Magazine
The M9 Museum of the 20th Century in Venice-Mestre is hosting draw love build, a large exhibition on thirty years of the work of Sauerbruch Hutton, the architectural practice that can boast of M9 as one of its flagship designs. Ulf Meyer visited the exhibition after its September 3rd...
The 15th International Alvar Aalto Symposium took place online on August 12th and 13th with the theme "Future of Industry" approached from perspectives of art, industry, and technology. Ulf Meyer attended the two days of talks to see how the participants responded to the theme, filing this...
The new pedestrian promenade in Bastia, France, is a masterpiece of urban design and engineering. Designed by Dietmar Feichtinger Architectes, the corniche follows the rocky coastline of the Mediterranean Sea below the Corsican city. Ulf Meyer recently visited the path that has become a...
Harvard University’s new Science and Engineering Complex in Boston, designed by Behnisch Architekten, has a LEED Platinum certified from the USGBC and a Living Building Challenge Petal certification from the International Living Future Institute, making it one of the healthiest laboratory...
In the 1960s, Astra Zarina was the only female architect among many male colleagues who designed more than 1,000 flats in the Märkisches Viertel housing estate in Berlin. Yet she went unnoticed. Why is that?
June 20th marked the 70th anniversary of the Geneva Convention on Refugees coming into force. It offers millions of people protection and a life in safety — things that people who have not suffered war or displacement take for granted. To remember history, but also to perpetuate it, the...
Contested Modernities consists of symposia, an exhibition, and a publication focused on postcolonial architecture in Southeast Asia as part of the long-term program Encounters with Southeast Asian Modernism. Ulf Meyer watched Contested Modernities’ second symposium, “The...
In April the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design in Atlanta earned Living Building Challenge certification, making it one of just 28 buildings that can boast of meeting the world's most stringent green building standard. The building by Miller Hull Partnership and Lord Aeck...
What do architects think about important future issues such as climate change or digitalization? How do they envision a sustainable building culture? What solutions do they have? What framework conditions do they need in order to fulfill their tasks and responsibilities in the best possible...
What do architects think about important future issues such as climate change or digitalization? How do they envision a sustainable building culture? What solutions do they have? What framework conditions do they need in order to fulfill their tasks and responsibilities in the best possible...
What do architects think about important future issues such as climate change or digitalization? How do they envision a sustainable building culture? What solutions do they have? What framework conditions do they need in order to fulfill their tasks and responsibilities in the best possible...
What do architects think about important future issues such as climate change or digitalization? How do they envision a sustainable building culture? What solutions do they have? What framework conditions do they need in order to fulfill their tasks and responsibilities in the best possible...
It is an extraordinary time for art museums and therefore a good moment for The Art Museum in Modern Times, which functions as a global guide through the evolution of art museums over the last century. The new book was written by Charles Saumarez Smith, a veteran of numerous art...
The 17th Venice Architecture Biennale opened on May 22 despite the ongoing pandemic. Curator Hashim Sarkis’s theme, How will we live together?, proves to be highly relevant. The Biennale cannot answer this question but nevertheless poses it emphatically. Sarkis deserves great praise for...
March saw the fifth anniversary of Zaha Hadid’s death, something the architecture scene took surprisingly little notice of. An exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, intended as an homage, focuses on the Pritzker Prize winner’s enthusiasm for the Russian avant-garde.
The Urban Environment House is a new nearly net-zero building in Helsinki's former docklands designed by Lahdelma & Mahlamäki architects for the city's Urban Environment Division. Its completion during the pandemic means the building is yet to be occupied by city workers, but hopefully...
In their new book, Old Is New: Architectural Works by New Material Research Laboratory, artist Hiroshi Sugimoto and architect Tomoyuki Sakakida reveal the inner workings of the practice they formed in 2008. Although the name New Material Research Laboratory expresses innovation, the duo...
Sergei Tchoban – Lines and Volumes: Encounters with the Architect, Artist, Collector and Museum Founder is a new book of conversations between curator Kristin Feireiss and Russian-German architect Sergei Tchoban, who has practices in both countries but, as the subtitle makes clear, is...
Madeline Carey reviews Building for Hope: Towards an Architecture of Belonging, the new book by Marwa al-Sabouni, a follow-up to The Battle for Home, the memoir that brought the Syrian architect international acclaim five years ago.
Swiss-Architects Editor in Chief Elias Baumgarten recently interviewed architect Saikal Zhunushova, who placed third in the 2021 Foundation Award, which annually recognizes the innovate work of Swiss architecture offices less than five years old. Born in Kyrgyzstan and now based in Winterthur,...
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America opened in late February at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Curated by MoMA's Sean Anderson and Columbia University's Mabel O. Wilson, the exhibition explores "how people have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms,...
Patrick Lüth, the managing director of Snøhetta’s Innsbruck studio, talked to Austrian-Architects about social and ecological sustainability and the digitalization of architecture.
The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn, released in 1962, is considered the first monograph on the great American architect. It is also the first of nearly 100 books by influential "information architect" Richard Saul Wurman. Long out of print and hard to find, a facsimile edition...
Aldo Rossi: The Architect and the Cities is a major retrospective opening on March 10 at MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome. The exhibition explores the architecture and theories of Italy’s “unusual architect.”
The 760-page Atlas of Digital Architecture is an ambitious reference book about the myriad ways architects use computers. With contributions by two-dozen experts in the digitization of architecture and hundreds upon hundreds of illustrations, the book is a nearly complete picture of the...
In Japan: Nation Building Nature, Joachim Nijs searches for an “alternative interpretation of Japanese architectural history” through a matrix of four ecological phenomena. Ulf Meyer — a fellow European as enthralled with Japan as Nijs is — read the recently published book and sent us...
In which we take a look inside Formgiving, the new monograph on BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, in the context of the three monographs the firm has produced with Taschen over the last twelve years.
OMA – Office for Metropolitan Architecture and Ingenhoven Architects are building a vertical city in Tokyo for Mori Building Co., Ltd. All that's missing are the Olympic Games.
Between April and December, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Swiss-Architects editor Elias Baumgarten interviewed a slew of German, Austrian, and Swiss architects: virtual conversations that were transcribed into the five-part D-A-CH Talks series. The fifth conversation is translated...
For sure, 2020 is a year many people would like to soon forget, what with the coronavirus pandemic derailing the events that regularly attracted architects and leading to the deaths of some notable figures in architecture, among other things. Nevertheless, against the backdrop of the pandemic,...
The biographies of architect Rudolf Hamburger and his wife Ursula are outstanding, since Rudolf’s journey through life brought him deep into Asia in 1930, while Ursula later worked for various secret services and finally as an author in the GDR under the name of Ruth Werner. Author Eduard...
Architecture must change in order to address the climate crisis. But what directions do architects want to take? Snøhetta is making an interesting contribution to the debate: In southern Norway, the firm has designed an office building that produces more energy than it consumes over its life...
What more can be written about Countryside, The Future, the highly ambitious and much anticipated exhibition by Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal/AMO that recently reopened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City?
Two of the Netherland’s most prominent architecture firms are reshaping Rotterdam’s Museumpark: MVRDV is giving the city an art depot that looks like a bowl; and Mecanoo is renovating the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, whose art will be stored in the depot. Ulf Meyer visited Rotterdam to take...
While his generation failed in its attempt to change society through architecture, Wolf D. Prix says today’s young talent does not even try to do so, preferring to take refuge in a romanticized past. What is urgently needed are fresh concepts for the next twenty years.
A new exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, explores Anupama Kundoo’s "handmade houses" and other projects that "just take time." Ulf Meyer visited Anupama Kundoo – Taking Time, the fourth installation in the museum’s “The Architect’s Studio” series,...