Category: Architecture

“Larger than life, bold as brass and certainly on the case.”
– Sir Peter Cook

Zaha Hadid is known for combining swooping curves with unusual angles in her buildings. Some examples include the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Azerbaijan, the perforated-concrete winged roof of the London Aquatics Center designed for the 2012 Summer Olympics that allows natural light to speckle the pool inside, and the Maxxi Museum of Art in Rome, which features curving gallery walls.

Buildings such as the Rosenthal Centre of Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and the Guangzhou opera house in China are hailed as architecture that transformed ideas of the future. Some other renowned designs include the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in Kensington Gardens, West London and the BMW factory in Leipzig – one of her first designs to actually be built. Soon to come is Hadid’s first residential building along West Chelsea’s High Line in New York City.

“Hadid’s global impact was profound and her legacy will be felt for many years to come because she shifted the culture of architecture and the way that we experience buildings,” said Amanda Levete, president of The Royal Institute of British Architects. The Pritzker-Prize-winning Iraqi-British architect Hadid was arguably the most famous female architect of her time. “Only rarely does an architect emerge with a philosophy and approach to the art form that influences the direction of the entire field,” architect Bill Lacy, the executive director of the Pritzker Prize, said when she received the prestigious award in 2004. “Such an architect is zaha Hadid who has patiently created and refined a vocabulary that sets new boundaries for the art of architecture.”

Through the years, Hadid earned awards for her distinguished structures chief amongst them the Royal IBA Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011 and just prior to her unexpected passing, she received the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) 2016 royal gold medal, the first woman to be awarded the honor in her own right.

“Dame Zaha Hadid was an inspirational woman, and the kind of architect one can only dream of being. Visionary and highly experimental, her legacy, despite her young age, is formidable.” -Jane Duncan, RIBA’s president.

Her pouncing silhouettes, angles and curves define Hadid’s work across three decades, accenting contemporary skylines with forms that seem imported from a far-off future. Indeed, just as architect Sir Peter Cook contributed her success to her substantial body of work rather than for work which is currently fashionable, a recipient of the RIBA gold medal award; he honored her for her daring. He summed it up by saying: “For three decades now she has ventured where few would dare … Such self-confidence is easily accepted in film-makers and football managers, but causes some architects to feel uncomfortable. Maybe they’re secretly jealous of her unquestionable talent. Let’s face it, we might have awarded the medal to a worthy comfortable character. We didn’t. We awarded it to Zaha: larger than life, bold as brass and certainly on the case.”

“Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless.”

– Zaha Hadid

Meier received his architectural training at Cornell University and established his own office in New York City in 1963. He has been awarded the highest honors in the field including the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, the Gold Medals of the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects as well as the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association.

For over five decades, Richard Meier & Partners has been selected to create important works in both the public and private spheres. Meier’s thoughtful, elegant contemporary architecture exceeds expectations for beauty and form while fulfilling complex operational needs.

The work of Richard Meier is instantly recognizable and internationally respected. Meier’s projects have received 30 National Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects and over 50 from the New York AIA and other regional chapters.

Meier is known for resisting trend-based design, instead developing his own design philosophy rooted in rationalism. He is noted for his use of ‘white’, the absence of color, an intrinsic characteristic of his works. His philosophy is grounded in using light as the main material to give form to his orderly, sculptural, and linear architecture.

“The way that light traverses and cuts through buildings is the interrogative and the principal magic from whence Meier’s projects are born,” states Frank Stella.

Profoundly influenced by Le Corbusier, Richard Meier refines his principles of geometrical progression by playing with structure, space and elements of formal precision. His designs can be seen as Neo-Le Corbusier, referencing the famous French architect’s early phase in particular. Meier has also cited Frank Lloyd Wright as a major influence.

He is everywhere: e Getty Center in Los Angeles, The Neugebauer House in Naples, Florida, the Jubilee Church in Rome, the iconic Charles and Perry Street Towers in New York City, the High Museum in Atlanta and the Arp Museum project in Rolandseck, Germany which traverses a mountain. They are recognizable geometrical and spatial compositions that reflect the continuous search and analysis of concepts perfected over more than half a century of constant work in the field of architecture and design by this American abstract artist and architect.

“I believe that architecture has the power to inspire, to elevate the spirit, to feed both the mind and the body.It is for me the most public of the arts.”
– FRANK GEHRY

An architect who combines artistry, imagination, architecture, function and challenges accepted design paradigms. A Canadian who made his home in California, this mainstream challenger continues to make audacious architectural statements worldwide.

Gehry says an architect “is given a program, budget, place and schedule and sometimes the end product rises to art.” It is art that this Pritzker laureate creates without a doubt. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, initiated his luminary status, intriguing the world with its wavy structures and incongruous materials. He designed the global headquarters for Facebook, The Experience Music Project in Seattle, which was inspired by a Stratocaster guitar and the Los Angeles Chiat/Day advertising agency building which among other novelties has a pair of binoculars as the entrance to the parking garage, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Gehry does not make buildings – he creates landmarks. They are innovative structures with a presence that honor the space as well as the function of the building; humanistic places that people like to be in. People love to be in the Walt Disney Concert Hall with its signature Gehry curving walls and acoustically-perfect, hardwood furnished interiors.

“I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can’t do that, I’ve failed,” declares Gehry.

“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.””
– FRANK GEHRY

Paris Newest Art Museum is like None You Have Ever Seen

From an initial sketch drawn on a blank page in a notebook to the transparent cloud sitting at the edge of the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, Frank Gehry constantly sought to “design, in Paris, a magnificent vessel symbolizing the cultural calling of France.”

“To reflect our constantly changing world, we wanted to create a building that would evolve according to the time and the light in order to give the impression of something ephemeral and continually changing,” states Frank Gehry.

A creator of dreams, he has designed a unique, emblematic and bold building.

Respectful of a history rooted in French culture of the 19th century, Gehry dares to use technological achievements of the 21st century, opening the way for pioneering innovation.

“IT IS A VERY UNUSUAL BUILDING. I HAVE NEVER DESIGNED ANYTHING LIKE IT.”
– FRANK GEHRY

 

ARCHITECTURE CHARACTERIZED BY ITS FAITH IN MODERNISM HUMANIZED BY ITS SUBTLETY, LYRICISM, AND BEAUTY

Pei was born in Canton, China in 1917 and moved to the United States in 1935 to study first at the University of Pennsylvania and then at MIT and at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Pei’s most well-known architectural feat is likely his crystalline extension to the Louvre in Paris. Other highly influential works include the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the JFK Presidential Library in Boston.

When he received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983, the jury citation stated that he “had given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms.”

“The important distinction is between a stylistic approach to the design and an analytical approach giving the process of due consideration to time, place, and purpose.”
– I.M. Pei

The oculus a Genuine People’s cathedral

The impact of the space and its crowning oculus is undeniable. In fact the Oculus is the name given to the central space in Calatrava’s sprawling complex in New York City – the station house which opened in early March of this year, the official World Trade Center Transportation Hub.

Considered the most expensive train station in the world, it was built on the site of the World Trade Center destroyed 15 years ago in the 9/11 attacks. It is the exhilarating nave of a genuine people’s cathedral destined to be a prime “selfie” location for years to come.

The Oculus is a room that soars under a great arc of glass. Calatrava has put together a space that is uplifting, full of light and movement, and capable of inspiring hope which has been in particularly short supply at “Ground Zero”.

The Oculus cost billions of dollars of public money and yet is a shrine to the commercial marketplace. is however doesn’t lessen the impact of the architecture nor negate the fact that this is the first time in fifty years that New York City has built a truly sumptuous interior space for the bene t of the public.

Standing inside the Oculus and gazing up is jaw-dropping. Curved, steel-ribbed walls rise up 160 feet like a pair of immense ethereal wings toward a ribbon of glass that is the giant hall’s skylight. The sun pours through the skylight, whose glass panes may be opened and closed. Using one of the architect’s favorite words, the new spaces are indeed “monumental” – open and airy, a radical transformation of space in an area of the city that can often feel closed-in and tightly confined.

When asked about his inspiration, Calatrava cites famous structures from antiquity, including the Parthenon, the Pantheon, the Hagia Sofia and the Alhambra in his native Spain, as well as American landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge and Grand Central Terminal.

Calatrava has defined his style as bridging the division between structural engineering and architecture. In his projects, he claims to continue a tradition of Spanish modernist engineering that included Antonio Gaudi? with a personal style that derives from numerous studies of the human body and the natural world.

 

“I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.”
– Santiago Calatrava