Architecture

World Architecture Festival 2014: Winners

Oct 04

This year’s World Architecture Festival held in Singapore saw architects and architecture studios from across the globe compete for honors in the macro categories of completed buildings, future, small projects and landscape. In recognizing worldwide architectural excellence and celebrating the built environment, the festival was attended by over two thousand architects, designers, and clients. The festival’s jury comprised some of the world’s leading architects and designers, led by British architect Richard Rogers, with Rocco Yim (Hong Kong), Julie Eizenberg (USA), Enric Ruiz Geli (Spain), Peter Rich (South Africa) and many others. Here is a selection of the winners of the World Architecture Festival 2014. Take a look. Read More…

World Architecture Festival 2013: Winners

Nov 10

The World Architecture Festival took place in Singapore this year and saw around 200 shortlisted projects compete for awards in 30 different categories, from offices and places of religion, to family homes, schools, shopping centers, and future architecture projects. WAF is arguably the most prestigious of architectural honors in the world, and it draws the best of talent from across nations. The shortlisted projects and the wide range of architectural interventions presented in the festival is indicative of the fertility of the built environment, of creative processes and responsibilities accruing to furthering of thinking and doing architecture, in breathing life into spaces and structures for human families, communities, and societies worldwide. Take a look at the top honors.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and the making of the human spirit

Aug 09

By his own admission, Wright was the greatest architect of all time. In this interview recorded at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1956, he touches on various facets of his architectural vision, made intense by his ideas about the making of the human spirit. More than any other modernist, he went through several distinct stylistic phases, and he does talk about his well known projects like the Unity Temple, Robie House, La Miniatura, and Falling Water. Rather than thinking of architecture as segmented, Wright perceived it as continuous and flowing, not as so many rooms added together but as a sculptable whole. He elaborates on his ideas of organic architecture, natural architecture, or “Architecture of Integrity”, integrity being the key expression. In this interview, some of his articulations do raise eyebrows, for example, he does appear to be sexist, and a ‘powerfreak’ of sorts, along with dropping gems like “Culture is an individual thing, culture is not for the crowd/herd”. His comparison of architecture and music is of interest though, and Ludwig van Beethoven seems to have played his part in inspiring some, if not all, of Wrights work. Listen in.

Frédéric Chaubin: Soviet Architecture. 1970-1990

Mar 30

Fascinated by the massive scale of Leonid Brezhnev era architecture, french magazine editor Frédéric Chaubin toured the former USSR for seven years (between 2003 and 2010), during which he stumbled upon 90 soviet buildings scattered across 14 former USSR republics, bearing the identifiers of what he calls ‘cosmic communist constructions’. His documentation is an important contribution to architectural history, especially of an era, of which not much is comprehensively known. Architectural Brutalism is somewhat evident in these structures that reveal a surprising freedom from the top-down directives of 1920s Constructivism and thereafter. These striking buildings, constructed on a huge scale usually from reinforced concrete, are anti-picturesque, their outlandish gravity-defying forms pitted against the landscape. Chaubin maintains that architecture reflects and expresses ideology and philosophy of that era. Take a look.

Early years schools: Sculpting of space and imagination.

Sep 02

I still remember my nursery/kindergarten classroom with a great deal of lucidity. The texture of paint on the chair and tables, the colours and the general layout of the land, as it were. In contrast, I don’t quite remember my teachers or my friends from that period – not to say that they failed me as teachers or friends, it is just what it is. I figure it has much do with being impressionable at that age and that sculpting of space has much to do with the sculpting of imagination. Having done my rounds of pre/nursery school visits in urban India this century, I am struck by how ‘Disneyfied’ everything is. I choose to call them the ‘Mickey Mouse Schools’ – the walls, tables, fixtures plastered with Goofys, Mickeys and Donalds, not to forget the Simbas and the Alladins. Predictable, dull, uninspiring, dead spaces. However all is not lost, as some remarkable architectural and interior minds have silently worked to put out school projects of remarkable inventiveness elsewhere Take a look.