World Class

With the world coming to Britain later this year, RIBAJ kicks off 2012 by looking at the best of architecture around the world through a galaxy of recommended stars

To find out what’s going on, talk to a local. So when we decided to take a global look at the state of architecture, as well as our own research we asked critics, practitioners and academics around the world to nominate what they regarded as the best and most interesting buildings, projects or people in their region.

This is an unusual step for the RIBAJ – for instance some of our contributors are fellow magazine editors. We did not know what we were going to get – we wanted to get out of our comfort zone. And plainly you cannot compress the whole world into one issue of a magazine. So we have taken a snapshot of 14 regions and nations. Some are old world, some new, some ‘developing’.

Some of our contributors choose to nominate the people behind places and projects, some focus on recently completed buildings, others take in everything from dealing with recession to modifying old buildings. In South Africa, for instance, the selected project concerns small-scale but effective urban interventions; in Columbia, the nomination shows how one man applied fresh architectural thinking to the poor quarters of Medellin.

We’re all familiar with our own patch: here, in contrast, is what’s happening elsewhere.  What comes across very clearly is that this global community of architects has more in common than it has differences: and that as you’d hope, the best projects always have inspiring and ingenious people behind them.

Germany
03 apartment block
Jurgen Mayer
Nominated by Matt Tempest
By rights, Jurgen Mayer H’s Johannisstrasse 03 apartment block should be the Berlin landmark of 2012. Opened in January, it is – incredibly – the first building by 15 year-old Berlin-based practice in its own city. Known internationally for its Metropole Parasole in Seville, its Berlin residential block, in the former East behind the GDR’s showcase FriedrichstadtPalast theatre,  has a ‘post-Blobitecture’ sinuous, organic, salami-sliced facade echoing some of the excitement about the possibilities of 3D-printing.

Despite a conservatism in the Berlin planning department and a preference for Prussian blandness post-IBA, post-Potsdamer Platz (which is in  danger of stifling Berlin in the way Paris has been suffocated since the 1970s), Mayer reports few problems in getting the design approved, bar a request for a staggered wall flank. Sadly, a playful cut out in the eastern gable wall is likely to be hidden by future developments.

Despite landmark projects in Georgia (an airport, a border crossing) in 2011, and an installation at the Berlinische Gallerie, this is the practice’s debut in its hometown.
Yet an honourable mention must go to Raumlabor (Space Laboratory), a practice born of Berlin’s pre- and post-Wall squatting scene, which is pioneering a form of low-fi interventionist architecture.

In 2012 it will oversee the rebirth of a 19th century market hall, involving the local community to convert the building over six years, having beaten off faster, ‘big money’ proposals including sale to a supermarket chain.

A quarter of the space will be a participatory experiment, with residents encouraged – a la Ralph Erskine – to help design and build new market stalls, and suggest other evening uses for the project. ‘The city is a not a company, it’s a community’, says Matthias Rick, head of Raumlabor Architects.

Matt Tempest is a journalist and architecture critic in Berlin
http://thetempestmayhowl.blogspot.com/

Denmark
8-tallet (the figure 8)
BIG
Nominated by Kjeld Vindum
The latest building in Denmark by BIG is the so-called ‘8-tallet’ in Ørestad, the new suburb of Copenhagen. The programme is primarily housing, with areas for common spaces and business in the lower floors. The block rises up to 11 floors housing 476 apartments and its total gross area is 62,000m2.

The building is located on the edge of the new town towards the flat landscape, which it seems to kind of grow out of. Like other urban buildings by BIG it tries to avoid conventional typologies such as the block or the slab, in an attempt to combine the qualities of both in a new form. In this case the building takes the form of a figure of eight, which differs in height to give most of the apartments a view of the landscape, while at the same time providing two 500m2 connected court yards for common use.
Also providing for the community is the 1km continuous path which winds along the facades, connecting all the apartments in a way comparable to that of the streets in a Mediterranean hill village. Many apartments are organised like two-story townhouses and many have small courtyards adjoining the pathway.

So in this and other aspects, the ‘8-tallet’ offers interesting and innovative attempts to create neighbourhood and community in a relatively dense large-scale housing project.
This is again related to what in my mind is a very important quality of ‘8-tallet’: the way in which it manages to work with differentiations, within a conventionally based building system. These are differentiations of building and floor heights, of apartment types and sizes, of common, public, semi-public spaces, of traffic, etc.

First and foremost the ‘8-tallet’ is an important proposal towards the re-thinking of dense large-scale housing/mix-use projects as complex diverse communities: new houses prepared for new times and new ways of living together.

Kjeld Vindum is editor of Arkitektur DK
http://arkfo.dk/english/

Ireland
NAMAlab
School of Architecture, Dublin Institute of Technology
Nominated by Dr Sandra O’Connell
It is the ‘unmaking’ of empty buildings, unfinished shells and ‘valueless’ sites that has sparked one of Ireland’s most progressive architectural projects this year. NAMAlab is a pioneer initiative by architecture graduates and teaching staff. Conceived as a framework theme for the fifth year thesis, it quickly developed into an architectural and urban research unit and incited an action-based manifesto, which includes pop-up exhibitions in empty shop units, organised walks of NAMA-bound properties and sites, public lectures, a symposium with Ireland’s leading urbanists and economists, and an impressive publication. 

NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency, whose remit is to take over and manage the banks’ paralysing bad loans – said to total a staggering 72.3 billion – is often challenged on its social and economic responsibility by putting empty buildings to new use. NAMAlab created the first ever visualisation of NAMA-bound buildings and sites in the greater Dublin area, for which students produced innovative masterplans for urban areas and well thought-out proposals for individual sites, ranging from an urban farm on a much-devalued Docklands site to a state-run casino in Temple Bar and a public gallery of Bank-owned art in the Anglo-Irish’s concrete skeleton. While the projects remain theoretical, what is most inspiring is the ‘can-do’ attitude of the young graduates who see their profession at the heart of problem solving.

Dr Sandra O’Connell is editor of Architecture Ireland
http://architectureireland.ie/

Australia
Museum of Old and New Art
Nonda Katsalidas, Fender Katsalidas
Nominated by Lindsay Johnston
Australian architect Glenn Murcutt often says: ‘It is not about doing extraordinary things, it is about doing ordinary things extraordinarily well’. Client David Walsh, architect Nonda Katsalidas and their team have done something really extraordinary, and have done it extraordinarily well.

Opened in January 2011, the new Museum of Old and New Art is a stunning intervention near the Tasmanian capital Hobart. Conceived and funded by David Walsh to house his private art collection, his nominated themes for the exhibits are ‘sex and death’. The pursuit of one and avoidance of the other, he says, are the two most fundamental human endeavours.

‘Larrikin’ – an Australian term describing rebellious disdain for authority – has emerged repeatedly, informing contemporary art, music, popular and youth culture and politics – a reaction to conservative bourgeois society. MONA seems at once altruistic and self-indulgent. Walsh, a definitive ‘larrikin’, has called himself a ‘rich wanker’ and been dubbed a ‘supernerd’. He certainly challenges all norms, including in his exhibits a wall of sculptured vaginas.

Lindsay Johnston is convener, Architecture Foundation Australia. www.ozetecture.org

United Arab Emirates
Burj Khalifa
SOM
Nominated by Oliver Ephgrave
When I arrived in 2008 I was not over impressed by Dubai’s 828m-high Burj Khalifa. With the top section concealed by scaffolding and everything below covered in dust, it resembled a monolithic TV mast with zero wow factor.
But ever since the building was opened to the world at the start of 2010, the mesmerising facade has shimmered in the desert sun. Its character metamorphoses – appearing ethereally cold in the early morning and invitingly warm at sunset.
Rather than a cut and paste design from Europe or North America, Burj Khalifa alludes to Islamic architecture in a subtle and sophisticated way. From a distance it appears like a soaring minaret, especially at night when the dramatic lighting accentuates the stepped form. It’s amazing that such a colossal structure can look so elegant.
Critics have cited the tower’s extreme height as a symbol of Dubai’s overblown ambition, but for many architects in the region Burj Khalifa represents the exciting possibilities of architecture and structural engineering.

Oliver Ephgrave is editor of Middle East Architect.
www.designmena.com

Switzerland
East Wing of the Natural History Museum, Berlin
Diener & Diener
Nominated by Casper Schärer
Building in historic existing fabric and the renovation of damaged or partially destroyed monuments calls for particularly profound examination. Basel-based Diener & Diener studied the history and function of the Natural History Museum in Berlin and linked it with a meticulous reading of the surviving original fabric. Out of this they developed a concept for rebuilding the east wing, which was destroyed by a bomb during World War Two. Parts of the brick walls of this wing had remained standing, while the roof and the entire interior had collapsed into the basement.

Among the exhibits of worldwide renown is the extensive Nass Collection [‘nass’ means ‘liquid’; it is specimens preserved in liquid chemicals]. It is now housed in the newly built east wing in ideal conditions for conservation and fire safety. Diener & Diener exploited the stipulation that this wing have no windows by fitting a windowless concrete building into the remains of the historic brick shell. Surviving window openings in the old facades were bricked up and the missing areas completed using compact prefabricated elements cast from artificial stone that match the forms of the original building. Inside the building, part of the spectacular Nass Collection can be viewed on the ground floor, while the remaining floors and the taxidermy department on the new attic level are reserved for museum staff. The exterior corresponds with the functional interior: the subdued and yet carefully presented rebuilding differs essentially from any kind of banal reconstruction out of nothing. The traces of history are reflected in an abstract way in the contemporary castings and precisely detailed replica of the original building surface. The old is well integrated in the new.

Caspar Schärer is editor of werk, bauen + wohnen
www.wbw.ch

China
Bridge School
Li Xiaodong Atelier with Hedao
Architecture Design
Nominated by Wang Lu
Bridge School, in a remote village in Fujian, provides both a physical function and a spiritual centre. The main concept of the design is to enliven an old community (the village) and sustain a traditional culture (the castles and lifestyle) through a contemporary language which does not compete with the traditional, but presents it with respect. This is done by combining several functions in one space – a bridge which connects two old castles across the creek, a school which symbolically connects past, current and future, a playground (for the kids) and the stage (for the villagers).

The lightweight steel structure is a contemporary take on the archetype of the inhabited bridge. Supported on concrete piers, it acts like a slightly dislocated giant box girder so the building subtly twists, rises and falls as it spans the creek. Inside a pair of wedge-shaped classrooms taper towards a small public library at the mid point of the structure. Although the building can be used as a bridge, a narrow crossing suspended beneath it and anchored by tensile wires offers a more direct route.

The project is the social centre of the village. Physical lightness and spatial fluidity are key. Sliding and folding doors can transform the school into an impromptu theatre or play structure. The steel frame is wrapped in a veil of slim timber slats, which filter light and temper the interior with cooling breeze. The new building acts as a foil to the mass and weight of neighbouring historical structures.

Wang Lu is editor in chief, World Architecture, and professor at Tsinghua University School of Architecture
www.worldarchitecture.org/main

Japan
Soichiro Fukutake
Nominated by Julian Worrall
For over 25 years, publishing magnate and art collector Soichiro Fukutake has conducted an extraordinary experiment in and around Naoshima, a tiny island with an aging and declining population of less than 3,500 in Japan’s Inland Sea. Describing himself as ‘a revolutionary whose weapons are art and architecture’, Fukutake is revitalising the island through the infusion of global high culture.

The boldness of his ambition is matched by a sureness of touch in his patronage. In addition to cultivating talents of global stature, including Tadao Ando, Sanaa, Hiroshi Sugimoto, James Turrell and Lee U-Fan, Fukutake has also supported numerous lesser-known names, such as architect Hiroshi Sambuichi and artists Yukinori Yanagi and Rei Naito, to great success. Encompassing several museums, a hotel, a visitors’ centre, various site-specific artworks embedded in abandoned houses and even a bathhouse, each intervention has been executed to exquisite material and aesthetic standards, settling into its site with impeccable felicity and tact.

The impact on the region has been transformative. Described in 1972 by old Japan hand Donald Richie as a ‘sad, lonely little island’, it now draws 400,000 visitors a year. The island economy, once almost exclusively dependent on a grim complex of raw materials processing plants, now counts cultural tourism as a major pillar.

A haiku-like aphorism captures Fukutake’s guiding philosophy: Revive that which is; create that which is not. By putting culture first,he offers a compelling view of human progress.

Julian Worrall is assistant professor of architecture and urban studies at Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University in Tokyo.
www.lllabo.com

Columbia
Alejandro Echeverri Restrepo
Nominated by Florencia Rodriguez
Alejandro Echeverri Restrepo is one of the most influential professionals in South-America, redefining how to look at metropolitan areas of informal growth, poverty and social challenges.

In areas with 40% poverty and rough and varied geography, his team works from an architectural rather than planner’s point of view. They strongly believe in using architectural interventions as the main instrument to improve marginal urban areas.

Restrepo’s vast interdisciplinary experience involves and empowers local people.

His methodology constructs a plan from the constellation of singular actions to build a better understanding of diverse Latin-American territory. In the new Colombian architecture that is in part consequence of these political tendencies, form and aesthetics are as important for the projects as social values. This ‘subversive’ posture, taking beauty as a cultural carrier, understands that as well as the need to function, a place has the power to dignify a part of the city and make its people proud.

Florencia Rodriguez is editor of Plot magazine, Argentina
www.revistaplot.com/

Spain
The Iberian context
Nominated by Ricardo Merí de la Maza
The party is over and the bill will be paid by the talented young architects that emerged in the noisy political architecture of the last decade. Now they are left only with the sound and the fury. The luckiest have built a bunch of good buildings; the not so lucky, with plentiful dreams and good ideas in their pockets, must move to who knows where in the world to have a chance. The promises are broken; the young Spanish architects emerged with conceptual and formal intensity all around the country, but no opportunity has been left by the expensive ‘all star’ patrimony we have inherited.

Some of them reproduced the mistakes of elders, concentrating more on puff and self-marketing than on producing quality architecture. Others were less interested in pretending and more in finding their own way in the peripheral outskirts away from the glare of publicity. The profession was gaining degrees; formal purity and material simplicity seemed the path to follow. I can list many and apologise for the absences: El Batel Conference Center in Cartagena by Selgas y Cano, the Condestable House in Pamplona by Tabuenca y Leache, the Environmental Unit Headquarters in Zaragoza by Magen Architects, the intervention in Puerto Malpica by Creus e Carrasco, the Rafal High School by Aranea group or the Zafra Theatre by Enrique Krahe are just a few examples.

The counterpoint to all this stands in the still surprising and personal work of old masters like Josep Llinás. He fights every day to survive and continue developing his strong work. All around him may change, but he stands working on his durable principles. The Scenic Arts Centre L’Atlàntida at Vic is a magnificent demonstration.

Ricardo Merí de la Maza is design professor at the Cardenal Herrera University in Valencia and assistant editor of TC Cuadernos magazine.
www.tccuadernos.com

South Africa
Violence Protection through Urban Upgrade (VPUU)
Nominated by Iain Low
This programme, a project of Cape Town and the German government, aims to improve the lives of disenfranchised citizens in the city’s townships. These apartheid neighbourhoods are locked in poverty, blighted by crime and violence. Human dignity and the potential of ‘becoming’ is severely restricted.

The VPUU works in partnership with civil society to address these issues by helping transform urban space. At Khayelitsha, 30km outside Cape Town, the Development Forum together with the city of Cape Town has devised a sustainable approach to community building. This co-production builds trust and confidence, which is seen as preconditions to achieve sustainability. Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood Development, the local consultancy employed to implement this agenda, identified multifunctionality as a priority, with architectural form compliant in the creation of functional environments.

A contiguous interior passage introduced to the township connects a commuter railstation with an informal shack settlement to provide a 24/7 safe passage. A ‘tower’ typology, the active box, marks the route to provide both legibility and urban vigilance, reinforced with street lighting and landscaping. The active boxes identify routes and anchor nodes along them: a sporting and recreation park, civic square with live-work units, post office and municipal pay centre, learning library, and other functions.

This project tackles urban transformation whereby process premiates over product, and architecture becomes aligned with community building. 

Iain Low is editor of the Digest of South African Architecture and professor at the University of Cape Town.
www.picasso.co.za

United States
Poetry Foundation
John Ronan Architects
Nominated by Cathleen McGuigan
The Poetry Foundation in Chicago, by architect John Ronan, opened last summer. It is not unknown in the US – just this week it won an AIA National Honor Award – nor is it a radical design. But it is a building of such high quality that it fills one with hope for the future of good architecture.

There was controversy before it was built. In 2002 the foundation got an unexpected $200 million bequest from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly. Yet some of the trustees thought a permanent home for their library and poetry readings would be too grandiose. In that light, Ronan’s quiet Miesian design makes perfect sense.

The building is both urbane and a refuge from the city: it meets the street yet recedes behind a layering of perforated screen and garden, through which one moves to gain entry to the oasis inside. The detailing of materials – zinc, wood, sandblasted cement – is especially fine, and the extensive use of glass floods the interior spaces with light. When asked to comment on the building for Architectural Record, poet Billy Collins said: ‘There are two kinds of poetry: One is stained glass and one is clear glass. Stained glass poetry wants to be very decorative and colourful and have a brilliant surface; the poetry I prefer, that of clear glass, makes you want to see through it to something vital.’

The Poetry Foundation is the architecture of vitality: dynamic flowing spaces – garden, lobby, reading rooms – so artfully executed that all is infused with an air of effortless serenity.

Cathleen McGuigan is editor in chief of Architectural Record
http://archrecord.construction.com/

Italy
Factory and HQ for Pratic
Geza Architects
Nominated by Roberto Zancan
The new factory complex and headquarters of Pratic, an Orioli brothers company that specialises in the design and manufacture of manual and automated awning systems, was recently built outside Fagagna, in Italy’s industrial northeast.

This project aims for ‘a realistic understanding of the value of chance and incidence on the quality of industrial architecture’. This isolated industrial building is no cultural institution, which makes its sophisticated architectural layering all the more interesting. It show that despite economic turmoil, Europe can still produce inventive schemes. It is not only a field for bringing an aesthetic quality, but for learning how to create a holistic proposal from a combination of product, design and architecture. This is an intelligent retort to the idea that the knee jerk response to the economic crisis results in cosmetic coatings.  In this sense it is an exemplar of anthropological context that aspires to preserve a local self-determination in the face of globalization.

This work renews an anti-intellectual tradition of European architecture. Administration and production spaces are treated with the same dignity and attention to detail, distinguished only by the work within them. Elegant design of access, parking and exterior space is as considered as that of the simple components making up the building’s architecture.

Roberto Zancan is deputy editor of Domus Italy
www.domusweb.it

India
The National Military Memorial
Mathew and Ghosh
Nominated by Radhika Desai
The National Military Memorial (Rashtriya Sainika Smaraka) in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) designed by Mathew and Ghosh Architects, will open to the public early this year. The architectural intervention of the Motivational Hall into the ground ensured that less than five of the park’s 384 trees were removed for the memorial. By inserting a major component of the structure below-grade, and in building a route as the primary architectural device, the designers conflate the landscape, its central city location and the elements of a memorial, to create a highly specific architecture with the ability to adapt to its various publics. The park will still be used by those who came to it originally, while becoming a public memorial for those wishing to pay their respects to lives lost in war since the sovereign Indian state came into being.

This commission by Bangalore Development Authority follows the Freedom Park national open competition by Bangalore Municipal Corporation that Nisha Mathew Ghosh and Soumitro Ghosh won in 2003, and the story reflects the peculiarities of public commissioning in the subcontinent. The authorities already had an in-house proposal but sought an alternative. Mathew and Ghosh developed a concept design which the commissioners accepted. A fee structure was agreed and they began work in June 2010.

Using granite in two tones for paving pathways, and fair-faced concrete in the subterranean structure with stone-clad memorial walls inscribed with the names of those who lost their lives in service to the nation, the architects describe an architecture in a formal and material language which is universally recognisable and yet grounded locally in material and interpretation.

In preserving the park while inscribing a major programmatic intention on the site, and in choreographing an experiential architecture for memorial visitors, the architects convey the possibilities inherent in public commissions with grace and deep formal control.

Radhika Desai is editor of Domus India.
www.domusweb.it