Odile Decq draws from Lyon’s industrial context to project the waterfront’s new identity. From Oslo and Lisbon to Hamburg and Amsterdam, the last 20 years have seen many of Europe’s redundant urban dockyards transformed into architectural zoos, peppered with signature structures by top-tier architects, often with greater regard for novelty than for the particularities of history or place.
Portal to the Past: Denton Corker Marshall created a forest of columns for the Stonehenge Exhibition and Visitor Centre that respects the ancient monument it serves.
Laboratory buildings are often the graveyard of architects' good intentions, as stringent technical requirements leave little room for environmental and aesthetic concerns.
The Sky's The Limit: The expansion of a vast trade-fair complex satisfies demanding exhibition-hall requirements and figures into a city's plans for urban renewal.
Two teams of architects employ very different strategies to reinvigorate a pair of ambitious 1960s apartment projects, one in the north of England and the other in Paris. Bois-le-Pêtre, Paris The $15.4 million overhaul of Bois-le-Pêtre, completed in 2011, is a more explicit manifesto for renovation. Its roots are in a combined response by Lacaton & Vassal and Frédéric Druot to the French government's 2003 demolition plan: 'We were shocked by the idea that nothing could be done except tabula rasa redevelopment,' recalls Anne Lacaton. The two architecture firms embarked on a published research project which concluded that such buildings
Two teams of architects employ very different strategies to reinvigorate a pair of ambitious 1960s apartment projects, one in the north of England and the other in Paris. The enthusiasm with which Britain and France took to the construction of Mid-Century Modern social housing is equaled only by their present appetite for its demolition. In 2003, the French government announced a 10-year urban-renewal plan in which 200,000 dwellings would be replaced; in Britain, Alison and Peter Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens, completed in London in 1972, is one of many projects that once enjoyed international prestige and are now facing the
Barn Again: Mixing materials and methods from the vernacular and the modern, a Japanese architect creates a timeless retreat for the sculpture of two German artists.
Mixing materials and methods from the vernacular and the modern, a Japanese architect creates a timeless retreat for the sculpture of two German artists.