Architecture Now
Excerpt from the introduction of the book 'Architecture Now, Volume II', by Philip Jodidio
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Talented architects, including another young Parisian couple, Dominique Jakob and Brendan MacFarlane (Jakob & MacFarlane) are carrying out more ambitious renovations in a number of other locations. Authors of the Georges Restaurant in the Pompidou Center, they have been called on to redo the so-called "Metal 57" factory building owned by Renault in Boulogne-Billancourt, making it into a conference and exhibition center. They have chosen to create a new shell inside the existing 15,000 square meter factory structure, redefining its use while retaining the external form. In a very different style, Manolo Nuñez-Yanowsky, a former associate of Ricardo Bofill, took on the creation of the Teatre Lliure Fabià Puigserver in Barcelona, retaining an external aspect of the existing structure that may bring to mind the "post-modern" attitude of Nuñez in the years subsequent to his separation from Bofill's Taller team. And yet what Nuñez had to work with from the outset was a building erected for the 1929 International Exhibition, the Palau de l'Agricultura, a far cry from Mies van der Rohe's German Pavilion for the same Exhibition. Esthetically speaking, however, the existence of such projects calls attention to the continuing lack of any dominant style in contemporary architecture. Between the extravagant "data-driven forms" of a Marcus Novak and the concrete austerity of Tadao Ando's Pulitzer Museum in Saint-Louis, there is such a divide that almost any other sensibility can find its own niche of respectability.
If stripping old buildings naked and turning them into usable modern facilities is a fashionable activity in today's architectural world, so is dressing up structures so that they appear to be in today's style. With their Umbra World Headquarters (Toronto, Canada, 1998-1999) Kohn Shnier Architects, took on an "ugly and banal" concrete factory, wrapped it in identical vacuum-formed modules of green copolyester
plastic shaped by a resin mold, and made it into a glamorous headquarters for the manufacturers of Karim Rashid's "Garbo" garbage can. Admittedly, this kind of intervention does have as much to do with fashion design as it does with more solid kinds of architecture, but with so many ugly old buildings available for a refit, renovation of all types looks like it will long be a mainstay of contemporary architecture.
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Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Talented architects, including another young Parisian couple, Dominique Jakob and Brendan MacFarlane (Jakob & MacFarlane) are carrying out more ambitious renovations in a number of other locations. Authors of the Georges Restaurant in the Pompidou Center, they have been called on to redo the so-called "Metal 57" factory building owned by Renault in Boulogne-Billancourt, making it into a conference and exhibition center. They have chosen to create a new shell inside the existing 15,000 square meter factory structure, redefining its use while retaining the external form. In a very different style, Manolo Nuñez-Yanowsky, a former associate of Ricardo Bofill, took on the creation of the Teatre Lliure Fabià Puigserver in Barcelona, retaining an external aspect of the existing structure that may bring to mind the "post-modern" attitude of Nuñez in the years subsequent to his separation from Bofill's Taller team. And yet what Nuñez had to work with from the outset was a building erected for the 1929 International Exhibition, the Palau de l'Agricultura, a far cry from Mies van der Rohe's German Pavilion for the same Exhibition. Esthetically speaking, however, the existence of such projects calls attention to the continuing lack of any dominant style in contemporary architecture. Between the extravagant "data-driven forms" of a Marcus Novak and the concrete austerity of Tadao Ando's Pulitzer Museum in Saint-Louis, there is such a divide that almost any other sensibility can find its own niche of respectability.
If stripping old buildings naked and turning them into usable modern facilities is a fashionable activity in today's architectural world, so is dressing up structures so that they appear to be in today's style. With their Umbra World Headquarters (Toronto, Canada, 1998-1999) Kohn Shnier Architects, took on an "ugly and banal" concrete factory, wrapped it in identical vacuum-formed modules of green copolyester
plastic shaped by a resin mold, and made it into a glamorous headquarters for the manufacturers of Karim Rashid's "Garbo" garbage can. Admittedly, this kind of intervention does have as much to do with fashion design as it does with more solid kinds of architecture, but with so many ugly old buildings available for a refit, renovation of all types looks like it will long be a mainstay of contemporary architecture.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Manolo Nuñez-Yanowsky, France: Teatre Lliure Fabià Puigserver (1993-2002)