upgrade the mile-long Poniente Beachfront of Benidorm — a sliver of a
city dubbed the “Manhattan of Spain” for its concentration of high-rise buildings along
the Mediterranean — he and his associate, Xavier Martí Galí, who are the project’s
design architects, referenced the landscape and wavy patterning of Roberto Burle Marx
’s Copacabana promenade, as well as the work of Antonio Gaudí, to devise an
engaging intervention. The resulting esplanade is now the central public meeting place
of this thriving tourist city. Completed in 2009, the architects’ solution is a sinuous
structure comprising a sculptural concrete shell and brilliantly color-coded, landscaped
tile paths punctuated by stairways and ramps that provide universal access to the town
and beach. A slender “boardwalk” winds around the base for strolling, bicycling, and
jogging.