boullée - newton centograph

cause the idea was brilliant. it'd be an incredible space to be in.

i didn't say piranesi's carceris cause they're not really "projects" but i love the drawings. (can you tell i'm an art history major?)

Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar

I believe SITE designed it.
I enjoy the way it manipulates natural and artificial light.
It's on page 118 of James Wines' book Green Architecture.

since you asked, I'll say: King's College Chapel. It so overwhelms my senses that it makes/made me mentally ill. It's great if you can stand it: otherwise you may wish to commit suicide...

no single fave
but more than one gaudi would be on the list.

wow
reminds me of a huge train station. nice

steel cloud, LA freeway - asymptote
st. ivo, rome - borromini

Not really a project, but I'm completely fascinated by Hans Hollein's "Flugzeugträger in der Landschaft":

Denver Museum in Denver, Libeskind

peter behrens' farbenwerk at hoechst


heinrich tessenow's school for rhythmic dance, hellerau




wagner's postsparkasse, vienna

ok, one a little more current...

clark & menefee's middleton inn, charleston, sc

It's an impossible question to answer. I have too many favorites, and too many favorite moments within those and other projects.

But my first "ah-ah!" moments in architecture I can identify.

In freshman arch overview class, Villa Savoye was a wake-up for the young inexperienced me. It was so complete, like every bit had been considered and given equal importance. I've never seen the building in real life.

So my first real-life ah-ha! moment was Eero Saarinen's chapel at MIT, the following year. It affected my whole body: the small scale approach, the humble materials employed simply, and the bang! of the Bertoia sculpture and light quality inside. The building both made me fully aware of my own physical material and took me out of my body to some hopeful idealistic realm. This image sucks, but here it is:




Last night I spent some time on this website and felt that physical/non-physical sensation again. Simple, intelligent, and loving use of materials. Siza is amazing.

liberty, that Siza stuff looks like it belongs on the fancy graphics lovers thread.


Sagrada Familia blows my mind. Anything that you can work on for 100 years and still not be done....closest thing to fantasy land I've ever experienced.

WonderK, I know what you mean! But the overall form is not what's interesting to me, it's the way the thing is put together along with the utterly loving way the photographs of it being put together are taken. Closeups of plywood grain and steel mounting plates and piles of bolts and forests of lally columns plus the closeups of the childlike tab method of joining - frankly it gives me a slider.

too many to list indeed. one of my first ah-ha moments >>

i like the aerial paris project by lebbeus.
likewise on newton's cenotaph.
the carceri series by piranesi is awesome.
i also like the beijing project that plexus did. so intense.
chiba golf club in japan by morphosis would have been cool to see.

one of my aha moments was probably when i visited the louis kahn museum in fortworth while ando's was under construction. really nice space.

i also had an ugh moment when i visited the high museum here in atlanta. the panels are so dingy in some places, and the wood floors squeeked like a sonofabitch. i couldn't get over how loud it was in there because of it. tied in with the fact that it is portrayed as in a field, but i just happened upon it in the middle of the city... definately a wtf moment.

>>Villa Savoye was a wake-up for the young inexperienced me. It was >>so complete, like every bit had been considered and given equal >>importance.

that was probably my first aha moment. my young virgin pre-teen eyes. i never knew what architecture was before i saw that house.

I'm deeply obsessed with a Villa Shodan (Corbu, Ahmedabad), I guess I love how the void is so present and also is amazing the way this concrete building looks 'home'.
The whole Campus of Universidad Central de Venezuela, but mainly Plaza Cubierta and the Aula Magna ( Carlos Raul Villanueva, a man captured by extraterrestrials, i guess) is an astonishing modern complex.
La Alhambra de Granada in Spain ( I wish to know it)
Sante Chapel in Paris ( once i had a sort of Sante Chapel inner space allutinations, I swear...)

So many Monasteries around the world ( an almost forgotten tipologhy...),

A lot of Gaudí's projects, Terragni's Danteum (a fantasy),
Closer in time:
AZT of Wiel Arets, Ito's Mediatheque, Oma's Grand Bibliothèque, a lot of Herzog & De Meuron....

And so on....

My two personal favorites (built) are:

Herzog & De Meuron's Dominus Winery
http://people.deas.harvard.edu/~jones/lab_arch/H_and_dM/winery_1.gif

and Mecanoo's TUDelft library

http://www.mecanoo.com/projecten/A126/Img0031.jpg

WonderK, the Sagrada Familia will be finished, according to a report presented a week ago or so by the Foundation that manages the whole thing, in 2022...
in three/four years they'll have covered the central nave so it will be operable for doin' religious offices.. after the nave, they will start building the evangelists towers and will leave for the end the main spire that holds an ugly huge cross on top..
after the building, they will tear down a whole Cerdà block in front of the temple so as to have a new park where a bridge 5 metres from the ground will raise over one of the adjacent streets up to the core of the building..

I uploaded a postcard here of how the thing will look like -apparently- when they finish it..