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  The Parish Church of St Luke the Evangelist

  Croatia is one of the latest “It Countries” at the top of every tourist’s European must-see agenda. Its capital city is Zagreb, which can be further refined into the New Zagreb area, and refined further still to find the Travno quarter within. At the very centre of this quarter lies a pocket of green parkland, and a short distance away, looms something altogether gargantuan: the megavolume apartment block, Mamutica. True to its name – Mamutica means “Mammoth” in English – this 20-storey monolith is one of the largest communal housing blocks in southeast Europe, and is home to around 5000 residents, making it the largest building (by volume) in all of Croatia. But we are not on a mammoth-hunting expedition. No, to find the quarry of this pursuit we must look to the interstitial space between the monster and a small park nearby. Here, we find the Parish Church of St Luke the Evangelist: the heart of the Travno quarter, and the soul it so verily needed.

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  Viva Zaha!

  Though some of Hadid’s earlier projects seem to burst forth from their surroundings like living, writhing beings, here the opposite is true. MAXXI carries its own distinct weight and character, but it does so as a continuation of the surrounding low-level urban texture. It is, in essence, an “urban graft”: a second skin over the site, rather than an external attachment. This is a building that makes its statement simply by not making a statement. This is, after all, a “Zaha” piece: from the architect whose oeuvre is typified by sinuous ribbon-like curves and a dramatic almost non-structural form. One could expect a breathtakingly outrageous outward expression. But MAXXI is not glossy or ostentatious: it is a homage to raw grey concrete on the exterior, with a bold but neutral black-andwhite palette a l’interieur. read more »
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  Pritzker Prize Winner 2009: Peter Zumthor

  For the past 30 years, Peter Zumthor has run a small practice of no more than 20 people in the remote Swiss mountain village of Haldenstein, turning down most of the commissions he is offered, and designing projects mainly in Germany and his native Switzerland. When he received the Pritzker Prize this year, few who knew his name were surprised – but outside of architectural circles, most still do not. read more »
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  Peres Peace House by Massimiliano Fuksas

  For all the wonder and perplexities in the world, one thing remains constant: politics and religion will never be friends. With a tumultuous history spanning decades, nowhere elseis this better understood than in the Middle East. And such isthe backdrop of the Peres Peace House – a building free of religious affiliation, but entrenched in political sentiment. Opened in March this year, the Peace House and the organisation it accommodates, is all about reaching peace through people, rather than governments. Built on the premise that it will assist to achieve peace and also represent it, the Peace House is a structure of profound significance, a symbol of innovation and change.

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  Boyne Tannum Memorial Parklands

  Studio 39
  While the function of a cemetery is to preserve the memory of the departed as they were, it arguably serves to suggest continuity as well. In a tranquil parkland setting, the material world of commerce, industry, and politics seems removed enough for the memorial to serve as a bubble in time, but in nature as in all things there is at least gradual change.

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  Seaford Life Saving Club

  Robert Simeoni Architects
  The local Surf Life Saving Club is an essential icon of Australian beach culture: red-and-yellow caps; hot chips from the kiosk and the seagulls that love them; melting icecreams and sandy suncream; noisy nippers competitions, and surfboat racing at dawn. Traditionally, this quintessential Aussie scene would all play out around a concrete, brick and/or timber club house: usually a slapdash, piecemeal construction built sometime between 1900 and 1970.

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  Shenzhen's Great Leap Forward

  Basking in the radiated heat of the retail hot spot that is Hong Kong, Shenzhen is already identified as a well-established yet still rapidly expanding commercial and financial hub. The city is Southern China’s answer to Wall Street – a bustling embodiment of the unstoppable economic behemoth that is Chinese capitalism, and among the nation’s fastest growing cities for the past thirty years. 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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  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 »