Design and the City is a podcast by reSITE, raising questions and proposing solutions for the city of the future. In the second episode, Chris Precht from Studio Precht talks about being part of a new generation of architects, concerned with the environment, climate change, and sustainability, rather than with theories or concepts.
Chris Precht, an Austrian architect raised in the Austrian Alps, known for his green modular buildings with interwoven, natural geometry, initiates the conversation by stating that “architecture was always driven by fictional stories. We built the pyramids for Gods, we built castles for kings, we built palaces for queens, and now we are building mostly to make a profit in an economic system”. In fact, he has his own visions about urban regeneration. Coming from an upbringing that connected him deeply to nature, Precht elaborates on the countryside’s influence in his creative approach and solution-based concepts.
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Courtesy of reSITE
We care about fictional stories, but our planet doesn’t. If we are not able to connect ourselves to our objective reality, then I do not see any chance that we are able to solve the problems of our time. –Chris Precht
Aiming to translate his own way of life into his projects and bringing his connection to nature into the city, Precht finds the solution in combining architecture and agriculture. For the founder of the Studio, by bringing back agriculture into the cities through architecture, vertical farming can reconnect people to their food production.
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Courtesy of Studio Precht
Moreover, he states that the problem nowadays is what we build and how we do it, resulting in identical buildings all over the world. Questioning how we can bring the quality of the countryside to cities, the architect fears that in the city of the future, people will feel less.
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Courtesy of Studio Precht
We also create spaces that really connect to all of our senses. We create spaces that we want to touch because we use haptic materials, we can listen to, because birds and bees are nesting into our buildings, and we can smell, taste, and eat parts of our buildings. So really buildings that connect to all of our senses. Then it creates different city centers. City centers that are not defined by banks or corporations but rather by health and vitality. – Chris Precht
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Courtesy of Studio Precht
ReSITE, a global non-profit acting to improve the urban environment, launched its first podcast, Design and the City, featuring nine speakers from the reSITE 2019 REGENERATE event. Revolving around how we can use design to make cities more livable and lovable, every week, a new episode is released, featuring a different guest.
by Evan RawnLego House. Image Courtesy of LEGO Group
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels (born 2 October 1974) is often cited as one of the most inspirational architects of our time. At an age when many architects are just beginning to establish themselves in professional practice, Ingels has already won numerous competitions and achieved a level of critical acclaim (and fame) that is rare for new names in the industry. His work embodies a rare optimism that is simultaneously playful, practical, and immediately accessible.
Ingels was born in Copenhagen in 1974 and began studying architecture at the Royal Academy in 1993. Interested in becoming a cartoonist, he originally attended architecture school with the hope that it would improve his drawing skills. However, while studying he discovered his passion for architecture and went on to continue his studies at the Technica Superior de Arquitectura in Barcelona. After working for three years at OMA in Rotterdam and then co-founding PLOT Architects with Julien de Smedt in 2001, Ingels went on to found his current practice, Bjarke Ingels Group, in 2005. With offices in Copenhagen and New York, BIG has grown at an astonishing rate and has quickly established an international presence.
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Mountain Dwellings / PLOT = BIG + JDS. Image Courtesy of BIG
Much of his philosophy about architecture is revealed in his 2009 manifesto entitled Yes is More, which introduces 30 projects from his practice in the familiar format of a comic book. In a concept that he calls “Hedonistic Sustainability,” many of his projects seek to question how sustainability can be playfully and responsibly integrated into buildings to actually increase standards of living. In a quote that summarizes BIG’s approach to architecture, Ingels states:
Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by two opposing extremes. On one side an avant-garde full of crazy ideas. Originating from philosophy, mysticism or a fascination of the formal potential of computer visualizations they are often so detached from reality that they fail to become something other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side there are well-organized corporate consultants that build predictable and boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems to be entrenched in two equally unfertile fronts: either naively utopian or petrifyingly pragmatic. We believe that there is a third way wedged in the no-mans-land between the diametrical opposites. Or in the small but very fertile overlap between the two. A pragmatic utopian architecture that takes on the creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective.
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VM Houses / BIG + JDS. Image Courtesy of BIG
In practice, this approach manifests in a strictly diagrammatic approach to generating architectural form that is borrowed from his former mentor Rem Koolhaas—albeit a more highly developed and systematic incarnation of such an approach. “Whether post-rationalized or generative,” writes Justin Fowler, “BIG’s diagrams project an attitude of inevitability, suggesting that the final form is the necessary result.” This approach to generating architecture is a perfect complement to Ingels’ highly developed powers of presentation, persuasion, and self-promotion that have drawn both ire and admiration from the architectural profession at large. Undoubtedly though, all of these factors have played a role in the success of Ingels and BIG.
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Copenhagen Harbour Bath / BIG + JDS. Image Courtesy of PLOT
Ingels has been involved in countless design competitions and some of his built projects include the Danish Pavilion, VM Houses, Danish National Maritime Museum, Mountain Dwellings, and many others. His architectural debut in North America was VIΛ 57 West, an apartment building at 57th Street in Manhattan along the West Side Highway. Completed in 2016, even when this building was still under construction, it garnered enough attention to significantly bolster BIG’s reputation in the United States, leading to the firm being selected to design the tower at Two World Trade Center in 2015 (though its future remains uncertain).
2018 has already been a significant year for the Danish designer. It was announced in May that the architect had been named Chief Architect at WeWork, a position that will see his already major influence stretch even further. Additionally his 2016 Serpentine Pavilion was recently relocated to Toronto, where it will remain until November (at which point it will be permanently moved to Vancouver.) But it’s not all been smooth sailing: BIG’s proposal for the Smithsonian Museum came under fire by none other than the Fine Arts Commission.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected 14 recipients for the 2017 AIA Young Architects Award. Now in its 24th year, the award was founded to honor young architects – licensed 10 years or fewer regardless of their age – who have “shown exceptional leadership and made significant contributions to the profession early in their careers.”
Also announced were the winners of the 2017 AIA Associates Award, given to individual Associate AIA members to “recognize outstanding leaders and creative thinkers for significant contributions to their communities and the architecture profession.” Associate membership is open to individuals who meet one of the following criteria: professional degree in architecture; currently work under the supervision of an architect; currently enrolled in the Architectural Experience Program (AXP) and working toward licensure; or faculty member in a university program in architecture.
Young Architects and Associate Award winners will be presented with their awards in a ceremony at the AIA 2017 National Convention on Architecture in Orlando. Learn more about the Young Architects award here, and the Associate Award here.
Jenny Sabin Studio. Lumen. 2017 (rendering). Winner of the Young Architects Program 2017, MoMA PS1, New York. Image Courtesy of Jenny Sabin Studio
Lumen by Jenny Sabin Studio has been named the winner of The Museum of Modern Art and MoMAPS1’s annual Young Architects Program. Opening on June 27 in the MoMAPS1 courtyard, this year’s construction is an immersive design that evolves over the course of a day, providing a cooling respite from the midday sun and a responsive glowing light after sundown. Drawn from among five finalists, Jenny Sabin Studio’s Lumen will serve as a temporary urban landscape for the 20th season of Warm Up, MoMAPS1’s pioneering outdoor music series. Lumen will remain on view through the summer.
Now in its 18th edition, the Young Architects Program at The Museum of Modern Art and MoMAPS1 has offered emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects, challenging each year’s winners to develop creative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation that provides shade, seating, and water. The architects must also work within guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling.
Made of responsive tubular structures in a lightweight knitted fabric, Lumen features a canopy of recycled, photo-luminescent, and solar active textiles that absorb, collect, and deliver light. A misting system responds to visitors’ proximity, activating fabric stalactites that produce a refreshing micro-climate. Socially and environmentally responsive, Lumen’s multisensory environment is inspired by collective levity, play, and interaction as the structure and materials transform throughout the day and night, adapting to the densities of bodies, heat, and sunlight.
“The Young Architects Program remains one of the most significant opportunities for architects and designers from across the country and world to build radical yet transformative ideas. This year’s finalists are no exception; their projects illustrate a diversity of approaches and refreshing ideas for architecture today,” said Sean Anderson, Associate Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Jenny Sabin’s catalytic immersive environment, Lumen, captured the jury’s attention for imaginatively merging public and private spaces. With innovative construction and design processes borne from a critical merging of technology and nature to precise attention to detail at every scale, Lumen will no doubt engage visitors from day to night in a series of graduated environments and experiences.”
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Jenny Sabin Studio. Lumen. 2017 (rendering). Winner of the Young Architects Program 2017, MoMA PS1, New York. Image Courtesy of Jenny Sabin Studio
Klaus Biesenbach, MoMAPS1 Director and MoMA Chief Curator at Large adds, “In its 18th iteration, this annual competition offered jointly by the Architecture and Design Department at MoMA and MoMAPS1 continues to take risks and encourage experimentation among architects. Jenny Sabin’s Lumen is a socially and environmentally responsive structure that spans practices and disciplines in its exploratory approach to new materials. Held in tension within the walls of MoMAPS1’s courtyard, Lumen turns visitors into participants who interact with its responsiveness to temperature, sunlight, and movement.”
The other finalists for this year’s MoMAPS1Young Architects Program were Bureau Spectacular (Jimenez Lai and Joanna Grant), Ania Jaworska, Office of III (Sean Canty, Ryan Golenberg and Stephanie Lin), and SCHAUM/SHIEH (Rosalyne Shieh and Troy Schaum). An exhibition of the five finalists’ proposed projects will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art over the summer, organized by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, with Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.
Bloomberg Philanthropies has supported the Young Architects Program since 2007. In 2016, MoMAPS1 and The Museum of Modern Art were thrilled to announce that this lead sponsorship had been extended for three years, enabling the Young Architects Program to thrive and excite audiences through summer 2018.
About Jenny Sabin Studio
Jenny Sabin Studio is an architectural design firm that investigates the intersections of architecture and science, biology, and mathematics. The principal, Jenny E. Sabin, is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Assistant Professor in the area of Design and Emerging Technologies and the newly-appointed Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. She is also the Director of the Sabin Design Lab at Cornell AAP, a trans-disciplinary design research lab with specialization in computational design, data visualization, and digital fabrication. Sabin’s awards include the AIA Henry Adams first prize medal, the Arthur Spayd Brooke gold medal, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a USA Knight Fellowship in Architecture, the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and a national IVY Innovator in design. Sabin has exhibited nationally and internationally including in the 9th ArchiLab at FRAC Centre, Orleans, France and Beauty, the 5th Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in New York City. Upcoming exhibitions include Imprimer Le Monde at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, France.
Selection Process
To choose an architectural firm for the 2017 Young Architects Program, deans of architecture schools and the editors of architecture publications nominate around 50 firms comprised of recent architectural school graduates, junior faculty, and established architects experimenting with new styles or techniques. These finalists are asked to submit portfolios of their work for review by a panel including Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art; Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director at The Museum of Modern Art; Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMAPS1 and Chief Curator at Large at the Museum of Modern Art; Peter Reed, Senior Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, The Museum of Modern Art; Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture & Design at The Museum of Modern Art; Sean Anderson, Associate Curator of Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art.
Design Team
Project lead and manager: Dillon Pranger Design & Representation: Jingyang Liu Leo, Diego Blanco, Mark Lien Robotic Fabrication: Andrew Moorman and Andres Gutierrez Virtual Reality: Christopher Morse Content Coordination: Jordan Berta Model Assistance: Jasmine Liu Video: Cole Skaggs Engineering Design: Clayton Binkley, Arup Lighting Design: Jeffrey Nash Knit Fabrication: Shima Seiki WHOLEGARMENT Misting Systems: Mist Cooling Inc. with special thanks to Larry Geohring
History
This year marks the 20th summer that MoMAPS1 has hosted an architectural installation and music series in its outdoor space, though it is only the 18th year of the Young Architects Program, which began in 2000. The inaugural project was an architecturally based 1998 installation by the Austrian artist collective Gelatin. In 1999, Philip Johnson’s DJ Pavilion celebrated the historic affiliation of MoMAPS1 and MoMA. The previous winners of the Young Architects Program are SHoP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli (2000), ROY (2001), William E. Massie (2002), Tom Wiscombe / EMERGENT (2003), nARCHITECTS (2004), Xefirotarch (2005), OBRA (2006), Ball-Nogues (2007), WORKac (2008), MOS (2009), Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (2010), Interboro Partners (2011), HWKN (2012), CODA (2013), The Living (2014), Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation (2015), and Escobedo Soliz Studio (2016).
The Fundació Mies van der Rohe has announced the three winners of the inaugural Young Talent Architecture Award (YTAA) 2016. Established this year to “support the talent of recently graduated Architects, Urban Planners and Landscape Architects who will be responsible for transforming our environment in the future,” 9 finalists were selected from a shortlist of 30 projects, which was then narrowed down to 3 winners.
The project proposes a simple and sustainable way to react to the dynamics of the demand of accommodation for tourists. The Jury appreciated the ‘glocal’ thinking which supports the local community in obtaining the tools to face the urban, economic and social changes that the city is undergoing.
Housing is a key topic in Europe today and the project understands the impermanence of our habitat. The Jury considered the importance of understanding architecture as an open process in an ever-changing environment and the potential to create a real time experimental FabLab connected to an innovative housing experience.
The project addresses the topic of cohabitation and how borders (both political and geographical) can be transformed in order to make this cohabitation possible. This proposal approaches the role of design as a political tool, as a spatial practice within a new emergent socio-political space. The Jury was positively impressed by the amount of overlapping layers of complexity created and by the skillful designs and modeling to explain a newly imagined world.
The Iraqi-born British Architect Dame Zaha Hadid, DBE (1950-2016) has died aged 65, in Miami, Florida. According to reports from the BBC, Hadid was being treated in hospital for bronchitis when she suffered a heart attack. Earlier this year she became the first sole woman to receive the RIBA Royal Gold Medal at a ceremony in London.
Read on for the official statement from Zaha Hadid Architects:
It is with great sadness that Zaha Hadid Architects have confirmed that Dame Zaha Hadid, DBE died suddenly in Miami in the early hours of this morning. She had contracted bronchitis earlier this week and suffered a sudden heart attack while being treated in hospital.
Zaha Hadid was widely regarded to be the greatest female architect in the world today. Born in Baghdad in 1950, she studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before starting her architectural journey in 1972 at the Architectural Association in London.
By 1979 she had established her own practice in London – Zaha HadidArchitects – garnering a reputation across the world for her ground-breaking theoretical works including The Peak in Hong Kong (1983), the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin (1986) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994).
Working with office partner Patrik Schumacher, her interest was in the interface between architecture, landscape, and geology; which her practice integrates with the use of innovative technologies often resulting in unexpected and dynamic architectural forms.
Zaha Hadid’s first major built commission, one that affirmed her international recognition, was the Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein, Germany (1993); subsequent notable projects including the MAXXI: Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome (2009), theLondon Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games (2011) and the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku (2013) illustrate her quest for complex, fluid space. Buildings such as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003) and the Guangzhou Opera House in China (2010) have also been hailed as architecture that transforms our ideas of the future with visionary spatial concepts defined by advanced design, material and construction processes.
In 2004, Zaha Hadid became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She twice won the UK’s most prestigious architecture award, the RIBA Stirling Prize: in 2010 for the MAXXI Museum in Rome, a building for the staging of 21st century art, the distillation of years of experimentation, a mature piece of architecture conveying a calmness that belies the complexities of its form and organisation; and the Evelyn Grace Academy, a unique design, expertly inserted into an extremely tight site, that shows the students, staff and local residents they are valued and celebrates the school’s specialism throughout its fabric, with views of student participation at every turn.
Zaha Hadid’s other awards included the Republic of France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale and in 2012, Zaha Hadid was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture.
She held various academic roles including the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture. Hadid also taught studios at Columbia University, Yale University and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Zaha Hadid was recently awarded the RIBA’s 2016 Royal Gold Medal, the first woman to be awarded the prestigious honour in her own right. On the occasion, Sir Peter Cook wrote the following citation:
“In our current culture of ticking every box, surely Zaha Hadid succeeds, since (to quote the Royal Gold Medal criteria) she is someone “who has made a significant contribution to the theory or practice of architecture…. for a substantial body of work rather than for work which is currently fashionable.” Indeed her work, though full of form, style and unstoppable mannerism, possesses a quality that some of us might refer to as an impeccable ‘eye’: which we would claim is a fundamental in the consideration of special architecture and is rarely satisfied by mere ‘fashion’.
And surely her work is special. For three decades now, she has ventured where few would dare: if Paul Klee took a line for a walk, then Zaha took the surfaces that were driven by that line out for a virtual dance and then deftly folded them over and then took them out for a journey into space. In her earlier, ‘spiky’ period there was already a sense of vigour that she shared with her admired Russian Suprematists and Constructivists – attempting with them to capture that elusive dynamic of movement at the end of the machine age.
Necessarily having to disperse effort through a studio production, rather than being a lone artist, she cottoned–on to the potential of the computer to turn space upon itself. Indeed there is an Urban Myth that suggests that the very early Apple Mac ‘boxes’ were still crude enough to plot the mathematically unlikely – and so Zaha with her mathematics background seized upon this and made those flying machine projections of the Hong Kong Peak project and the like. Meanwhile, with paintings and special small drawings Zaha continued to lead from the front. She has also been smart enough to pull in some formidable computational talent without being phased by its ways.
Thus the evolution of the ‘flowing’ rather than spikey architecture crept up upon us in stages, as did the scale of her commissions, but in most cases, they remained clear in identity and control. When you entered the Fire Station at Vitra, you were conscious of being inside one of those early drawings and yes, it could be done. Yet at perhaps its highest, those of us lucky enough to see the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku in the flesh, can surely never have been in such a dream-like space, with its totality, its enormous internal ramp and dart-like lights seeming to have come from a vocabulary that lies so far beyond the normal architecture that we assess or rationalize.
So we are presenting her with this Medal as a British Institution: and as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire: thus she might seem to be a member of our British Establishment. Yet in reality, many of our chattering classes and not a few fellow architects have treated her with characteristic faint praise, and when she heroically won the Cardiff Opera House competition, blocking the scheme. Or when we awarded her the RIBA Stirling Prize for the school in South London – her second win in a row – we, the jury, were loudly derided by a number of distinguished architects. Of course, in our culture of circumspection and modesty her work is certainly not modest, and she herself is the opposite of modest. Indeed her vociferous criticism of poor work or stupidity recalls the line-side comments of the tennis player John McEnroe. Yet this is surely characteristic of the seriousness with which she takes the whole business: sloppiness and waywardness pain her and she cannot play the comfy
British game of platitudinous waffle that is the preferred cushion adopted by many people of achievement or power. Her methods and perhaps much of her psychology remain Mesopotamian and not a little scary: but certainly clear.
As a result, it is perhaps a little lonely there up at the top, surrounded now by some very considerable talent in the office, but feared somewhat and distanced from the young. Yet in private Zaha is gossipy and amusing, genuinely interested in the work of talented colleagues who do very different architecture such as Steven Holl, and she was the first to bring to London talent such as Lebbeus Woods or Stanley Saiotowitz. She is exceptionally loyal to her old friends: many of whom came from the Alvin Boyarsky period of the Architectural Association: which seems to remain as her comfort zone and golden period of friendship. Encouraged and promoted at an early age by Boyarsky, she has rewarded the AA with an unremitting loyalty and fondness for it.
The history of the Gold Medal must surely include many major figures who commanded a big ship and one ponders upon the operation involved that gets such strong concepts as the MAXXI in Rome – in which the power of organization is so clear – or the Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck where dynamic is at last captured – or the Aquatics Centre for the London Olympics where the lines diving boards were as fluid as the motion of the divers – made into reality. And she has done it time and time again in Vienna, Marseilles, Beijing and Guangzhou. Never has she been so prolific, so consistent. We realize that Kenzo Tange and Frank Lloyd Wright could not have drawn every line or checked every joint, yet Zaha shares with them the precious role of towering, distinctive and relentless influence upon all around her that sets the results apart from the norm. Such self-confidence is easily accepted in film-makers and football managers, but causes some architects to feel uncomfortable, maybe they’re secretly jealous of her unquestionable talent. Let’s face it, we might have awarded the medal to a worthy, comfortable character. We didn’t, we awarded it to Zaha: larger than life, bold as brass and certainly on the case.
Our Heroine. How lucky we are to have her in London.”
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Zaha Hadid received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in February 2016. Image via RIBA
Jane Duncan, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), who awarded Hadid the Royal Gold Medal, has said:
This is absolutely terrible news. Dame Zaha Hadid was an inspirational woman, and the kind of architect one can only dream of being. Visionary and highly experimental, her legacy despite her young age, is formidable. She leaves behind a body of work from buildings to furniture, footwear and cars, that delight and astound people all around the world. It was only last month that I had the enviable task of awarding Zaha the 2016 Royal Gold Medal for architecture – she was delighted to receive the recognition and adds the medal to an amazing collection of awards, not least winning the RIBA Stirling Prize two years running. The world of architecture has lost a star today.
Details of Zaha Hadid’s memorial service will be announced shortly.
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels (born 2 October 1974) is often cited as one of the most inspirational architects of our time. At an age when many architects are just beginning to establish themselves in professional practice, Ingels has already won numerous competitions and achieved a level of critical acclaim (and fame) that is rare for new names in the industry. His work embodies a rare optimism that is simultaneously playful, practical, and immediately accessible.
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Archy Naija 