Daniel Libeskind's Museum of Military History has sparked contraversy and provoked thought. The building is a monument, not to heroes, but to bloodshed, brutality and social fragmentation.
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For you, what object captures the spirit of design? To celebrate the ground breaking of the new Design Museum in London, leading figures from the worlds of design and architecture, including the museum's Design Circle members, Zaha Hadid, Paul Smith, Norman Foster and Cecil Balmond, as well as Sir Terence Conran and John Pawson, were invited to nominate an object to go in a time capsule to be buried in the foundations of the new building. Designed by John Pawson, the new Design Museum, which will be the world's leading museum of its kind, is planned to open in 2015. The move will give the museum three times more space, free access to its unique collection and bring it into Kensington's cultural quarter where it will join the V&A, Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Royal College of Art and Serpentine Gallery. The choices that were made for the capsule are a fascinating portrayal of the vast world design and architecture encompass. From Hadid’s model of the MAXXI museum in Rome to Thomas Hetherwick and Ingo Maurer’s choice of a standard light bulb, to Sir Terence Conran’s choices, which went from an iPhone 4S to a tin of Anchovies and a good bottle of 2012 Burgundy, the objects are a reminder of good design – from the simple to the cutting edge. But what will the future archeologists think of the capsule?
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The city of Shanghai is renowned for the way in which it mingles modernity and traditional culture. The results are often unique, always fascinating and sometimes quite eclectic. The Shanghai Museum of Glass is all these things. Located in a former glass-making workshop in the remote industrial Boashan district, the Museum tells the story of how glass making has evolved throughout history and how it might continue to evolve into Shanghai’s dynamic future.
A regular glass museum in the outskirts of Shanghai simply was not going to cut it. They needed to do something exceptional. That exceptional something has now taken on a life of its own. The museum is Phase One in the completion of the G+ Glass Theme Park – a monumental project set to breathe new life into the once tired Boashan district. Phases two, three and four? A sculpture yard, science park and business park. For now, though, only the museum is built. But it is not just any old Museum.
The Shanghai Museum of Glass is intended to turn the traditional concept of a museum on its head. Known as a ‘Type Two’ museum, the 3500 sqm building is intended to be engaging, interactive and hands-on. Leading an international team of architects, designers, artists, filmmakers and multimedia specialists, COORDINATION Asia – responsible for the design and concept of the museum interior – were determined to use the museum space to engage with people spatially and temporally. The museum is designed to be an experience that plays with our sense of the past, the present and the future. It is a space where all three converge.
This happens on a number of different levels. Firstly, the architects were careful to incorporate the original architecture into the design of the new building. The old structures – open workshop ceiling, rough floor and walls – are protected. In one sense, then, the old glass factory still stands, but it has been utterly transformed. The façade is dramatic, dazzling and designed to be noticed.
Externally, the building is mostly formed of dark U-shaped glass imported from Germany and coated in black enamel. The visitor to the museum will first be greeted by the cacophony of multi-lingual words about glass that are blasted into the U shaped glass, which is lit up by LED backlighting. The interior of the museum is similarly vivid and, like the exterior, betrays the museum’s obsession with glass and light.
Upon entering the museum, the first thing the visitor encounters is the Kaleidoscope Entrance. Polished steel facets reflect five multimedia screens showing images that artistically explore various aspects of humanity and its relationship with glass through time and space. Past this historical kaleidoscope is a blown-up picture of a glass sphinx, which marks the beginning of the ‘Journey through Time’ trail.
The second level of the Shanghai Museum of Glass is a creative gallery that showcases glass works from Chinese and international glass artists. The centerpiece of the room is a twenty-five metre neon artwork which showcases the words of Anton Chekov: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Tilman Thürmer, the brains behind COORDINATION Asia, had the intention of designing the building to be like a piece of black crystal glass. Visually, he certainly succeeded. The building is brimming with black lacquered glass and LED lighting. There are mirrors everywhere – mirrors reflecting the walls, the artwork, the glass, the other mirrors, and the people who visit – merging all of these things together into a living, moving, dynamic picture. For a project that is so preoccupied with history (it is, after all, a museum), the message is clear: history is a dynamic, active process that is formed in a large part by our interaction with it, and by how we use it to understand the present and the future.
And this is just the beginning. The future Shanghai Museum of Glass is set to be an entire park dedicated to glass, with workshops, studios, labs and shops. The Museum itself will eventually host galleries, temporary exhibition halls, a library, shop and café. In the mean time, the museum has succeeded in drawing our attention to the incredible place that glass making holds in the cultural fabric of human kind. It is hard to imagine a better city for such a building, which asks us to engage with the sometimes fragile interface between tradition and modernity. Shanghai is very familiar with this tension, and its Museum of Glass has contributed masterfully to our understanding of how art can help us to comprehend the relationship of history to the present.+
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It isn’t often that an entire exhibition is focused solely on the work of one single contemporary design firm, but DAM: Deutsches Architecktur-museum in Frankfurt is doing just that with their showing of WOHA - Breathing Architecture.
A multidisciplinary design firm based in Singapore, WOHA is led by directors Wong Mun Summ, a native Singaporean, and Richard Hassell, an Australian born and raised Architect. As a team, the pair made a name for themselves in the late 1990s, with their open, single-family dwelling designs suitable for the tropics. Today, their work is of a greater scale, mainly designing high-rises and large structures, such as a mega residential park in India and office and hotel towers in Singapore.
The company’s design philosophy revolves around the idea that the responsibility of the architect to create diverse, innovative and exciting environments. They believe that each project should add a humane and desirable environment to the world, resulting in a continuous improvement of the constructed environment. It is this ideology that makes WOHA the shining example of building for vertical garden cities.
The firm is intent on creating permeable architecture, creating building structures which provide cooling, natural lighting, reused rainwater and solar modules which harvest energy.
The exhibition is split into four categories: Permeable Houses, Open School and Community Buildings, Porous Towers, and Perforated Hotels and Resorts. Across these chapters, 19 of WOHA’s most important projects are showcased, through large format photos and plans, project texts, digital images and models.
Within these classifications, there is a focus on different themes as well, including tree, umbrella, landscaping, community and porosity, all revolving around the progressive development of life and living standards in Singapore.
A key feature of Singapore design is that of skyward development, with buildings being built vertically to maximise space. Parallel with this advancement, has been the transformation of the metropolis into a garden city. Here, the umbrella-like crowns of trees make them the fundamental tropical shelters, optimising conditions in a hot and humid climate. With this as inspiration, WOHA has transformed this image for use in the contemporary Singaporean multi-storey. The firm also extensively uses plants as shading and facade materials, with their green buildings devised and developed in the context of Singapore’s garden ideal. Traditional styled pavilion structures and cabanas have been transformed by WOHA into contemporary forms, providing new interpretations for other building typologies.
It is this tropical slant to architecture that makes WOHA such an appealing choice to display, being permeable, leafy and interspersed with community spaces. These characteristics are what lead to the title of “Breathing Architecture”, as WOHA’s works really do seem to grow and develop just like living organisms. +
WOHA - Breathing Architecture is on at DAM: Deutsches Architekturmuseum until 29th April 2012
For more information visit www.dam-online.de
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The city of Shanghai is renowned for the way in which it mingles modernity and traditional culture. The results are often unique, always fascinating and sometimes quite eclectic. The Shanghai Museum of Glass is all these things. Located in a former glass-making workshop in the remote industrial Boashan district, the Museum tells the story of how glass making has evolved throughout history and how it might continue to evolve into Shanghai’s dynamic future.
read more »
The Palazzo dell ́Arengario in Milan houses the Museo del Novecento, home to the city’s important collection of 20th century Italian art. The building, which was started in the 1930s and was completed in the 1950s, is a monumental and imposing structure.The competition to convert the building into a coherent museum space was won by a group of designers under the direction of the Milanese architect and designer, Italo Rota. While the façade was barely touched, the building was extensively gutted to create an articulate and stimulating space that has a new feel of openness and accessibility. At the heart of the new interior is a dynamic spiral ramp which leads from the subway to the exhibitions and which is illuminated by two sets of lights – downlights in the ceiling illuminate the ramp while LED spots in the balustrade luminously emanate a blue-green light. As for the exhibition spaces themselves, “Our aim was to create a peaceful atmosphere with soft, neutral colours and homogeneous lighting – the works of art are the stars here, after all,” explains Alessandro Pedretti, the architect at Studio Italo Rota responsible for the interior and lighting design of the project. Light modules cover the doors of the entrances to the galleries and Zumtobel’s Cielos lumi- nous ceiling, a modular lighting system, creates an even, diffuse basic illumination. The importance of illumination in the new museum is carried to the very top of the building, where Lucio Fontana’s lighting installation ‘Struttura al neon’ can be seen shining out.
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Architects Beckmann N'Thépé and landscape designers TN PLUS have designed a new zoo for St Peterburg, Russia, which is expected to be completed in 2014. The zoo will reunite Pangaea, the super continent that existed hundreds of millions of years ago. The zoo will consist of islands that represent the earths various zones: Southeast Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, North America and Eurasia, all next to one another like they were before the continents split. The design of the zoo is therefore closely linked to geological history, providing opportunities for education about the movement of the tectonic plates and how the world has changed in its long history. By providing the animals with large enclosures and mimicking the land- scape and botanical species of each continent, the zoo will give visitors the impres- sion of exploring faraway continents. For the architects, however, the very fist con- sideration was the wellness of the animals themselves, and creating a balance between the man-made nature of architecture and the natural landscapes that will be so important to the zoo. The zoo’s location in Russia with its harsh winter climate was also a serious factor. With temperatures frequently dropping below -25 degrees and with little daylight, indoors shelters have to be generous. Made from ultra-light ETFE the greenhouses will shelter the tropical animals throughout the long winter.
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Peter Eisenman Architects' Cidade da Cultura is located within the World Heritage listed city of Santiago de Compostela - a culturally rich setting which has inspired and moulded the major project. The City of Culture of Galicia is to be a major cultural hub in Santiago de Compostela, where it brings together knowledge and creativity through its celebration of the city's past and present. The project features a library and the Archive of Galicia and was officially opened on January 11th, 2011.
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The recently completed Bilbao L Cristobal Balenciaga Museum in the village of Getaria in Spain is dedicated to the life and work of the Spanish Couturier Cristobal Balenciago. After winning a competition to design and curate the permanent exhibition based on the renowned designer, AV62 Arquitectos have convincingly integrated architecture with art, bringing together space, movement and light with the wondrous artistic creations of Cristobal Balenciago. In the words of AV62: "The museum design project positions Balenciaga in the ambit of the great creative figures of the twentieth century, overcoming all hierarchical disciplinary barriers. Both spacially and conceptually speaking, his designs are displayed as they would be in any art exhibition, with contiuous and fluid spacing where the spectator and the piece itself share the same environment without separation." AV62
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Every August the city of Aomori in northern Japan celebrates – symbolically waking up from the sleepy summer months in preparation for autumn and, historically, the harvest. At night the primal beat of taiko drums and the haunting sweetness of bamboo flutes sound over streets filled with people dancing and the stunning Nebuta themselves: huge, colourful paper lanterns that glow and float above the crowd as they are paraded through the city. It is estimated that the annual festival has a history that stretches back to the eighth century and it is an important cultural event, attracting millions to the city each year. molo’s new Nebuta House is a structure as dazzling as the festival itself, which will showcase and celebrate the beauty and excitement of the Nebuta celebrations, and trace the festival’s cycle through the year.
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