A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Price Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah by Machado & Silvetti, 2000 The following building, and text, is by the Boston firm of Machado & Silvetti for the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The site for the museum is located at the southern end of the campus mall, creating a strong physical terminus to an important vista. In response to the language of the campus architecture (primarily built in the 1960s), the building comprises strong rectangular volumes that step up around a centrally located grand gallery. Five distinct volumes rest atop a concrete plinth, each distinguished by differing brick patterns to present the building as a procession not only in height but also in color from dark to light. Two window types punctuate these volumes: horizontal recessed windows and projected windows. Clad in zinc sheet metal and containing clear anodized aluminum window systems, the varying proportions of these w...

Park Duisburg Nord in Duisburg, Germany by Latz + Partner  The Park Duisburg Nord is only a small portion of Germany's effort to reuse old industrial areas in the Ruhr river basin, the park a part of a large green belt area in the Emschler region. Latz + Partner's winning design has set a precedent for regenerating obsolete industrial lands in urban areas, though the park was only completed this year. Its influence is for good reason; instead of creating a tabula rasa surface for development the design attempts to celebrate the area's industrial past by integrating vegetation and industry. The evident contradictions add to (not detract from) the park's overall effect. Blast furnaces, a gasometer, cooling tanks, railroad tracks and slag heaps, among other things, occupied the land upon which the park was added. Instead of tearing down the blast furnaces walkways ...

Wooster Street Loft in New York, NY by Archi-Tectonics, 1998 The following project and text are by Winka Dubbeldam of New York City. SITE For the Wooster St. project, we were asked to adapt the 5th floor of a converted SOHO loft building to residential space for an art collector. This highly urban living condition reflects the "nomadic" quality of today's metropolis. As the owner moves between london and new york, the internet is the primary mode of communication. CONCEPT LOFT = existing space, manipulated. Reconstituted with additions and divisions, standard residential elements reformulated, to create spatial continuities. In the design for the loft, different zones are generated - public / private / guest areas, and a concept of "connective cuts" is developed. Planes are introduced as connective membranes not only by means of translucency, but rather by the slicing of these...