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Specifier Magazine Issue 83

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  Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture

  In a city as old as London, the fortieth birthday of a civic institution would, at first instance, not be a particularly auspicious or exciting event. While forty marks the onset of middle-age in individuals, a forty-year-old art gallery is comparatively spritely, not yet even the dignified bookend of a half-century. And so it is with the Hayward, in the Southbank Centre, which has just celebrated its ruby anniversary with a nubile exhibition entitled ‘Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture’. read more »
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  Marsh Cashman Koolloos Architects

  Chatswood House
  
  Notions of journey, spatial experience, ambiguous space and transition are always prominent in MCK projects, but it isn’t often that the RAIA judges come across a home where the central courtyard doubles as a time portal. The central garden of the Chatswood House project, sandwiched between new and old volumes, is, like the Wood between the Worlds in CS Lewis’ Narnia tales, a grassy transitioning ground between two distinct times and places; allowing visitors to pass freely and fluently between the heritage elements of the existing streetfront home, and the contemporary architectural adventurousness of the rear volume. read more »
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  Sam Teoh Architects

  The Rise
  
  

  Anyone who has ever lived in the inner suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne knows the perpetual darkness of the terrace house. With walls pressed against the neighbours’, the lack of side windows consigns these houses to a permanent twilight. And yet, terrace-style housing remains one of the most efficient ways of using precious and increasingly indemand inner-city land.

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  Stanic Harding

  Darlington Point Apartment 2
  
  Most Sydney apartment buildings within sight of the harbour – and this is truer the more recently the building was designed – take pains to seize any view of the Bridge, Opera House, or the city proper. Indeed, some apartments are wildly contorted in aiming for maximum exposure in the direction of the city, so that every possible sliver of lucrative view is framed, and the neighbouring towers carefully hidden. This was not so with Darling Point Apartment 2 – at least before Stanic Harding got to it. read more »
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  Architects Studio / Mode Design Corporation

  Batchelor Pad, Batchelor, NT
  
  When the owners of Batchelor Pad initially approached Architects Studio/Mode Design Corporation with a brief that called for an all-new, architect-designed house with a budget of only $160,000, the architects were doubtful. But to their great credit, they swallowed their skepticism and set about rising to the challenge: producing a low-budget house that embodied the good design, inventive problem-solving and environmental awareness characteristic of quality architect-designed buildings. read more »
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  Going Public: Will Alsop

  To an Antipodean eye, Will Alsop’s The Public looks like the wilder sibling of Melbourne’s Federation Square: all punky angles, oddball apertures and shattered-looking glass. And like Federation Square – and I.M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid for that matter – The Public was brought into the world to mixed reviews. The British press and global online design community have labelled it everything from “beautiful” and “pure genius” to “incoherent” and “out of touch”. read more »
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  Studio Pei-Zhu

  In the post-Olympics afterglow, as athletes return home and the year’s sporting achievements move into history, the great architectural feats of Beijing 2008 will remain standing. Digital Beijing, the Olympics’ technical control centre, is the only Chinese-designed building capable of rivalling – or even appearing alongside – the major venues. The selection of the design launched the career of its architect, Pei Zhu, and confirmed his studio’s status as one of China’s most important architectural firms. read more »
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  Mexican Wedding

  Like a beautiful Mexican bride, though aesthetically more low-key, La Estancia Chapel is a blaze of translucent white; modest and serene behind a glassy veil. read more »
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  New Romantic: Moscow's fairytale transformation

  Moscow: a city of dense white winters, heavy furs, old wealth, vodka and exotic beauty. A country hobbled by its own history; one of revolution, war, oppression and corruption. But like the ageless characters in a children’s story book, Russia’s monumental buildings have always survived, evoking longforgotten notions of royalty and adventure, romance and fantasy, beauty and drama. Now, some of the world’s biggest names in architecture have begun to pen a new chapter in this Muscovite fairytale. read more »