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Specifier Magazine Issue 85

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  Children's Activity Centre, of Shipping Containers

  Phooey Architects
  Repurposed shipping containers are perhaps the ultimate symbol of globalization running against the local grain, of a dead-end flow of global production and consumption being interrupted by a small recycling loop. Deconstructing and reusing such a potent symbol of industry involves breaking social norms guiding our interaction with material. It has the dubious honour of being, in a sense, the architectural equivalent of dumpster diving; in that both might be done out of poverty and economy as well as a concern for the environment, both breaching our categorisation of material as waste or food, as an artificial unit or as a building material like any other. read more »
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  RSPCA Kennels in Burwood, Victoria

  NH Architects
  In their design of the first stage of redevelopment for the RSPCA’s facilities in East Burwood, Victoria, NHArchitecture had to consider what few architects must in their careers; how to design a building for which dogs are the primary users. According to the architects, the 5-wing quarantine and boarding kennels are the first fully enclosed, naturally ventilated and day-lit facility of its kind in the world. The aim of the new kennels were to increase adoption rates (which were previously affected in bad weather), to maintain best practice in caring for the dogs by making their stay as safe and stressfree as possible, and to reduce the impact of the facility on its neighbours. read more »
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  Ribbon House

  Hartree + Associates
  Unmistakably modelled on the tail of a flyaway ribbon flickering in the wind, the roofline of the Ribbon House is the source of the project’s lively persona as well as its name. A playful, smoothed-out interpretation of the neighbouring peaked terrace row roofs, the undulating roof ends abruptly, its edge cantilevered out over empty space as if it isn’t quite finished, or maybe it’s trying to run away. And in this sense it literally does, as the architects say, breathe a sense of animation into space.

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  Tube House

  Adrian Fitzgerald of Denton Corker Marshall
  It is often said that the finest architecture embraces constraints and makes opportunities of them. This is certainly true of the Tube House. While designed outside of the practice, the project is nevertheless similar to other projects by Denton Corker Marshall, of which the architect is a director, in that it’s design is guided by a strong single idea expressed in a contemporary language in form and detail; in this case, the idea of expressed tubes

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  San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum

  Daniel Libeskind
  It must be hard sometimes for northern Californians. Their southern brethren are the world’s most successful exporters of culture. As a result, the northerners have to deal with outsiders conflating California with Hollywood and all of the connotations that flow: endless surf beaches and arid deserts, Los Angeles sprawl and fad diets. In the minds of many, the qualification – northern – may as well not exist despite the distinctions it marks: Golden Gate harbours and redwood forests, urbane cityscapes and wholesome living. Monuments to Jewish culture face the same problem of inaccurate generalisations. There’s a Gibbon-like idea that they will be little more than a depressing register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. So it’s unsurprising that the new Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco stands tall as a testament of a different ilk, a distinctly northern Californian celebration of the Jewish contribution to American culture. read more »
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  It’s a MAD World

  MAD
  Some of their ideas truly do seem crazy. For the opening of the China Millennium Monument art museum, MAD cast a huge 9x9x9 foot iceblock from frozen smoke ink, and left it out the front, where the sweltering Chinese heat melted it into a mysteriously organic blob, glistening darkly and riddled with melt-holes, before dissolving into a puddle of dark nothingness. MAD’s proposal for a future Beijing looks like something out a sci-fi film with floating islands hovering above the city. And their proposal for Copenhagen Central Station in Denmark (2007) would have turned an urban void into a field of translucent organic pores. read more »
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  Cathederal of Christ the Light

  Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP
  Bishops of the Catholic Church are sometimes given a bad rap, but it must have its advantages. When you’re a bishop building a cathedral and the architect asks what the feel of the project should be, you can just point them in the direction of the Christian Bible; a thousand pages of stories, histories, messages and imagery. For centuries architects have taken this directive and created traditional, sombre cathedrals, characterised by dark corners, brooding stones, cumbersome leadlight and heavy iconography. In contrast, the new Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, California takes the first command – let there be light – and creates a place for Catholic worship that is unabashedly celebratory. read more »
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  Like Spinning Plates

  David Fisher
  Dubai is a city built by press releases, where buildings flicker into life and disappear like struck matches. Some, like SOM’s Burj Dubai, are built the old fashioned way, with a design chosen by an international competition. But for most prestige buildings the concept comes first, with engineers and architects brought in to test their feasibility only after the brochures are printed. If such a concept secures a financial backer, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee it will be realised.

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