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Specifier Magazine Issue 88

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Masdar City by LAVA

When the British propose new sustainable towns – encouraged, not inconsequentially, by the Prince of Wales – they’re called “villages”, and they’re framed as a return to community, simplicity, and thrift. When the United Arab Emirates builds a sustainable town, it’s called “an oasis of the future”, a vast technological fantasy. Masdar City, a seven-year, US$20 billion project on the eastern fringe of Abu Dhabi, is conservation-as-spectacle. It will boast giant shade structures that open and close like sunflowers; materials and features that adapt to pedestrian volumes and environmental conditions; a magnetic public transport system with individual pods that drive you to your destination using solar power; buildings sheared away as if by erosion, and a plaza that doubles as a multimedia screen. But there is a very serious side to Masdar, and a lot of smart architectural, engineering and scientific minds – including Australians – have jumped aboard.
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La Chapelle des Diaconesses de Reuilly, Versailles by Marc Rolinet

The Deaconesses of Reuilly are a Protestant community founded in the nineteenth century with the stated aim of healing and uniting a divided church. Every year, Deaconesses worldwide would gather in the quiet, wooded area in south Versailles to worship together in a hundred-year old chapel. Squeezed to maximum capacity, the gathering inevitably spilled out into a canvas tent set up in the gardens. But when the tent was severely mauled by a gale in 1999, the Deaconesses decided to build something with a little more permanence.
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The New Acropolis Museum by Bernard Tschumi
In mid-2007, the Old Acropolis Museum shut its doors. Its collection of giants and centaurs, metopes, pediments and parts of the Parthenon Frieze, were wrapped in plastic shrouds and packed in reinforced wooden boxes, and hauled into the air over Athens. The artworks, some weighing two and a half tonnes, were passed between Europe’s three largest lifting cranes on their way to their new, €130 million home. Now, two years later, the New Acropolis Museum – one of the most significant and frankly political cultural projects of the last decade – has finally opened its doors. read more »
Polygreen
Bellemo & Cat
Bellemo & Cat is an architect/artist team that freely moves between architecture and sculpture, and between public and private works, including an Australian Technical College, a pavilion in a park, residential buildings and large-scale public art. One of their most recent projects, the design for the team’s own home-office, incorporates a little of the practice’s rich genealogy into its form.

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Australian Technical College, Northern Adelaide

Brown Falconer
Australian Technical Colleges provide education opportunities in regions with a large youth population, a strong industry base and a high need for skilled labour. The Northern Adelaide college campus, designed by Brown Falconer and completed in 2008, provides for 360 Year 11 and 12 students and 40 staff, teaching commercial cookery, metals engineering, building and construction, electro-technology and automotive industry skills.
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Snowy Mountains House

James Stockwell
The brother of James Stockwell, architect of a rather breathtaking new house in the Snowy Mountains, is a geologist. It is always revealing, Stockwell says, to talk to his brother when he is starting out on a project. The geology of the Snowy Mountains site turned out to be weathered igneous granite, with later deformations of quartz “blows” or veins. The diagram of the quartz crystal is a tetrahedron helix, a form containing both triangulated strength and a dazzling ability to catch the alpine light. Geology was the first inspiration for Stockwell’s structure, a structure that thinks seriously about the place of design within a natural system.
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Urquhart Park Primary School

Gray Puksand
Thanks to the stimulus package, there’s a lot of money around at the moment for sub-$3m school building projects. One of the more contested aspects of this Federal Government program has been the use of “best practice” design templates to rationalise and accelerate the building process for all public schools. Schools are asked to nominate the type of facility they would like, choose from amongst a number of templates, and customise according to need.
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Swan Street Residence

Iredale Pedersen Hook
In a sleepy Perth riverside suburb, Iredale Pedersen Hook’s Swan Street Residence is a re-interpretation of the suburban bungalow, with a nod to the materials and forms of the early 20th century Arts and Crafts movement. An extension of a family home, the design takes the line of the existing roof and zigzags it upwards, transforming it into an oblique new upstairs wall, which scoops over the new space like free-form origami. The additions fold and unfold, compress and release to create subtle internal relationships.
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