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Specifier Magazine Issue 82

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  Dubai Next: Face of 21st Century Culture

  Dubai represents a fascinating rebuttal of the idea that time is the key to achieving cultural depth. The largest city in the United Arab Emirates has evolved from an invisible fishing village to an omnipresent global city in only a few decades, and has left the rest of the world clinging to the tassels of the magic carpet on which it rides. It is no surprise then that the state-run culture authority hired one of the world’s most renowned architects to curate an exhibition of images tasked with answering the question “what does ‘culture’ mean in a city like Dubai?”. read more »
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  Lyons

  University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law

  The University of New South Wales’ Faculty of Law is thirtyseven years old this year. It is the second oldest law school in the state and one of the nation’s most wellregarded faculties, but until recently it had been working out of a series of interim locations, from the initial Huts in which it was founded, to the five-storeys of UNSW library tower that it abandoned two years ago. The construction of Lyons’ new Faculty of Law changed all that, providing it with its first purposebuilt building in its now long and distinguished history.

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  Troppo Architects

  The Study Retreat

  Natural disasters, perversely, have their silver linings. Like Hurricane Katrina in our times, Cyclone Tracy’s razing of Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974 combined catastrophe with unexpected opportunity. Tracy destroyed more than 70 percent of Darwin’s buildings, left most of its population homeless, and continues to haunt the inhabitants of Australia’s Top End. Architects and builders who flocked to the devastated city in the years after the cyclone were required to build a new cyclone-proof city from scratch. It required the kind of resourcefulness – speed, flexibility, ingenuity and technological innovation – that the building industry is rarely called upon to exercise.

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  Hartree + Associates Architects

  68 Marine Terrace Apartments, Fremantle WA

  It is surprising how much the ‘new’ is so heavily influenced by the ‘old’, either willingly or by necessity. The utterly new Marine Terrace Apartments are no exception to this age-old realisation.

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  Hugh Gordon Architect

  Boobialla Street House, O'Connor, ACT

  This house was designed to be a robust family home, through and through. With a flock of three young children, the clients wanted a straightforward, functional, liveable home: warm, and light-filled, with lots of space and plenty of opportunity to enjoy its external surroundings. They wanted no lofty airs and graces: no pretensions of grandeur, nor precious fragility. And yet, as great as ‘durable’ and ‘lowmaintenance’ sound, no family dreams of living in a utilitarian bunker, nor do they want to inhabit an oversized playroom, just to keep the children happy.

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  Fitt De Felice

  Pescara Residence; Donvale, Victoria

  Sometimes, simplicity is key. Seeking virtue, we aim to adore simple pleasures, lead a simple life, and accept the simple truth. We are often told to follow the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid). The antithesis of stupid, Einstein believed we should “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Because sometimes, simplicity is a good thing.

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  Elbe Philharmonic Hall

  Hamburg

  Music, at once otherworldly and arrestingly present, presents a unique challenge to architects called upon to house it. Herzog & de Meuron rise to the challenge with the Elbe Philharmonic Hall, an ethereal monument to musical form.

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  Art in Public

  Shenzhen's new art galleries by Urbanus

  The gold standard of art gallery design is the white box, a pristine space removed from worldly concerns, outside both place and time. It’s an important statement about the works that hang inside the gallery: art, it says, is universal and timeless. This is why it’s valued. But in its designs for Shenzhen’s newest art galleries, Urbanus Architecture is challenging these basic assumptions, producing art spaces that engage with local urban culture.

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  Church of St Mary of the Angels

  Singapore

  Like water into wine, the miracle of urban development has performed an almost biblical feat of transformation on Singapore’s Church of St Mary of the Angels: without one inch of movement, the once-hilltop Friary now nestles on the floor of an urban valley, surrounded by the vertiginous peaks of Singapore’s high rise residential sprawl. Time had also worked its mysterious ways: the congregation has grown from thirty in the 1950s to 5000 parishioners today. The piecemeal addition of buildings helped to accommodate this growth, but gradually transformed the selfcontained Friary into a rambling agglomeration, devoid of direction or distinct form.

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  Make It Right Project: More than a Celebrity Soap Box

  A-list architects pitch in to help rebuild New Orleans

  Name a political or social justice movement, and you’re likely to spot a handful of superstar backers on the sidelines, wielding their social clout for the good of the cause. Now a phalanx of celebrities have rallied around Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, while US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is naming Robert De Niro, Scarlett Johansson, George Clooney and Stevie Wonder among his superstar retinue.

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