Minoru Nomata

Minoru Nomata is a Japanese artist, he is known for his illustrations of fantastic architectures. Inspired by mythical and archaeological relics to construct these structures, the artist reduces the grandeur of the monuments by using pastel colors, light faded textures and subdued backdrops. Even though he did use shading techniques to convey the 3 dimensional aspect of his work, the ruins are a mix of perspectives and elevations that have this flatness and stillness that only reflects silence and emptiness.

Cement 3D Printing – Anish Kapoor

With the craze of 3D printing for architecture, the British Sculptor has developed a series of cement sculptures. Throughout his creative career, the artist worked on merging sculpture with architecture. In this pproject he created a purpose-built machine that generates form through the integration of digital tools with the qualities of cement.

The Swallow Fortress: making a memorial

Monuments are an important part of the city’s urban morphology and of a people’s cultural identity. Monuments are symbolic buildings: they are a means of representation and are open to interpretation. They stand for something but are at the same time something in and of themselves. Memorial monument are especially there to provoke emotions by their presence, which then raise personal memories that resonate between the people, bringing them all to the same state of mind, uniting them.

Not too far from the busy capital city’s downtown, on the west bank of river Hrazdan, perched on a hill overlooking Yerevan, stands the Swallow Fortress crowned by a monument stretching over 4500 sqm, built in 1965 for the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. The building was opened to the public in 1967. After a long debate stretching about 15 years about the possibility of building this monument in a soviet country and debating the candidates’ proposals for the monument, finally young architects Arthur Tarkhanyan and Sashur Kalashyan were chosen to implement their proposal.

Through many funding difficulties and scarcity of materials (mainly of big chunks of basalt stone) and even though there was no patent yet for it to be legal, the construction began without any changes of the project’s initial scale and design sustained only by the willfulness of the two young architects who refused to succumb to any difficulty. As the builders and architects worked together on the illegal site, they kept repeating: “We are building the graves of our grandparents.” Two thirds of the Armenian population had been systematically massacred, drowned, burned… None of them received a proper burial. Crowds of students and professors would come to the construction site to aid. Clearly, the people needed this monument and they worked together to make it happen.

During the excavations for the construction, there were found urns from the Urartian era, pointing out that the location that the architects had chosen to erect the monument was already an ancient cemetery. The mood on site became even graver if it ever could have.

Before the monument at the Swallow Fortress, the people went to the cemetery to seek Gomidas, a well known priest and artist (musicologist, composer, singer, choirmaster) who developed a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing atrocities done to his people. Every year, for 50 years, the Armenians silently flocked to his grave seeking a place to mourn the big wound left in them. The memorial would be built 50 years after the massive massacres took place. Ever since, during the commemoration of the genocide on April 24th, the masses that march up hill towards the monument, pass through the basalt pillars and place their flowers around the eternal fire and continue down hill.

No ornaments disturb the blank surface of the 12 slanting basalt pillars representing the 12 lost Armenian provinces. This blankness stresses the gravity of what the pillars represent. At their center burns the eternal fire in memory of the 1 and a half million who perished. Not far from them stands the memorial column, sectioned into two columns measuring 50 meters in height, darting towards the sky. At first it was clad by charcoal-ed stainless steel to mimic stone but this was later dismantled and replaced by black granite in the 1970s. The structure was strong enough to withstand the earthquake that hit Armenia in 1988. As for the proportions of the pillars and column, they are based on the same proportional scales used for planing Armenian churches.The interpretation of these structures is left to what they whisper to the visitors’ souls.

reference: Rouzan Khachanyan

Can we keep the old brick building? – MoMA P.S.1

Every enclosed space we usually encounter has a specific use or function. These enclosures were indeed made to enclose these functions. However, it doesn’t mean that every enclosure in turn doesn’t possess the ability to transcend, the ability to be reinterpreted, rethought and remade into an enclosure that inhabits a different function, alien to the previous one and completely unintended for it. Such is the case of contemporary museum of art MoMA P.S.1 in New York City.

The abandoned structures of a public school (P.S.) was converted into an art hub by Alanna Heiss in 1976 and after raising the necessary amount of money, in 1997 Frederik Fisher and David W. Prendergast implemented an adaptive-reuse design onto the existing school, which by incident was the first public school in Long Island. The architect’s intervention on the old school building is minimal, which clearly shows the respectful approach to the historic building however, the intervention to the building is crucial: the simple banner stating P.S. 1 makes the building visible to all and the minimalistic concrete entrance links the street to the building with a natural flow. With these simple gestures, the architect was able to replug the building to the city and revive it. Today, P.S.1 caters for young architects and artists as MoMA’s contemporary art branch in New York. P.S.1’s mission is to act as “a catalyst and an advocate for new ideas, discourses, and trends in contemporary art.”reference: MoMA PS1, Frederik Fisher Architects

Respecting the old: Bodmer library and museum

Martin Bodmer (1899-1971) was a Swiss bibliophile, scholar and collector. A library and museum, in his name, was founded in Cologny (Geneva, Switzerland) in 1951. The library and museum contains hundreds of western and oriental manuscripts and very old prints dating before 1500. The current building is a mix between two older buildings which were preserved and an extension modern building designed by Mario Botta Architects in 1998. This new building was sunken into the ground to prevent obscuring the previous prestigious buildings which by 1998 were already part of the people’s collective memory and cherished accordingly.

The new two story building doesn’t only respect the old classical style villas, it also links them together. The architect points out that the ancient documents themselves suggest a buried building. The five parallelepiped glass volumes rising to about 3.5 meters high are the only emerging volumes from the underground building. They act as skylights filtering in natural light to the exhibition areas bellow. “Their transparency and their highly geometrical shape combine to change the perception of outside space at the entrance, unexpectedly creating an atmosphere that prompts a different different view of the landscape. At the same time they discreetly reveal the presence of the underground exhibition space” says Botta. The extension building is 1289sqm with an exhibition area of 750sqm. The exhibition is inhabited in cast-iron display cases with armored glass. This gives the impression of strength that contrasts with the apparent fragility of the items displayed.

 

 

reference: Mario Botta Architects, Fondation Bodmer, Taschen’s Architecture in Switzerland

Meet the African Visionary Architect: Bodys Isek Kingelez

Congolese architect Bodys Isek Kingelez passed away on March 15th of this year and left behind him a legacy of visionary architecture for Africa. As well known visionary architect Lebbeus Woods once said :

“I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world … All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.” LEBBEUS WOODS, “An Architect Unshackled by Limits of the Real World”, New York Times, Aug. 25, 2008

Bodys envisioned a new “fantastic” Africa right after the colonial powers were withdrawn. His work helped many in imagining a futuristic Africa. The “Extreme Models” that were exhibited in Paris’ Centre Pompidou  and Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany, were executed with a variety of methods, such as cardboard and found objects such as bottle caps or tinfoil to realize these visions.

Questioning the State of the Prison

A while back, we had shared a post entitled “What does the geography of incarceration in the US actually look like-Josh Begely” that allowed to visualize from an aerial point of view the true nature of incarceration in the United States of America. The San Pedro prison became a great means of comparison. The idea of imprisonment comes with its own preconceived ideas, a bunch of inmates locked up behind a modular system of cells and metallic bars. The particular case of San Pedro prison allows one to question the very idea of this institution. In fact, the prison , contrary to the ones we see in America,  are located in the middle of La Paz,Bolivia  because families of the convicted are allowed to join them within the complex. Furthermore,  the institution houses 1500 detainees and gives them the chance to acquire a profession,  gain some money,and  indulge in different activities. The state of the prison and its particular architecture have not changed radically. Can architecture help in this change? or would it also need a deeply-rooted investigation about the societal implications of this change?Can the prison in San Pedro be considered as the new best thing?

A more comprehensive read about this is found here.

Making a live-in concrete truffle

Before the Romans invented the opus caementicium or the Roman concrete, circular shapes like domes such as that of the Pantheon were nearly impossible to make. Other than being structurally strong, one of concrete’s main characteristic is that is that it could be molded into any shape a mold can have.

Even today, architects experiment with this edge of concrete: you could stack hay bales and pour concrete over it and let a calf eat the hay you had stacked inside! When the calf’s been through all of it, you’ll get a concrete truffle with plenty of room inside to watch the sunset through and this is what Ensamble Studio did in Spain.

Although architecture is always a process, we can clearly see that this process is not a rigid one. You can have all sorts of fun approaches to make spaces.

Cartooning Archibald, the Architect

Mike Herman, an Antwerp based architect, created a weekly cartoon series named “arch.” based on  Archibald the architect and his perpetual daily work-oriented struggles. The animated series of barely a minute tackles the different situations architects are found in primarily in the workplace.

In the episode posted below, Archibald lightly hints to the preconceived ideas that  the society has built about architecture.

Here is a discussion he had with his son about architecture.

This one deals with the well-known tensions between architects and contractors. Right to the point!

And not to mention finally, the highly unstable relationship between architects and their clients.

Catch more here.

Musée d’Orsay: the train station

The musée d’Orsay is currently the Modern Art museum in Paris. Although not built initially for this purpose, the history of this building is charged with artistic devotion. The museum was a in fact a train station built as part of the railway from Paris to Orléans implemented in 1900 in preparation for the Exposition Universelle held in Paris that year. Other buildings that were constructed for this purpose are the Tour Eiffel, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais which are still part of the Parisian skyline.

The station was later abandoned. During this time, it housed film productions such as Kafka’s The Trial in 1962. But in 1970, the decision was taken to demolish the abandoned station. The Minister of Cultural Affairs opposed this decision and the building was listed as historic heritage. Then came the idea of turning the station into a museum of art! In 1986, the museum was finally opened to the public.

 

 

 

 

 

Musée d’Orsay shares with us old pictures of the luxurious staying rooms from back when it was a train station.