Archinect - News

Oliver Wainwright on the Barbican’s big 4-0

2022-03-04T18:55:00-05:00

The result was a beguiling cocktail – part bastion, part brutalist hanging gardens of Babylon – and it stood as the ultimate expression of the modern movement’s search for a monument. The complexity of incorporating so many venues on so many levels across a 40-acre site has always made the place an infuriating labyrinth for the uninitiated, with successive decades of signage and way-finding strategies deployed in an attempt to ease the maze-like passageways.

The Barbican’s important birthday comes ahead of next month’s revealing of the winner of the City of London Corporation-sponsored redevelopment contest. The Centre is celebrating with a weekend of special programming including a guest DJ’d after party.

Previously on Archinect: City of London reveals shortlisted candidates for the redevelopment of the Barbican Centre

Wainwright also managed to dig up an original review of the Barbican’s opening from 1982, which provides remarkable insights as to how the estate, which was first commissioned by the city’s Court of Common Council in 1957, was received by the media.

“The overpowering imagination, skill and effort which has gone into the 25-year project becomes apparent immediately,” The Aberdeen Press and Journal wrote at the time. “It is engrained in the pine-clad walls, the polished teak flooring, the subtle lighting, the overall design. In fact, the Barbican has been described as ‘a haven of cultural perfection in the midst of the City...

As the Eden Project turns 20, its creators take a look back

2021-03-16T13:51:00-04:00

Our original designs for the biomes – hundreds of hexagonal and pentagonal cells supported by geodesic tubular steel – looked more like Waterloo, but we used ETFE foil, or ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, which was more transparent than glass but extremely lightweight. It uses 1% of the energy and carbon of glass. The difficulty was creating biomes that would interlock across a constantly shifting landscape.

The Eden Project with its famed geodesic biomes opened twenty years ago on March 17th, 2001 in Cornwall, England.

Inside the tropical biome of the Eden Project. Photo: Hchc2009/Wikimedia Commons.

Boston City Hall is turning 50, and there's a commemorative pin to celebrate the Brutalist icon

2019-02-19T14:15:00-05:00

The city’s most polarizing building is now officially middle-aged and a couple of fans have reproduced a pin that was given out during its opening week celebrations in 1969 [...] Joyce Linehan, chief of policy for Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh, still has an original pin, which local designers Chris Grimley and Shannon McLean used as the basis for a reproduction.

Commemorative pin and letter press drawing card. Image via OverUnder's website

"Cast in bronze and hand patina’d, the commemorative lapel pin is produced in a limited edition of fifty," reads the pin's description on the website of OverUnder, the Boston-based architecture and design firm behind the commemorative initiative.

"Included with each pin is a unique numbered letterpress card that reproduces one of the original competition sketches for the building. Printed with gold ink, and signed in gold by Michael McKinnell, architect of the building, the set is a unique memento that celebrates Boston, City Hall and their concrete legacy."

The pin and card set is available for $250 here.

Herzog & de Meuron turns 40

2018-11-05T14:41:00-05:00

Today their studio is a scant five-minute walk from the old neighborhood, and they spend much of their time at the office tinkering with models and dreaming up gee-whiz notions. But the pair now have a firm of 390 employees playing alongside them, with another 62 scattered across five satellite branches around the world. And they’re no longer dealing in idle fancies but creating some of the most challenging and startling architecture to be found anywhere.

As Herzog & De Meuron is celebrating its 40th company anniversary, WSJ.Magazine takes a look back at the beginnings of the six-decade-long friendship that unites the founding partners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, both 68; from their childhood in 1950s Basel to winning the 2001 Pritzker Prize to designing landmark buildings around the world.

"As difficult as it is to fix an aesthetic label to the firm," Ian Volner writes in his article, "its conceptual MO is even harder to describe, and talking to the founders doesn’t necessarily clarify anything."

Zaha Hadid's Nordpark Cable Railway stations turn ten

2017-12-27T09:15:00-05:00

Time flies mercilessly, and another iconic example of contemporary architecture is already celebrating its 10th anniversary: designed by the late Dame Hadid and shortlisted for the 2008 RIBA Stirling Prize, the four stations of Innsbruck’s Nordpark Cable Railway opened to the public in December 2007. Since then, over 4.5 million passengers have used the Hungerburg funicular railway between the city center up the Nordkette mountain.

Lowenhaus Station. Photographer: Hélène Binet.

From Zaha Hadid Architects: "The Hungerburg funicular (Hungerburgbahn) is part of Innsbruck’s Nordpark Cable Railway (Nordkettenbahnen) and begins at the Congress underground station in the centre of the city. Trains stop at Lowenhaus Station before crossing the bridge over the River Inn, then climbing to Alpenzoo Station and on to Hungerburg where passengers can continue their journey on the Seegrube and Hafelekar cable cars up to its summit at 2,300m. The Nordkette mountain is within the Karwendel, the large...

Dror envisions second geodesic dome in Montreal's Expo 67 site

2016-04-26T14:24:00-04:00

Originally built as the U.S. Pavilion in the memorable World Expo of 1967, the steel structural frame of Buckminster Fuller's Biosphere remains standing to this day as a sole landmark in Montreal's Parc Jean-Drapeau. In planning for the 50th anniversary of Expo 67 as well as Montreal's 375th anniversary next April, designer Dror Benshetrit of the New York-based practice Dror came up with the idea for adding, what do you know, a second geodesic dome near the Biosphere.

After touring Montreal's Île Sainte-Hélène with the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Benshetrit thought of a second dome as a way to help reinvigorate the seasonally used Expo 67 site grounds and evidently pay tribute to Fuller's landmark. Compared to the Biosphere, which is 76 meters in diameter and 62 meters high, Dror's proposed dome is a 150-meter-wide aluminum latticed sphere with a planted canopy.

The studio describes that its vegetated cover would act as a natural sound buffer and provide an enchanting public enviro...

New photos of E. Fay Jones' Thorncrown Chapel unveiled to mark 35th anniversary

2015-05-19T15:29:00-04:00

Concealed within the forest landscape of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas, the acclaimed Thorncrown Chapel will celebrate its 35th anniversary this summer. Designed by E. Fay Jones, who was commissioned by retired schoolteacher Jim Reed, the 48 ft. tall chapel boasts 425 windows and over 6,000 sq. ft of glass, and it became widely recognized for its organic "Ozark Gothic" style when it first opened on July 10, 1980.

To mark the Thorncrown Chapel's anniversary, architect-turned-photographer Randall Connaughton from Atlanta began an ongoing photography series of the wood-and-glass structure last year in what he described is "an effort to add new depth to the visual record of Thorncrown Chapel and bring its transcendent experience to a wide audience."

Thorncrown is the backdrop to countless wedding photos, but according to the Chapel organization, Connaughton's snapshots are the "first professionally produced photos of their kind" since 1980 -- when those photos that first contributed to ...

Google doodle honors Eiffel Tower's 126th opening anniversary

2015-03-31T13:55:00-04:00

The Eiffel Tower, one of Paris's most visited attractions, welcoming almost seven million visitors per year, was completed 126 years ago today - and there's a Google Doodle to mark the anniversary.

Contrary to the Telegraph quote above, the Eiffel Tower was actually completed on March 15. Today's anniversary honors the public opening on March 31, 1889.

Joyeux anniversaire, old friend!

Forbes portraits David Rockwell on his 30th firm anniversary

2014-12-26T12:54:00-05:00

David Rockwell has got the art of theatrics down pat. His world is a stage complete with cuts, scene changes, sequences and transitions, where he is the director presiding over the action between performer, audience and space. [...] “The emphasis on arrival, procession, lighting and the all-encompassing power of a live theatrical experience have really impacted how I think about my designs.” He counts on his audiences buying in emotionally to his designs [...].

Welton Becket-designed Hollywood Cinerama Dome Marks 50 Years

2013-11-07T19:05:00-05:00

The only geodesic dome movie theater in the world, Becket’s design was inspired by Buckminster Fuller—and the nation’s midcentury obsession with landing on the moon. Built to resemble a giant spacecraft, the Dome boasted futuristic floating stairways—a first for any movie theater at the time. Simultaneously projected images using three 35mm cameras were so cutting-edge, the Dome’s own original projector—the Norelco Universal—would win a Technical Academy Award in 1963 [...].

Gehry and Salonen discuss ten years of music at Disney Concert Hall

2013-10-16T16:15:00-04:00

To celebrate Disney Hall’s tenth anniversary, architect Frank Gehry and Conductor Laureate for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Esa-Pekka Salonen reminisced on the building’s inspiration last night, at a discussion held at the Hammer Museum. Co-hosted by the LA Phil, far from the actual concert hall and its spotty downtown L.A. environs, the discussion’s moderator Nicolai Ouroussoff (former architecture critic for the New York Times) tried to tease out the relationship between architecture and music. While Salonen touched upon questions of classical music’s relevance, Gehry didn’t delve too deeply into the particulars of his design.

As Music Director for the LA Philharmonic from 1992-2009, Salonen oversaw the orchestra during its transition from the slightly-stuffy Dorothy Chandler Pavilion over to Disney Hall, and is highly regarded for whipping the Philharmonic into shape as a progressive and formidable cultural institution. The trajectory of the LA Phil is largely wrapped up in b...