AN’s Matthew Marani present’s Site 4’s complex façade systems in this month’s special issue of AN.
“At Site 4, the aluminum panels are enormous—each is 10 feet tall, anywhere between 15 and 29 feet wide, and weighs 4,200 pounds—yet they are arranged like courses of masonry. Pushing the comparison further, they dagger at the tower corners like coppery quoins.”
Read on HERE.
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The idea of an architectural manifesto seems somewhat monocular in its focus in a time when the complexities of the architectural discipline are anything but singular. At the same time, the idea of a call to arms is also mired in a mentality of urgency that characterizes the many texts that por-actively build crises first, if only to qualify their response. This is not to say that the clarity of vision that both necessitate is not required, and furthermore that there are not real urgencies to which the architectural discipline cannot speak. Thus, rather than rely on the crutch of pandemonium, zeitgeist, or vision, this text is dedicated to a disaggregated series of conversations with the longue durée of architectural debates, both historic and contemporary in nature, but thematically motivated, if only to help better position the disciplinary investments we might advocate to advance architectural agency today.
Read on HERE. Práctica Arquitectonica IV is available for purchase HERE.
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Architectural Record’s April Issue features a book review of NADAAA’s forthcoming book on Villa Varoise!
‘With its conversational tone, the exchange captured in the book manages to complement the images and drawings more successfully than is usual in a conventional monograph. The dialogue goes beyond a comparison of the houses and leads to discussions of the typology of the house itself. By doing so, it transcends the conceit of dueling dwellings, opening up a larger discourse on the practice of architecture. But it’s a fun read—both light and serious.
[]
The art of this book is that it can be enjoyed on several levels. It is a deep dive into the design process and the meticulous execution of one single house and its surrounding landscape, taken from initial concept and site strategies through drawings, diagrams, models, and construction details. [] But the book is also a manifesto—a reminder to all of us that as architects it is “our responsibility to change the status quo . . . to motivate the discipline, and produce not novelty, but innovation.” If you manage that, then the results of the design process just may be “better.”’
-Stella Betts, founding principal at LEVENBETTS
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AN’s Samuel Medina writes on NADAAA’s dual exhibits for La Biennale di Venezia 2021–that both happen to revolve around the potentials of CLT.
‘[The NADAAA] installations pursue opposing trajectories for CLT and, for that reason, should be taken together as a complementary pair. As Tehrani explained, whereas the portico is “a one-off that radicalizes, let’s say, the ‘figure’ of architecture,” its counterpart “suppresses it to instead explore how something as standard as a CLT panel can become the basis for mass customization.”’
Read on HERE.
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More on this issue and to order visit HERE.
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for ‘Manifest no. 3 Bigger than Big’
The Melbourne School of Design and the Daniels Building are featured in Porcelanosa Lifestyle’s article on new educational architecture.
“La arquitectura académica necesita espacios específicos que inducen al estudio, a la concentración de la investigación, a intercambio de ideas y debates entre compañeros para generar un sentido crítico y reforzar el aprendizaje.”
Read on HERE.
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The Rock Creek House is featured this week on Archello. Check it out HERE.
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On the twentieth anniversary of Eladio Dieste’s passing, Nader writes on ‘confluence’ in Dieste’s work in AR Confluences. Eladio Dieste, an Uragayian ‘designer’ and a “great, yet lesser-known, 20th-century thinker who operated outside of the modernist canons” has had his work analyzed by many writers, all of which “note the way in which art and science are brought into confluence, revealing with great analytical precision how Dieste worked with the science of engineering to achieve geometric and structural feats that are deemed great works of ‘art.’”
“At the same time, it was the strategic way in which he brought the confluence of mathematics, geometric thinking, the protocols of construction, material innovation and historical knowledge into dialogue that made possible the types of inventions he unleashed [..] the laws of physics and optics come into an improbable alliance—not natural, nor harmonious or obvious—but a masterful aplomb of artifice to witness.”
Read the full essay HERE.
AR/Architecture Research is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published yearly by the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Architecture. AR Confluences is guest-edited by Robert McCarter.
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In Nader’s conversation with TRANSFER editor Isabel Concheiro a few weeks ago they discussed the potential effects of COVID-19 on globalization, revolution, public space, housing inequalities, sustainability, and our evolving architectural discourse.
“to some degree, this may require a paradigm shift in the discipline: the centrality of the human would need to be displaced with the environment at large as its center, including the various species and flora that it sustains. And it poses a very difficult existential question: If humans have the intellectual power to conceptualize a model of sustainability for the globe that was to be to the detriment of human life, would they elect to support it? Could they support a model that prioritizes a center outside of the self?”
Read on HERE.
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