Category Archives: Classic Architectures

After Barcelona, here I am, one day in Roma which apparently has some new surprises every time I visit it. La Fontana di Trevi by Nicola Salvi, despite a noisy popularity for the tourists, presents very interesting baroque details that directly talk to architecture. The fountain is made to appear as a building -since it is its basis- back to the natural state. The stone used for the building transforms itself in a performative way into the original rock it was (romantically) extracted from. The craft of this transformation is very well made and the transition between one another is thus extremely fluid.
One can use this beautiful example in order to illustrate narration in architecture…

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Last Tuesday, I re-visited Barcelone’s Sagrada Familia. The six years since my first visit there made me forget how absolutely amazing this building is from the inside. Each pillar is a magnificient tree supporting vortex brick and concrete ceilings.

The chuch is of course still in construction and still will be for quite a while but I came to think that those high cranes in the sky could now be considered just as much as part of the building as the rest of Antoni Gaudi‘s architectonic inventions. Since the beggining of its construction the Sagrada Familia have seen two languages dialoging one with another: the incredible Gaudian architectural vocabulary and the technical support (scaffoldings, cranes, workers etc.) that is necessitated in order to build the former.

 

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Although Bruce Goff (1904-1982) is very famous in the Chicagoan architecture milieu, he is not so well known (I think) outside of the United States. His Bavinger House (1955) in Norman Oklahoma is however a very interesting hybridization of high level of craft (see the joint between the glass and the stones) with a more deliberate approximation (see the net handrail or the polyurethane volumes).
This house is only the most expressive manifesto of Goff’s architecture but there are several other buildings that definitely deserve attention.

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I happened to see some pictures (via Archdaily) from various pavilions’ construction yesterday for Shanghai Expo 2010 and it made me recall when World Expos were actually synonym with architectural experiments and innovation.
In 1958, Le Corbusier and Xenakis designed the Philips Pavilion for Brussels’ Expo
In 1967, Montreal’s Expo hosts various innovative buildings designed by Frei Otto (German Pavilion), Moshe Safdie (Habitat67) and Buckminster Fuller (Biosphere).
In 1970, Kisho Kurokawa designed three buildings for Osaka’s Expo as metabolist manifestos. 

Today, the French pavilion for Shanghai 2010 is pretty representative of the global quality of architecture (as far as the Expo is concerned but maybe also in general): it is drab, conventional and thinks it talks about sustainability because some plants grow (have been plugged) on it… I talk about the French one, but the others are not so interesting either…Heatherwick’s British pavilion might be the only one interesting questioning the notion of archive by hosting a giant seed bank.

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There is an architectural invention I believe James Wines (SITE) created that fascinates me. It consists in designing architecture as it is expected to be, yet this paradigm is being frozen, corrupted and dramatized in a way which cannot be ignored and therefore which question this paradigm. This technique is a perfect architectural adaptation of what the Situationnists were calling Detournement, a form of acknowledgment that resistance towards establishment can be only accomplished by this same establishment’s weapons and pictorial objects and therefore the hijacking of those weapon in order to flip them back towards their system of production.
This invention has been re-used by Edouard Francois for his renovation of the Fouquet’s Hotel in Paris. Continue reading →

I’d like to think that I was not the only one who did not know about this Synagogue designed by Frank Lloyd Wright before I did visit it. Commissioned by the Beth Sholom Congregation in Philadelphia, Wright designed a very singular building strongly inspired by his Japan experience. I am personally a bit torn in my appreciation, recognizing an origami boat symbolizing the Jewish continuous exile and on the other hand, the weight and spectacular aspect of the building makes me think that the nomadic and discreet appearance of usual synagogues has been denied.
In any case, this project is one of Wright’s last (he died five months before the opening) and it is interesting to observe his style evolving just like it did with the NY Guggenheim museum.

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Décio Tozzi has always worked in Sao Paulo and still is. His work from the 60′s, the 70′s and the 80′s is striking by the love expressed for the craft work and exposed materials. One can obviously recognize Oscar Niemeyer’s influence but along the years, Tozzi’s work seems to have developed an own very interesting identity (by the color and the “graphic design” of the projects to name only one example).

pictures:
- Jardim Ipe School (1965)
- Geraldo Abbondanza Neto Residence (1989)
- Carmen Heloisa Ferraz Carvalhal Gonsalves Residence (1977)
- Antonio Teofilo de Andrade Orth Residence (1974)
- Fazenda Veneza Residence (1970)

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