10(+) architects I have been thinking about

Doctor Casino, your 'Adventure' flickr and the commentary have improved my post-bank holiday morning more than you could believe! Many thanks!

I am also v jealous of long holiday on sunny continent!

i love this thread.

Thanks, kv_nol! Now that I know ILX is not actually dead, here's another little dose..

The ever-controversial Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Hundertwasserhaus, Vienna.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1078/1074205574_c3237f9200.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1431/1074207102_a12d46a54d.jpg

(1983-1986, if you care!)

Otto Wagner, Kirche am Steinhof, Vienna (1905-1907)

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1021/1072841639_4119061ce0.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1377/1072841699_f993893804.jpg

herzog & de meuron are very good.

Giovanni Michelucci, Chiesa dell'Autostrada del Sole (Church of the Highway of the Sun, Florence, 1960-1964)

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1272/1196710226_658e8ea782.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1358/1196710318_cb4c6574ab.jpg

Carlo Scarpa, Brion-Vega Cemetery (~Altivole, 1970-1972)

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1184/1123228572_61e5865220.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1155/1122625393_38305e659a.jpg

Doctor Casino, no interiors of Santa Croce in Florence? My favourite church there by a long shot.

Fantastic pictures of Siena. What's the story are you all architecture students on a jolly or is it just you that's on this 'pilgrimage' (wrong word I know...)?

I did like Santa Croce, but looking through my negatives it looks like it got skipped. Dang.

Yeah, it was an architecture field trip, basically - organized by a very dedicated professor at my college who's been doing these trips for something like ten years now. The agenda (which is scheduled down to fifteen-minute increments some days) gets tweaked a bit every year to allow for brand-new buildings or things that are out of commission (eg, the Tugendhat House in Brno has been cut till its renovation is complete), and there are alternating schedules every other year. So, cross fingers, assuming the program stays viable financially and I can make it work with my own means, I'll be doing this again next summer for Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Even if that falls through, this year's trip by itself has more than tripled my interest in, knowledge of, and mental percolation of, architecture...such a fabulous time.

You are an incredibly lucky person. I would love to do something like that! Keep taking the pictures. Fantastic welcome back to desk after long weekend!

'Person' obviously wasn't the word I was going to use but I thought that it might be a little too... aggressive to use the other :)

love the dresden synagogue, thanks dr. casino.

i love the H&DeM Cottbus too - you take very nice photos!

Nice photos very OTM!

I have been mainly thinking about circus tents and marquees. Sad but true...

the tears of a clown ;_;

No, the being pissed at a festival for the past few days :)

I'm trying to think. I don't think that there's a thread I've not brought that up on today. Well done me and my spamming!

Thanks Jed and kv_nol (once again). Sadly the photo-posting barrage is over. I see I haven't touched this thread since much earlier in said barrage so I'll poke back through and see if there's anything else good, although a lot of the great stuff from late in the trip is already well-represented on this classic thread (Zumthor and HdM especially).

Funnily enough, the architect "I have been thinking about" the most is goofy old Hundertwasser...currently plowing through this huge volume of quotes and photos. I find his hippie babbling really endearing and actually refreshing in the context of architecture where it's a lot rarer than elsewhere in art/culture. In book form it wears a little thin, because he really did hit on the same themes, OVER and OVER for decades, and meanwhile the architecture so often really fails to live up to the philosophy, even if it's kind of sweet and charming in its own way. Some of my favorite bits, already quoted on Flickr:

"But should the three window types of the three houses belong to one house, it is seen as a violation fo the racial segregation of windows. Why? Each individual window has its own right to life. According to the prevailing code, however, if window races are mixed, window apartheid is infringed. [...] For the repetition of identical windows next to each other and above each other as in a grid system is a characteristic of concentration camps."

"If modern man is forced to walk on flat asphalt and concrete floors as they were planned thoughtlessly in designers' offices, estranged from man's age-old relationship and contact to earth, a crucial part of man withers and dies. [...] The uneven floor becomes a symphony, a melody for the feet and brings back natural vibrations to man."

"[The tenant] must also be allowed to cut up the walls and make all kinds of changes, even if this disturbs the architectural harmony of a so-called masterwork, and he must be able to fill his room with mud or children’s modelling clay."

Re: the Dresden Synagogue - I think it might be my favorite building of the trip in certain ways. One of the few places where the desire to infuse metaphor, the insistence on simple forms, and the infatuation with optical/material effects all worked together to yield something really powerful, and nice to be in. Very few things doing a whole lot of work.

Just read this so Lutyens:

Thiepval (I would love to visit. He also did the war memorial here)
http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/Thiepval1.jpg

Rashtrapati Bhawan (pictures can't do this justice!)
http://rajyasabha.nic.in/presidentelection/president3.jpg

India Gate (War memorial down the road from Rashtrapati Bhawan - in the background here)
http://www.reisehuset.com/images/india-gate.jpg

Will definitely read more in the series.

Dr. Casino that sounds very interesting. Thinking of Dresden and the survival of it's Jewish population you could do a lot worse than read these.

Oh woah, they're huge (also not v good quality). Sorry. Some images of War Memorial designed by

http://irelandposters.com/dublin/images/war_memorial_garden4.jpg
http://irelandposters.com/dublin/images/national_war_memorial_photo.jpg
http://irelandposters.com/dublin/images/memorial_bookcase_buildings.jpg

Speak of Lutyens.

A pity the photos above are no longer there.

Sorry, that should have been speaking...

Lutyens is cool. This is just near my office...
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/51/120694779_43247c8095.jpg

Lovely shot. Great that the flag is painted stone!

Dutch architects Merkx + Girod have won the Lensvelt de Architect Interior Prize 2007 for their Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht - a bookstore inside a former Dominican church.

http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/2007_000190.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/2007_000234.jpg
http://www.dezeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/2007_000307.jpg

i could def do without that cross shaped reading/coffee table but i really love this project.

That is beautiful.

So many great buildings on this thread! And so many I hadn't seen until this thread.

Foreign Office Architects

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2408/2075945998_9c1157d43a.jpg

in Leicester!

That bookstore/church is a really gorgeous project - would have been hard to go too wrong with that shell, though.

Nothing to add. Just that this is a great thread to stumble onto on a gray Tuesday morning. So much beautiful things.

I DIED, it would have been so easy to go wrong but i know what yr driving at: that the shell enhances the effect of the intervention.

True. I guess I should have said any fairly passive approach was bound to generate pretty great results - I could certainly see a designer really screwing it up by trying to compete with the existing structure. It just seems like obvious award fodder to me - well DUH the bookstore in an old church is going to look better than the one in a mall, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was better designed.

That said, it's really beautiful and my quibbles have a lot more to do with the kind of projects that get awards than with the project itself.

Love the church/bookstore, but agree that its success seems to derive mostly from the relatively restrained, passive approach.

i absolutely agree with you both.

Dutch architects Merkx + Girod have won the Lensvelt de Architect Interior Prize 2007 for their Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht - a bookstore inside a former Dominican church.

Wow, I was there when it was still a church. It had a great reliquary iirc. Great find though. I do love this thread.

more Zumthor:

http://img32.picoodle.com/img/img32/4/2/27/f_z1m_e024df0.jpg

http://img33.picoodle.com/img/img33/4/2/27/f_z3m_fb1a634.jpg

http://img01.picoodle.com/img/img01/4/2/27/f_z2m_710f451.jpg
(lol gluckman stair)

surely the world's greatest architect.

I DIED,i don't know what a gluckman stair is?

i could def do without that cross shaped reading/coffee table but i really love this project.

haha co-sign this, I said the exact same thing to lynne. really, really like this design. contrast to the usual density of bookshops: books are high information objects in themselves, shouldn't be packed like peoples in hong kong but need to breeeathe so that I may, hmm, breathe. v.nice

(xpost) I can't find a good picture of it, but it's very similar to the somewhat famous stair Richard Gluckman did at the Helmut Lang Parfumerie in New York.

I don't know if Zumthor is the world's greatest architect, but at the very least he understands materials better than anyone else.

we're all still getting over zumthor's bruder klaus kapelle, of course : )

but, yeah, the point I was making about the maastricht bookshop is that bookshops ordinarily (from waterstones and borders to independents) are very densely packed with products which are themselves very densely packed = double-density. the maastricht design looks like there is lots of space which is just doing absolutely nothing, except allowing you space to think and for books to do their own thing. would need to walk around it, obv, to confirm this, but I like it still... despite the cruci-table

The stairs reminded me of these ones, too.
http://www.johnpawson.com/library/f939e407bdcb120f8fbec23ec223c825.jpg
John Pawson('s house)

haha I was just talking with some friends a few days ago about a Gluckman/Pawson compare & contract.

(also wow at stairwaytoheaven.jpg)

also all those stairs are 1000 x better than the overpraised one at the New Museum

http://img37.picoodle.com/img/img37/4/2/27/f_2265531035bm_b82ca77.jpg

well i think SANAA said one of the motivating concepts of the design for the New Museum was the poverty of US building practise compared to the finish you could get in, e.g. japan or germany (i'm not bragging, it would have looked as shoddy in the UK (i think they deliberately designed external cladding that was foolproof - if it was badly applied it would look even better?)).

i actually like that building a whole lot but i wouldn't like to see 150 new yorkers squeezing up and down there.

that staircase is def not designed to be some sort of "spiritual" element like the Pawson or zumthor ones though.

try to make sense of that post!

we're all still getting over zumthor's bruder klaus kapelle, of course : )

i don't think i'll ever get over it!

I like the form of SAANA's New Museum very much but I give very little credibility to any of their arguments about how the building had a modest budget or craftsmanship comparisons - sure you can get much better finishes in Japan, but there are MUCH better crafted buildings in the US for a not-at-all-modest budget of $800/sf. I agree that a Lower East Side boundary-pushing art museum should be rough around the edges, but it's hard to make an argument for spending that much for the result. Tanaguchi's MoMA expansion was similarly expensive and poorly crafted, which makes me wonder whether it's a question of adequate construction administration budgets or whether they even care that much about finished products they'll never be around.

Design aside, I've seen reliably well crafted projects in the US by Williams and Tsien, Gluckman Mayner, Stern, Foster, Pawson, and Ando (and others I'm sure I'm forgetting), so I'm sure it can be done.

Also the New Museum SERIOUSLY needs to rethink the lighting.

the inside-out insanity of Herzog & de Meuron's Miami mixed-use parking garage has me enthralled:

http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g309/xzayvier07/fa.jpg