The architectural legacies of Kisho Kurokawa in China

Kisho Kurokawa (1934–2007) was a world-famous Japanese architect who made his impact on urban architecture in Japan and many other countries. His philosophy of symbiosis influenced several generations of designers and social architects in Japan and the world. In his heyday during the mid 1980s, Kurokawa started a twenty-year journey of architectural design and urban planning in China. His designs in China are closely involved with the contemporary architectural history and practice of the country: for example, in importing foreign architectural design, researching the formal design language and the emerging of private development. The authors traced the footprints of Kurokawa in China and investigated the relevant building and urban design cases. This paper reviews Kurokawa's outstanding works in China, tries to reveal the master's trajectory of adapting ‘symbiosis’ and ‘grey’ concepts in different conditions, and fills a gap in the understanding of modern Chinese and Japanese architecture.     

20世纪30年代到40年代日本建筑中关于“传统”的想法与实践 通过现代建筑的滤镜转译日本建筑传统

文章主要介绍了日本现代主义建筑师如何思考和表达本国建筑传统。在20世纪30至40年代的民族主义背景下,这一主题引起了很多日本建筑师的注意,他们热衷于将现代建筑表现为在钢筋混凝土建筑上加上一个倾斜的瓦屋顶。但也有日本建筑师认为这只是对中国建筑的继承而非日本建筑本质的转译,并进而在现代主义的视角下发展了自身的传统。     

Arup Associates

A specialist architectural division of the wider Arup group, Arup Associates has a unique composition and ethos. In its studios, teams of architects, structural engineers, environmental engineers, urban designers and product designers work alongside each other on the design of buildings from a project's inception. It is an interdisciplinary approach that the practice pioneered in the 1960s, and which has been reinvigorated in the last few years by a new emphasis on ‘unified design’ – a radical wholeness in thinking and execution. Here, Jay Merrick talks to Arup Associates' principal Declan O'Carroll and considers his vision of an architecture capable of addressing complexity and sustaining humanity in the face of modernity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

拥抱传统——当下对建筑传统的再思考

在全球建筑融通的时代背景下,认识传统、理解传统、发扬传统是当下建筑师努力实践的方向,但多数建筑师对传统、文脉的理解与认识是片段的、破碎的。本文试图对建筑传统、建筑文脉、建筑民族性话题再思考,引起重视以便在建筑创作中得以延续与发展。     

Studio Mumbai Architects ( Bijoy and Prija Jain)

Studio Mumbai Architects presents an exquisite architectural poiesis through the crafting or weaving of the building with the landscape, and the crafted fabrication of the building itself. The result is a choreographed architecture, compelling also in its Zen-like sparseness and delightful elegance. The intense sensuality of the practice's work is palpable without ideological mediation, through the modulation of light, material crafts, tactility, contrasting colours, and a heightened awareness of the site. Seeking ‘tradition’ through materiality and crafting, the architects incorporate ‘local’ construction techniques as a Modernist aestheticisation of the unselfconscious tradition. Secret gardens, structures embedded in the landscape inviting flexible uses, materials that interact with garden, sky and weather, and the transformative effects of time (weathering) are just some of the terms of engagement for the work of Studio Mumbai. Very few architects since Geoffrey Bawa have established such a compelling and instructive relationship with the landscape, as this requires the patient botanical metaphor of cultivation. The question of landscape is not just a pictorial one, but one that must be substantiated by ecological and sustainable programmes. Directed by Bijoy and Priya Jain, Studio Mumbai is a collaborative, multidisciplinary firm integrating architecture, landscape and interior design with product and furniture design. With a focus on crafting, the practice maintains its own established, year-round fabrication facilities in two locations where the timber structures, finished carpentry and furniture are handcrafted for each of its projects. Here, teams of skilled craftspeople, many originating from a long lineage of regional artisans, collaborate in a flexible and highly precise manufacturing process. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heat and light thematised in the modern architecture of Houston

Mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in Houston thematised responsiveness to the natural phenomena of heat and light despite the fact that Houston's most celebrated modern buildings were designed to be completely reliant on central air-conditioning. An examination of Houston buildings constructed from the late 1940s through the 1960s demonstrates the ways in which modern architects sought to privilege the architectural recognition of regional climatic difference while also employing modern technology to alleviate local climatic extremes of heat and humidity. The spectacular modern buildings that represent this era in Houston raise crucial questions: How did architects reconcile the doctrine of climatic responsiveness to the equally modern desire for maximum transparency? What proved more compelling: responsiveness to local circumstance or the imperatives of modern structural and mechanical engineering? Did modern architects perceive that there might be contradictions between responsiveness to climate and other aspects of modern architectural identity, such as transparency? Because concern about the roles of building design and construction in the responsible use of natural resources is current at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is pertinent to examine the ways modern architects in a particular climatic setting negotiated the issue of climatic responsiveness as modern architecture became the dominant practice.     

Heat and light thematised in the modern architecture of Houston

Mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in Houston thematised responsiveness to the natural phenomena of heat and light despite the fact that Houston's most celebrated modern buildings were designed to be completely reliant on central air-conditioning. An examination of Houston buildings constructed from the late 1940s through the 1960s demonstrates the ways in which modern architects sought to privilege the architectural recognition of regional climatic difference while also employing modern technology to alleviate local climatic extremes of heat and humidity. The spectacular modern buildings that represent this era in Houston raise crucial questions: How did architects reconcile the doctrine of climatic responsiveness to the equally modern desire for maximum transparency? What proved more compelling: responsiveness to local circumstance or the imperatives of modern structural and mechanical engineering? Did modern architects perceive that there might be contradictions between responsiveness to climate and other aspects of modern architectural identity, such as transparency? Because concern about the roles of building design and construction in the responsible use of natural resources is current at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is pertinent to examine the ways modern architects in a particular climatic setting negotiated the issue of climatic responsiveness as modern architecture became the dominant practice.     

Hitler's ‘Generalsiedlungsplanung Ost’: a case only for Poland? A forgotten dimension of national-socialist spatial and town planning in the former Czechoslovakia

Adolf Hitler constructed his Nazi ideology as a universal worldview aimed at the German Reich's eastward expansion; the ‘Generalsiedlungsplanung Ost’ programme was officially launched in 1940. The forcible establishment of multiple administrative units in 1938/1939 created the conditions for an architecture that would serve the totalitarian regime. Thus began an enormous planning process and the targeted institutionalization of urban development and spatial planning and research. This programme included not only German government agencies and research institutions specifically established or reorganized for this purpose, but increasingly also involved communal politics and independent or government architects. The author pursues the thesis that this Germanization concept, formulated within the framework of the ‘Generalsiedlungspläne Ost’, allowed the relevant agencies to increase their influence or eliminate any opponents. From this basis, the study identifies the role that GBI (Generalbauinspektor) for Berlin Albert Speer, his architects, and local architects played in the planning process in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and analyses the architectural evidence of the Nazi rulers’ Germanization and colonization policies. The initial comparison of the urban planning models applied in ‘Großreich Deutschland’ with those in the annexed regions in today's Poland and Czech Republic offers relevant arguments related to this far-reaching sociological and architecture–historical topic.     

Gathering,Disposing and the Cultivation of Judgement in Sir Henry Wotton's: The Elements of Architecture

Employing a hermeneutic approach to Sir Henry Wotton's seventeenth century text on architecture, this paper discloses the discourse on judgement that lies at its heart. Wotton's conception of judgement is Aristotelian, and refers to Aristotle's Ethics; specifically his discourses on practical reasoning, legislation and political wisdom. Addressed to the aristocratic amateur architects of Jacobean England. The Elements of Architecture seeks to provide a ‘rule’ to guide the cultivation of good judgment in architecture. Nuances of the relationship between ‘rule’ and ‘example’ in Wotton's conception of judgement are examined, highlighting a consonance with the play between logos and ethos that is characteristic of Aristotelian ethics. This play, it is argued, is crucial to Wotton's conception of both judgement and architectural making     

Robert Damora and the mission of American architecture

In the United States of the 1950s, many architects, artists and historians were engaged with issues surrounding the nature of an authentic American architecture, and their professional responsibility to define its contours and potential. These issues included questions about the relationship of design to a democratic society and the expressive possibilities of architectural monumentality. This essay examines the contribution made by the master architectural photographer Robert Damora (1912–2009) with his wife Sirkka (b. 1924) to the development of a response to these concerns. It addresses his part in shaping American modern design through: his documentation of the work of prominent American modern architects and designers such as Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Eero Saarinen, I. M. Pei, Florence Knoll, Edward Durrell Stone, Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson; post-war studies of new housing types and innovative concrete construction; photographic interpretations of corporate work such as the Hancock Tower in Boston. Like his contemporaries Julius Shulman, Balthasar Korab and Ezra Stoller, Damora also communicated to the public the heroic drama of modern buildings through the two-dimensional medium of photography, yet unfortunately his work remains less-known than that of his peers. The essay seeks to fill this gap by presenting Damora's own participation in envisioning a new American ideal of a refined yet functionalist way of living, both through the medium of photography and through such exploratory architectural projects as the Seeds for Architecture programme of the Universal Atlas Cement Company.     

The uncanny side of the fairy tale: post-apocalyptic symbolism in Terunobu Fujimori's architecture

Having first established himself as an architectural historian, Terunobu Fujimori (b. 1946) is now more famous for his design work than for his academic publications. He has even been praised as ‘the most influential architect in Japan’ by the critic Kenjiro Okazaki (2006). Fujimori's popularity is attributable in particular to the fairy tale-like image of his architecture, which tends to appear playful as well as natural and nostalgic. However, this research focuses on the other side of the ‘fairy tale’—specifically, the strangely unfamiliar, even unsettling, feeling that his architecture evokes. Using Freud's and Vidler's notions of ‘the uncanny’ for analysis, this study identifies the contradictory sentiment residing in the hidden clashes between the natural and artificial qualities of his design. Arguably, the uncanny aspect of Fujimori's architecture stems from a post-apocalyptic sensibility imprinted in the Japanese unconscious, which is haunted by the trauma of ruin, whether caused by natural or man-made disaster. This research focus can lead to a broader cultural discourse beyond the scope of a single architect's work, relevant to all ‘modern unhomely’ societies.     

From the viewpoint of a client

Collaboration between choreographers and architects still usually takes the traditional form of the latter designing sets for the former, while research on the relationship between architecture and dance is scant. One of the few examples of a choreographer working with then-current architectural concerns is William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt in the late 1980s, particularly in Enemy in the Figure (1989) and Limb's Theorem (1990). These pieces show a profound understanding of and engagement with architectural issues then being addressed by Daniel Libeskind. Forsythe's interest in Libeskind was not his ‘deconstruction’, as has often been asserted, but in his operations on drawing. Their coincidence of intellectual interests and resulting friendship allows us to see clearly how concerns in architecture were also explored through the medium of ballet. It is a reminder too of a period, postmodernism, when architecture led theoretical discussions.     

关于王澍获奖

问答王澍 AW:普利兹克先生表示:“这是具有划时代意义的一步,评委会决定将奖项授予一名中国建筑师,这标志着中国在建筑理想发展方面将要发挥的作用得到了世界的认可”.本次获奖对您个人和对整个中国建筑的意义是什么?您对当代中国建筑的发展,持什么样的看法?对未来中国建筑的发展有何建议?     

Looking through axonometric windows

From Frank Lloyd Wright's box-breaking corner windows to Le Corbusier's fenêtre en longueur and Mies van der Rohe's reflective glass walls, modernist architectural space emerged through the transformation of the window. As a mechanism for articulating the primordial architectural distinction between inside and outside, the window has long been a primary architectural element. In modern architecture, however, the types of window multiplied in response to new technologies, structural systems and cultural conditions. The window increased in importance as architects explored its capacity not only to control the transmission of light, air, heat, vision and information, but also to produce different kinds of space and to transform social distinctions such as those between public and private, self and other. In this essay I present a little-known chapter in that story: the series of windows American architect Claude Bragdon designed in 1915 using his system of ‘projective ornament’ (Fig. 1).     

THE ARCHITECTURAL NARRATIVE: On Michael Speaks' Ruminations on a ‘Big,Soft, Orange’

The Big, Soft, Orange exhibition on four Dutch architectural firms focuses on the (soft) processes these architects have evolved for dealing with the large scope(big) of contemporary architectural undertakings and the particular historical and geographical conditions these attempts address in the contemporary Netherlands (orange). Following the precedent of the curator. Michael Speaks' comments, the content of the exhibition will be seen to have broader relevance for Architecture. Speaks' own circumstance is considerably influenced by his relationship with, and critique of the work of, Frederic Jameson. By reading between Jameson and Speaks, this paper will use Speaks' exhibition to question the success of the architecture of postmodernity's preoccupation with overtuming the modern-modernism's Utopian assertions, its preoccupation with form, its totalising tendency, and the strictures of the ‘handed-down’ discipline of architecture with a telos in Building.From a Heideggerian perspective the paper will consider the architectural process as the concrete materialisation of the narrative of architectural production informs other than, but leading toward, the traditionally privileged architectural form: Building. Rather than the architectural approaches of postmodernity overturning modernism,it will be concluded that these approaches are merely innovative differentiation as they ‘flesh-out’ and articulate hitherto unformed narratives already extant within the reductive frames of modernity     

Epilogue: on meaning and experience (or images versus practices)

The essay presents an alternative idea of what Islamic architecture could be from what is termed as a ‘value-centred’ approach. To date, the theory of Islamic architecture has been mainly derived either from a formalistic analysis of historically selected buildings from the past, or from the works of Sufism which claim to be the form generator of the Islamic spirit. There are also the works of regionalist architects that maintain the idea of Islamic architecture as being a product of cultural and environmental as well as geographical forces. The essay instead presents the argument that since modernist architecture was the product of a value-centred discourse ranging across political, religious and environmental issues, then Islamic architecture could also be derived from an examination of the values inherent in the hadith or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. The body of hadiths contains many accounts of the Prophet's values concerning life practices of which some can be used in order to derive a framework of architectural design. With this framework, a re-evaluation of past historical works can be carried out and new building designs can be made from the interpretation of hadiths within the context of the cultural, geographical, economic and political settings of each project.     

Shennan Road and the modernization of Shenzhen architecture

Shenzhen exemplifies the rapid development of urban planning and construction in China. Over the last 40 years, many representative urban spaces and buildings have been built on Shennan Road, the city's main east–west thoroughfare, which has witnessed the formation of a multicenter structural layout and the miraculous expansion of the city. Many iconic buildings were designed by Hong Kong or foreign architects. The continuous development along Shennan Road not only symbolizes the fruits of the reform and opening up policies of Shenzhen and even China, but also reflects the modern architectural history in Shenzhen. This study uses historical research methods to review the changes in the urban fabric and the design trends, as seen in representative buildings along Shennan Road in different periods. In addition to the transition path of the city center, the unique role of streets and buildings in the development of the urban structure is analyzed, and other urban functions and symbolic meanings are identified. This work contributes to the history and theory of the modernization of contemporary Chinese architecture.     

为什么没有伟大的女建筑师?

上世纪60～70年代,女建筑师的生存状况开始引起西方女性主义建筑学者的关注.但在没有强大女性运动传统的中国,这一问题至今尚未引起足够的重视.本文以“为什么没有伟大的女建筑师”为线索,尝试引发人们对女建筑师的重视.笔者认为,历史中之所以没有伟大的女建筑师,一方面是因为女性在进入建筑师职业之前的建造行为不被认可为评价伟大建...     

The post-modernist turn and spectres of criticality in post-socialist architecture: ‘one:table’ at the Venice Biennale 2012

This article examines the ‘one:table’ installation in the pavilion of Serbia at the 13^th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (2012). The large empty table put on public view by its co-authorial team of ten architecture graduates is argued to be meaningful beyond its reasoning as an exhibit responding to the Biennale theme of ‘common ground’. The inquiry aims to demonstrate that this one simple object has an important critical effect in the architectural discourse of post-socialist Serbia. Its effect, it is argued, is complementary to designs for prominent buildings in Belgrade by the world-renowned architects Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Wolfgang Tschapeller and Sou Fujimoto. Conversely, its implicit criticality is compared to the method and media of an analogous case of post-modern critique in the installation ‘Table (of a Dancer, of a Marksman, of a Philosopher)’ (1982) by the architect Mustafa Musi?. The aim of the article is to compare the two exhibitions where the thematic of the table as architectural exhibit opens a discussion of criticality in post-modernist and post-socialist moments. The article discusses the two table installations in terms of Jacques Derrida's thesis of ‘hauntology’, which is itself derived from the analysis of another table, that is, a ‘simple wooden table’ used by Karl Marx in his seminal section on ‘the fetishism of the commodity and its secret’.     

Eric de Maré: between the functional and the beautiful

Eric de Maré’s photographs were very widely published in post-war Britain and his images may be seen to have influenced a generation of architects. Perhaps more than any polemic or lengthy rationale they expanded the possibilities of architectural design; his pioneering work on the photography of early industrial buildings seen in ‘The Functional Tradition’, published as an article in The Architectural Review in 1957 and subsequently as a book, helped to create a new language at a time ready for such change.

De Maré was part of the wider architectural culture of the Architectural Press and The Architectural Review, and acknowledged the influence of the long-time proprietor de Cronin Hastings as well as other contributors such as John Piper, Gordon Cullen and J.M. Richards. There are clear links with another major position in British architectural work of that period, the ‘New Brutalism': the Smithsons’ ideas of honesty of form and materials are very close to the lessons which were drawn from de Maré's photographic evidence, whilst drawing attention to the ordinary and unvalued was the common ground basic to both positions. More than this, his images of worn surfaces and ageing structures are informed by an acute architectural sensibility. De Maré's work represents a repudiation of the utopianism of Modernist practice and theory, in favour of a new kind of beauty, redemptive in the harshly utilitarian modern world.