A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The Eden Project in Cornwall England by Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, 2001 On Saturday, March 17 the Eden Project in Cornwall, England by Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners , and one of Great Britain's Millennium Projects, opened to the general public. But unlike the Millennium Dome in London the future is bright for this "showcase for global bio-diversity and human dependence upon plants". The diagram at left illustrates the focus of the design: two linked, climate-controlled biomes providing conditions for vegetational growth from humid tropics and warm temperate regions (with a third outdoor biome for Cornwall's climate). The site, a former china clay quarry, seemed ideal (south-facing, sheltered, near the sea) though presented many problems for the architects and engineers: very little level ground, a propensity for flooding...

Gedenkstätte Lindenstrasse in Berlin, Germany by Zvi Hecker, 1996 It would seem that designing a monument would be the ideal commission for an architect, finally able to ignore the practicalities of function that hinder the artist within. But what is, and are the functions of, a monument? and how does one design a monument? Two contrary definitions exist for a monument: 1. something set up to keep alive a person's or event's memory; 2. a work of of enduring value or significance. The former is designed as a monument, the latter becomes a monument. Gedenkstätte Lindenstrasse in Berlin, Germany by Zvi Hecker , a monument to a synagogue destroyed on the site, straddles the two definitions (unfortunately the situation pertaining to the synagogue's destruction is unknown by this writer, so this essay takes a general approach to its ...

New Suburbanism by Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL Architects)   Project and text by Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis . What if the popular desires fueling the contemporary suburban culture of mini-mansions and big box stores were creatively reconfigured? New sectional matings mitigate the redundant horizontal surfaces of suburban sprawl, while the hybridized spatial logic of house and store produce new efficiencies of land-use, infrastructure, and transportation. Suburban dwellings migrate to occupy the vast horizontal roofscape of the big boxes. The repetitive system of aisles in the megastore below establishes a linear designation of individual houses and yards above. Storage structures extrude through the inhabitable roof plane providing a container for the equipment and commodities of domestic life. Private pools double as skylights for the s...