A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Melbourne City Link in Melbourne, Australia by Denton Corker Marshall The following text and images are by Aussie architects Denton Corker Marshall for their Melbourne City Link. Denton Corker Marshall has designed an international gateway to Melbourne and a bridge across the Yarra River for the Melbourne City Link Project.  The Gateway, a modern urban architectural sculpture, will create a strong sense of arrival for Melbourne visitors. Elements include a yellow column cantilevering 70 metres over the freeway, 39 red sticks, each 30 metres high, forming an angled wall and a long sinuous orange sound wall. In November 1999 Denton Corker Marshall were awarded the Special Jury Award by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects for the Melbourne Gateway and Henry Bolte Bridge.

Garden Pavilion in Portland, Oregon by RIGGA Reminiscent of Michael Cadwell's small buildings, this small garden pavilion in Portland, Oregon, designed by the firm RIGGA, of the same northwest city, presents itself in varying configurations through the use of folding doors and fixed panels at its perimeter. A sloping roof/canopy rests on slender columns which meet the concrete base; the columns acting as fulcrums about which the doors move. Although a relatively simple and undistinguished structure, the pavilion has a strong relationship to its natural environment through materials and changing levels of openness. The plan at left illustrates the incorporation of sliding and folding doors, sometimes both within one door. With the columns located at the centers of the trapezoidal sides, it is at the corners where th...

GSW Headquarters in Berlin, Germany by Sauerbruch Hutton Architects, 1999 One of five finalists for the Royal Institute of British Architects ' Stirling Prize for the year 2000 (won by Alsop and Störmer for London's Peckham Library ), Sauerbruch Hutton Architects ' much-publicized extension and renovation of the GSW Headquarters in Berlin, Germany is featured here with the firm's text and images. This design forms the extension to an office tower which was one of the first projects to be built during the reconstruction of Berlin in the 1950s. The design endeavors to combine the "as-found" fragments of the city into a three-dimensional composition through which the existing building is able to be (re-)integrated into its context. The idea of conglomerate growth is not only accepted but put forward as a ...

Ando Hiroshige Museum in Batoh, Japan by Kengo Kuma, 2000 Intended to hold a collection of Edo-era artist Ando Hiroshige (image below), this museum in Batoh , Japan was inspired by one of the artist's ink drawings, "Rain on Travelers". Architect Kengo Kuma noticed how the artist used thin lines to portray the rain and carried this technique over into his design; the walls and roof of the simple box composed of a wood lattice over a wood structure. Hiroshige's work represents ukiyoe , a movement in Japanese art to depict "pictures of the floating world". In other words his prints and paintings attempted to express the ambiguous elements of nature: light, wind, rain, fog. Consequently, Kuma's desire was to create in a building the spirit of the...

Graduate House in Toronto, Ontario, Canada by Morphosis, 2000 Darlings of the architectural undergrad, Santa Monica, California's Morphosis , currently headed by co-founder Thom Mayne, created a large following through a layering device: layering of spaces and materials. Since the departure of co-founder Michael Rotondi the firm has embraced digital media, using the computer to develop forms that veer from the orthogonal, such as the Diamond Ranch High School in Ponoma, California. Their design for Graduate House (with Teeple Architects ) at the west entrance to the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto recalls their earlier work, particularly the Salick Health Care Office Building of 1991, each building creating a strong presence in their respective ...