During our 2010 network meeting in Barcelona we visited villa Ricarda, built by Antoni Bonet between 1959-1963.
Under a beautiful blue sky, we had a rare chance to walk around this very sexy 1950ies home, located between the beach and Barcelona airport. In essence, the villa consists of a composition of elegant white vaults, arranged under pine trees in a big garden. Custom-designed furniture and translucent walls made of stoneware bricks turn it into a real “Gesamtkunstwerk”. Unfortunately it’s not quite as easy on the ears as on the eyes. Thanks to several airport extensions, deafening airplane noise is the soundtrack of the villa. But hey, maybe that’s why it has never been modernized and can still be admired in its original state…
- a fresh initiative based on a cooperation between artists / architects and a material producers exploring sustainabillity.
The first exhibition is now on display, called LINOLEUM DIAMONDS – a synergybased work of linoleum manufacturer Forbo, 036 and danish artist Malene Bach.
Durring the year alltogether 6 collaborations will be presented including events and after-work lectures and talks.
The New Museum (Neues Museum) in Berlin, part of the Unesco World Heritage Museum Island, built by Andreas Schlüter in 1856 was heavily destroyed in World War II.
After 40 years being a ruin it is now renovated in an extraordinary way by David Chipperfield. About 4.000 visitors a day are fascinated by the Nofretete (Nefertiti) bust, the Greek and Aegyptian collection and the respectful restoration of the only museum with an original interior of the German Historism in the 19th century. The New Museum finally opened on 16th October 2009.
The reconstruction of the New Museum is only a part of the general renewal of the Museum Island. In 2010 David Chipperfield will add a contemporary entrance building: The James Simon Gallery. Here will start the new underground „archeologic pathway“, which will connect the four museums with a distinct thematic approach to each institution.
The first new building in the neighbourhood of the island by Chipperfield was the Art Gallery „Am Kupfergraben“, finished in 2007.
„Ticket B - Architectural Guided Tours in Berlin“ offers from now on special tours to the urban development of the Museum Island with short inside visits in parts of the museums in cooperation with the Foundation „Preussischer Kulturbesitz“.
ga-Paris and the Pavillon de l’Arsenal have signed an agreement of collaboration to discover the history of Paris, to analyse the contemporary city and to understand the metropolis of tomorrow.
Created in 1988, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal is a centre for information, documentation and exhibition of urbanism and today’s architecture of Paris, a unique place where the development of the city and the new architectural projects are presented to everyone. More than 300 architectural projects, 940 hectares of ongoing urban operations and six large territories in continuous mutation are introduced to explain the city of today and of tomorrow.
ga-Paris has included the Pavillon in its standard visits. We will also inform our guests of the activities of the Pavillon via our website as well as this blog.
Architecture critic Hanno Rauterberg once maintained in German weekly “Die Zeit” that with its simple exterior and intricate interior spaces, Ben van Berkel’s Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart resembles great Baroque performance architecture. The same can be said of the MUMUTH, UN Studio’s brand new university building for musical studies and music theatre in the Austrian city of Graz. The surface might be a bit boring, but the inner space – wow! The main hall is dominated by the “Twist”, a very complex circular concrete sculpture, carrying the ceilings, taking visitors up and down. And making them dizzy.
For a few years now, Barcelona has a tram, running up and down Diagonal. News? Not at all, as this film proves:
Seeing how slow these trams were and how many people were jumping around carelessly in front of them, it seems like irony of fate that Barcelona’s most famous architect Antoni Gaudí became a victim of a tram just a few years after this film was made. On 8 June 1926, Gaudí was run over by a tram and died in hospital a few days later.
Every three years, the city of Hamburg hosts the architecture event Hamburger Architektur Sommer. In 2006, young architects Torsten Stern, Marco Pawlik, Stephen Perry, Stefan Schrick and Ulrich Hahnefeld contributed the Architekturbox (see image on the left), an information and communication centre for the event. Located next to the Binnenalster, opposite Jungfernstieg and nearby the Kunsthalle and main station, thus in the heart of the city, the Architekturbox, which was based on a private intiative of the architects, turned out to be the main contact point for all visitors over the summer months.
Three years on, Hamburger Architektur Sommer will take place again – but it will be boxless. For 2009, the architects had designed a new information centre (see image below), based on their experiences from 2006.
This time, the Architekturbox was to be realised next to the city hall. Unfortunately, the city has recently withdrawn the assigned plot without suggesting any alternatives. It looks like the Architektur Sommer will have to make do without a central meeting point for visitors this year – and hope to succeed in realising an Architekturbox again for the 2012 edition.
The Ruhr area is famous for its series of landmarks, created by international artists on top of former mining dumps and in converted industrial buildings. One of the most important artworks is the Tetraeder (Bottrop/Ruhr area), realised by Wolfgang Christ and Jürgen LIT Fischer in the 1990s, during the period of “Strukturwandel” in the Ruhr area. Now the Tetraeder is the focus of attention again, due to an artwork that triggered a huge public discussion in the Ruhr area. The question is: who is allowed to define the public space?
Tetraeder in Bottrop by Wolfgang Christ and Fred F.’s aliens at the foot of the sculpture.
52-year-old Fred F. from Bottrop has created some images of aliens on the platform on top of the mining dump which serves as the base of the Tetraeder. He made them from old stones, which he collected on top of the hill and sorted according to colour (light grey to dark grey). Then he re-decorated the hilltop.
When the Regionalverband Ruhr rebuilt the platform and brought it back to its original state, it caused a landslide of public indignation: Many people in the area are convinced that Fred F.’s aliens were artworks as well.
On January 17th 2009, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) hosted the grand opening of a new concert centre - ‘Koncerthuset’. The new concert centre makes up the fourth and last segment of DR’s corporate domicile, DR Byen (literally ‘the DR city’).
The opening of Koncerthuset means a new national and international concert venue for Denmark and a new architectural landmark for the capital – and perhaps even for Northern Europe. Designed by Jean Nouvel, the building puts Copenhagen on par with other cities around the world which provide the best modern acoustics and visual settings for concert-goers.
In the long term, events at Koncerthuset will range widely in terms of size and genre: small-scale jazz concerts in the foyer, chamber music, choral, rock and pop concerts in the three smaller concert halls and symphony concerts, guest appearances and large-scale rhythmic concerts in the big concert hall. During the first season after the grand opening, it is expected that three major rhythmic concert events will be presented. After the first year or two following the opening, notable international and local artists within rock or pop music will find their way to the programme of Koncerthuset, as will a number of slightly more alternative or ‘street-related’ artists and/or DJs within the genres of e.g. electronica, trip hop etc.
200 wind turbine rotor blades go to the scrapheap in the Netherlands every year, just because they have tiny fissures. When Rotterdam-based 2012 Architects, specialized in re-use projects, found out about this, they thought that there must be some way to give the unwanted polyester blades a second life.
In October their first rotor-blade project was finished: a playground in the north of Rotterdam. It consists of five old rotor blades, neatly sawn into pieces by a ship builder, decorated with colourful stripes and finished off with two F16-bomber cockpits. The blades create a graphic pattern and also form borders between different areas of the playground. Around an existing football pitch, the architects placed four little towers made from the fat ends of the blades: there’s a slide tower, a look-out tower (with the cockpits as lantern room) and a tower incorporating a little windmill, which generates energy for a water pump.
Before the turbine-playground, 2012 Architects designed e.g. a rooftop extension in Amsterdam made from old sinks, a shoe-shop in The Hague, furnished with scrap wood benches and a shelving system made from car windshields, and a coffee-bar for TU Delft made from the front panels of washing machines.
Created in 1988, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal is a centre for information, documentation and exhibition of urbanism and today’s architecture of Paris, a unique place where the development of the city and the new architectural projects are presented to everyone. More than 300 architectural projects, 940 hectares of ongoing urban operations and six large territories in continuous mutation are introduced to explain the city of today and of tomorrow.
Every three years, the city of Hamburg hosts the architecture event 
On January 17th 2009, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) hosted the grand opening of a new concert centre - ‘Koncerthuset’. The new concert centre makes up the fourth and last segment of DR’s corporate domicile, DR Byen (literally ‘the DR city’).
concerts in the three smaller concert halls and symphony concerts, guest appearances and large-scale rhythmic concerts in the big concert hall. During the first season after the grand opening, it is expected that three major rhythmic concert events will be presented. After the first year or two following the opening, notable international and local artists within rock or pop music will find their way to the programme of Koncerthuset, as will a number of slightly more alternative or ‘street-related’ artists and/or DJs within the genres of e.g. electronica, trip hop etc.
In October their first rotor-blade project was finished: a playground in the north of Rotterdam. It consists of five old rotor blades, neatly sawn into pieces by a ship builder, decorated with colourful stripes and finished off with two F16-bomber cockpits. The blades create a graphic pattern and also form borders between different areas of the playground. Around an existing football pitch, the architects placed four little towers made from the fat ends of the blades: there’s a slide tower, a look-out tower (with the cockpits as lantern room) and a tower incorporating a little windmill, which generates energy for a water pump.
