Another Architecture N°69 August — September 2017

USD 19.95 JPY 3.990 KRW 40.000

EUR 19.95 GBP 14 CHF 30 CAD 29.50

New Kid
BP

on the Block
omas Kröger

ns
Art Installation
ular,
by Bureau Spectacu
d
Doug Aitken and
Saloobuono

‘e purpose
k’
in life is a book
Mark Cousins

Beirut’s newest buildings by Bernard Khoury,

Youssef Tohme and Herzog & de Meuron
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Mark’s
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 Mark 69 August — September 2017 005

Plan
044
010 Notice Board

020 Cross Section

022 Extrastudio Vendas de Azeitão

024 Salo obuono Mexico Ci
026 Ryu Mitarai Too
028 Elding Oscarson Lund
030 Production Design
032 Christ & Gantenbein Praeln
034 Rosenbaum and Aleph Zero
Formoso do Araguaia
036 Marieke Kums and Junya
Ishigami Tytsjerk
038 Infographic
040 Terra e Tuma São Paulo
042 Chance de Silva London
044 Ram Arkitektur Espedalen
046 Suppose Design Office Tokoname
048 Studio MK27 Catuçaba Ram Arkitektur
Log tower in Espedalen

050 Dollhouses Photo Sam Hughes

052 Pers ective

Beirut 056

054 Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes discusses

citizens’ rights to their ci.
056 Bernard Khoury no longer responds
to ture urban plans for the Lebanese
capital.
068 Herzog & de Meuron's Beirut Terraces
project suests transparency, but it
is first of all an accumulation of single
luxury apartments. Bernard Khoury

076 Youssef Tohme’s architecture is Apartment building in Beirut

Photo Ieva Saudargaite

defined by Lebanon’s political structure

and its rued geography.
006 Mark 69 August — September 2017

088 Lon Section

090 C.F. Møller’s Copenhagen 100

International School is a pioneer
in an industrial-transformation
zone.
100 Bureau Spectacular’s projects
are geing bier and more
concrete, without sacrificing a
sense of humour.
110 Office KGDVS’s Solo House
exemplifies an ongoing shi
towards exceptionali in
contemporary architecture.
120 omas Kröger creates
something new out of what
we think we know.
136 Giancarlo Mazzanti provided
a kindergarten in Barranquilla
with a stimulating environment.
146 ree works of art by Bureau Spectacular

Doug Aitken consider modern life Another Primitive Hut in Los Angeles
Photo Injee Unshin

through modern architecture.

154 Aires Mateus built a Facul
of Architecture that allows
freedom of appropriation.
162 Mark Cousins has spent 120
half a life lecturing at the
Architectural Association.

166 Tools

176 Exit

omas Kröger
House in Pinnow
Photo omas Heimann
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008
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Mark 69 August — September 2017
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Mark 69

Notice
Board
 Notice Board 011

‘ere’s a
ndamental
lon in
forChristoph Hesse and Neeraj Bhatia at the
‘Ways of Life’ exhibition in Kassel, page 014

nature,
evoked b the
contem orar
challen es of
urbani ’
012 Mark 69 Notice Board

1 Rendering by Art-Invest / Accumulata Immobilien 2

1 Retirement Housing 3
Chonburi – ailand
ASWA (Architectural Studio of
Work-Aholic)
– A 3,500-m2 retirement home
with heath facilities
Expected completion undisclosed
aswarchitect.com

2 Die Macherei
Munich – Germany
Hollwich Kushner, OSA Ochs
Schmidhuber and MSM Meyer
Schmitz-Morkramer Rendering by Saida Dalmau (sbda.cat)
– Urban centre with 64,000 4
m2 of rental space, including a
hotel, offices and incubator space
for Art-Invest and Accumulata
Immobilien
Expected completion 2019
hwkn.com
osa-muenchen.de
msm-architecture.com

3 Contemporary Hamlet
Limoges – France
CoCo Architecture
– For housing units, car park
and workshop
Competition entry, 1st prize,
expected completion 2019
cocoarchitecture.fr

4 Quartier Heidestrasse
Berlin – Germany
EM2N
– A row of commercial buildings
with two office headquarters, one
at the south end of Heidestrasse
and one at Nordhafenplatz, in
Europaci
Competition entry, 1st prize,
expected completion undisclosed
em2n.ch
 013

5 Museum of Istanbul
Istanbul – Turkey
Alper Derinboğaz
– A 38,000-m2 museum
featuring the 8,000-year history
of Istanbul, with permanent
exhibition spaces, library,
children’s workshop, event hall,
activi areas, restaurants, cafés
and temporary exhibition hall
Expected completion 2018
salonarchitects.com

6 Antelias 1403
Antelias – Lebanon
J.M.Bonfils Architects
– A 60,000-m2 mixed-use project
with retail and offices
Expected completion undisclosed
jmbonfils.com

5
7 Grand Egyptian Museum
Giza – Egypt
Heneghan Peng Architects
(architecture) and Atelier
Brückner (exhibition design)
– A 90,000-m2 museum,
currently under construction
6
near the Great Pyramids of Giza
Competition entry, 1st prize,
expected completion undisclosed
hparc.com
atelier-brueckner.com

7
014 Mark 69 Notice Board

Ways of Life
As part of Documenta 14, the
‘Ways of Life’ exhibition appeared
in July at the Kulturbahnhof
in Kassel, Germany. Twen
architects presented twen
designs for buildings that combine
living and working within nature.
e proposed sites are in Scheid,
a peninsula that extends into the
Edersee, a lake in central Germany.
e curators, Christoph Hesse and
Neeraj Bhatia, hope to find clients
for some of the houses and have
them built. Aer it closed at the
end of July, the exhibition moved
to the foyer of the Universi of
Kassel’s ASL Building, where it can
be visited until 17 September.

1
2

4
 015

1 House of Endless Landscapes

Atelier Alter (Yingfan Zhang, Xiaojun Bu,
Kai Qin, Zhenwei Li, Lidong Song, Jiahe
Zhang and Ran Yan)
atelieraltercn.com

2 Eder
Pezo Von Ellrichshausen
pezo.cl

3 Yin Yang House

Penda
home-of-penda.com

4 Earth Wind Water House

Christoph Hesse Architects
christophhesse.eu

5 Perched House
Rendering by Squarevoxel Somatic Collaborative (Felipe Correa,
5
James Carse, Anthony Acciavai, Clayton
Strange and Jessy Yang)
somatic-collaborative.com

6 Workshop Recovering Humanism

Yamazaki Kentaro Design
ykdw.org

7 Ten Stories' House

Rica Studio (Iñaqui Carnicero, Lorena del
Río and Antonio Boeri)
ricastudio.com

8 Depth of Fields
e Open Workshop (Neeraj Bhatia, Hayfa
Al-Gwaiz, Jared Cli on, Cesar Lopez,
Nicholas Scribner and Laura Williams)
theopenworkshop.ca

8
016 Mark 69 Notice Board

Renderings by Arq&DEA

1 CNAD (Centro Nacional

de Artesanato e Design)
Mindelo – São Vincente –
Cape Verde 3
Ramos Castellano Arquitectos
(Moreno Castellano and
Eloisa Ramos)
– Design museum
Expected completion 2019
ramoscastellano.com

2 De Voortuinen
Amsterdam – Netherlands
Tank Architecture
– A 9,000-m2 apartment tower
in a former office building
Expected completion 2018
tank.nl

3 Extension Fondation Beyeler

Basel – Switzerland
Atelier Peter Zumthor
– Extension to art museum
Fondation Beyeler, to be realized
in the Iselin-Weber Park
Expected completion undisclosed
fondationbeyeler.ch
018 Mark 69 Notice Board

1 Danish National Rowing

Stadium
Copenhagen – Denmark
AART Architects, E+E
Architects and LIW Planning
– National rowing stadium
at Bagsværd Lake, including
a referee tower and a rowing
centre with boat hall,
workshop, training room,
multipurpose room, meeting
2
rooms and administration
Expected completion 2020
aart.dk

2 Hospital of the Future

Martin – Slovakia
FAAB (Adam Białobrzeski,
Adam Figurski and Maria
Messina)
– Universi hospital with an
emergency and trauma centre,
laboratory complex, diagnostic
unit, transplantation
centre, surgery centre,
internal-medicine centre,
women-mother-baby centre,
rehabilitation centre and more
Competition entry, 3rd prize
faab.pl
In the beginning there were columns.
And to this day they are a classic staple of architecture. We don’t use them.
They clutter up the work environment. So we kick them out of the way to
make room for space. Useful space without visual noise. Optimum space way
up to the ceiling. So bid those classics goodbye. Because once you design
with our advanced construction system, you can have your space. All of it.

g e o m e t r i c a . c o m / a rc h i t e c t u r a l
 020
Mark 69

Cross
Section
 Cross Section 021

‘We talk
about
flow in
architecture,
but
as architects,
we do build
boundaries’
Maeo Ghidoni of Saloobuono about his
temporary pavilion in Mexico Ci, page 024
022 Mark 69 Cross Section

Full-bodied Red
Extrastudio converted a winery into a home.
 Extrastudio
Text Ana Martins
Photos Fernando Guerra / FG+SG
Lisbon-based Extrastudio
combined age-old construction
techniques and existing
materials with the clean lines
of contemporary architecture
to turn a family-owned winery
into a home. Located in Vendas
de Azeitão, a small village 40 km
south of the Portuguese capital,
the 360-m2 Red House was
completed in 2016.
In its exploration of
Mediterranean imagery and the
accompanying lifesle, landscape
firm Oficina dos Jardins decided
to preserve a grove of orange trees
at the site and to add a reflective
swimming pool. According to
João Ferrão of Extrastudio, the
‘microclimate’ of the garden
enters the ground-floor living
area through a 14-m-long glazed
section on the west side of the
house, causing the interior and
exterior to merge.
How did the design evolve?
JOÃO FERRÃO: On our first visit
to the site, we were struck by the
winery. e façade was covered in
lichens, like the surface of a rock.
at’s when we started thinking of
combining an ageing and altering
exterior with a more fixed,
contemporary interior. Because
the volume of the building far
exceeded the programme required
for the house, we realized that
A triple-height void connects the living room to the aic.
Vendas de Azeitão — Portugal 023
Cross Section
what we had in mind couldn’t
occupy the existing two floors in
their entire. Instead, we created
a hierarchy of double- and triple-
height spaces.
Can you explain why you adopted
this particular reuse strategy?
We saw much of the project’s
potential in the original
construction, which we had to
either maintain or transform. +2
We might have missed the
opportuni to work with
quicklime if we hadn’t had to
deal with elements that were
manufactured and used at a
previous time and were, therefore,
incompatible with today’s
techniques. Certainly, it would
have been a crime not to make use
of the roof tiles, timber and stone
that were available on site.
Why did you choose red for the
+1
façade?
e shade we used is identical
to the red of Alcázar of Seville’s
Lion Gate – even the technique
and material are the same. In the
early 20th century, as industrial
paints became available, the older
techniques were abandoned
without ever questioning their
utili. is house will never have
to be painted, and its colour will
be in permanent transformation.
extrastudio.pt 0
024
Writing
on the
Wall
Maeo Ghidoni
designed a room ll
of interpretations.
Architect Maeo Ghidoni says his temporary
pavilion – the result of an international
competition – contained a ‘fragment of desert’.
Photo Juan Benavides
Text Kaa Tylevich
‘When “the wall” is all people can
think about, then okay, maybe
it’s time to think about the wall,’
says Maeo Ghidoni, the founder
of Saloobuono. e Milan
architecture studio collaborated
with Venice-based Enrico Dusi for
the realization – and near-instant
demolition, two weeks later – of a
temporary pavilion called A Room,
which appeared at Mextrópoli, an
international architecture festival
in Mexico Ci.
ree 4-m-high concrete
walls, one equipped with a
basketball hoop, bordered the
43-m2 triangular Room, which
Saloobuono
people entered through a human-
sized hole (2 m in diameter) or
a ladder propped against the
exterior. A hole 60 cm in diameter
invited them to peep inside. A
slope of desert sand ending in a
copse of cacti represented what
many of us envision when we
think of what’s ‘across the border’.
Maybe the structure is
architectural satire on you-know-
who’s big, beauti l – very, very
beauti l – flavour of the day,
but Ghidoni almost sighs when
I mention his name. ‘Yes, yes,
but we thought it a bit cynical
and easy to end there.’ One
Mexico Ci — Mexico
critic judged A Room to be a
commentary on colonialism, and,
oh my God, what isn’t? But the
pavilion can also be seen as an
introspective contemplation of
architecture’s contemporary role.
‘Room is almost an
archepe,’ says Ghidoni, ‘You
define a space with walls and
establish a difference between
outside and inside.’ is pavilion’s
interior, however, is a slice of
the outside (the wild, the past),
while its urban outdoors are
completely designed and man-
made. ‘We talk about flow in
architecture – the movement of
Photo LGM Studio / Luis Gallardo
bodies – but as architects, we do
build boundaries,’ he says, drawing
aention to architecture as an
artifice of freedom in confined
zones. en again, A Room
pays homage to Luis Barragán
and the modernists. Ultimately,
the work is a wide reflection
on the urban condition and an
experiment. ‘I almost hoped it
would be vandalized,’ he says
with disappointment, ‘but people
treated it very well.’
saloobuono.com
Sports Complex Koning Willem-Alexander by Slangen+Koenis

concrete skin
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| various colours and shapes, vivid surface

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026 Mark 69 Cross Section

Window of
Text Cathelijne Nuijsink
Photos Kai Nakamura

What is your interest in the ey requested brightness inside

Opportuni
Ryu Mitarai uses bay windows
to produce additional floor space.
window, a basic architectural
element?
RYU MITARAI: I am particularly
interested in the possibilities of
scale provided by the window,
which initially nctioned as
an opening for the passage of
light and air. But if we enlarge
the window and give it depth, it
can be used as a space-making
element. As such, the window
is released from modernist
nctionalism.
Did the making of spaces around
the windows in this house stem
from your client’s request?
e client is a classmate from
universi. He and his family love
the surrounding neighbourhood.
the house and the maximum
floor area permied on this site.
In Japan, bay windows do not
necessarily count as floor area by
law. e client’s requests, together
with the gap in the law, gave
me a big opportuni, which I
used to design spaces around the
windows.
Each of the seven bay windows
seems to imply a different activi.
Can you explain?
e window on the first floor
facing the street serves as a
gallery, with a view to the
outside. e family likes to
bring their portable tatami mats
here to generate the feeling of a
comfortable, traditionally Japanese
 Ryu Mitarai Too — Japan 027

+2

+1

Long Section

e biest of the seven bay windows creates a

void between the living room on the first floor
and the children’s room on the second floor.
Photo Yohei Imahori

space. anks to a light in the

small window on the same floor,
at night the entire bay window
becomes a lighting fixture. e
largest window, which connects
the first and second floors, creates
a void inside the house, where it
is also used as a work counter. e
small window next to the kitchen
is sometimes used as a desk for the
cook. A bay window on the second
floor contains a bed that offers
a view of the neighbourhood.
A bench window finished with
sound-absorbing wood wool
cement board is a perfect spot
for reading. Lastly, a window
positioned outside on the balcony
works as a buffer zone between
the bath and the outdoors.
ryumitarai.jp
028 Mark 69 Cross Section

Rough yet Refined

Elding Oscarson’s museum extension employs
Corten steel to create a distinctive contrast.

Interior walls are lined in birch plywood panels.

 Elding Oscarson
Plan
Text Lauren Teague
Photos Åke E:son Lindman
Founded in 1934 as the Museum
of Artistic Process and Public Art,
the Skissernas Museum in Lund,
Sweden, features an archive that
documents the artistic process
and holds the world’s largest
collection of sketches, templates
and models. In its 70-year
history, the building has seen
countless visitors and exhibitions,
plus a handl of architectural
renovations, the most recent of
which was realized earlier this
year by Stockholm-based Elding
Oscarson, a firm led by Jonas
Elding and Johan Oscarson. It is
the first time that the museum has
incorporated separate facilities
– foyer, restaurant, shop and
multinctional hall – for purposes
other than exhibiting art. With
the new extension, the architects
hope to increase public interest
in the museum as an a ractive
meeting place.
‘Skissernas used to be
the kind of museum that many
people knew about and had visited
once, but not the kind where you
would go repeatedly,’ says Elding.
‘It was rather dormant, so to
Lund — Sweden 029
Section
speak.’ e addition’s rough façade,
clad in Corten-steel panelling
that gives the overall surface a
slightly convex curve, timelessly
complements the previous
extension’s brutalist concrete
appearance. e architects
selected Corten steel because it
enabled the creation of sharply
detailed panelling, a result quite
unlike anything achievable in
concrete. Visitors entering the
building find a smooth skin of
birch plywood that makes for a
so warm contrast. ‘ e wooden
interior matches the outside in its
detailing,’ says Elding. ‘It speaks
a similar language, as well as
emphasizing the presence of the
outdoors inside the building.’
External walls are
interspersed with windows that
su est random placement. In fact,
their carelly calculated positions
offer specific views of the
surrounding landscape and open
sightlines throughout the building,
providing a level of transparency
without resorting to conventional
curtain glazing.
eldingoscarson.com
030
A New
Media
Shell
In the film
Ghost in
the Shell, the
ciscape is
determined by
augmented-
reali
holograms –
or ‘solograms’.
Text Oliver Zeller
Images Paramount Pictures
Ghost in the Shell (1995) – an iconic
anime film directed by Mamoru
Oshii and based on Masumune
Shirow’s manga – remains a highly
influential science fiction movie.
Like the Japanese original, an
American live-action remake of
the same name explores the nature
of consciousness and humani
in an age of robotics, artificial
intelligence and cyberization.
What may sound like fiction is
becoming increasingly topical as
we edge towards transhumanism,
exemplified by Elon Musk’s recent
launch of brain-augmentation
venture Neuralink.
In this year’s Ghost in the
Shell, Section 9 counterterrorism
commander Mira Killian becomes
the first human to successlly
undergo a brain implant into
a cybernetic body, courtesy of
Hanka Robotics. When Section 9
responds to a hacker who violently
Mark 69
disrupts a Hanka meeting,
the team gradually unveils a
conspiracy.
In transitioning Ghost in
the Shell to live action, director
Rupert Sanders (Snow White and
the Huntsman) and production
designer Jan Roelfs (Gaaca)
produce a visually striking film
that derives much of its character
from 1980s Hong Kong. e Paul
Rudolph-designed Lippo Centre
serves as Hanka headquarters,
and a more angular redesign
of the windowless Hong Kong
Cultural Centre by government
architect Pau Shiu-hung becomes
Section 9’s base of military
operations. Monolithic concrete
buildings designed by Ash
orp, Maciej Kuciara and Weta
Workshop loosely follow the
same aesthetic. eir aim was
to ‘echo the look of a mainframe
computer’. Stacked and cascading
Cross Section
architecture is a common refrain,
from the Montane Mansion and
Tsuen Wan Chinese Permanent
Cemetery to the bi-cyclindrical
sscrapers of public housing
estate Lai Tak Tsuen.
In om Be ridge’s
interview with curator Stefan
Riekeles, they discuss the
architecture in the original
anime, in which Hong Kong was
used to depict the Japan of the
ture. According to Riekeles:
‘e idea was to evoke a feeling
of submerging into the deep
levels of the ci, where a flood
of information overflows the
human senses and a lot of noise
surrounds the people.’ e 2017
film rouses this feeling with
‘solograms’: ‘virtual, augmented-
reali holograms where objects
on different scales exist, animate,
and interact with an environment’
and where everyone ‘sees the ci
differently’. Signage dynamically
extends into three dimensions, and
otherwise mundane architecture
is transformed by adverts that can
be as tall as a building, producing
a ‘sensory overload’ that conjures
the ‘carnivalesque feel’ of the 2004
anime sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2:
Innocence.
Solograms aren’t a
particularly new concept. Last
year’s Sy series, Incorporated,
showcased such visuals, as did
Keiichi Matsuda’s short film,
Hyper-Reali. Yet solograms in
the 2017 film seem to redefine
architecture, eliciting questions
of how architects, urban planners
and artists can leverage media to
define a building’s shell, while still
maintaining its ghost.
 Enrico Montecchi - Fabrizio Mariani
NABA - Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano.

25-29 SEPTEMBER 2017

promoted by

CONFINDUSTRIA CERAMICA

in collaboration with

organized by

Free ticket online show management

www.cersaie.it/onlinebooth Promos srl
032
Galvanized Diamond
Christ & Gantenbein provides Praeln with a landmark.
Text Lauren Teague
Photo Stefano Graziani
Aquila Tower, designed by Swiss
outfit Christ & Gantenbein, is
based on a traditional form: a
tower atop a podium. e mixed-
use complex is in the municipali
of Praeln, some 10 km southeast
of central Basel. Nearly a quarter
of the area’s built environment
comprises industrial buildings or
urban infrastructure.
e architects manipulated
the form of the high-rise in order
to reduce the effects of noise
pollution from the neighbouring
railway without the need for a
costly double façade. e lower
levels of Aquila Tower, which
accommodate retail and office
space, are split into pointed
wings that open towards the
train station, seemingly drawing
visitors into a welcoming
two-armed embrace. Inside the
20-storey residential tower,
76 apartments fan out from a
northern access core, maximizing
Cross Section
Mark 69 Cross Section
+ 18
exposure to the southern
perimeter and diminishing the
risk of noise disturbance as
the tower turns its back on the
railway. A diamond-shaped floor
plan and ‘squinting’ windows
that offer wide views of the
surroundings are part of Christ &
Gantenbein’s strategy for affording
comfort to occupants.
e project’s galvanized-
steel skin, which refers directly
to the industrial character of
the area, is intended to weather
+4
grace lly. ‘Untreated steel plates
would eventually rust, but
galvanization ensures effective
protection,’ say the architects.
‘at said, the surface remains
reactive and is subject to
changes in colour as a result of
environmental conditions. e
material’s appearance can change
unexpectedly within a maer of
weeks or even days.’
christgantenbein.com
+1
0
Christ & Gantenbein Praeln — Switzerland 033
034 Mark 69 Cross Section
Child’s Play Text Ana Martins
Photos Leonardo Finoi
In a rural area of Brazil’s Central-
West Region, the Bradesco
Rosenbaum and Aleph Zero Foundation set up its first
boarding school in 1973. Since
provide students with light, then, Fazenda de Canuaña has
air and space. hosted children from remote
villages that offer no opportunities
for a formal education. e
school’s new residences, completed
in 2016, are part of a 30-year
master plan being carried out
by São Paulo-based studio
Rosenbaum to revamp the entire
complex.
For this project, studio
founder Marcelo Rosenbaum
approached Gustavo Utrabo and
Pedro Duschenes of Aleph Zero,
another Paulista architecture
firm. Together they embarked on
a design process guided by three
principles featured in Rosenbaum’s
manifesto, ‘A Gente Transforma’:
ancestry, beau and sustainabili .
To avoid having the school stand out like an unsightly blot on the landscape,
the architects blurred the boundaries between inside and outside.
e statement refers to
architecture and design created to
reconnect with age-old traditions
in remote areas of Brazil.
During two stays in
Canuaña, the architects visited the
children’s native villages, spoke to
parents and educators, engaged
with members of the indigenous
Javaé tribe and, through
workshops with the pupils, tried
to understand what would make
the boarding school feel more like
home.
By analysing the children’s
relationship with space and
initiating a dialogue to discover
their ideas for the new residences,
the architects arrived at the
dimensions and shapes of the
various rooms and determined
what sort of complementary
spaces would be necessary. Each
11,500-m2 building (one for boys,
 Rosenbaum and Aleph Zero Formoso do Araguaia — Brazil 035

one for girls) contains 45 rooms,

each with six beds, and communal
facilities such as TV and reading
rooms, balconies and courards.
Utrabo’s goal was to
‘translate the region’s complex
culture and history into
architecture’. Although the
traditional adobe and straw homes
of farmers living in camps are
extremely effective in terms of
isolation and ventilation – the
region has a tropical climate –
they are seen as substandard
constructions. To raise awareness
of their value, Rosenbaum and
+1
Aleph Zero used some 4,000
adobe bricks, made on site, for
the walls of the new buildings.
Small openings supply natural
ventilation and give the façades a
dynamic aesthetic. Finally, aer
several conversations with tribal
leaders, they developed a wrien
and graphic vocabulary for use
in indicating the rooms, each
of which has a Javaé name and
corresponding graphic panel.
e resulting residences
provide pupils with warm and
welcoming spaces that help them
find their individuali within
a collective environment. e
school is also a generous source
of ancestral and indigenous
0
culture, values and traditions.
In Rosenbaum’s words: ‘We
were looking to reconnect the
children with the wealth of
the area’s history.’ He believes
that architecture can ‘heal’ old
perceptions and restore the use of
timeworn skills. It should never be
‘an imposition’.
alephzero.arq.br
rosenbaum.com.br
036 Mark 69 Cross Section

Sections

e pavilion emerges from a single

plate of glass.
 Marieke Kums and Junya Ishigami Tytsjerk — Netherlands
Almost
Nothing
Marieke Kums and
Junya Ishigami
use glass for
the supporting
structure.
Text David Keuning
Photos Christian van der Kooy
In 2010, when Marieke Kums
decided to enter a competition
for the design of a pavilion in the
Dutch province of Friesland, she
invited Junya Ishigami to join her.
ey’d both worked for Sanaa at
an earlier stage, but not at the
same time: Ishigami had been
Plan gone for two years when Kums
started in 2006. In 2010, now back
in the Netherlands, she founded
Studio Maks. e invitation she
extended to Ishigami proved to
be a success. Aer five teams
of architects presented their
designs in the second round, the
Dutch-Japanese partnership was
proclaimed the winner.
eir pavilion is an
extension of an old villa on an
estate known as Park Groot
Vijversburg. Both villa and park
have been under the protection
of a foundation since 1892,
when the last resident, Age
Looxma Ypeij, died childless. e
foundation wanted a space that
could be used for gatherings, but
the new building had to leave
the house and park, which are
national monuments, in all their
glory. ‘We wanted to make the
pavilion as minimal as possible,’
says Ishigami. ‘It should be part
of the scenery of the garden. It’s
not about the structure or the
landscape, but about the total
environment.’
037
e pavilion’s loadbearing glass
walls made columns obsolete.
Kums and Ishigami a ained their
goal with an innovative structural
design that they developed together
with engineers ABT and Jun Sato.
Load-bearing glass walls rise from
a concrete parapet, and the slightly
wavy roof rests directly on the
walls. ‘e plan has a triangular
shape, because that form is stable
in itself,’ says Kums. ‘A triangle
allowed us to avoid using trusses
or transverse walls.’ e curved,
extra clear glass, produced in
China, consists of a load-bearing
2-cm-thick inner pane, a cavi
and an outer pane, for a total
thickness of 4 cm.
e architects had quite
a lot of adversi to overcome
during the execution of the project;
the opening of the pavilion was
postponed multiple times. First
there was a delay in the delivery of
glass from China, then the wrong
order arrived and, to top it all off,
the contractor went bankrupt.
But the result is impressive. e
bright pavilion evokes memories
of the theatre that Sanaa originally
designed for Almere in 2007 (Mark
7, page 130). Where the subtle
of the Japanese architecture firm
was smothered by Dutch building
regulations ten years ago, Kums
and Ishigami managed to maintain
the lightness of their initial design.
studiomaks.nl
jnyi.jp
 1910

1970
1930

1950
1920

2010
1990
1960

1980
1940

2000
038

Fianna Éireann
Cumann na mBan
Deendar Anjuman*
Muslim Brotherhood
Hizb ut-Tahrir
ETA

1953 Hizb ut-Tahrir

1909 Fianna Éireann
Revolutionary Par of Kurdistan

1914 Cumann na mBan

Palestine Liberation Front

1928 Muslim Brotherhood

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
National Liberation Army
United National Liberation Front
Ulster Volunteer Force
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Saor Éire*

1964 Nat. Lib. Army

1964 RAF Colombia
1961 Palestine Lib. Fr.
Jamiat-e Islami

1964 UN Liberation Front

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command
Grey Wolves
Communist Par of the Philippines / New People's Army
Komala
Communist Par of India (Marxist–Leninist)
Provisional Irish Republican Army*
Force 17*

1968 PFLP - GC

1968 Grey Wolves

1968 Jamiat-e Islami

1968 C.P. Philippines

Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front*
Shining Path
Takfir wal-Hijra*
Kach and Kahane Chai
Ulster Defence Association
Communist Par of Turkey / Marxist–Leninist
Red Hand Commando
Mark 69

Abu Nidal Organization*

1970 Shining Path

1971 Ulster Def. Ass.

1970 G.E. Islam. R.F.
Irish National Liberation Army

1971 Kach & Kahane C.

Maoist Communist Centre of India
Revolutionary Organization 17 November
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
People's Revolutionary Par of Kangleipak
Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin
Students Islamic Movement of India*

1974 Irish NLA

Kurdistan Workers' Par

1975 MCC of India

1975 RO 17 November
Manipur People’s Liberation Front*

1976 L. Tigers Tamil E.

People's Liberation Army of Manipur
United Liberation Front of Assam
Akhil Bharat Nepali Ekta Samaj
Kangleipak Communist Par
Quds Force
Babbar Khalsa International

1979 ULF Assam

Tamil Nadu Liberation Army

1978 PLA Manipur

RED | before 1989

1979 AB Nepali ES
1978 Kurdistan WP
Haqqani network*
Egyptian Islamic Jihad*
Tamil National Retrieval Troops*
Kurdish Hezbollah
Aum Shinrio
Harkat-al-Jihad al-Islami in Bangladesh*
International Sikh Youth Federation*
Hezbollah

1984 Aum Shinrio

1980 Tamil Nadu LA
Hezbollah (Military Wing)*

1980 Babbar Khalsa Int.

1983 Kurdish Hezbollah

Hezbollah (External Securi Organisation)*
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
World Tamil Movement
Lashkar-e-Taiba
National Democratic Front of Bodoland

1987 Hamas
Irish People's Liberation Organisation*
Jamaat al Dawa al Quran*

1986 NDF Bodoland

Cross Section

1986 Lashkar-e-Taiba
1986 World Tamil Mov.
Hamas
Hezbollah Al-Hejaz
Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Khalistan Commando Force
al-Haramain Foundation
al-Qaeda

1988 al-Qaeda
Khalistan Zindabad Force*

1987 Khalistan C.F.

1988 al-Haramain F.
Al-Umar-Mujahideen*
Hizbul Mujahideen

1989 Hizbul Mujahideen

National Liberation Front of Tripura
Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development
All Tripura Tiger Force
Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami
Commiee for Chari and Solidari with Palestine*
Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group*

1991 Abu Sayyaf

1991 Jund al-Sham

Abu Sayyaf
Jund al-Sham

1990 Harkat-ul-Jihad al-I.

1990 A.Tripura Tiger Force
Kurdistan Democratic Par/North
al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya / al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya
Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya
Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi
Socie of the Revival of Islamic Heritage*
 Infographic 039

e Colour of Terror
Text and graphics eo Deutinger

Currently, there are over 180 terrorist 1960 to 1980. Communism formed the
Legend organizations worldwide. Unlike secret basis of many wars in Africa and East Asia.
Red Hand Commando predominantly red flag criminal societies like the Mafia, whose Aer the fall of the Soviet Union, religion –
Kurdish Hezbollah predominantly green flag main objective is economic profit, terrorist Islam in particular – emerged as a political
al-Qaeda predominantly black flag
ETA predominantly white flag
organizations are threatening the power ideology that aracted a multitude of
Aum Shinrio other colours monopoly of existing nation states. To members. e 1990s saw a new wave of
Jamiat ul-Ansar* no flag available be recognized as a genuine opponent of terrorism that was rooted in a milder form
a sovereign state and to distinguish itself of Islamism (Green Period), but that phase
Sources: en.wikipedia.org, from comparable movements, the terrorist swily advanced to become the radical
worldstatesmen.org,
eur-lex.europa.eu and various group has a flag, a coat of arms and Islamism (Black Period) we face today.
other websites
sometimes even an anthem. Terrorism is the most extreme and
To finance their endeavours and to violent version of political opposition.
accumulate a critical mass of supporters, Radical terrorists follow a political
terrorist groups oen avail themselves programme based on the staunch belief
of popular pre-existing ideologies and that their group is good and all others are
GREEN | 1989 - 2001 alliances. In the case of Communism (Red
Period), the hijacking of a well-prepared
bad. All pes of terrorism are faced with
the same dilemma, however: how to explain
body of people worked quite well from convincingly why it is right to kill.
Palestinian Relief Development Fund – Interpal
Revolutionary People's Liberation Par–Front

BLACK | aer 2001

Marxist–Leninist Communist Par

Continui Irish Republican Army*

Armed Islamic Group of Algeria

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades

United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia

Aden-Abyan Islamic Army*

East Turkestan Information Center*

Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup*
Vanguards of Conquest*

Khuddam ul-Islam / Jaish-e-Mohammed*

Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh*

East Turkestan Liberation Organization

Dukhtaran-e-Millat

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan

Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan
Jemaah Islamiyah*

Real Irish Republican Army*

East Turkestan Islamic Par
Jamiat ul-Ansar*

Loyalist Volunteer Force

Osbat al-Ansar*

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi

al-Aqsa Foundation

Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order

Harakat-Ul-Mujahideen/Alami*
Stichting Al Aqsa*

Red Hand Defenders

al-Aqsa Marrs' Brigades

Orange Volunteers*
Houthis*

Ansar al-Sharia (Tunisia)

Mujahideen Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem

Taliban

Tanzim*

Jamiat al-Islah al-Idzhtimai*

Jaish-e-Mohammed

Par of Free Life of Kurdistan

Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa

World Uygur Youth Congress
Balochistan Liberation Army

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – Yemen Province

Kurdistan Freedom Falcons

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – Khorasan Province

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – Caucasus Province
Revolutionary Strule

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – Libya Province

Jamaat Ansar al-Sunna
Islamic Jihad Union

al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb

Al-Badr

Hofstad Network*
Ansar al-Islam

al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

Kata'ib Hezbollah
Ergenekon*

Boko Haram

Al-Nusra Front / Jabhat Fateh al-Sham

Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan

Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei

Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid
e Saved Sect*

Abdullah Azzam Brigades

Jundallah

Indian Mujahideen*

Mujahidin Indonesia Timur

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

Al Ghurabaa*

Caucasus Emirate

al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent

Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar
Army of Islam
Al-Shabaab

Yarmouk Marrs Brigade

Ansar Bait al-Maqdis

Ansar al-Sharia (Libya)

Lugansk People's Republic

Donetsk People's Republic

Harakat Sham al-Islam

Al-Mourabitoun

Jund al-Khilafah*
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar*
Ansar Dine

Ajnad Misr

Jund al-Aqsa
Ansaru

1992 Al-Itihaad al-Isl. 1994 M arx.–Leninist CP 1996 Loy. Vol. Force 1998 Al-Badr 2002 Islamic Jihad Un. 2004 Balochistan L.A. 2006 Al-Shabaab 2009 Abd.Azzam B. 2012 Yarmouk M arrs B. 2013 ISIL 2014 ISIL Yemen

1992 Tehreek-e-Nafaz 1994 PRDF – Interpal 1997 E. Turkestan I.P. 2000 A. al-Sharia (Tun.) 2002 Boko Haram 2004 PFL Kurdistan 2007 Caucasus Emirate 2009 al-Qaeda Arab. P. 2012 Jaish al-M . w.-A. 2013 Al-M ourabitoun 2014 ISIL Libya

1993 AIG Algeria 1994 Taliban 1997 al-Aqsa Found. 2000 al-Aqsa M.B. 2003 Kata'ib Hezbollah 2004 Kurd. F. Falcons 2007 al-Qaeda I. M ag. 2010 M ujah.Ind. Timur 2012 Ansar Dine 2013 Ajnad M isr 2014 Harakat Sham a.I.

1993 Dukhtaran-e-M illat 1995 S.S.P. 1997 USDF Colombia 2000 E. Turkestan L.O. 2003 Rev. Strule 2004 W. Uygur Y.C. 2007 T.-i-Taliban Pak. 2011 M .O. Jihad W. Afr. 2012 M SCE Jerusalem 2014 al-Qaeda Ind. S. 2014 Jund al-Aqsa
040 Mark 69 Cross Section
Brutalist Bricks
Terra e Tuma’s newest house is bold yet introverted.
Text Ana Martins
Photos Nelson Kon
Mipibu House sits on a narrow,
170-m2 plot in a residential
neighbourhood in São Paulo,
Brazil. To protect it from adjacent
buildings, architects Danilo
Terra, Pedro Tuma and Fernanda
Sakano of studio Terra e Tuma
created an introverted, walled-in
oasis. Inside, vegetation-filled
light wells, a balcony and interior
patios – one of which boasts a fish
pond – flood the two-storey house
with light and greenery. Walls
and ceilings are made of exposed
concrete and pipes for electrici
and water have been le visible.
Combined with abundant foliage,
they give the house an exotic
brutalist atmosphere, reminiscent
of Chamberlain Powell and Bon’s
Barbican Estate gardens.
You gave the house blind façades,
anticipating taller neighbouring
houses in the ture.
DANILO TERRA: In all of our
projects, we start with a thorough
study of the environment. Aer
all, the house will be part of
the ci. We need to propose
 Terra e Tuma São Paulo — Brazil 041

Long Section

a balanced path between the

ideas of our client and the ci
environment. e building is 6 m
tall and with the rooop’s terrace
safe wall it reaches 7 m. at
was the maximum height allowed
at the time of the design.
+1
At the end of 2016, a law
was passed that increased the
allowed building height to 10 m.
Real estate development is now in
ll swing and we estimate that in
less than ten years, the area will be
completely different. São Paulo is a
ci that does not keep or preserve,
at the very best it longs for what
0
once was. Decade aer decade a
new ci emerges, in a movement
that is invisible to the eyes of
socie.

How did the collaboration with

landscape architect Gabriella
Ornaghi develop?
PEDRO TUMA: We began to work
together early on, allowing us
to arrive at solutions that would
otherwise have been impossible.
Two ndamental examples are the
foliage trays over the fish pond,
and the tree planted on the first-
floor balcony. In the first instance,
slabs had to be calculated to carry
their load and in the second, a
vertical tunnel filled with soil was
developed so that the roots could
develop naturally.

In your opinion, what is the

project’s main characteristic?
FERNANDA SAKANO: Even
though they are not new to the
world of architecture, proposing
solutions such as the inversion of
the interior/exterior dichotomy,
or placing the private spaces
on the ground floor – whereas
traditionally that would be the
location of the social areas – was
not an easy task. Our intention is
to always keep an open dialogue
with socie in order to move
forward, instead of maintaining
a comfortable position of
conformi. We believe that small
things like these, thanks to the
direct relationship with our
clients, are more edi ing to the
architectural profession than one
might realize. Foliage trays hover over the fish pond.
terraetuma.com
042 Mark 69 Cross Section

Acoustic
Chance de Silva Architects and Scanner
Domestici team up to design a residential sound.

Text Campbell McNeill

Photos Hélène Binet

Stephen Chance and Wendy de

Silva started collaborating with
sound artist Robin Rimbaud (aka
Scanner) in 2012, seing out to
explore the boundary between
sound and architecture. To date
they have exhibited work at
the 2014 Venice Biennale; made
recordings of the sound of pouring
concrete; and designed Vex, a
studio house in Stoke Newington,
an area in the London borough of
Hackney.
Buildings are usually
designed with the human senses
in mind – sight being the most
important – but some pologies
lend themselves to a focused
consideration of those senses:
restaurants curate taste, baths
provide textures and temperatures,
gardens offer fragrance, galleries
accommodate visual arts and
concert halls are all about sound.
Architects might have all five
senses in mind when designing
a house, but most o en they
focus on visual articulation
and spatial organization. In
the case of Vex, Chance de
Silva and Scanner overlaid
nctions in an assemblage that
can be experienced not only
as a continuous volume and a
visual spectacle, but also as an
environment for listening.
e house is on a street
in a Victorian conservation area
and came with a challenging
set of contextual requirements.
Instead of taking cues from the
surroundings, the team drew
inspiration from Erik Satie’s
Vexations, an 18-hour-long
(sometimes even longer) piano
piece wrien in the late 19th
century that features a short
theme replayed 840 times. e
architects and sound artist
introduced Satie’s repetition
conceptually by wrapping a design
model in the musical score, leaving
 Chance de Silva Architects London — UK 043

Roof

+2

+1

e three-storey building houses a ground-floor

studio and living spaces on the upper levels.

marks translated into vertical

ridges. Exterior walls are concrete
cast in situ using corrugated
formwork that gives the building
its so, fluted, rhythmic Long Section
materiali. e re-looping of the
musical work is referenced with
elliptical floors stacked and shied
to create a winding circulation
plan, as well as a number of
vertical openings that allow light
to enter the interior, where space
and acoustics can blend into a
stage for performances, as Stephen
Chance explains. ‘At some point
we are going to have a live gig
here,’ he says, ‘where Scanner will
mix construction sounds recorded
during the project.’
chancedesilva.com
044 Mark 69 Cross Section

Moose Tower is the first of five projects planned for the area.
e second, a walkway in the gorge, is currently under construction.
e remaining three have yet to find financial backing.
 Ram Arkitektur
Into the Wild
Six beds cantilever into the
treetops from Ram Arkitektur’s
log tower in Norway.
+3
+2
+1
Text Lauren Teague
Photos Sam Hughes
Plans for the Norwegian valley
Long Section of Espedalen include a series of
five architectural interventions
intended to entice motorists
to stop and explore the area.
With nding provided by two
local hotels (Ruten Fjellstue and
Dalseter Høyellshotell), the
first project to be completed
is Elgtårn (Moose Tower), a
12-m-high lakeside structure
topped by a viewing platform.
Providing only the bare bones
of hospitali, Elgtårn offers
overnight accommodation for six
visitors – but no running water
or electrici. Beds cantilevering
from three sides of the tower are
protected from the treetops by
panes of glass. On the remaining
side, ladders to the viewing
platform add a sense of drama to
the climb.
Espedalen — Norway
e accommodation includes a small communal area on
the third level, with a wood stove and cooking facilities.
What is the project about?
SAM HUGHES (Ram Arkitektur):
e idea was to create a unique
overnight experience for a small
number of guests in a remote
location, combined with a public
viewing platform. e form of the
building emerged through early
sketches aimed at the efficient
placement of beds around a small
space. We wanted each bed to
have a panoramic view of the
surrounding area.
How did the construction phase go?
e remote location made access
to the site difficult. By using
modular elements, we reduced
the amount of production work
required on site, as well as the
number of materials being
transported. We explored
different pes of prefabricated
045
panels throughout the design
phase. During one of our early
site visits with the client, we
looked at some of the historical
buildings in the valley and the
idea crystallized – a real eureka
moment – that a log-pe
construction made sense. Its long
history and strong connection
with the valley satisfied all the
criteria for the modular system
we were trying to develop. e
overall aesthetic is a result of the
structural principles we applied.
e influence of local traditions
firmly anchors the identi of
the tower into its regional
context, even though we
interpreted the past in the form
of a contemporary design.
ram-arkitektur.no
046 Mark 69 Cross Section

Expansive Living
Suppose Design Office creates
openness by building walls.

0 +1 +2

Cross Section Long Section

 Suppose Design Office Tokoname — Japan
e interior of the house is a
continuous space that is subtly
divided into smaller spaces.
Text Cathelijne Nuijsink
Photos Toshiyuki Yano
Did your clients have a clear
vision of what their new house
should be?
MAKOTO TANIJIRI (Suppose
Design Office): e couple and
their two children used to live in
a pical Japanese condominium
with an interior that was difficult
to open lly. It’s that limitation
that led to their request for a house
with ‘a feeling of openness’.
Why do you believe that walls are
the best way to create openness?
Without ‘closeness’, ‘openness’ does
not have meaning. In this house,
we used five walls arranged in
parallel to achieve a simultaneous
condition of open and closed.
Openness is generated through
the making of apertures, or ‘walls
with openings’, which form layers
that introduce a sense of depth
into the space. As a result, you feel
more openness in this house than
047
you would if there were no walls.
Call it a ‘sensation of unending
expansiveness’. Although not
obviously divided into rooms, the
interior has a sense of continui
and separation at the same time.
Although the concept fits into
your portfolio as a project
that combines what you call
‘inconsistent elements’ – in this
case openness and closeness –
what makes it stand out from
your other residential projects?
We deliberately used a minimum
number of architectural elements
to make a maximum impact.
I believe that by limiting the
amount of elements and by
considering the scale of the
building – in terms of small and
large, narrow and wide, high and
low – we can beer define a new
kind of space.
suppose.jp
048 Mark 69 Cross Section

Text Ana Martins

Model House Photos Fernando Guerra / FG+SG

A self-sufficient, modular
dwelling that does not impose
House: a 309-m2 pre-fabricated FSC
wood structure nestled between two

Studio MK27’s latest house on the surrounding nature. is

is exemplary in more than
one way.
was the client’s request when he
approached Márcio Kogan, founder
of São Paulo-based Studio MK27,
to design a model house for one of
the plots on his Catuçaba estate.
During a process that
lasted five years, architects
Márcio Kogan and Lair Reis
developed their design, which they
characterize as ‘modernist Caipira’
(a sort of modern local farm).
ey adapted it to the wishes of
new owners and oversaw the
construction of the first Catuçaba
adobe brick walls.
Sloping and remote, the
site was but one of the challenges
that the architects faced. As they
worked towards a self-sufficient
design, the dwelling was chosen as
a pilot project for the development
of sustainabili reference standards
for houses in Brazil. Building
according to LEED standards meant
that the architects had to not only
take the house’s energy performance
into consideration, but also the
sustainabili of the materials and
construction methods used.
 Studio MK27 Catuçaba — Brazil 049

e bedrooms’ small openings are a reinterpretation of

the blue colonial windows found throughout the area.

A north-facing balcony that stretches along the house’s

entire width looks out onto the vast expanse of the estate.

e living room has glass walls on three sides.

e open kitchen, dining and e architects saw in the project

living area is surrounded by
double-glazed openings and
protected by folding eucalyptus
wood shuers on the south-
facing front. When closed, the
laer forms a continuation of the
wooden façade of the sleeping
area, which contains four
bedrooms. e interior floors are
lined in adobe brick, and the grass-
covered roof is fied with solar
thermal and photovoltaic panels.
PET foam insulation, natural
ventilation and a wind turbine
rther contribute to the house’s
efficiency and self-sufficiency.
– the first house to receive
the highest level of Brazil’s
Green Building Council (GBC)
certification – an opportuni to
Plan
rther the studio’s knowledge
and culture of sustainable
development. ‘From now on,
every home we design will
reach the minimum level of GBC
certification at no additional costs
to the client,’ Reis maintains.
‘Depending on the client’s interests
and budget, we can then work to
achieve a higher certification.’
studiomk27.com
050
Text Kirsten Hannema
Dutch architect Peter Masselink
always wanted to build a
dollhouse for his youngest
daughter Juliet. He didn’t get
to make one for his first, Imre:
she died shortly aer birth of a
mitochondrial disease, the same
rare disease that afflicts his son
Sverre (7 years old), for which
there is still no cure. It was this
tragic circumstance that brought
back the idea of the dollhouse, and
he invited 17 colleagues to join
him in designing a contemporary
version of this time-honoured toy.
ey will be auctioned off this fall,
with the proceeds going to two
charities that support the research
of mitochondrial diseases. A
similar British dollhouse project
in 2013, which featured famous
architects like Zaha Hadid,
generated over 100,000 euros.
e dollhouse project is
more than a benefit, it is also an
exploration of the dollhouse as
an object for playing, learning,
Mark 69 Cross Section
M3H
exploration and art, inspired
by the sick child’s realm. e
results vary greatly. M3H came
up with the Listening House, an
arche pical house with rooms as
speakers that play compositions
with ‘homey’ sounds. Dreessen
Willemse Architects thought up
a construction box that children
can use to build their own dream
house (or boat, or train). Office
Winhov designed a cross between
Petronella Oortman’s 17th-century
dollhouse in the Amsterdam
Rijksmuseum and the pavilion
Friedrich Schinkel built for
Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1825 in
the gardens of Charloenburg
Palace. Masselink himself made a
suspended, e-shaped dollhouse
for his kids. Sverre, who has
multiple disabilities, can play
with the Escher-like interior
that is hidden in the half open
construction while lying down.
dolls-house.nl
Office Winhov
 Dollhouses 051

Inside Life
Seventeen dollhouses to
invigorate a child’s world.
Sverre Group

Dreessen Willemse Architects

 052
Mark 69

Per-
spective
 Perspective 053

‘e dynamics of
a ro riatin
ublic domain
in Beirut are
individual,
tem orary,
a ile and
weirdly invitin ’
Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes about
the Lebanese capital, page 054
054
Look
Do citizens have an intrinsic right to
their ci? In Beirut, this question is
not as rhetorical as it may seem.
Text
Stephanie Akkaoui Hu hes
Having grown up in Beirut, for years I
witnessed a constant dance of appropriation
and negotiation of public space. Aided by
moderate weather, public space in Lebanon’s
capital appears to be up for grabs. Anyone can,
at any time, pull up a chair to smoke shisha
on the pavement, play a game of dama with a
friend on a street corner, or set up a number of
tables to create a spontaneous extension to a
local café. When walking on the streets – few
of which even have pavements – you have to
watch out for cars, street ‘selers’ and private
homes encroaching on the public domain. Daily
and naturally, the ci’s inhabitants navigate
such hazards. ey apparently negotiate public
space instinctively, along with others who
are doing the same thing. e dynamics of
appropriating public domain are individual,
temporary (even if daily), agile and weirdly
inviting. It’s tempting to pull up a chair and join
the par. To an outsider, these mechanisms
may seem chaotic, even hopeless, but they’re at
the core of urban life in Beirut.
e gravi of the situation takes a
new turn when this ‘up for grabs’ principle
becomes accessible to commercial developers,
whose basis for ‘grabbing’ is financial. Instead
of a chair, their objective is a shopping mall,
an office building or a residential high-
rise, structures that are simply parachuted
Mark 69
onto a site which is in most cases – even if
undeveloped – not emp or unused. e
commercial selements are larger, permanent
and excluding. roughout the history of urban
development, ci centres and downtown areas
are usually a ci’s most heavily used public
spaces. In Beirut, our Down Town – with
a capital D and a capital T – is protected or
controlled (a fine line divides the two) by armed
guards. at should tell you enough.
Even though it may feel as if public
space is everywhere, the reali is a total lack
of public space in Beirut. Or, beer said, there
is no vision for and no protection of public
space here. Almost daily, citizens are robbed of
another plot of land, another view, another air
space. No par is protecting the interests of
citizens when it comes to the urban quali of
the ci. Public money is not public. ere is no
urban master plan and no overarching strategy
for guiding developments towards making
a unified ci. Instead, we see the sporadic
erection of individual projects driven by private
interests, and as beautil as they may or may
not be, they are of lile use to the ci and its
citizens. Beirut’s urban development, in which
private places and exclusive venues pop up
regularly, can hardly be called gentrification.
Or is it gentrification at all? Does gentriing
for another country’s middle classes count?
Perspective
But
Stacked terraced apartments, artists’ studios,
living los. Iconic structures, prime locations,
priceless views. Who are these properties
for? Can members of the emerging creative
scene in Beirut – for which some projects are
presumably designed – actually afford them?
In fact, very few locals can pay to live in a
residential tower. Most high-rise apartments
are bought by Arabs from oil-rich countries in
the Gulf who spend only a few weeks of the
year in Beirut. An apartment in the s allows
them to escape the scorching heat and – equally
oen and not mutually exclusive – the social
and cultural restrictions of neighbouring Gulf
states. It’s not gentrification that’s happening
here. Gentriing a ci for well-to-do visitors
from another ci doesn’t count. What is
happening is not even urban regeneration
but rather the generation of a different ci, a
seasonal ci, a ci within a ci.
Most of Beirut’s high-rise sculptures
are the work of local and foreign starchitects.
Although they claim that the concepts behind
these buildings emerged from the ci itself, I
believe their ideas are more oen imposed on
the ci and its citizens. e way I see it, the
incredibly rich history of Beirut is for foreign
architects extremely ‘exotic’ and for our local
ones an easy way out. Layers of occupation,
years of civil war, gruesome assassinations in

Don’t
broad daylight and more recent wars all offer a
mine rich in one-word concepts and one-liner
responses. As a result, high-rises are frequently
an exercise in stacking ‘layers of history’,
reconnecting the worlds of inside and outside,
commemorating bullet holes, shipwrecks and
hand grenades. While it may be compelling
and even intellectually wiy at times, is it
what the people of Beirut want to see as they
negotiate public space? e concepts described
here are not new, not exotic, not compelling
and, I would argue, not helpl in an aempt to
move forward. e developments themselves, as
well as their concepts and aesthetics, are being
imposed on citizens. What if such projects
were to emerge through a participatory process
that engages the population of Beirut? What if
architecture was not a process of maer, but a
maer of process?
We are operating in an era of
starchitects. When a building is featured in
magazines, it is celebrated, regardless of its
consequences on the ci and its citizens. Even
when buildings do not physically displace
families, they isolate and exclude by raising
physical as well as social barriers. Describing
Plan of Beirut
01 Bernard Khoury, Plot 1282, 2017
02 Bernard Khoury, Plot 4371, 2015
03 Herzog & de Meuron, Beirut Terraces, 2016
04 Youssef Tohme Architects, Villa M, 2017
05 Youssef Tohme Architects, Villa VR, 2017
03
Beirut 01
02
Beirut — Lebanon
a tower as a ‘vertical boulevard’ does not
Touch
make it one. A boulevard is a hub of social
interactions; these towers are nothing more
than an accumulation of shielded private
worlds. Vegetation, gardens and green walls are
recurrent themes in many new buildings in the
ci. I strongly doubt, however, that cladding
a façade with a green wall is enough to claim
that the communi’s been offered a garden
that replaces an adjacent public garden once
accessible to all. Although beautil, the wall
conveys a somewhat hypocritical ‘look but don’t
touch’ message.
In his four-volume masterwork, e
Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander talks
about the extent to which a building should
support its surroundings. When he was
involved in writing the zoning laws for an
area in the USA, he included the requirement
that an architect should demonstrate how a
proposed building helps, supports or improves
the surrounding environment. is item was
strongly rejected by the zoning-laws board.
A recent study showed that all the
architects in the world work for no more
than 1 per cent of the global population. Most
Cornet Chahwan
Jdeideh
055
architects are not aware of this fact and might
even dispute its truth. Understandably, they
find the information very disconcerting. It
means that for 99 per cent of the world we
architects are irrelevant, and we continue to
narrow our target group. It’s not that we’re
influencing fewer people. On the contrary, even
though we cater for more exclusive groups, we
influence – most of the time negatively and
without considering the consequences – more
and more people. In reaction to the adverse
effect of our output, some of us wonder how
we and our profession can remain relevant.
It may be a perfectly acceptable question,
but I think it’s emanating from the wrong
(egocentric) starting point. Why not look at the
problem from an external perspective and ask
how architecture can create added value? Can
we evaluate good architecture by analysing
not what it is but what it does? How does it
serve the people inhabiting it, and how does
it support those not inhabiting it? How does
it help the larger communi? How does it
improve the quali of the ci? _
05
Ajaltoun
04
056 Mark 69 Perspective

Photo Bahaa Ghoussainy

In his architecture, Bernard Khoury no longer

responds to ture urban plans – they’re bound
to change anyway.
Text
Michele Braidy
 Bernard Khoury Beirut — Lebanon 057

‘Beirut required
from me that
I answer in the now’
058
the war just ended in Lebanon, leaving the
country an open wound. Beirut Central District
is disfigured. e architectural ture of the
ci is unclear. Despite the massive destruction,
a strong hope rises among the new generation;
the situation is seen as an opportuni for
reconstruction and renewal. It is in this context
that Bernard Khoury decides to come back to
Beirut from the United States, where he’s just
graduated from Harvard Universi, and to
start an independent architecture practice. His
first projects mark this chaotic period through
their straightforward and honest designs,
while also generating controversy owing
to their nctions: he builds entertainment
venues, for instance, at places with a rather
macabre history, most notably the famous
subterranean nightclub B018.
Almost 25 years later, Khoury runs
a successl office that’s involved in many
of the ci’s noteworthy residential projects.
Two recent examples are Plot #1282 and
Plot #4371; Khoury oen gives his Lebanese
projects names that coincide with the Land
Registry’s plot numbers. Plot #1282 comprises
95 industrial los, most of which have
double-height, open-plan living areas. Outside,
the building’s sharply edged terraces and
expressive vertical li shas have a mysterious
aesthetic and evoke images of a ghost ship.
Plot #4371 is a compact, bullet-shaped, seven-
storey building whose 29 units are also mainly
double-height. e building’s pièce de résistance
is a large freight elevator that transports cars
and motorcycles and allows them to be parked
inside the apartments.
Bernard Khoury discusses the bumpy
road that led from his early beginnings to his
present-day ideas.
Your first projects were built on sites that
were heavily charged with political history.
e fact that they were meant to be temporary
gave those projects even more intensi.
Your discourse on scars and remembrance
Mark 69 Perspective
1993:
challenged the general denial of war and
violence. Some of the early projects – now
almost landmarks – remain today, but the
context is quite different. When you consider
your initial aims, do you recognize a sort of
self-betrayal in the continuation of these
projects?
BERNARD KHOURY: First, I would not
use the word ‘discourse’. I never had a
systematic architectural strategy. I approach
every project in a different way. You have to
understand the political context that existed
during that period. We had big hopes – call it
naive – for the reconstruction of our nation.
But it didn’t happen, for many reasons. Our
country has been hijacked by a corrupt,
incompetent political class. Beirut Central
District was completely privatized. For many
of us architects, it was a very tough start.
Architecture with a political dimension –
social housing, schools or communi centres,
for instance – happens through institutional
Bernard Khoury.
Photo Piero Martinello projects. At least that’s what I had been taught
during my academic years. But in Lebanon we
couldn’t build social projects. In this context,
no political act was possible. In an aempt to
survive, I had to explore other territories.
My clients handed me sites that hadn’t
reached ll maturi in terms of land value;
they wanted buildings for only a limited
length of time. Because I couldn’t design
‘temporary’ institutional projects, I started
from the boom up. I did a lot of entertainment
venues, such as music clubs and bars, which
are less meaningl on an architectural scale.
ere was a huge contradiction between the
entertainment industry and the historically
charged sites occupied by those venues. I had to
deal with existential questions. To top it all off,
my projects had predetermined expiry dates. To
be honest, I had been obsessed with the notion
of temporali even as a student, but being
confronted with the ephemeral in post-war
Beirut was a brutal experience for me. It’s like
telling a pregnant woman that her baby will die
 Bernard Khoury
‘Beirut Central District
has been hijacked by a corrupt,
incompetent political class’
at the age of six. Nevertheless, I soon realized I
could do something in temporary projects that
I couldn’t express otherwise. It changed my
relation to time. Beirut required from me that I
answer in the now and only the now, and I owe
her that.
It’s true that the present context is oen
completely different to what we initially found
here. Restaurant-bar La Centrale has a roof
that can be opened up. When we completed the
project in 2001, the roof offered prey views
of old residential buildings in the vicini.
It’s now surrounded by blank walls on three
sides. e subterranean Yabani restaurant has
simply been abandoned; the building is still
there, but it’s emp now. Beirut’s reali has
changed palpably. e gentrification of certain
neighbourhoods endangers the coherence of
such projects. Back in 2002, when Yabani was
built, the building next to it was squaed by
Syrian workers. Even the music we used to play
at B018 was completely different. If B018 is still
holding, it’s because La Quarantaine is kind
of cursed. e government stores mounds of
garbage in that neighbourhood; no-one wants
to sele in an environment like that. Although
B018 has survived so far, it’s still threatened by
an expiry date. It’s just a maer of time.
What is your approach to permanent projects?
My first permanent project, an apartment
building called IB3 that was built in 2006,
marked the beginning of a new phase for me.
I’ve moved on from projects that didn’t involve
floor area ratios, for instance, to works that
demand my compliance with that kind of stuff.
To satis the requirements, I applied the ci’s
zoning regulations to the leer. e form of
the building corresponds to the maximum
volume allowed. I didn’t draw floor plans. I
submied the building for approval with a core
and shell design, which included structure and
circulation. I le the design of the floor plans
and the façades to the interior architects. In my
temporary projects, I had controlled everything
Beirut — Lebanon 059
– right down to the tiniest rniture detail –
and here I decided to let go of everything. e
developers were more than happy. We now
gear every project to its site, but we are also
strongly inspired by the people who initiate
these projects.
Indeed, in your book, Local Heroes, you focus
on the close relationship between the story of
a project, its site and its initiators. When you
look at Plot #1282 and Plot #4371 from this
perspective, what do you see?
Every site has its stumbling block. Plot #1282,
in its present state, benefits from panoramic
views, thanks to expansive glass façades and
large balconies. Even though the area isn’t
residential at the moment, our project faces the
risk of construction on surrounding plots that
could literally suffocate it. Studying the history
of plots in Beirut is like analysing the ci’s
DNA. You begin to understand why we reached
such a concentration of solitary islands with no
possibili of communication between them.
An unhealthy urban fabric leads to unhealthy
living and feeds hostili among people. We
applied a setback along the total perimeter
and had the floor slabs gradually diminish as
the building rises, allowing it to breathe and
connect to its environment, even if it gets
surrounded by other buildings.
As for Plot #4371, the developer had
acquired this abandoned land – a proper
in line to be condemned – for a very good
price. ere wasn’t a lot of interest initially,
and I first resed to design a project that
seemed destined to fail. But I couldn’t resist
the temptation of the developer’s eccentric
proposal for a high-rise designed for specific
kinds of users: the divorced, the playboys,
people without kids and those who liked the
idea of ending the night in their cars, at home.
It proved to be a winning bet. _
bernardkhoury.com
060 Mark 69 Perspective

Plot #1282
Beirut — Lebanon — 2017
Containing 95 industrial los from 100 to 650 m2, Plot #1282
occupies a total built-up area of 25,800 m2. Nine exposed
cores lend access to a maximum of two apartments per floor.
Most units have double-height, open-plan living areas.
Photos Bahaa Ghoussainy

Generous balconies offer impressive views of the ci – for now.

e ground floor houses an open-air car park.

Bernard Khoury Beirut — Lebanon 061

e building site has a 430-m perimeter, only 12 m of which faces

a public access road. e implication is that 97% of the perimeter
borders on plots suitable for other building projects in the ture.
062 Mark 69 Perspective

Large balconies line the ll perimeter of the building.

 Bernard Khoury Beirut — Lebanon 063

Los feature 5.3-m-high ceilings, open-

plan layouts and minimal partitioning.

Plot #4371 can be seen through the window.

064 Mark 69 Perspective

+1 +2
 Bernard Khoury Beirut — Lebanon 065

+ 13 + 14
066 Mark 69 Perspective

e apartment building is near Damascus

Highway and the National Museum District.

Plot #4371
Beirut — Lebanon — 2015
Plot #4371’s studios are large enough for items such
Plot #4371 is a seven-storey, 29- as works of art, musical instruments and automobiles.
unit building with 24 pes of
apartments, ranging from 110-m2
duplexes to 435-m2 lo s. A freight
elevator surrounded by circular
floor slabs serves all residents and
provides direct vehicular access to
each unit.
Photos Ieva Saudargaite
 Bernard Khoury Beirut — Lebanon 067

+ 5 upper level Section

+ 5 lower level

A freight elevator can be used to transport vehicles and other large loads.

‘An unhealthy
urban fabric
feeds hostili
among people’
068 Mark 69 Perspective

Stacking
Layers
Although Herzog & de Meuron’s
Beirut Terraces project suests
transparency and permeabili, it is
first of all an accumulation of single
luxury apartments.

Text Photos
Stefano Corbo Iwan Baan
Herzog & de Meuron Beirut — Lebanon 069
070 Mark 69 Perspective
 Herzog & de Meuron
At
the beginning of the 1990s, with the Lebanese
Civil War finally over, Beirut’s ci centre
appeared to be a blank space, an involuntary
and promising tabula rasa upon which a new
model of coexistence could be based; around
80 per cent of the buildings had been destroyed
or seriously damaged. rough a series of
anomalous political concessions and procedural
faults, Solidere – a private company founded
by Rafik Hariri, Lebanon’s prime minister at
the time – came to manage the entire process
of reconstruction of the Central District
and gradually became the only owner of the
area. An almost unique example of neoliberal
planning policies aimed at dismantling all
forms of public control over the urban fabric,
Solidere agreed to build Beirut’s infrastructure,
including its collective utilities, in exchange for
a 75-year concession covering the management
of services and buildings, as well as the
construction of a new waterfront. International
firms invited to contribute to the master plan
realized residential and office towers for the
most part. To date, the regeneration of Beirut’s
ci centre is still not complete. Solidere has an
annual turnover equivalent to almost a quarter
of the Lebanese gross domestic product.
Beirut Terraces, Herzog & de Meuron’s
first residential project in Lebanon, is part
of this complex and challenging context.
e 119-m-high tower is composed of 130
apartments on 26 levels. It was designed in
2009 with the cooperation of other established
firms: engineering consultant Arup, executive
architects Khatib & Alami, interior designer
Vincent Van Duysen and landscape architect
Vladimir Djurovic. In comparison with similar
projects built over the last few years in the
same area, Beirut Terraces is an aempt
to rethink the traditional pology of the
residential tower by offering an alternative
to the monotonous repetition of stacking
apartment units. At the same time, Herzog
& de Meuron’s tower belongs to another
category of projects by the Swiss office, most
of them developed between 2005 and 2010
and characterized by a design methodology
that features an irregular and seemingly
unstable superposition of basic elements: boxes
(examples are 56 Leonard Street, 2016, and the
Actelion Business Center, 2005-2009), houses
(VitraHaus, 2006-2009), slabs (São Paulo
Cultural Complex Luz, 2009) and columns
(Bordeaux Stadium, 2011-2015). Manipulations,
variations and interaction among the
constitutive elements of these projects allowed
Beirut — Lebanon
Spacious terraces with glass balustrades are set back
from the edges of the floor slabs.
Opposite e entrance level is one storey above the street.
Herzog & de Meuron to experiment with
different languages of form and to reach an
unexpected outcome every time.
In Beirut, the asymmetric stratification
of 26 perforated white slabs produces a
diaphanous skeleton, an emptied tower
designed to be progressively integrated by
vegetation. e fluid space between slabs
generates a linear connection that joins
indoor and outdoor areas; the slabs of each
level protrude on all sides by a minimum of
60 cm to define terraces ranging from 28 m2
to 400 m2. Each slab acts as a homogenous
surface that merges interior and exterior.
Such an abstract and elegant overlaying of
slabs – the visual impact is reminiscent of
Mediterranean modernism from the 1950s – is
counterbalanced by a compact floor plan. e
organization of the building is the result of a
combination of five modular floors arranged
around a vertical core. e tower contains 60
two-bedroom units, 45 three-bedroom units,
17 four-bedroom units and eight duplexes
whose floor areas are between 615 m2 and
985 m2. Despite differences in size, all
apartments have a clear height of 3.31 m and
a sequence of three distinguishable areas: a
reception area with foyer and living room,
a private area with family spaces and
bedrooms, and a service area with kitchen
and laundry room. e programme also
includes communal amenities – spa, pool
and gym – as well as retail facilities and a
six-level underground car park. e vertical
core of the building accommodates lis,
stairs and mechanical services. A structural
grid of columns that spans up to 14.7 m
071
precludes the need for loadbearing walls
inside the apartments and, in so doing, allows
for reconfiguration. e thick slabs not only
meet aesthetic considerations but also rther
Herzog & de Meuron’s passive design strategy
by maintaining the desired temperature
throughout the day, thus providing sustainable
thermal comfort.
Vegetal terrace walls separate the
apartments from one another and guarantee
an adequate level of privacy. Contrary to the
architects’ desire for continui and permeabili,
isolation seems to be the key to this project:
isolation from the ci as well as isolation
from one’s neighbours. e spatial and formal
fragmentation of the tower is congruent with the
social condition of each occupant. Rather than a
‘vertical village’ (as the project was defined by its
developers), Beirut Terraces is an accumulation
of single luxury apartments: the sum of its
isolated units. If the use of vegetation is merely
defensive – a way to prevent social interaction
and preserve privacy – it’s at street level where
the real character of the project reveals itself.
A sort of podium, decorated with plants and
surrounded by a water screen, disconnects the
apartments from life outside the tower while
marking the transition from the chaos of the
ci to an intimate microcosm. Greenery acts as
a gentle barrier between interior and exterior,
between architecture and ci. e gradual
process of privatization that is affecting central
Beirut and its social life is well represented by
Herzog & de Meuron’s tower, whose formal
and spatial intentions collide of necessi with
Lebanon’s inexorable economic climate. _
herzogdemeuron.com
072 Mark 69 Perspective
Herzog & de Meuron Beirut — Lebanon 073

ick floor slabs maintain the desired

temperature throughout the day, thus
providing sustainable thermal comfort.
074 Mark 69 Perspective

+ 20

+8 + 19

+4 + 15
 Herzog & de Meuron Beirut — Lebanon 075

‘A podium, decorated with plants and surrounded by

a water screen, disconnects the tower from the ci’

Section
076 Mark 69 Perspective

‘A violent
seing
needs a
strong
gesture’
Lebanon’s political structure
and its rued geography define
Youssef Tohme’s architecture.
Text Photos
Michele Braidy Ieva Saudargaite
YTAA Beirut — Lebanon 077
078
Since
founding YTAA (Youssef Tohme Architects
and Associates) in 2008 with partners Roger
Akoury and Anastasia Elrouss, Youssef
Tohme hasn’t prioritized the aesthetic or
theoretical aspects of architecture. Instead,
he’s focused on more practical architectural
and urban issues, such as the nature of an
entrance or the relationships between spaces.
Designing a spatial experience within a broad
emotional frame of reference is high on his
programme of concerns. e man is the image
of his architecture: intensely present and
extremely driven.
Cases in point are two recently
completed villas on the outskirts of Beirut:
Villa M in Cornet Chahwan and Villa VR in
Ajaltoun. Neither is an archepal Lebanese
house featuring stone masonry and a tiled roof.
Villa M is a rough concrete volume perched
on the edge of a steep incline. At the boom
of the structure, where the house meets a low
stone rampart, the former’s orthogonal walls
give way to faceted surfaces that negotiate
between the building and the topography. Villa
VR, too, is on a steep incline, but it deals with
its surroundings in a completely different way.
With a series of terraces, YTAA makes the best
use of the site’s 25-m difference in level. e
Mark 69
building itself is less an object than a landscape.
Its prestressed white concrete roofs undulate
slightly, creating openings that let natural light
into the living areas.
Youssef Tohme and Anastasia Elrouss
elaborate on the ideas behind the designs.
e country’s collective fantasy of the ideal
‘Lebanese house’ is very persistent. Despite
the cultural and historical inconsistencies
evident in this archepal cliché, even
governmental institutions endorse it through
the zoning regulations they impose upon
architects. e houses you design completely
ignore the fantasy, yet you manage to build
them in spite of regulations. Do you consider
your houses ‘Lebanese’?
YOUSSEF TOHME: We build in the now,
and our architecture is contextual. ere
is something in Lebanese culture that we
don’t find in Western cultures: it’s the way
we deal with the unexpected. We embrace it,
use it, transform it, and always end up with
something new. is capaci, which arises
from being accustomed to living in chaos,
without a well- nctioning government,
differentiates us from most Western countries,
where many things are organized and
Perspective
Youssef Tohme.
established – and where accidents are not
tolerated. At the office with Anastasia and the
team, we look forward to embracing fortuitous
obstacles and drawing on them.
e houses we design are ‘Lebanese’ in
the way they connect to their context. Each one
answers the question: what is the experience of
living in this environment? e houses respond
to their surroundings with equal energy: in a
violent seing you need a strong gesture, and
the design remains ultimately contextual. e
site of Villa M, for instance, offers a view so
impressive that we could not have answered it
with anything other than a strong architectural
gesture. Villa M is not a house. It’s a rock on a
mountainside, standing on it but also against it.
e house overlooks Beirut but can’t help being
part of the ci. Actually, Villa M is a perfect
metaphor for the situation in Lebanon, now
and in the past: it stands at the edge of a ravine,
with the horizon ahead.
ANASTASIA ELROUSS: e horizon is always
visible in Lebanon; whether you’re on the coast
or in the mountains, you have a vanishing
line before your eyes. Its omnipresence
carries a permanent possibili of escape. It’s a
reassuring promise, a hope we hold onto and
which gives us the choice to stay and adapt to
 YTAA Beirut — Lebanon
the situation, in an intention of resistance.
is is what our architecture does: it resists
by being there, unfolding and adapting to
the context.
Fortunately, the limits of our zoning
regulations are not very precise, and although
we oen have to go through the high council
that deals with exceptional architectural
projects, we’re able to use the flexibili of
those regulations and to prove that our projects
are well integrated. In the end, we invariably
obtain a nod of approval.
In an interview that appeared in the summer
2015 edition of Executive Life, you said that
your architecture is a mix of two extremes:
Peter Zumthor and Rem Koolhaas, physicali
and theory. How do you link the two, and what
kind of interaction happens in your projects?
TOHME: Yes, I am interested in both theory
and physical experience. I studied architecture
in Paris before I founded my office in
Beirut – my dual interest may be due to my
multicultural identi. Let’s just say that I’m ‘We look
both Middle-Easterly emotional and Westerly
cerebral. Even though our architecture
forward to
sometimes seems simple from the outside,
because it’s based on a clear concept, you’ll only
embracing
really discover it through the different layers
that unfold when you experience the space
fortuitous
obstacles
and drawing
on them’
Anastasia Elrouss.
079
itself. Villa VR is a good example. e first
impression is that of a landscape. e habitat
and its natural surroundings merge.
But indoors, the comfort of a house dominates:
the warmth of wood and the so curves of
cast-in-situ concrete.
What is the common thread that links all
your projects?
TOHME: In Bordeaux, we’re currently involved
in the urban planning of Brazza, a former
industrial site on the east bank of the Garonne.
e project includes all the aspects that ma er
to us. We don’t want to create a developer’s
architecture but one that puts the individual at
the centre. e starting point is the way people
live. e reali that connects us all is the
landscape that we inhabit, whether it’s rural
or urban, and not the economy. at’s why a
social mix is crucial to us. We try to achieve an
urbanism that is political in nature, because it
includes architecture that addresses different
groups of people. ere’s another recurrent
element: silence, or the possibili of living a
personal experience. We’re looking for sereni,
a much-desired quali, especially in Lebanon
but also in Europe. rough the intensi of our
intention to bring out the essential, we try to
express the innermost nature of spaces. _
ytaa.co
080 Mark 69 Perspective

Villa M
Cornet Chahwan — Lebanon — 2017
Set on a steep mountainside, Villa M resembles a rock that has
survived erosion. From the nearby road it looms into sight like a
powerl monolith. e house is free of internal structures, open to
views of Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea, and characterized by its
open plan and multiple stairways. Reception and entry areas have
180° views that continue on a large terrace overlooking the valley.

A ramp leads down from the road to the main entrance.

A bridge lends direct access to the garage on the top floor.

e pool extends into the building volume.

e glass wall of the open-plan living

space can be lly retracted.
YTAA Beirut — Lebanon 081

‘Fortunately, the limits

of our zoning regulations
are not very precise’
082 Mark 69 Perspective

Cross Section

Part of the living room is double-height.

Faceted surfaces define the lower floor.

 YTAA Beirut — Lebanon 083

+1

01

02 03
03

04

08 07 06

05

-1

06
11
14

09 10

-2

13
13 11 13

13
12
03

Long Section

01 Garage
02 Master bedroom
03 Bedroom
04 Pool
05 Terrace
06 Living room
07 Dining room
08 Kitchen
09 Guest room
10 Guard
11 Storage
12 Atelier
13 Technical room
14 Laundry
084 Mark 69 Perspective

e villa’s glazed walls and concrete roofs have curved corners.

Villa VR
Ajaltoun — Lebanon — 2017
e two main levels of Villa VR form an enti with
the topography: a sloping site that differs 25 m from its
highest to lowest points. Two expansive white roofs
trace the outlines of both levels, like vast sheets that are
seemingly insubstantial yet solid. Made from prestressed
concrete, they take the material to the limits of its
flexibili. From within, the roof appears to split and
crack, leing natural light enter through the openings.
 YTAA Beirut — Lebanon 085

A spacious terrace complements the reception aera.

‘rough the intensi of our intention

to bring out the essential, we try to
express the innermost nature of spaces’

e two main levels offer generous views of the surroundings.

086 Mark 69 Perspective

A long, straight flight of stairs connects the reception aera to the floor above.

Long Sections

An undulating ceiling defines the bedrooms.

Cross Section
 YTAA Beirut — Lebanon 087

+1
01 Living room
02 Master bedroom
03 Bedroom
04 Terrace
03 03 03
02
01

0
01 Entrance
02 Reception area
03 Dining room
05 04 09
04 Kitchen
05 Office
07 06
06 Gym
07 Guest room 08
08 Bar 03
09 Garage 01
10 Garden
11 Terrace 10

02

11

-1
01 Garage
02 Guard
03 Maid
04 Laundry 05 05 04
05 Technical room 06 06
06 Water tank
07 Storage
05 03

05 03 02

07

05
01
05
 088
Mark 69

Long
Section
 Long Section 089

‘I
don’t
have a
relationshi
with nature
Jimenez Lai of Bureau Spectacular about
Laugier’s Primitive Hut, page 100

M nature is
consumerism’
090 Mark 69 Long Section

A School with

Rooop greenhouses will be a hands-

on learning centre for students to grow
vegetables and plants.
 C.F. Møller Copenhagen — Denmark 091

a View
C.F. Møller’s Copenhagen International School is
a pioneer in an industrial-transformation zone.
Text Photos
Terri Peters Adam Mørk
092 Mark 69
Copenhagen
International School (CIS), designed by C.F.
Møller, assumes a striking pose in Nordhavn,
the Danish capital’s new waterfront district. At
first sight, the complex appears to be wrapped
in shimmering blue-green sequins which are,
in fact, solar cells. ey cover an area of about
6,000 m2, making the school one of the largest
building-integrated solar-power plants in
Denmark, producing about 300 MWh annually
– or approximately half the school’s electrici
consumption.
e school was formerly located in a
posh residential suburb in the northern part
of the ci. In its latest guise, CIS is one of the
e new site offered the school the space
needed to double its student population.
Long Section
first completed projects in a large industrial-
transformation zone that is based on a master
plan for a mixed-use neighbourhood that will
eventually be served by public transport. e
plan, created by COBE Architects, includes
offices and a range of high- and low-rise
housing. e site offered the school the learning
space and outdoor areas that were needed
to double the student population to 1,200
pupils, ages five through 18. It exemplifies the
school’s ambition to connect to its immediate
environment and to the wider communi.
Architect Mads Mandrup Hansen, involved in
the project since the beginning, recalls the day
 C.F. Møller
when school authorities decided to consider a
more urban location instead of extending the
existing institution. ‘I remember the former
headmaster’s visit to the site,’ he says. ‘Looking
out over the windy terrain and the shipping
containers, he realized that this spot could
be the perfect place to build an international
communi, to give students an up-close view
of transport, globalization and environmental
issues right here on the water.’
Literally built at the water’s edge,
CIS has places for kids to play on either
side of the building and, inside, a number of
shared facilities such as sports halls, music
Copenhagen — Denmark
and performance spaces, visual-arts rooms
and a large dining area. ese are housed in
a two-storey plinth that can be used by the
communi when needed. e deep floor plate
was a challenge for designers who wanted
an inspiring daylit interior. Hansen says
they used colour spectrums in places that
are almost beyond the reach of daylight: ‘We
brought in as much natural light as possible
and compensated with RGB LED lights.’ e
interior is remarkably open plan, with views
from the upper-floor library and a glazed
reading area that stretches along the façade and
down into the hall; dining spaces below can
093
be opened up and reconfigured for events. One
timber-clad wall with tiered seating can be
used for lounging and socializing.
Atop the plinth is the main outdoor
playground, which C.F. Møller lied to provide
extra space, a sense of privacy and protection
from the wind. Classrooms in four small towers
accommodate younger pupils at the boom,
older ones in the middle and high school kids
at the top. Large windows and setbacks take
advantage of available light. ‘e site has great
natural light,’ says Hansen, ‘which reflects from
the water into the classrooms. We worked with
an Austrian lighting manufacturer to develop →
094
e building is wrapped almost entirely in solar panels. Angled in four
directions, they create the illusion of cladding in different hues.
specially designed LED lighting; it’s installed
in all the classrooms to improve concentration
and comfort – and to support our low-energy
strategy. e goal was to make it customizable
for the teachers, to have both down-lighting
and up-lighting nctions in the same lamps.’
e new housing planned nearby will
be brick and the goal was to offer a visual
and formal contrast, to add diversi to the
area, and to give the school a presence. Using
green for the façade was decided early on, but
finding the right solar panels was a lengthy
process, as the architects struled to find
appropriate examples of projects, products and
precedents. Where had solar panels been used
on such a large scale? Eventually they located
researchers in Switzerland who managed to
produce the desired colour, a company in the
Mark 69
Middle East that came up with the paerned
coating on the glass, and a factory in Croatia
that glued the glass to the solar cells. At that
point, the panels were shipped to Denmark and
installed on the building’s façade. Angled in
four directions, the panels create the illusion
of cladding in different hues; passers-by ‘see’
light blue, turquoise or green units that change
colour over the course of the day. ‘We didn't
even consider using traditional coloured solar
cells,’ says the architect. ‘It would be gloomy if
they were grey or black.’ From the outset, the
plan had been to design a colourl building
that would look different depending on the
weather and the time of day. ‘Worldwide, there
are only a handl of projects this size with as
many solar cells, so it’s us and the new Apple
headquarters.’ He laughs.
Long Section
Plans to add the building’s performance to
the curriculum feature a visual dashboard of
real-time energy use integrated into signage
on the various floors. It allows even the
youngest pupils to participate in a discussion
of environmental performance that highlights
how human behaviour in a building impacts
the use of its resources. e school’s progressive
approach to being a first mover in Nordhavn –
by experimenting with large-scale renewable
energy in building design and integrating
environmental-performance data into a
monumental project – will continue in the
proposed second phase, which includes floating
platforms, a small pool, a sauna and more
hands-on environmental learning. _
cfmoller.com
 C.F. Møller Copenhagen — Denmark 095

‘We didn't
even
consider
using
traditional
coloured
solar cells’
Pupils aending CIS range from five to 18 years of age.

Isometric
096 Mark 69 Long Section

As is oen the case in Denmark, the school offers plen of indoor and outdoor sports facilities.

Near the entrance, a timber-clad wall

with tiered seating can be used for
lounging and socializing.
 C.F. Møller Copenhagen — Denmark 097

‘ere are
plans to add
the building’s
performance
to the
curriculum’

Wall-to-ceiling windows draw daylight deep into the building.

098 Mark 69 Long Section

Cross Section

Long Section

10
02 02
05 07 09

04 08 02
07
01

01 09 01

03 06
09
 C.F. Møller Copenhagen — Denmark 099

+3
23
01 Gym
02 Locker room
03 Canteen
04 Kitchen serving
23
05 Kitchen 23
06 eatre 23
07 Drama studio
08 Black box / film
09 Storage
10 Maintenance
11 Vestibule
12 Reception
13 IT front desk
14 Meeting room
15 Gym early years
16 Gym, dance, aerobics
17 Gym / Fitness
18 Music
19 Music pod
20
21
22
Library
Lounge / study
Administration
‘With its windy terrain and
23 Classroom
shipping containers, this
spot gives students a view
of transport, globalization
and environmental issues’

+1

11
22 14
12 18
13 15 18

19
16

20 19

18

21
17
100 Mark 69 Long Section

Band
of Outliers

Ever since Bureau Spectacular

exchanged its nomadic existence
for an office in Los Angeles, the
firm’s projects have been geing
bier and more concrete, without
sacrificing a sense of humour.
Text Photos
Kaa Tylevich Injee Unshin
Bureau Spectacular Los Angeles — CA — USA 101

Jimenez Lai.
102
Siing
roughly 4 m above a concrete floor on the
roof of an ‘indoor treehouse’ that has no
railings and is absolutely not up to code, I
take the opportuni to meditate on the state
of healthcare in the US and to worry. Next to
me, Jimenez Lai, founder of LA architecture
studio Bureau Spectacular and creator of the
perilous situation we’re in, casually dangles
his feet off the edge and talks passionately
about everything at once: the 2016 presidential
election, elections worldwide, 18th-century
architecture critic and philosopher Marc-
Antoine Laugier, Le Corbusier, Rem Koolhaas
and Home Depot aesthetics. All these topics
have a symbolic place at the literal (built-
in) table of Another Primitive Hut, the
project we’re using as a seat and a reference
to Laugier’s ideas about the relationship
between architecture and nature. ‘I don’t have
a relationship with nature,’ Lai laughs. ‘My
nature is consumerism.’
Like all Bureau Spectacular projects,
Another Primitive Hut adheres to the mo o
that architecture should be practised through
‘the contemplation of art, history, politics,
sociology, linguistics, mathematics, graphic
design, technology and storytelling’. And, in
the tradition of acronymic architecture firms,
Bureau Spectacular lly accepts the possibili
that its B.S. monogrammed stationery could
indicate a message writ upon bullshit. at’s
part of ‘the contemplation’, I’m told, and an
example of the outfit’s sense of humour. ‘Have
you read philosopher Harry G. Frank rt’s “On
Bullshit”?’ Lai asks.
Before ge ing an official Los Angeles
zip code in 2015, Bureau Spectacular was a
nomadic firm founded in 2008 by Lai, whose
‘cool’ reputation preceded his arrival: he’d
worked for OMA, lived and worked at Taliesin
West, resided in an Atelier van Lieshout
shipping container in Ro erdam and authored
several books, including ‘architectural graphic
novel’ Citizens of No Place, a collection of stories
on architecture and urbanism that went on
to develop a cult following. Initially, the move
to Los Angeles le Lai financially broke but
creatively validated, as he found steady clients
and progressed to bier, and built, projects.
In 2016 Bureau Spectacular saw the
realization of two important works. At the
Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, B.S.
erected e Tower of Twelve Stories, a bright-
white, 16-m-high ‘fictional apartment building’
on stilts. e architects stacked 12 cartoon-like
Mark 69 Long Section
bubbles for unscripted retreat and le the
façade – Chekov’s fourth wall – open for public
viewing. Inhabitants of the ‘apartments’ were
also in plain sight, exposed to visitors as well
as to the elements, making the installation both
an elevated den of privacy and another stage
for performance.
Pragmatically, e Tower of Twelve
Stories is also a canopy, providing shade in
the desert. No less pragmatically, it references
Leonard Cohen’s ‘Tower of Song’, particularly
the lyrics: ‘I said to Hank Williams, how lonely
does it get? Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet.
But I can hear him coughing, all night long. A
hundred floors above me, in the tower of song.’
What’s more, the installation reflects Louis
Sullivan’s ideas about 20th-century sscrapers,
while nodding to a painting by Magri e,
an essay by Rem Koolhaas and Lai’s own
architectural comics. Insisting that storytelling
and communication are inherent to his
profession, Lai says e Tower of Twelve Stories
‘only becomes real when people populate it’.
e second 2016 milestone for B.S. was
the completion of a retail project for fashion
brand Frankie. At the downtown LA flagship
store, Bureau Spectacular introduced a flexible
interior, in which an 8.5-m-long, 2.4-m-high
white staircase, or ‘bleacher’, serves as seating
during screenings and events. Easily taken
apart, the unit divides into nine modules on
wheels that nction as fi ing rooms, storage
space and displays of various heights. Lai calls
the modular element ‘super- rniture’, which he
defines as ‘a structure too small to be a building
but too large to be simply a piece of rniture’.
In its first two months, Frankie
changed the interior layout at least three
times. Although it’s got all the requisites of
retail show-and-tell, the design is most notable
for its effortless mood swings, its seamless
transition between scenes. Not surprisingly,
the brief for Frankie was less about material
‘I don’t have and more about soul. Lai and Frankie founder
Kevin Chen made the films of Jean-Luc Godard
a relationship their reference point. Bureau Spectacular hit
the brick exterior with a geometric black-and-
white graphic, drawing three-dimensional
with nature. shadows across the shop’s façade. A degree in
French New Wave isn’t required to recognize
the cinematic influence. But B.S. doesn’t value
My nature is the perfectly composed film still as much as the
process of editing and reinvention, the abili
consumerism’ for people and spaces to continuously change
one another. →
 Bureau Spectacular Los Angeles — CA — USA 103

Another Primitive Hut

Los Angeles — USA — 2016
Another Primitive Hut is a chamber that welcomes friends and
family to enter a domestic environment. It is a place for social
gatherings, whether or not anyone wants to gather any more. It
is a project that asks us to consider what it means to be a human
at this stage in history and to imagine the chapters still to come.
104
Lai takes pleasure in de ing the restrictions and
permanence of architecture. Back at Another
Primitive Hut, we care lly (very care lly) make
our way down the treehouse, as Lai complains
that ‘in LA – as in many places around the
world – it’s bureaucracy that builds architecture,
not architects. e only place to do something
actually free is inside buildings.’
e treehouse is a free zone without a
façade, a three-storey shelter within a shelter.
It once served as a living room, dining room
and gathering space for Bureau Spectacular,
back when it lived in B.S.’s downtown studio.
‘I’ve served lunch to 12 people on its roof,’ says
Lai. ‘Every Tuesday I cook for the office, and
this was a space where we could eat together.
ere’s something primal about sharing food
and sharing ideas – that’s when we accidentally
talk about something social that’s related to our
work and make it be er.’
Like most free spirits, the treehouse
didn’t get on with Lai’s landlord, who kicked it
out for being a liabili . Another Primitive Hut
now lives a solitary life in a storage space by the
ocean. Lai hopes its lonely home is temporary.
Exemplary of a Bureau Spectacular project, the
treehouse is an extrovert, ge ing its energy
from people. Another Primitive Hut is also an
appropriate symbol for the inevitable conflict
between freedom and constraint that marks
Bureau Spectacular’s transformation from
designers on paper to practising architects.
As we leave the ocean and drive downtown to
company headquarters, Lai tells me about his
interest in Toyo Ito’s trajectory, particularly
those eight years between Ito opening shop
under the pseudonym Urbot (Urban Robot)
and his rebaptism as Toyo Ito & Associates, as
he went from ‘publications, exhibitions and
theoretical work to ge ing “real” jobs’.
Lai thinks of Bureau Spectacular as a
‘band that occasionally changes drummers’.
Mark 69 Long Section
His partner, architect Joanna Grant, became
an integral part of the band when she joined
in 2013, and in 2014 she and Lai designed the
Taiwan pavilion at the Venice Architecture
Biennale. At present, they work with three
additional people at the office, and while B.S.
‘responds to the people who work here at any
given time’, Lai insists on maintaining the
firm’s core character, a subject that will take
us back to Toyo Ito in due time – storytelling,
remember?
e downtown studio is an industrial
lo , seven storeys above a lively urban stretch,
where the clucks of chickens compete with the
growls of people and cars. Inside, we walk past
a long table, gorgeously crammed with models
and notes for current projects, among which
an event design for Redcat, a contemporary
arts centre in LA; Insideoutsidebetweenbeyond,
an installation for the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art; and a proposal for Pool Par ,
a splish-splash urban oasis for MoMA PS1 in
New York Ci .
From the studio, Lai and I walk up to
the roof of the building, which overlooks the
ci below, and he returns to Toyo Ito’s dramatic
eight-year-long studio metamorphosis. Lai
is on year seven of B.S. and ‘if our studio
didn’t transform with time, I would think
of it as a problem’. Change is part of Bureau
Spectacular’s DNA, and it’s also part of the
mnemonic coat of arms that Lai designed
for his organization: the black queen of the
game of chess next to a white heart within a
black diamond. e queen, signi ing the most
desirable chess piece for its abili to move
undeterred is ‘our reminder not to give up and
not to die’, he says. e heart in a diamond is ‘to
remember to stay so on the inside’. _
bureau-spectacular.net
e 16-m-high installation is open at
the front, exposing a stack of cartoonish
‘bubbles’ that nction as apartments.
Bureau Spectacular Los Angeles — CA — USA 105

e Tower of Twelve Stories

Coachella Valley — USA — 2016
e Tower of Twelve Stories, designed for the Coachella
Valley Music and Arts Festival, is Bureau Spectacular’s
largest project to date. A combination of art, architecture
and comic-book illustrations, it is a 1:1 section model of a
fictional apartment building. e timber-clad steel frame is
painted white. Designed with the festival audience and hot
climate in mind, the installation casts a long shadow that
serves as a canopy during the day.
Photos Jeff Frost
106 Mark 69 Long Section

Bureau Spectacular designed the graphic that now adorns the building’s original façade.

‘If our studio didn’t transform with

time, I would think of it as a problem’

Frankie
Los Angeles — USA — 2016
e main element of this retail interior is a
structure too small to be a building but too
large to be simply a piece of rniture. When
assembled, the nine-piece modular staircase
can be used as seating, as a runway for
fashion shows and as a performance stage.
When disassembled, the nine modules (on
wheels) assume various nctions, ranging
from product display and fiing room to
storage space and cash desk.
 Bureau Spectacular Los Angeles — CA — USA 107

e modular element, which Lai calls ‘super-

rniture’, consists of nine units that can be
used to create a varie of configurations.
108 Mark 69 Long Section
 Bureau Spectacular Los Angeles — CA — USA 109

Insideoutsidebetweenbeyond
San Francisco — USA — 2017
Insideoutsidebetweenbeyond is an installation that was on show
at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier this year.
It develops ideas that the office explored in drawings acquired
by the museum in 2015. e centrepiece comprises five three-
dimensional models that examine the communal aspects of
urban life through surrealistic forms and situations.
Photos SFMOMA / Don Ross

‘It’s bureaucracy that builds

architecture, not architects’
110 Mark 69 Long Section

Loop the Loop

 Office KGDVS Cretas — Spain 111

Office KGDVS’s Solo House exemplifies an ongoing shi

towards exceptionali in contemporary architecture.
Text Photos
Rafael Gómez-Moriana Bas Princen
112 Mark 69 Long Section
 Office KGDVS Cretas — Spain
e roof features water tanks
and generators, designed as
sculptural objects. Energy is
provided by photovoltaic cells.
Solo
Houses is the name of a project that’s intended
to include more than a dozen villas designed
by different architects. e location is a
mountainous region in northeast Spain, not
far from the border with Catalonia and about
three hours from Barcelona by car. If you’re
looking for ‘the middle of nowhere’, this is the
place to be. So far, two Solo Houses have been
completed, the first in 2013 by Chilean studio
Pezo Von Ellrichshausen and the second a
contribution by Belgian firm Office Kersten
Geers David Van Severen (KGDVS). In addition
to these two firms, other participants are
Sou Fujimoto, Johnston Marklee, Christ &
Gantenbein, Didier Faustino, Studio Mumbai,
Anne Holtrop, Barozzi Veiga, Rintala E erston,
MOS, Go Hasegawa, Kühn Malvezzi, Tatiana
Bilbao, TNA, Smiljan Radi and Bas Smets.
Solo Houses are nothing like the
pseudo-Spanish holiday homes we know
from tourist brochures and travel blogs. ese
more conceptual villas are, according to the
literature, ‘an ongoing project of contemporary
small resort proto pes’. e venture is the
brainchild of Christian Bourdais, a French
proper developer who, together with art
producer Eva Albarran, is also responsible for
the Solo Gallery in Paris, a space dedicated to
‘architects who display a truly artistic approach
in their work’. Solo claims to be ‘the first
contemporary art gallery to exhibit works of
architects in their own right’.
e conflation of private proper
development and modern art is as old as urban
gentrification, which inevitably follows the
moves of ‘pioneering’ artists, but the sparsely
populated wilderness chosen for Solo Houses
is far away from artists’ lo s and trendy cafés.
e closest recent precedent for this kind of
development is probably the failed Ordos 100
venture in China, planned by Ai Wei Wei and
curated by Herzog & de Meuron, but Ordos
was promoted as a design-driven development
meant to serve a new Chinese metropolis badly
in need of some cachet. Solo Houses is more
modest in scale, slower in progress and, as the
name su ests, entirely on its own.
113
Remarkably, the Spanish project is by a private
developer who seems genuinely passionate
about art and architecture and not on one who’s
simply eager to give the project an artistic
mantle. As such, it says something about the
kind of a pical context in which architecture is
encouraged to thrive relatively unencumbered
by convention, legislation or market demand.
Serious architecture is increasingly forced to
seek re ge under the institutional umbrella of
serious art in order to be taken ‘seriously’. In
the process, it becomes the stuff of private and
public collectors, galleries, museums, biennials
and curated exhibitions – architecture for the
art world more than the real world.
Furthermore, as a series of ‘resort
proto pes’ presumably meant as temporary
retreats rather than year-round homes, Solo
Houses exemplifies the ongoing shi in
architecture towards exceptionali , leisure
time and the kinds of ’experiences’ that social
networks entice us to share online. Since the
end of modernism, we’ve come to know that
haute architecture is not something most
people would choose to reside in permanently.
But we have also discovered, in turn, that this
kind of architecture is accepted more when it
is something to visit or reside in temporarily,
in which case it is seen as a n experience. If
‘social housing’ was an architectural mantra in
the early 20th-century, that of the 21st century
would clearly have to be ‘ nhouses’.
e latest Solo House – rather ironically
titled Solo Office – is indeed a lot of n. To
begin with, it’s round. In fact, it’s a sprawling,
circular loop that offers panoramic views from
its hilltop site, as it embraces and domesticates
a piece of the comprehensive project’s back of
beyond. Essentially, Solo Office is a covered
4.5-m-wide walkway that encompasses
enclosed areas – or what the architects call
‘houses’ – that nction as living, cooking and
sleeping quarters. e circular roof rests on
four straight rows of steel columns that form a
square with chamfered corners. e spaces – or
‘houses’ – between columns and perimeter leave
large parts of the walkway unprogrammed and
ready for all pes of planned and unplanned
use. ey come in handy at big cocktail parties,
for instance, and are great for lounging around
in. Sliding walls suspended from rails that
run without interruption along the edge of the
roof allow each ‘house’ to open to the outside;
the same walls thus shelter the ‘free spaces’
from wind, rain, prying eyes – or cameras.
A swimming pool within the wide round
cour ard looks quite ‘natural’ by virtue of its
subtly undulating edge and irregularly formed
steps where it meets the untouched landscape.
A gravel path connects the pool steps with the
looped walkway, making this an ideal villa for
barefoot masochists.
Although Solo Office’s doughnut-
shaped design recalls that of several projects
aempting to justi circulari on the
grounds of nctionali – among which Apple
Corporation’s nearly completed Spaceship →
114 Mark 69 Long Section

‘Contact with nature has always been

 Office KGDVS Cretas — Spain 115

e Solo House designed by Office KGDVS

is approximately 300 m away from the
first Solo House, designed by Pezo Von
Ellrichshausen and completed in 2013.

what villas are about’

116
Campus in Cupertino, California, by Norman
Foster; OMA’s competition entry for the Ci
of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de
Compostela, Spain; and the International
Centre for Sports Innovation in Cáceres, Spain,
by José María Sánchez García – in this case the
shape is arbitrary and seemingly conceived
purely for the n of it. Why not, as long as
it works? Curiously, the straight lines of an
orthogonal building are rarely justified, but the
designer of a round building oen feels obliged
to invent all kinds of pretexts, whereas here in
northeast Spain, the architects of a building
that dares to combine circles and squares offer
no explanation whatsoever.
What you see is pure folly paired
with a strict geometry that makes the work
highly mathematical and abstract. On one
level, it can be seen as a piece of conceptual
architecture in the tradition of some of the
driest conceptual art ever made. But while a
concern for geometry oen results in highly
solipsistic intellectual exercises removed from
Mark 69 Long Section
e architects wanted to make ‘as lile house as possible’ so
that occupants could live ‘without boundaries between the
house and the nature surrounding it’.
any consideration for the wellbeing of people,
this house is also very much about enjoyment
and pleasure. In that regard, it falls squarely,
not to say roundly, within the tradition of the
Mediterranean villa, the Ur-protope of which
is Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli, the subject of
scholars who have spent centuries trying to
make sense of its geometry, never stopping
to consider whether it was intended to make
sense at all.
Ultimately, Solo Office’s looped
geometry, operable walls and seemingly
neglected courard serve no other purpose than
to maximize its occupants’ close contact with
nature and the pleasure this gives them. is has
always been what villas are about. In an age in
which the word ‘nature’ increasingly appears
between quotation marks – a reference to its
portended demise and the proliferation of its
artificial simulation – it is reassuring to see
that nature-embracing architecture (or is it art?)
still has the power to throw us for a loop. _
officekgdvs.com
Office KGDVS Cretas — Spain 117

Large stretches of curtain façade slide along

the outer edge of the circle, opening living areas
to the outdoors as desired and maximizing the
occupants’ close contact with nature.
118 Mark 69 Long Section

Photo Martina Bjorn

 Office KGDVS Cretas — Spain 119

Plan
01 Kitchen
02 Dining
03 Living 06
04 Bedroom
04 04
05 Bathroom
06 Studio
07 Terrace
08 Mechanical systems
09 Solarium 07 07
10 Exterior kitchen

08
06

09

05

10

04

07 07

01
03

02

Long Section

‘Haute architecture is accepted more when

it is something to reside in temporarily’
120 Mark 69 Long Section

‘I don’t
want to feel
like I’m
destroying
something’

omas Kröger creates something

new out of what we know.

Text Photos
Florian Heilmeyer omas Heimann
omas Kröger Berlin — Germany 121

omas Kröger.
122 Mark 69
omas
Kröger worked for Norman Foster and Max
Dudler, but there’s hardly a trace of their
influence to be found in his designs. Kröger
has managed his own studio in Berlin since
2001. He now has more than twen employees
and he’s situated in the ci centre next to the
Landwehrkanal; from his office, he has a view
of the Neue Nationalgalerie through the trees.
You’d be hard pressed to find someplace more
urban, but despite that he mostly designs
freestanding houses in the countryside
surrounding Berlin. Time for a conversation
about building in rural areas.
You gained recognition with a series of
remarkable, freestanding single-family
residences in the vicini of Berlin. As an
architect, do you have more freedom when
building in the countryside?
THOMAS KRÖGER: Not really. My design
method is the same as in the ci. All of our
projects were designed with the intention to
create a strong connection to the respective
sites. But I admit: I grew up in a rural
environment and therefore feel a special
connection to those kinds of areas. I have
a different sort of respect for the slowly
established uni in the countryside, which my
architecture builds on. A ci has a completely
different history of interventions and changes,
of permanent transformation. On the other
hand, the countryside has places that have been
devoid of construction for a long time. I don’t
want to feel like I’m destroying something
there. Maybe that’s why I look so intensively
for connections that give the design a basis, and
therefore a justification.
Is that also the case for your most recent
project, Am Deich (House on the Dike),
which was just completed in Ostfriesland
on the border of a protected landscape? It’s a
peculiar house. With its uneven shape and two
remarkable, round windows it could be both a
newly built or renovated house. What does it
refer to?
Long Section
We researched the area and discovered the
old, so-called Gulf houses. Big, robust farms
that have been built in the region since the
17th century. e farmer and his family lived
in the front, the livestock lived in the back.
Because of that the buildings have two faces:
the representative part on the street side and
the stable with barn to the rear. e stable is
broader than the dwelling and the gu er is
closer to the ground. e ‘gulf’ is a separate part
of the barn where the harvest and hay were
stored. We visited a few of these farms with
the clients; some have enormous inside spaces,
with wooden constructions that invoke an
almost cathedral-like impression.
So that’s where the motive for the asymmetrical
roof, greatly lowered on one side, and the
big, open space in the interior comes from.
But the clearly visible, surprisingly power l
supporting structure is made of reinforced
concrete.
Like a concrete tree. We could have
significantly slimmed down the supporting
structure, but I felt it was important that it
be thicker than the floors. I wanted it to be
a distinct framework that clearly supports
the entire structure. at’s why we now have
beams with a cross section of 40 × 40 cm.
And what’s the story behind those remarkable
round windows?
e Gulf houses have big doors, which – as
opposed to traditional barns – are never in a
centralized position. e carts were supposed
to enter from the side, to unload their cargo in
the ‘gulf’ in the middle of the space. We used
this in the interior, which consists of one big
room with a big, raised stage in the centre.
At the same time, we needed a power l,
a ention-grabbing element that could counter
the supporting structure, to keep the concrete
beams from becoming the centre of a ention.
e large, round openings draw the a ention to
the flat meadows to the rear of the building and
to the walled courard on the street side.
 omas Kröger
With Tenne, you realized a similar interior
space. While Am Deich gives the impression
of being a renovated barn, Tenne is exactly that.
Yes. ere it was, a large, old barn in the
village of Fergitz. It was bought by a family
from Berlin that wanted to convert it into
a residence. e village has always been
relatively poor. I thought: if we transform the
barn into a large, chic ‘wonder box’, it’ll stick
out like a sore thumb in relation to the humble
houses in the area. e point was to keep the
modes of the building intact. So we changed
almost nothing about the street side façade.
Aer the conversion, the neighbour promptly
proclaimed: ‘What’s this? First all this hassle,
and now it looks just like it did before?’ I think
that’s a great compliment.
But visitors are surprised by the large, double-
height space inside.
We cut a smaller door in the old, large wooden
door. People who go through it have to stoop
a lile to enter the hall with its large fireplace
and three arched doorways to the garden. at’s
such a big jump in scale that most first-time
visitors just stand and look around once they’ve
crossed the doorstep.
How did you come up with the idea for the hall?
Aer we cleared out the trash from the barn,
the beau of the wooden supporting structure
and the size of the interior became visible. We
could preserve both with a two-storey-high
hall. e whole space can be heated with just
the fireplace. Only the bedrooms upstairs
have additional heating. e street side façade
is almost entirely closed off, but we wanted
the garden side to open up, like the estates in
‘I mix that which is
already there with my own
personal associations’
Toscane. We took the segmental arches of the
original windows and continued them to the
floor. at’s where the three parabolic arches
that open up to the garden came from. In
summertime, the hall can be lly incorporated
into the garden.
Do you find working with existing buildings
to be harder than designing new buildings?
I like working on existing buildings, because
old houses oen possess so much sensibili
and beau. I think it’s important that my
interventions are as humble as possible. I
usually like to explore and expand on the ideas
inherent to an existing building more than to
put my own visions in the limelight through
Berlin — Germany
that building. Of course, any changes made to
a building will change its character. But if I’m
successl at making the new additions come
from an inherent logic of the existing building,
that can create a complex beau and sense of
purpose all of its own.
In this context, I’m also curious about the third
project we’ll talk about today, and I haven’t seen
this one in person yet: Pavillon (the pavilion
next to the Pinnower See). For me, it doesn’t
evoke as many familiar associations as the
other two projects. It actually seems like a
rather cheerl, weird and even exotic element
in the landscape.
Like the others, this building is closely
connected to its site. e almost 2-ha piece of
ground forms a slightly sloped hill that rises
slightly from the street and then descends
again towards the lake. On one side is a forest
with a cherry tree orchard in front of it, which
blooms beautilly in spring. Only a small
portion of the proper was allowed to be built
on, which is how the idea of a small, light and
light-hearted building that would sit on the hill
came into being. en I thought of bandstands,
like you see on village squares. at’s the origin
of the hexagonal plan and the motive of the
large pointed roof. e inside of the house has
a simple layout, but because of the six outside
walls every room has a special relation to the
surroundings: the forest, the cherry trees, or
the lake.
e roof looks like a large hat that’s been pulled
over the face of the house.
e ‘hat’ indeed got larger and more impressive
as the design developed and now it now
protrudes 1.20 m from the façade. is is
important, because it gives the house a light
impression. Of course, it’s visibly larger than
a bandstand.
e master bedroom is in the ‘hat’, which has
the only window in the roof.
Indeed. e room is almost 6 m high and all
aention is drawn upwards. e Uckermark
is a very sparsely populated region. e nights
are pitch black there, and the starry s , as seen
through the s light, is overwhelming.
While you were designing Pavillon, was there
any moment you thought you might really be
exa erating?
123
No, never. Perhaps the house makes an
exa erated impression on photos. But it’s
unambiguously connected to the landscape,
which is so extravagantly beautil, that
nothing in it could be overdone. Waking up
here in the morning, while the mist from the
lake moves up and deer stand quietly amid
the cherry trees, it’s really amazing. Pavillon
is right where it should be at those times.
Sometimes a place seems to ask for a kind
of architecture that becomes the centre of a
landscape. ink, for example, of the follies
in an English landscape garden. at’s how
Pavillon nctions as well.
What these three projects seem to have in
common is that they connect to the place, the
region, or to traditional, historical pologies
and building methods, which are then alienated
and expanded on.
at’s right. I mix what’s already there with
my own personal associations. In Pavillon
you’ll find references to the follies in English
landscape gardens, the supporting structure of
Am Deich contains traces of Kazuo Shinohara’s
architecture. If you limit yourself to the
essential, reduction takes place. If you then
expand on several specific elements, you’ll
get abstraction and radicalization at the same
time. at’s what happened with the three
segmental arches in Tenne, or the supporting
structure of Am Deich. Every alienation creates
something new, which will hopelly evoke
entirely different associations. At least I hope
that our designs don’t just show our ideas, but
that the buildings also inspire their residents
and passers-by.
Very important: we’re not aer purely
aesthetical reduction, which would become
a naked shell in this case. What we’re looking
for, are elements that allow us to develop a
specific quali for our building. Only then
will something new rise from the familiar.
Anything else would be quite boring.
In the end, it’s all about working with
something that’s already there. Sometimes
that’s a specific building, and sometimes the
architectural history of the entire region. From
that, you distil a basic theme, which might
be familiar, but then gets mixed with other
elements and partially drastically transformed.
Yes, that’s how I would describe it. ere are
regional discoveries like the Gulf houses and
the intensive use of this pology reminds
you of other things you’ve seen. at’s how
the translation works: you suddenly think
of one of Sinohara’s details, that helps to free
the traditional pology from a centuries-old
framework, and to enrich it with something
totally different. is is about emotional
memory, where maybe some details play a
much larger role than they objectively warrant.
All of that material is then mixed and kneaded,
like cake baer, until it’s smooth and hopelly
tastes good. _
thomaskroeger.net
124 Mark 69 Long Section

+2

08

Am Deich (House on the Dike)

Leer — Germany — 2017 +1
07 08
01 Courard
is single-family house is situated on a proper 02 Entrance
03
next to a nature reserve near the ci of Leer. e 03 Bathroom
04 Kitchen
building consists of a residential building, an entrance 05 Dining room 08
courard and a garage. It was built for a young family, 06 Living room
07 Void
but the design is aligned with the traditional look of 08 Bedroom
the regional Gulf houses. e house has taken the low
roof edges and structural form of its traditional role
model. e structural material is reinforced concrete,
which is oversized to give it a sculptural quali. e
bricks, produced at the nearby Wimunder bricard,
have been matched to the colour of the roof tiles to
create a monolithic feeling. e bricks in the gables
are laid in a herringbone bond. is connects the
45-degree tilted roof to the brickwork.
0 05

06 04

02
03

01

Cross Section

e large round window is a nod to the stable doors in the local Gulf houses.
Photo Jan Steenblock
 omas Kröger Berlin — Germany 125

e concrete supporting structure forms

a striking element in the living room.
Photo Jan Steenblock
126 Mark 69 Long Section

Tenne
Fergitz — Germany — 2014
In a small village in the Uckermark, north of Berlin, a large barn has been
converted into a country house with an additional independent apartment. e
barn was built 140 years ago in brick with a timber structure. At some point,
it was divided into two parts. omas Kröger rerbished one half for a young
family. e centre of the house is a double-height living room with fireplace.
ree major arched openings, which can be closed with large wooden shuers,
open to expose the orchard and green expanses beyond. e house is designed
so that the unheated great hall is enclosed by a heated body of rooms. In cold
seasons, only the smaller and more sociable areas of the house can be used.

e barn has been restored, but with added new features.

 omas Kröger Berlin — Germany 127

When the doors to the garden are open, the hall becomes a covered terrace.

‘Old houses oen contain so much

sensibili and beau’
128 Mark 69 Long Section
omas Kröger Berlin — Germany 129

e dining area is topped by a wooden pyramid.

Opposite e original timber structure is visible in

the double-height hall.
130 Mark 69 Long Section

Long Section

+1 06 06

01 Hall
06
02 Living room
03 Dining room
04 Kitchen
07
05 Void 09
06 Bedroom
07 Bathroom
08 Study
09 Apartment
05
05

05

08 08

0
02

09 01 03

04
 omas Kröger Berlin — Germany 131

Cross Section

Next to the hall, and slightly elevated, is the

living room and a free-standing kitchen.
132 Mark 69 Long Section

Pavillon
Pinnow — Germany — 2017
is proper in Pinnow contains all of the elements
of the Uckermark in miniature: hills, a forest, a lake,
a cherry tree orchard and greenhouses. e design
deals with the motif of the narrative, similar to the
romanticism of an English landscape garden. e
house is half for pleasure, half for living. Its scale and
position have been adapted to the surroundings, at the
same time emphasizing its artificiali. e pavilion’s
floor plan is a hexagon. e rooms have been
geometrically laid out around a central living space.
On the upper floor, a large slight in the bedroom
gives a view of the stars. e roof is similar to a hat
made of iridescent metal shingles. In the summer, it
shades the porch.

In spring, the cherry trees blossom.

 omas Kröger Berlin — Germany 133

Section

+1
01 Entrance
02 Living room
03 Dining room / kitchen
04 Bedroom
05 Bathroom

e stairs to the first-floor bedroom is hidden behind a door in the hallway. 04

01

04

05
02

04 03

e bathroom on the ground floor is painted turquoise.

134 Mark 69 Long Section

e living room is in
the centre of the house.
 omas Kröger Berlin — Germany 135

e dining room offers a view of the cherry tree orchard.

e terrace overlooks Pinnow Lake.

‘I hope our
designs don’t
just show our
ideas, but that
they also inspire
impressions of
their own’
136 Mark 69 Long Section

Fun
 El Equipo Mazzanti Barranquilla — Colombia 137

and Games

Giancarlo Mazzanti provided a kindergarten in

Barranquilla with a stimulating environment.
Text Photos
Cathelijne Nuijsink Rodrigo Dávila
138 Mark 69 Long Section

Giancarlo Mazzanti’s latest kindergarten in Barranquilla,

in the north of Colombia, is composed of
a series of glazed circles and voids and can
accommodate up to 175 children between the
ages of 3 months and 4 years. e architect
explains the philosophy behind the project.

You have designed multiple kindergartens and

schools during your career. Can you explain
the ‘evolution’ of this building pology within
your portfolio?
GIANCARLO MAZZANTI: For many
years we’ve been researching how school
environments have the possibili to generate
new forms of behaviour and therefore how new
teaching methodologies can work together with
 El Equipo Mazzanti
different spatial configurations. We believe
that school seings themselves can be learning
mechanisms. In the first schools we designed,
we started working with the idea of using
pieces, modules and systems. We projected
them as toys that could be assembled and work
as open-ended and ever-changing structures.
From there, we developed a line of
research whose objectives are to understand
the performative capaci of our school projects
and the value of games and playlness in
today’s social life, criticizing in a way the
concept of nctionali and how modern
buildings were built based only on ideas of
efficiency and utili. Each project, then, is an
opportuni to ask: What can happen if we
Barranquilla — Colombia
introduce new ways of using space, not only
those based on effectiveness and utili? is is
why we support ludic activities. Ludic activities
are not only instruments to generate new forms
of architecture, but are also capable of solving
problems and generating fantasies and new
ways of using space.
What’s the idea behind the pe of kindergarten
you designed this time, consisting of circular
thematic spaces set within an open patio
and surrounded by a semi-transparent
exterior wall?
e idea was to develop spaces that are visually
related but at the same time acoustically
separated. Each circle is a classroom that can
139
e semi-open concrete façades have deformations that give
the impression that huge balls were thrown against them
from the inside.
Photo Alfredo Manjarres
be joined to the next one. Curtains allow these
areas to be opened or closed, leing kids see
and learn from each other. is refers to a
strategy of curiosi: if I see what others are
doing, it makes me curious and I want to go
there too and interact.
So the glazed walls are designed as a kind
of interactive device?
Each circle generates reflections that, in my
experience, create a sensation similar to being
inside a Dan Graham sculpture.
Who runs this kindergarten?
e client is a psychologist who works with
a teaching method called Reggio Emilia →
140
developed in the 1940s by Italian educator
Loris Malaguzzi, which in my opinion is one of
the most fascinating models of exchange and
education. e director of the kindergarten,
Silvia Pinedo, defined it as ‘a space for
children’, and rather than a simple school it is
a cultural and educational centre that interacts
with its urban and social context.
How do we see this teaching philosophy
reflected in your design?
Transparency, dialogue, expression, freedom,
flexibili and movement are characteristics
visible in both the educational and
architectural project of the centre. Every
element of the centre makes it possible to
Mark 69
create connections that become learning
experiences. As such, the project moves away
from an extreme planning and an inflexible
programming of the building, to give users a
space to explore, experiment and interact. e
resulting environment is, as Malaguzzi has
said, the ‘third teacher’ [the first two being
adults and other children]. It is an element of
re-creation.
On the other hand, in this
kindergarten, teachers act as facilitators. ey
do not direct, but encourage and support
kids to define their interests throughout the
process. e micro universe developed by the
pedagogical team is, according to the director,
a place where nothing is pre-established.
Long Section
Both the pedagogy and the environment of
the kindergarten are grounded on a flexible
approach to learning. Just like the lives of
the girls and boys, this is a place open to
continuous transformation.
It seems you have spent quite some time
designing the concrete façade. What is the idea
behind the façade detailing?
e façade is a thermal membrane that
is deformed as if it was hit by balls from
inside the school. It works as a brise-soleil
that protects the interior from the intense
Caribbean sun. At the same time, it allows
air to flow through the façade, which helps to
improve the climatic conditions inside.
 El Equipo Mazzanti Barranquilla — Colombia 141

‘We believe that

school seings
themselves can
be learning
mechanisms’

e openings in the roof

provide plen of light
in the interior.

What makes this private institution different

from the many new public kindergartens
designed and built in Colombia in recent years,
to which you have contributed as well?
Public buildings in Colombia have a very
limited budget and we usually do not have
any control over the public contractors
and the methods they use. But on a private
commission like this we can work closely with
the construction team. Without doubt, a higher
budget and the capaci to influence decisions
such as the rniture and the way the space
can be used make this project different from
the public kindergartens we have designed
previously. _
elequipomazzanti.com Most of the ground floor space serves as a covered play area.
142 Mark 69 Long Section

e kindergarten is for
children between the ages
of 3 months and 4 years.

‘e building
refers to a
strategy of
curiosi’

ree trees grow through the building.

 El Equipo Mazzanti Barranquilla — Colombia 143

To stimulate the children’s

inquisitiveness, the classrooms offer
open views of the rest of the building.
144 Mark 69 Long Section

e circular classrooms on the second floor

are accessed via a rectangular gallery.

Long Section
 El Equipo Mazzanti Barranquilla — Colombia 145

+1
18

10
17

11

06
16

09
12

13
14

15

0
01 Outdoor play area 01
02 Covered play area
03 Gym 02
04 Music room
05 Cafeteria
06 erapy room
07 Office 08 06
08 Rentable office 02
09 Toilets
10 Sensorial room
11 Cras room 03
12 Fine motor skills room
13 Language room 06
14 Multinctional space
15 Kitchen 08
16 Cloakroom
17 Staff room
18 Storage
05
06
09
07

02
04

07

01
146 Mark 69 Long Section

Doug Aitken.
Photo Ami Sioux
Doug Aitken Los Angeles — CA — USA 147

rough
the
Looking
Glass

ree works of art by Doug

Aitken consider modern life
through modern architecture.
Text
Kaa Tylevich
148
A
large sign prohibits all dogs, so the number of
Yorkies on site must mean the spirit of protest
is alive and well in Southern California. is
is a project that literally reflects its context,
and right now the composure of Mirage,
by artist Doug Aitken, is challenged by the
unpredictabili of its visitors and their
contraband. Another sign implores visitors to
refrain from taking photographs or videos. It
is blatantly disregarded. Well, isn’t this a tidy
allegory for the dilemmas of architecture?
Places for living expose the chasm between
intentions and inhabitants. ‘Wow, I’ve never
seen anything like this before,’ says a stranger in
a Hawaiian-print shirt. Actually, sir, you have.
At face value, Mirage, part of temporary
art exhibition Desert X, is a suburban ranch
Mark 69
house made of reflective glass and sited on
a residential desert hillside in Palm Springs.
Its outline is purposely generic and familiar,
reminiscent of the cookie-cuer post-war
American home (and the American Dream, of
course). e soul of Mirage is a mirror of your
own projections. Walking within or around
the ‘house’, you see, at various points, an image
of yourself, multiple versions of yourself or of
someone else, the naked desert, a ralesnake,
or a stunning gridded vista of urban sprawl in
the valley below. Visitors are confronted with
dizzying reflections, which are punctuated by
views through deliberately placed windows.
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether you
are looking at ‘reali’ or through the looking
glass.
Long Section
As a private experience, Mirage is a meditation
on the kind of life prescribed by a structure
like this. e personal response may be a
memory, an aspiration, or revulsion. Were it
not for the reflection of moving bodies on its
exterior, Mirage would camouflage itself into its
environment, would seem immaterial, illusive
– not unlike the utopian ideas that, among
other less noble intentions, elled the spread
of suburban neighbourhoods in the post-war
United States. Here, bodies in motion disrupt
all moments of solipsism; they walk into frame
and alter the meaning of the scene. e light
changes, as does the position of the sun, the
clouds, the weather, the mood. As a ‘clean’
installation, Mirage gives the false impression of
sereni, when it is in fact constantly disturbed.
 Doug Aitken Los Angeles — CA — USA 149

e structure both absorbs and

reflects the landscape around it.
Photo Dakota Higgins / courtesy of
Mirage
the artist and Desert X
Desert Palisades — Palm
Springs — USA — 2017
Mirage is an installation that is part of
contemporary art festival Desert X.
It presents a continually changing
encounter in which subject and object,
inside and outside, are in constant flux.
Every available surface of the ranch-sle
structure is clad in mirrored surfaces. As
Mirage pulls the landscape in and reflects
it out, this classic one-storey suburban
house becomes a framing device, a
perceptual echo chamber endlessly
bouncing between the dream of nature
as a pure uninhabited state and the
pursuit of its conquest.

Like all works of architecture, even those green

ones with the smallest of footprints, Mirage is
an intrusion upon nature. It is cognizant of its
aempts at discretion, even as it is a foreign
object in a prehistoric landscape. As a result,
Mirage comments on the expertly branded
modern development in which it is currently
located. is is a gated communi, within
which Mirage is both an advertisement (life
as an impeccably produced work of art) and a
subversion. Aer all, Mirage actively aracts
outsiders to a neighbourhood that has all the
subtle of a ‘keep out’ notice. To get to Mirage,
you need to pass a securi roundabout. e
public art installation is a trespasser on both
the artificial (social) and natural environment. Mirage will be open to visitors until the end of October.
So, then, is the viewer, who might feel a lile → Photo Lance Gerber / courtesy of the artist and Desert X
150 Mark 69 Long Section

Underwater Pavilions is an art installation off the

California coast near Catalina Island, south of
Los Angeles.

Underwater Pavilions Photos Doug Aitken Workshop / courtesy of the artist,

Parley for the Oceans, and MOCA Los Angeles

Avalon — USA — 2016

Underwater Pavilions consists of three temporary underwater
sculptures moored to the ocean floor. Geometric in design, they
create living environments that reflect and refract light, opening
a portal that physically connects the viewer to the expanse of the
ocean. By merging the language of contemporary architecture,
land art and ocean awareness, Underwater Pavilions becomes a
living work of art within a vibrant ecosystem.

defensive about the boundaries between private
and public that are reinforced by architecture.
A recurring characteristic of Aitken’s
work is its nomadism. Not only does the viewer
travel to see works like Mirage; the work
itself is a rolling stone. Aitken plans to move
Mirage in the near ture, possibly to Taliesin
West – Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘winter home’
in Scosdale, Arizona – where it will reflect
an entirely different set of truths, aspirations,
tensions and failures. In the past year, Aitken
has inadvertently created a trilogy of works
that evoke tropes of modern architecture as
symbols for modern life. ey invite a mutual
transformation. e works change in response
to their environments, and viewers change in
response to the works.
In June, Aitken’s project e Garden opened
in Aarhus, Denmark, as part of the ARoS
Triennial. Like Mirage, e Garden also
highlights tensions inherent within ‘generic’
symbols of modernism. is time, the symbol is
a transparent glass box, not exactly Miesian but
with a Miesian aertaste.
To access e Garden, you enter one of
several anonymous warehouses at the end of a
dock. Once inside, confronted by darkness, you
make your way through a jungle of artificially
fabricated ‘organic’ nature, through the oxygen
and humidi it emits, and towards a glowing
geometric construction in the distance. e
interior of this rectangular glass structure
is outfied with minimalist necessities of
domestic life – namely, modern living-room
rniture and decor. You experience the work
as both subject and surveyor. Visitors inhabit
the structure, which is composed of thick
bulletproof glass, one at a time. Each has
permission to obliterate and violently destroy
the trappings of modern life inside, should this
prove desirable. People outside the glazed walls
can watch. Aitken’s project description calls
the resulting frenzy a ‘release of and against
the modern environment. Does it somehow go
without saying that ‘the modern environment’
is a source of emotional repression? at it’s
satising to smash its prey lile ideas?
Both Mirage and e Garden
demonstrate a strained relationship between
the regulatory idealism of modern structures
and the fragmented, nonlinear, explosive ways
 Doug Aitken
e geometric structures of mirror and
rock are accessible only to marine life
and to scuba divers.
Photo Patrick T. Fallon / courtesy of the artist,
Parley for the Oceans and MOCA Los Angeles
in which we actually live our lives. e Garden,
of course, invites a physical fragmentation
– an eruption – of interior life. When I meet
Aitken in his Venice, California, studio, I ask
if the two works are meant as a critique of
modern architecture – perhaps a critique of the
unrealistic narrative of health and integrated
living that modern architecture imposes on
an otherwise chaotic existence. Aitken doesn’t
want to use the c-word, instead describing his
intention to ‘break down’ such narratives, to
‘crack them open’ and allow people to ‘enter’
their shambles.
‘When a person enters a work like
that, they are inescapably – one to one – living
in real time with their surroundings.’ e
relationship between person and structure
Los Angeles — CA — USA
is levelled; the inhabitant somehow has
greater power over the architecture through
manipulation or destruction rather than
everyday use or – God forbid – simple
viewership. Aitken wants to make a person
a physical subject of these works, not just a
witness or even a participant. e spontanei
of relationships between visitors and art
installations is an exaeration of the everyday
power strule between designed aspiration
and sloppy actuali. Aitken designs a
controlled environment for loss of control.
Last December, Aitken placed three
large geometric structures underwater, in
the Pacific Ocean off the California coast
near Catalina Island. e project was realized
with help from Parley, an organization for
151
the protection of oceans. e Underwater
Pavilions are accessible only to marine life and
scuba-certified humans. ey are composed
of glass mirrors and ‘hand-carved composite
designed to foster marine growth with a goal
of “interactivi”’. Like Mirage, the Pavilions
reflect their surroundings. ey also become
their surroundings – are overrun by them,
resembling ruins of modern civilization.
Adhering to Aitken’s interest in
nomadism, the Pavilions will eventually
‘migrate’ (be transported) to other bodies of
water. When they move, the new life that
colonized these man-made habitats will be
professionally removed and le in the waters.
is is a piece that fosters new growth while
reminding us of loss and displacement. →
152
Difficult not to think of the dying Great Barrier
Reef, irreversibly wrecked by climate change.
Strange, somehow, that Aitken’s man-made
structures actually contribute to the regrowth
of an ecosystem. is is deliberate, of course,
and in conflict with expectation. Like Mirage
and e Garden, the Pavilions are a hallucination
that one can physically touch.
‘e first time I dove the Underwater
Pavilions, it was wintertime, the ocean was
cold and the s was stormy,’ Aitken tells me.
‘I became aware that I was breathing air in a
place in which I shouldn’t be able to breathe.
All of a sudden, I was seeing these shining,
geometric shapes in the distance. I moved
towards them in slow motion, while horizontal,
through space with seemingly no gravi. No
Mark 69
longer on terra firma, I experienced the shock of
the new – a disturbance of what I know, thrust
into a very unfamiliar condition.’
Of the three works, Underwater Pavilions
most forcibly demonstrates a break with
designed navigation, by suspending normal
human movement and ‘leing go’. ese three
pieces are built upon architectural metaphor:
they are an outward representation of modern
structures, but all three have the quali of being
or becoming immaterial. eir minimalist,
perfectionist execution exists solely for the
purposel loss of perfection – for overgrowth,
for destruction. ey are not an admonishment
of the architecture they represent but an
observation of its limitations in the face of the
living organisms around and within them.
Long Section
‘It’s a perverse relationship,’ says Aitken. ‘I try
to make everything perfect but am aware that
in a few hours or days these pieces will be
transformed completely beyond recognition.
I can’t make the work climate-controlled,’
he laughs. ‘I like the idea of containers of
energy and disruption, of continual changing,
changing, changing.’ _
dougaitkenworkshop.com
‘I like the idea
 Doug Aitken Los Angeles — CA — USA 153

e Garden
Aarhus — Denmark — 2017
e first ARoS Triennial, entitled e Garden
– End of Times; Beginning of Times, includes
Aitken’s interactive art installation, which
embraces the dichotomy between natural
and man-made environments. e piece is
based on therapeutic ‘anger rooms’, in which
participants are invited to destroy their
surroundings.
Images Doug Aitken Workshop / courtesy of the artist and ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum

e installation at the opening

of the ARoS Triennial.

Renderings showing a visitor of e Garden at work.

of containers of energy and disruption’

154 Mark 69 Long Section

Teaching
Space

Aires Mateus built a Facul of Architecture

that allows freedom of appropriation.

Text Photos
Ana Martins Tim Van de Velde
Aires Mateus Tournai — Belgium 155
156
Outstanding
buildings don’t have to be the result of towering
nds, lavish materials or an exhaustive
planning of nctions and spaces. ese are
some of the lessons that can be learnt from
the new Facul of Architecture in Tournai,
designed by Portuguese studio Aires Mateus
and inaugurated in March this year.
Lisbon-based architects and brothers
Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus won
a competition launched by the Université
Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in 2013 for the
construction of a new campus for its Facul of
Architecture. e programme saw the move of
the school from Tournai’s periphery to a block
in the centre of one of Belgium’s oldest cities.
Built with a strict budget of 4 million
euros, the 7000-m2 complex that includes a
library, an auditorium, workshops, classrooms
and administrative spaces, is the outcome
of ‘a spartan project’. As we discuss the
project, Manuel Aires Mateus explains how
this austeri was welcomed as a liberating
challenge in the design process and, ultimately,
made the school what it is today.
How specific was UCL’s brief for the
competition?
MANUEL AIRES MATEUS: ere was
something very interesting about this
competition: it imposed very few things.
ere was the site, a 6,000-m2 block, where
only one of the pre-existing buildings had to
e central garden is meant to be a public space.
Mark 69
be preserved: an old convent, later converted
into a hospital. Other than that there were two
limitations: time and money. Our proposal
involved taking advantage of these very limits.
How so?
In order to make the construction as
expeditious and economic as possible, we
decided to keep, besides the old convent, two
industrial buildings. en, from the moment
that all of the other existing architecture was
taken out of the equation, a single gesture
revealed itself: a building that would unite
all of the different elements, both vertically
and horizontally; draw the public spaces; and
establish a relationship with the manifold
surroundings. is was our first reaction to the
project, and it remained more or less the same
until the end.
What aspects of this first approach changed?
In the initial programme, the new building was
a huge container, inhabited by architectural
archepes that served different nctions.
en, as we felt the need to evoke a space that
was part of the school’s identi, these forms
were pushed to the limits of the building and
transformed into its doors, windows and
passageways, and the space became an emp
foyer. Just as in the old school, the students
now have a multinctional space that can
be used for anything from exhibitions to
Long Section
conferences, and, more importantly, as a day-
to-day meeting place. is way, the foyer not
only solves all of the building’s problems in
terms of visual and physical connections, but
becomes the heart of the new school.
e school sits in a block that is bordered
by an industrial area on one side and a
residential street on the other. How did you
integrate the building into two such disparate
environments?
We designed each exterior shape so that all
parts of the building would be related to one
another, as well as to the different scales of the
surroundings. For instance, the main entrance,
with its imposing portico, faces the industrial
area, while the back entrance uses the scale and
details of the secondary, residential street. is
connection is also established physically. e
idea is that the building is a public crossing in
the ci, it’s open and everyone can go through.
I don’t know how much that will happen, but
that’s our intention. In fact, the central garden
is imagined as a public space.
What informed your choice of colour for the
new building?
Since we couldn’t use the red brick and pierre
bleue of the exisiting structures, we wanted
to draw quali from them. So, we looked
for a colour that would not only emphasize
these materials, but take advantage of their
properties. We chose this specific grey cement-
based cladding, which we used both in the
exterior and the interior, from a thousand
variations of the colour, but it was always grey,
we never thought it could be any other colour.
e entire process, from project execution until
the school was inaugurated in March, took less
than three years. What contributed to this?
First and foremost, there was a pressing
necessi to get it done very quickly: the school
had to leave its previous location on a set date.
Another factor is that we presented the
proposal with Tradeco, a Belgian construction
firm. Together, we studied what would be
the quickest, easiest and most effective
construction methods. We used a lot of
prefabrication, for instance. So, even though
there was a more lengthy part of the process
that had to do with approvals and politics,
from the moment everything was approved, the
assembly was very swi .
Were there any major issues you had to
circumvent arising from the phase of
approvals? →
 Aires Mateus Tournai — Belgium 157

e back entrance is adjusted to

the scale of the residential street.
158 Mark 69 Long Section
 Aires Mateus Tournai — Belgium 159

Opposite top e foyer is the heart of the

school, both a meeting place and the element
that connects to the other buildings.

Opposite boom e school features a repeated

use of the archepal image of the house.

e only thing – and it actually became an

interesting anecdote in this project – was the
report from the fire department, which came
with the condition that the width of one of
the staircases be increased. is requirement
led us to redesign the staircase in question,
and the end result became a big part of the
school’s identi.

I assume you are talking about the spiral

staircase by the main entrance of the school.
What changed from the original design?
Exactly. e original design was a single
spiral staircase, which would have lost visual
strength if we were to comply with the fire
department’s report. So, instead of widening it,
we duplicated it. We designed two staircases
that depart from the same spot, and twist one
inside the other twice, both landing at the same
spot. We call the inner staircase the stairs of the
stressed, the other, outer spiral, is the stairs of
the lovebirds.
In addition, the underside of the stairs
mirrors the steps, so the whole thing becomes
a giant optical illusion. is did add complexi
to the construction process, because we had to
build the stairs in situ, using formwork. Other
than that, as I mentioned before, the entire
structure was almost totally prefabricated.

Another striking element in the school is the

repeated use of the archepal image of the
house. What prompted this?
We needed an iconic, inviting entrance, and
this was the shape that served us best. We also
wanted to establish a very obvious, almost
childlike, relationship of the building to
architecture. So, we ended up repeating this
collective memory, a shape everyone easily
associates with architecture. Eventually, it
became a reference of the very building, uniting
the entire project.
Do you think the project leaves space for the
school to grow?
Yes, I think there is leeway for that to happen
because the school’s spaces are very informal
and open. For instance, what happened in
the existing structures, since there was no
money, was that we removed stuff, we didn’t
add anything. What you now have are very
raw, primitive spaces, great for workshops and
project classrooms. As the school gathers more
nds, it will be able to go back to these spaces,
if it thinks it’s necessary.
Can you describe in more detail the solutions
found for the existing structures?
As the result of a demand by the fire department,
the single spiral staircase evolved into a double one.
e operation was basic, there was very lile
restoration work. e industrial buildings
had been used by some kind of call-centre, so
we decided to remove all the usual add-ons of
offices like these, the dropped-ceilings, false
walls, windows, and so on. What is le are
the shells of the original buildings with the
minimum required installations to resolve
things like artificial lighting and ventilation.
What did it mean for you, as architects and
teachers, to design this building?
It was a very interesting moment for us. I’ve
always taught, I love teaching and it’s a very
important part of our work. Designing the
school allowed us to think about what we truly
believe in for the teaching of architecture. For
me it was very clear that the spaces should be
open and fluid, that there should be a meeting
space, that the school should, ndamentally,
permit freedom of use and movement.
How can students learn from the building?
I think they will learn that spaces are
containers of life and so they must allow a
great freedom of appropriation. Architecture
is an incomplete art. It doesn’t end in itself.
It ends with the life it receives. Students can
learn this lesson. eir school is waiting for
their very presence to become a complete
building. _
airesmateus.com
160 Mark 69 Long Section

0
01 Main entrance
02 Rear entrance
03 Foyer
04 Auditorium 04
05 Classroom
06 Bar
07 Library
08 Computer room 06
09 Storage
10 Print room
11 Staff
12 Meeting room
13 Kitchene e 05 03
14 Seminar room
15 Atelier
16 A ic 02 01

12 11 11

12
11
11

11
13 07
11
10

11

11
09
08

‘Architecture is an incomplete art,

Long Section

Cross Section
 Aires Mateus Tournai — Belgium 161

+2

15

05

16

15

it ends with the life it receives’

+1

15

05

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162 Mark 69 Long Section

‘e
purpose
in
life
is
a book’

Cultural critic and architectural theorist

Mark Cousins has spent half a life
lecturing at the Architectural Association.
Text Photo
Gili Merin Andrew Meredith
Mark Cousins Bookmark 163

Mark Cousins on the Architectural

Association’s roof terrace in London.
164
Over
the past three decades, Mark Cousins’ lectures
at the Architectural Association in London
have become a Friday-night pilgrimage for art,
architecture, philosophy and psychoanalysis
enthusiasts alike. His writings on Michel
Foucault and Sigmund Freud inspire countless
people, and his theories on Immanuel Kant
and the sublime resonate in the works of the
academy’s graduates, among them Zaha Hadid
and Rem Koolhaas. And yet Cousins remains
extremely approachable and is always keen
on sharing his thoughts – that is, if you can
reach him: he doesn’t use his e-mail (though
he keeps an active landline) and he constantly
leaves his mobile at home (where he won’t lose
it). Instead, if you were to step into the AA in
Bedford Square, you would easily find Cousins
on the terrace surrounded by a flock of eager
students, in the canteen with a fellow tutor,
or in his humble office, surrounded by yet-to-
be-reviewed PhD dissertations. e laer is
where we discussed his method of working
(which predates the computer), the abused role
of theory in architectural schools, imagination-
evoking libraries, and Donald Trump.
As the head of the History and eory studies
at the AA, what is the nature, in your opinion,
of the bond between theory and practice?
MARK COUSINS: To many architects,
architecture seems to be a weak discipline.
Architecture always fantasizes that an
outsider is about to introduce the theoretical
position that will finally stabilize architectural
discourse – which of course it can’t. is was
the case when I first joined the AA: I knew a
lot about [Jacques] Derrida, [Gilles] Deleuze
and other philosophers, but already back then
I was a phase apart from the rest who quoted
them so oen, because I didn’t necessarily
think – as much as I enjoyed reading them –
that they had much to do with architecture.
When architects became delighted reading
Deleuze, I soon saw that they read it without
it troubling their basic empiricism, and indeed
they started to use a Deleuzian distinction
between ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ as if these
are ordinary words you use in architecture –
which you don’t – and at this point it becomes
Mark 69
pseudo-architectural babble. It is something
that has become prevalent, and the fact that it
is pandemic makes no difference: intellectually,
it’s nonsense. Everyone, I think, is aware that
there is something fake about it.
If theory in architecture schools seem to be the
basis for pseudo-academic discussions, what is
its real role?
I feel that the role of theory is to get non-
architectural discourse off the back of
architecture. To explain this I will use the case
of deconstruction. e architectural candidates
of Deconstructive Architecture had no real
connection to Derrida – apart perhaps from
Peter Eisenman, whose connection was made
largely through his own understanding of
Derrida. Where deconstruction could have been
helpl is in performing a very quiet, modest
set of investigations. You could run a seminar
on the window; it wouldn’t be difficult to
show how the history of the window, since the
Renaissance, has been massively subjected to
an intervention by philosophy. Philosophy likes
to use the window to describe a certain general
relation of thought to something it calls reali :
the outside-inside connections, the window as
a model for knowledge, and so on. In effect, by
having a certain kind of window, it reassures
you of the basic relations to the world that
philosophy is trying to paint. Only by pointing
this out and deconstructing it could you
establish that there is no architectural reason
why a window should be like this, and to
conform to a kind of philosophy – or one could
even say to common sense. In that way theory
becomes a kind of purgation of other theories,
which allows the new architectural relations to
be translated into more abstract terms, where
theory is a sort of summary of ‘where we are at’.
Do you believe in architectural criticism?
ere are people who still believe in the term
‘critique’, a word much abused in architecture.
A critique is quite different from a criticism:
writing a hostile aack and calling it ‘criticism’
is fine, but it is not a critique. A critique is
when you say what is being done is wrong,
but it has within it the seeds of its own
correction. For example, if you look at the
title page of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, it has
a subtitle that reads ‘A Critique of Political
Economy’. In the book, Marx criticizes an
argument made by economists Smith and
Ricardo, yet he acknowledges their theories as
being ndamentally strong, and his critique
is thus the correction. In this way, Das Kapital
is not, for the most part, an empirical study
of Manchester’s factory conditions, but it is
about what was wrong in Smith and Ricardo’s
work and its rectification through Marx’s
corrections, achieved by purely theoretical
work. Seeing where the contradictions were
Long Section
and puing them right was to Marx a practice
of science; it was thus a critique. Architectural
criticism, by contrast, is a heterogeneous
field composed largely of writings about
architecture, constructed almost on any basis:
some architectural criticism stays very close
to the actual architecture, some involve a lot
of historical and cultural speculations. e
problem with architectural criticism is then,
in my opinion, that people oen use the term
critique when they mean criticism.
How do you see the practice of writing as
related to your work?
e practice of writing, for me, is really
subordinated to a certain individual practice
of working, and I can’t describe that system
of working without including lecturing. I
don’t necessarily mean giving a lecture course
according to a syllabus, but also my own
lectures that I do both outside and inside
the AA. Next year we will celebrate 30 years
of my Friday-evening lectures at the school
(though no one knows exactly when they
began) and I shall convert these lectures, as
I have always intended, into writing. I don’t
share the enthusiasm of some people who think
that each lecture series should become a book;
I know that it is not all completely original
and that over 30 years you are certainly guil
of repetition. ere needs to be some savage
editing, as I’m genuinely becoming prehistoric
. . . at some point you begin to realize that you
get up on Fridays and lecture because that is
what you do. I’m always a lile shocked when
new students present themselves aer the first
lecture and say: ‘I was told to say hello from
my parents who used to come to your lectures
when they were students.’ I have become one of
those fixed objects that have always been here.
What are your working methods when
preparing for these lectures?
My system of working is related to why I don’t
use a computer – simply because my system of
working predates the computer. Fortunately
or unfortunately, I developed a whole form of
working before the rise of the digital, and in
terms of book culture, I could hardly be called
‘efficient’. Nevertheless, I realized that I worked
both in composing words and arguments at
any time of the day or night – anywhere, hence
my work was not directly connected to siing
at a desk, and my task then was to make sure
I wrote down scraps of words and diagrams
of ideas, so I don’t lose them. To this day I
keep a notebook, which seems to su est some
homology with the architect’s sketchbook,
although I think that what architecture
students use their sketchbook for is oen quite
mysterious.
When my system of working came to
be tested by giving and preparing the lectures,
 Mark Cousins
I soon found myself in a somewhat bizarre
cycle of working over the year. is is going
to sound ludicrously random: in the spring, I
need to fantasize – or dream, which I have done
frequently – of what I want to talk about the
following fall. I trust my intuition, because I
find that quite oen even in a topic that sound
quite odd, I have conjured it out of the air – the
same air that other people breathe. Normally
you would think, for example, this year’s topic
of ‘miracles’ would be esoteric and weird –
especially in an architecture school – and yet
the moment I start saying it people seem to
not just approve of it, but also get it and get
why I want to think about this strange thing
‘e role of
now. A past topic was ‘angels’, which had the
same eerie feeling; especially if you consider
the rise of the digital – as angels were a mode
of communication, inhabiting a pre-modern
cyberspace. Another topic for a series was the
to get non-
‘ugly’, which was really about having a quasi-
positive aitude towards the ugly.
Fortunately, nobody at the AA
architectural
questions the relevance of these topics to
contemporary architecture. Once I think of the
topic, I get into the London Library and start
discourse off
working bibliographically, assembling things
that I think I must read, and by the end of the
the back of
summer I have a list of lecture titles. en I
spend the week before a lecture thinking about
it all the time that I can – which is much more
architecture’
than you think, because when you work as
I do, you are never not-working. It may be a
question of thinking out an argument, it may
be just thinking of words. I make it an internal
rule to make sure that I have worked it out in
my mind sufficiently, so that when I deliver the
lecture I don’t need notes, but I’m relying on a
text that’s in my head. Perhaps the reason I do
not use a word processor is because, in a sense,
I am one.
Admiedly, you read more than most people do.
e crude truth is that I am addicted to
reading: it shows all the characteristics of an
addiction. If I go long enough without reading
Princeton Universi Press, Princeton, 2012
I start wondering what on earth life is for. e
purpose in life, I think, is a book. Even if you
don’t write books, it doesn’t maer – you are
writing all the time. You could call it other
Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet,
things – like reflection – but that term lacks
a certain brutal crudi. Indeed, people would
say that it is what removes you from existence
because I am not usually interested in what
you’re supposed to be interested in, what you’re
seeing or being at, but I am interested in the
odd bits of discussion.
Could you give an example?
e kind of thing I have been interested in for
a while is the alternative history of the house.
I saw that someone just designed a house in
Bel-Air for half a billion dollars; I looked at it
Bookmark
theory is
Mark Cousins
Recommends
Peter Brown, rough the Eye of a Needle:
Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making
of Christiani in the West, 350-550 AD,
Roland Barthes, Michelet par lui-même,
Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1954
Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Zone
Books, New York, 1988
Georges Canguilhem, e Normal and the
Pathological, Zone Books, New York, 1991
165
very carelly, the pictures and the drawings,
and I kept trying to figure out what exactly is
it. ere is no point in calling it a palace, which
is what social historians might call it. I realized
that what it is, is a hotel. And the relation of
the quasi-official ‘hotel’ with what you may call
‘the domestic’ is geing stronger and stronger.
It’s also not reckless to say that it is really the
logo of Donald Trump. Trump is a hotel, and not
just because he trades in them, but because his
mind is like a hotel; his whole take on existence
is that of a hotel. Take a few characteristics of
the hotel. e hotel, as it greets us, has no past.
It lives in a continuous present, temporarily
marked by workers’ shis, while the past is
something that is ‘cleaned up’ and thrown away
every morning. e preparation of a room,
where a guest will exist (for a lack of a beer
term) is in a space that has been industrially
cleansed of the past. e notepaper is new,
the scribbling pad has not been wrien on,
nobody has ever been here, or rather they have
vanished into the confidentiali of the hotel’s
billing archive. Something of the same is true
for Trump’s mind: a hotel manager finds it easy
to say, in reting an argument – ‘but that was
yesterday’. It’s undoubtedly a formulation that
Trump will be using oen as president.
Lastly, what would you say you have learned
from most?
I worked at the Warburg Institute, which
had the strangest organization I have ever
seen. ere were four stories to the library:
‘Word’, ‘Image’, ‘Orientation’ and ‘Action’. So
the library has a philosophical frame to it that
is very carelly and beautilly orchestrated
by the librarian. Its classification system is
unbelievable – it’s at the opposite end of the
DOI [Digital Object Identifier] system. e
classification system is, basically, by intuition
as to what is significant. Some sections are
amazing, showcasing ‘the le hand’ next to
‘the bad prince’. In a longstanding row with
the universi, who kept trying to submit and
subject the library to the DOI system, the
universi lost. Even when they got American
consultants from the DOI System, they said that
they wouldn’t know how to classi at least 30
per cent of the books, they just won’t fit; it is the
fiing of the library-that-won’t-fit. It is where
you learn that adjacency can be inspiring; it
is a library that compels you to be browsing
all the time. Actually, if you can’t find a book
on the specific floor, it oen works three-
dimensionally: you can go down or up and look
at the same place, and you will probably find
what you were looking for. is is a library that
celebrates the unexpected – which turns out to
be just the thing you needed. _
166 Mark 69

Tools
 Tools 167

‘A bathroom is
culturally
relevant.
Mike Meiré about the Vaia series of
bathroom fiings by Dornbracht, page 174

It’s about
sexuali,
and about
a ein ’
168 Mark 68 Tools

Doors Modular Vinyl

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e iD Mixonomi collection of
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Oxide Collection
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laminam.it Sliding doors in Grey Oxide, Laminam 3+ at the Sekisui House in Osaka, Japan.
 Doors and Floors 169

Twist
Ceramiche Refin
Italian tile manufacturer Ceramiche Refin
and design duo Studiopepe joined forces to
develop the Twist collection, the result of
research and experimentation by the founders
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refin-ceramic-tiles.com

Porcelain
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Florim
Nature meets technology in
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florim.it
170 Mark 68 Tools

Marmoleum
Forbo
Marmoleum Cocoa adds a new dimension to
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Oak Planks
Dinesen
Dinesen reveals the inner life of the oak tree, whose annual rings and
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planks. Dinesen preserves the irregularities, even locking cracks with
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Qualified forester omas Dinesen explains: ‘We pride ourselves in making
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HeartOak offers architects and designers a wide range of possibilities.
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Reclaimed Antique Oak

Hakwood
Hakwood Reclaimed Antique Oak flooring gives old timber a second life.
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Hakwood’s lab works with clients to develop bespoke colours. Using planks of
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hakwood.com
 Doors and Floors
Carpets
Ege
Taking their success l collaboration to the next level,
Christian Lacroix and Ege carpets created Atelier,
a collection of 16 designs based on three themes:
Textile, Mineral and Gravure. For Textile, the designer
transformed fabrics, such as patchwork and paisleys,
into motifs for new carpets. A collector of stones, he
borrowed their beau for Mineral, with carpets that
reflect the mosaic effect of stones on the beach, in
171
Resin Floors
Gobbeo
Until the late 1950s, resins were associated with boats and
planes. During that time, the company led by Giancarlo
Gobbeo patented Monosint, the first line of monolithic
resins used for floors, walls and industrial coatings.
Another innovation, Gobbeo’s Mare Soo, enhanced
colour separation in cast thermoset polymer. Expanding
into residential and commercial projects in the ’80s, the
company launched DegaArt® and Dega®Spatolato, for use
in interiors, and Dega®Carpet for outdoor surfaces. Last
year saw the introduction of Floating Resin Panels and an
appearance at Art Basel in Miami. At Salone del Mobile 2017,
Gobbeo sponsored Gaetano Pesce’s exhibition. Meanwhile,
the showroom in Milan welcomes creatives who are seeking
customized solutions for their work, a visit that includes the
factory in Trezzano sul Naviglio.
gobbeo.com
quarries and in roadway paerns. Inspired by Lacroix’s
birthplace in Provence, Gravure mixes monumental
architecture with birds, buerflies and mountain
landscapes. ‘When I started collaborating with Ege 13
years ago, I entered a limitless world,’ he says. ‘Carpet is a
way of communicating. It makes the room larger, wider
or smaller. It underlines what you want to express.’
ege.dk
172 Mark 68 Tools
Mario Boa characterizes his design as a ‘flower of stone’.
Photos Enrico Cano
Mountain
Flower Monte Generoso, part of the
impressive mountain range on
the south side of the Canton
of Ticino in Switzerland, is an
Mario Boa applied Alpine tourism classic. For over
125 years, a 9-km-long cog train
Jansen profile systems track has run from the village
in his design for a of Capolago on the shore of
Lake Lugano, through a nature
Swiss mountaintop reserve, towards the mountain’s
1,701-m-high summit. A new
restaurant. mountaintop restaurant opened
here in April 2017. Designed by
local architect Mario Boa, it was
constructed on the site of an early-
20th-century hotel. e location is
breath-taking. e small plateau,
surrounded by migh rocks, looks
out over a 300- to 400-m-deep
precipice on the north side of the
mountain. e imposing rock
formation inspired Boa to design
a ‘flower of stone’: an octagonal
building formed by eight ‘petals’
enclosing a central space. On
the east side this circular crown
opens to an observation deck that
follows the ridge of the mountain.
e cog railway terminal
is at 1,600 m, where visitors
disembark at the building’s
ground-floor level. A spacious
entrance with sliding glass doors
marks the transition from the
exterior to the interior. e ground
floor hosts an exhibition on the
history of Monte Generoso. Two
staircases and elevators lead to
the floors above. e first floor
contains the technical spaces,
the second a conference room,
offices and staff accommodations.
e third floor gives access to
the extensive observation deck,
 Jansen Oberriet — Switzerland 173

and the cafeteria-sle restaurant
Generoso. e fourth floor houses
the more formal restaurant
Fiore di Pietra, with five large
panoramic windows. e original
plan to fill these openings with
one big plate of glass (without
disruptive window frames), had
to be aborted straight away: the
strain of wind and snow on the
construction was too great, and
the transportation’s capaci was
for the observation deck. A second
glass rampart, about 1 m high, was
placed on the inside (the terrace
side) to form an upside-down V
shape. is allows the visitors to
enjoy the 360-degree panoramic
view: Milan’s Po Valley to the
south and Lugano Lake and the
Alps to the north.
e closed parts of
the façade are clad in grey
natural stone, blending into
it possible to solve discrepancies
in the measurements of the rough
construction’s ferroconcrete with
the smaller pieces of natural stone
– easier to do than with huge
panes of glass. e Jansen VISS HI
TVS steel profile system window
frames were not mounted until the
natural stone was in place.
e window frames were
constructed with mitred corners
and a visible breadth of 60 mm.
Fighting Fire
Fire resistance is always
an important theme. In this
building, each floor has a
fire partition between the
stairwell and the rest of the
spaces. e glass partition
walls are built using the
Jansen VISS Fire TV steel
profile system with fire
resistance EI60. e doors
are made of Janisol 2 with
fire resistance EI30.

too limited. the surrounding landscape. e glass panes are extraordinary:

e size of the cog
railway’s freight wagon
determined the maximum
proportions of most of the
building materials, including the
windows. Besides these logistic
limitations, the constructive
requirements of the window
frames – which are entirely
subject to the elements at this
altitude – had to be taken into
account. A static weight of 10,8
kN/m2 was determined for the
snow, which, combined with a
maximum wind speed of 178
km/h, amounts to a pressure of
1.54 kN/m2, with a maximum
deflection of 10 mm. is dictated
the use of steel profiles. e façade
designers assembled window
frames for the restaurant using
the Jansen VISS HI TVS steel
profile system with triple glazing.
e logistically optimized grid
of 150 × 500 cm – three panes
wide, two panes high – produces
a striking constructive feature:
the top part of the upper row of
windows nctions as a rampart
Horizontal strips of polished and
chiseled natural stone give the
façade a clear structure, which is
pical of Mario Boa’s designs.
e internationally renowned
architect, who grew up in Ticino,
has made the Monte Generoso
bloom with his ‘flower of stone’
landmark, visible from afar.
e limited transportation
capaci of the cog train on Monte
Generoso also determined the
manner in which the window
frames were built. e freight
wagon, with a floor space of 2 ×
4 m, can transport two tonnes
using electric propulsion and eight
tonnes with the more power l
diesel engine. is meant that
off-site prefabrication was limited
to cuing the profiles to the right
length; everything else was done
on the mountain. Because the
panoramic windows had to be
set flush with the natural stone,
profiles were applied where
stone and glass were to meet, to
determine the placement of the
natural stone. is method made
because of the low air pressure at
1,600 m, they are filled with only
90 per cent Argon. e energy
transmission of the element is
0,6 W/m2K.
ere are also large
glass surfaces between the
‘petal’ towers, vertical bands
reaching from the first floor
to the observation deck. Only
Jansen VISS HI TVS, with a
visible breadth of 50 mm, could
be applied here. Sandwich panels
with an outer plating of stainless
steel were mounted on the
landings. eir heat transmission
is ≤ 0,18 W/m2K, and that of the
frames and glazing in the vertical
bands is ≤ 0,90 W/m2K. is was
how the strict requirements for
the steel profiles, which must be
able to withstand great forces
at the top of Monte Generoso,
were met to perfection, both
constructively and aesthetically.
jansen.com

e top part of the panoramic windows on the observation deck extends to

rampart-height. For the inner rampart a second glass window, made using
the same profile system, was placed against it in an upside-down V shape.
174 Mark 69
Transitional
Sle
Dornbracht had Neri&Hu
and Rafael de Cárdenas design
environments for the Vaia
series of bathroom fiings.
Tools
Traditional elegance and new ideas mingle in De Cárdenas's architectural concept.
When Dornbracht introduced the
fiing series Vaia at the start of
the year, creative director Mike
Meiré suested taking a different
approach to the presentation
of taps and shower heads.
Meiré, who’s been involved with
Dornbracht as a brand director for
more than 25 years, is responsible
for the design of the imaginary
bathrooms where the company’s
products are presented. To allow
as much creative freedom a
possible, he decided to ask two
design studios that weren’t closely
connected to Dornbracht. ‘We
wanted someone from Asia and
someone from North America,’
says Meiré. ‘In the end, we asked
Neri&Hu and Rafael de Cárdenas.
ey do a lot for hotels and other
professional clients, and are very
familiar with the topics that are
relevant at the moment.’
e Vaia series was created
by Sieger Design. is studio also
has a long-lasting relationship
with the family-run company,
dating back to the 1980s. Dieter
Sieger, the founder, was succeeded
by his sons Christian and Michael,
who both designed several
products for Dornbracht. e Vaia
series is vaguely reminiscent of
the existing Tara series, although
Tara has lots of details with sharp
corners. ‘Vaia is more gentile,’ says
Meiré. ‘Inside, the fixtures are
beauti lly curved. People want
innovation, but at the same time
they long for tradition, a reference
to something that already exists.
at’s what Vaia is about. We
wanted to make it both modern
and familiar, as in a déjà vu. You
could call it a transitional s le.’
Meiré tasked Neri&Hu
and Rafael de Cárdenas to let
their imaginations run wild.
‘Orginally, bathrooms were all
about combining fixtures and
fiings in one s le, but these days
it’s much more eclectic,’ he says.
‘You can combine products from
more than one series.’ Apart from
that, he wanted their designs to
rise above the prosaic qualities of
most bathroom iterations. ‘ere’s
 Dornbracht
a strong cultural dimension to
the bathroom and we want to
communicate that,’ says Meiré. ‘A
bathroom is usually very private;
everything happens behind closed
doors. It’s also about sexuali and
ageing. is is culturally relevant.’
e commission for
Dornbracht wasn’t Neri&Hu’s
first collaboration with a sanitary
wares manufacturer. ‘We designed
our first bathtub, which was
launched in Milan during the past
Salone, for Agape,’ says Lyndon
Neri. For Dornbracht, Neri&Hu
was looking for ‘a sense of the
domestic ritual within bathing
spaces’. e designers came
up with a beautil concrete
structure, where the arched
ceilings and shallow pond
recall Le Corbusier’s Legislative
Assembly in Chandigarh, India.
Furthermore, they used a lot of
marble and combined both wall-
and deck-mounted taps with one
brass washing basin. Part of the
ceiling is open, to give the space
the characteristics of a courard.
Rafael de Cárdenas made
multiple designs, of which one
had a plan with strongly curved
walls. ‘We were encouraged to
design an environment with
a high fantasy quotient,’ says
De Cárdenas. ‘Yet it was also
meant to reflect the notion of a
“transitional sle”, which is about
the juxtaposition of the traditional
Neri&Hu’s architectural concept focuses on the atrium.
Iserlohn – Germany 175
and the contemporary, and which
initially informed the design of the
fiings. So, for example, we gave a
prominent place to brick masonry,
a consummately traditional
practice, but we inflected it with a
distinctly non-traditional coursing
to break up the gravi of the
walls and inse the classical with
a sense of contemporanei.’ e
design by De Cárdenas has earthly
colours and so, round shapes. e
taps are affixed to a cubistic piece
of bathroom rniture made of
different, dark coloured materials, Based on the conceptual approaches of Neri&Hu, Vaia in mae
like Corian and smoked glass. platinum is central within the bathroom architecture.
Photo omas Popinger
Although initially there
were no plans to actually realize
the designs, Meiré doesn’t
exclude that from happening –
‘for something like a fair stand’.
Aer the renderings were done,
two mock-ups were built for the
photoshoot. Some of the materials
in those were real, and others
were imitated and then refined
in Photoshop. ‘So the pictures
are a cross-over,’ says Meiré. ‘For
now, it’s about the imagery.’ e
images were then turned into
trailers that can be seen on social e bathroom architecture for the mae dark platinum
Vaia ties in with the central elements of Rafael de
media, such as facebook.com/
Cárdenas’s design, and also with the range of finishes and
dornbracht. In order to stimulate colours outlined in the material collage.
a discourse about transitional Photo omas Popinger
sle in progressive interiors,
Dornbracht also created the
hashtag #createanewbalance.
dornbracht.com
176 Mark 69 Exit

Exit
Mark 70
Oct — Nov 2017

Photo Marco Cappellei

Urban
Redevelopment
On the site of a former bus
depot, Italian architecture
firm Labics has completed
a series of buildings on
a common pedestal that
includes commercial spaces
and a public library at
ground level, offices on
the first floor and public
spaces on top of those. ree
buildings are perched above
this public area – one with
more offices and the other
two with apartments. e
first residential building is a
tower containing small and
medium-sized flats, partially
enclosed by a horizontal
glass brise-soleil. e second
building contains luxury
duplex apartments and is
clad in aluminium panels
that provide adjustable sun
shading and a playl, ever-
changing envelope.

Also
Affordable housing in
Los Angeles

A profile of Antonin Ziegler

And
An interview with Carlos
M. Teixeira, cofounder of
studio Vazio
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